Men Trapped in Modernity, with Mark Walsh

All right, Mr. Mark Walsh. How are you doing brother?

Good to see you. Enjoying the death cult of modernity, enjoying Croatia, enjoying paying tax to criminals. You know, the normal, still breathing. Did a bit of barefoot walking on the grass by the coast here in Croatia today, trying to, trying to keep sane in what, in what I call the psychological apocalypse that we find ourselves in. So yeah, keep insane.

Yeah, good. Well that's, that is good. I do think that that's going to be important to have men that are holding down the anchor of being grounded in a complete time of chaos as everything unravels. And I actually, I thought about doing an episode on, you know, how we're moving from like, how do you be, you know, how do you be a man in a world that's moving from multilateralism into basically nation states, right? Like just countries completely just sort of pulling the nets in and you know, the destabilization that's happening, I think for a lot of people is really messing with them of like, is there going to be war? What's that going to look like? So it's, it's an interesting time and then yeah, modernity, which is a, an alluring mistress. But let's, let's start with, let's, let's start with the future of men. Let's start with young men and then we'll kind of make our way towards, you know, how do we as men deal with some of this shit? But what, what's really happening from your perspective with young men today, you know, is, is it as bad as the news paints it out to, to be? Like, are the majority of young men in cells and completely lost and misogynistic and like what's happening?

The kids are okay, that's what I'd say. But the whole world is insane. So the death cult of modernity is just breaking down. This is the good news. You know, I'm long term sober and in, in sobriety we say rock bottom. So the whole of the culture is hitting rock bottom. You know, we're the most insane culture in human history. It's difficult to measure because of self reporting things, but I'd say there's a pretty strong case for that in terms of addiction, self ending levels of mental illness of various kinds. Now that's the case for everyone. However, young men are on the lead edge of that for reasons we can get into. And that resonates with me. You know, I basically have bad genetics. My, my, in some ways. So my family is all insane. They're all mystic soldiers and crazy Schizophrenics, multiple suicides, depressives, vegetarians, even, you know, really quite mentally unwell people. And as a result, I've kind of had to develop a certain set of skills. You know, unlike what's. Who was that? I've got a certain set of skills. Mine were basically how to stay sane.

Just Liam Neeson. There you go.

Irish family. But I can't do the accent so well. And I'm now sharing those with young men because they particularly need them. You know, I'm starting to become the sort of man I needed as a young man who had addiction issues and depression and all of these things, difficult things going on. And yeah, it seems like they are badly in need of those. The meaning crisis hits young men particularly badly because men desperately need a sense of purpose and meaning. Like we live for that. Like many people I've tried to sort of self initiate with martial arts and in various war zones, and I think I finally accidentally managed that in Ukraine a few years ago and then saw, saw how much young men needed a war. And I know you've analyzed fight club recently. You know, so our war is a spiritual war and that that is happening now both because the kind of world the cult we're in is breaking down, but also just young men are on the edge of that, in that the state has also grown and grown through modernity, and the state is in direct competition with men for protection and provision. So we have a decadent period which leads to this sort of gender breakdown, feminization, lack of borders and boundaries, which all hits men really bad because our thing is borders and boundaries. Standards, leadership, excellence, competence. How does one be courageous in the age of social media? So there's a lot of factors, you know, the breakdown of modernity, the decadence of our current period, which kind of leads to this femininity, gender confusion technologically. So it's like, what does it mean to be brave in this age compared to, I don't know, my granddad who got on an Irish fishing boat or, you know, he went to fight in World War II as a volunteer and the other grand had was on D Day, you know, they had a very different, very physical kind of courage to show that manhood. So yeah, between those issues of decadence, modernity, disembodiment, I'm sure hit on, there's lots going on for young guys and they're, they're not doing great often though I also have a lot of faith in them. I. They're. I mean, they're wild. Like I thought I was a crazy right wing lunatic. Like, they are wild and I love that wildness. I love that they're looking well outside the overtone window and they still have courage. Like, I do a course for young guys, right? It's really interesting. I said I gave them a load of practices. This is what I do. I'm big on practices, not just philosophy. And the two practices they like most, one was going outside 10 minutes a day without their phones. I was like, that was like week one. I thought, this is the easy week, you know, And I'm like, okay, wild. Like, I spend three or four hours a day outside every day. I do my coaching outside. And I was like, wow, okay, so this, this is an easy win. And then the second one, of course, was cold showers because it's macho and they love it and it's difficult and they get that state head and, you know, young guys still want to do difficult things like that. So I've also got a lot of hope as well as some face popping at the state of the world.

I want to. That's awesome. I love that. I want to back up and can you just maybe sort of define what you mean by the death cult of modernity? Because I think, you know, if you're a man who's kind of gone down different YouTube rabbit holes at some point, you've probably seen the whole, you know, reject modernity, choose masculinity notion along the way. And so I think it'd be good to just sort of define that. What, what is the death cult of Moder?

Yeah, the memes are fun. It's like the crusading memes. You're seeing, like people really long for a crusade. You know, we really need to retake Constantinople, I still call it that. Then Jerusalem, then Mecca. You know, we do need that. And things emerge through comedy in a sort of clown world, wherein a lot of stuff emerges through comedy. That's where truth can be told. We've seen that in recent years. And another one is meme form. It's almost like the tip of the collective unconscious. So these memes are funny and we maybe shouldn't take them too seriously at times, you know, some of the essence of them. But there's something there. So historians argue about this, but modernity can be sort of anything. From the 16th century onwards, we could divide the world into the sort of classical period. Then there's the Renaissance or the Dark Ages. Again, notice the terminology, because it's named by modernity. Right? The idea that this progress is named by modernity so after this sort of more Christian Dark Ages, we could think of them simply as the communitarian and religious ages. The ages where people still had sanity was people were still connected to the divine. Then we had the supposed Enlightenment, which is a great PR job of a name. And it's really caught in our naming, like the Dark Ages Enlightenment. And then we had this period where we said the key of peace, I think, is materialism. So secular modernity, we can't really take those apart. So the idea is there is just stuff, right? And if there's just stuff, there's no meaning, there's no God. I mean, all the important stuff of life, like love and beauty and honor and all these things are now meaningless. And Nietzsche kind of flagged this and said, hang on a minute, this is a nightmare. This is gonna. If God is dead, we've killed him. This is a real problem. And of course it led to many good things. Like, I like cappuccino, I like iPhones, I like dentistry, even though I'm British. These things are all fantastic. However, what it basically did is gave us a lot of physical good stuff, but it destroyed us emotionally and spiritually. And that because we've been riding the dregs of the fumes of Christianity in Europe and the European world, North America, we're essentially have kind of coped till this point. But now those fumes are running out. People can look up Tom Holland, the historian on. On the actual Christian influence and how that went into modernity. You can think of modernity as a sort of Christian heresy, actually. It's kind of like a bad version of Christianity, like socialism, like woke like many of these things. And that's led us to a point where we're all insane and unhappy and, you know, the village is destroyed communities. I sometimes talk about the four disconnections. So I have this tetrarchy model. So it's the disconnection to body. And my first introduction to sort of the bullshit of materialism was embodiment. It's like, this isn't just a hunk of meat. This is a gateway to the divine. This is part of who I am. This is a. This part of our subject is embodied. A personhood is embodied. And then it was also like, oh, hang on a minute, if I'm not an object, neither are other people. And then we can actually be empathic and have relations and, you know, in your terms, have good attachment. We don't. We stop. As Kant said, we stop treating people as means to ends. They become ends in themselves. We Become relational. The village becomes possible again. Which, you know, the village is what's supposed to keep us sane, right? We're not supposed to be doing therapy and yoga to keep us sane. We're supposed to have, like, I live in a small community in Croatia. Like, you're supposed to know your neighbors. You're supposed to co regulate with them deeply in ways that are. We are impoverished in this way, in a way that's hard to imagine, actually, particularly North America, northwestern Europe, we'll come back to that maybe. But third, connection to land, to ecology. This is like the pagan piece, right? The hills are alive with the sounds of gods. And Josh Schrei is great on this. The mystery and the deeply connected alive mytho poeticness of the natural world. It's not just a resource to be used up as industrialization, which, you know, comes naturally out of modernity would say. And the last piece, of course, is connection to God or to spirit. And I, I've come to the conclusion, as someone who's been studying psychology coaching for all my life, you know, even transgenerationally, that individually and society, it just doesn't work without a higher power, as they'd say in aa. It just doesn't work without that. The godless material modernity leads to hell, essentially. Hell is a psychological state. Hell is a social state. Hell is a destruction of the nation state. Three hells we could call that. And that hell is no longer functional. We've basically got I can't live in hell. And why is it a cult? Because it doesn't allow you to leave very easily. It has a narcissistic leader at the center of it, which is you and your own ego. Not you, Connor, but oneself. Right? The narcissistic cult leader is oneself. It has all the features of a cult, actually, and it's a death cult because it kills us, our souls, it kills us inside. We become like Keir Starmer, the gray managerial man who doesn't dream right. Like the office, but without the humor. It kills us on the level of we start killing babies and old people. You know, there's a holocaust of dead children every year, actually 10 times the Holocaust in numbers every year of inconvenient babies, you know, euthanizing old people has also become a trend across the world. And it also. We don't reproduce. So without meaning, without this deep sense of. This is kind of a black pill. There will be dick jokes again afterwards. But like the. The. You have to kind of face reality that we're not even breeding. We're like over socialized pandas in a zoo who won't anymore. And you need God to, you need the community to fuck. You need something that's more, that's worth reproducing for. And as a result we're dying out as a species on various levels. Now young men, as I said, are on the front edge of that. Okay, that's enough history and philosophy. But how's that land, Connor?

I think that's, I think there's some, some solid pieces in there. I mean as you were talking, I was reminded of this, this video I saw of this woman on a campus and she was talking to another woman who was really proud that her bloodline was going to end with her. It' and it was like that she had done some like she was doing a moral duty by ending her bloodline with her. And I was like, what? Like what? How have you gotten to the place cognitively, psychologically, morally where you think that the highest and best thing that you can do for the human species is to not exist? Like that is that, you know, that is a kind of anti human standpoint where it's hard to then find any type of reasoning for why you do exist and how your, your existence is in any way beneficial to the earth. Like I think there's, there's people that really hold the perspective of humans are a virus, we should go extinct and that would be good for nature.

Well, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, it's like, it's, whoa. It's a self loathing. So I had Benedict Beckham. There really is really. So there's xenophobia and there's oikophobia. Right. So Benedict Beckham, philosopher, had on my podcast, talking about this, the self loathing. I mean it starts with there's a few pieces here. Like one is just the way the good news is those people are dying out because they're not having kids. I mean all the sensible conservatives, we're having more sex and the best sex and more children. Like all we have to do is wait a generation or two and all the crazy people have died out. So that's, that's good news in a way. Right? It's just going to be Mormons in space. It's going to be great. And like space Jews, space Mormons, space trads. That's all there's going to be. It's going to be great. So on the one hand it's like, relax, this problem solves itself. Yeah. And you see that when you see like the kind of lead edge of modernity, the activist type who's got, you know, seven genders and 12 mental illnesses. They, they just don't feel healthy, they don't feel like someone who's going to breed and reproduce. And their philosophy is one of self destruction, literally, chemically, in some cases, many cases. You know, if you look at who are the. Someone putting out to be the saints of modernity are the guys you see under the bridges in Austin or on the streets of San Francisco, the mentally ill, drug addicted people like those guys, God bless them. You know, I've been an addict, so I've got sympathy. But those guys are in some ways the exemplar of the philosophy of modernity. And the other one would be a sort of non reproductive feminist activist who hates children, hates life, hates herself, hates her own culture. It's essentially, it's like you could talk about sometimes in men's work they talk about the three fathers or the forefathers, I like to add. So it's like they hate their own dads usually if you kind of ask them, they're a bad relationship with their dad, they hate the dad of their own culture. This is the oikophobic element, they hate them. And this is very prevalent in Europe. The States thankfully still has a sort of, you know, love of itself in a way. America's strong on that way and Europe really Since World War I and World War II has developed this sort of self loathing. They don't necessarily have a good mentor figure, which is the year the third Father and the. And then the Holy Father. They don't have a God who says life is good. God created the plan and said this is good, life is good, babies are good, man. Like, like look at little kids playing, look at nature. Like life is like my girlfriend's Italian, right, Because I have taste. But also like they love life in Italy. You go to Italy and it's just like wine and beautiful women and food and like old ladies gossiping in the square, you know. And I don't want to idealize Italy. It has its problems with mass migration and various other things still, but they love life. And where that love of life is missing or people are disconnected from their bodies, where that, where that's where we anchor into life, right? Our bodies. If they're disconnected for themselves, then this self destructive philosophy, which is frankly satanic, you know, I think this is satanic. Satanic death cult. The cult bit's easy to prove. The death bit's pretty obvious, I think. The satanic bit, I'm just guessing. At least it does sort of Feel evil. It doesn't just feel a mistake. So yeah, that's.

It seems like it's, there's a, there's a vacuum, you know, there's like a, there's a vacuum of meaning. And what has filled that quality of meaning and work where you derive any sense of purpose or, or interest is this. It's the Aurora Boris snake. Right? It's like this, this misanthropy, misanthropy, this hate of human beings, of like we are the fundamental problems and so we should cease to exist. And that's going to be my mission, you know. And so it's like we need a mission, we need meaning, we need to function. And in the absence of that, you know, what fills it is this kind of like self loathing hatred of we should, you know, we shouldn't be here. And so it's okay for us to collapse society, but I think to just come back to, to young men. One of the reasons why I wanted to talk to you is that it does seem like, you know, over the last number of years there has been this massive divergence between young men and young women politically and that young men are moving more, moving a little bit more to the right and that young women statistically have moved dramatically more to the left. And I find it very interesting because when you look at the commentary online, it's always like, oh, the radicalization of men. But nobody talks about the radicalization of young women.

And they have been more radicalized if you look at the change, right?

Totally, yes, yes. They've become much more radicalized than young men. But what gets fixated on is this sort of like quote unquote, extremists of the young men. And so I'm curious, because you are an advocate for young men, you're on the more conservative side. What is pulling young men more in that direction? What's the. Because I had, I'll just say one last piece and I'll let you jump in. I had one of the main people from the government of California on because they've started this program called Go Serve. And their hope is to get, you know, tens of thousands of young men out and to be of service and to try and get them into, into service. And you know, part of my pushback on it was it feels like this is a program to try and salvage relationships with the generation of young men that you've spent the last two decades telling are the fundamental problem with existence. And this feels like a bit of a PR campaign. You know, it's hard I, I get the sentiment of it. I like the sentiment of it. I like that somebody's doing this. Young men do want to serve, but it feels like this is a, you know, come be a part of our party after we've told you that you're the fundamental problem.

Exactly.

Society and existence.

Too little, too late, right? Like, like you're not getting the. You're not getting the young now you've been hating them in every media, like every cartoon film for years now has been painting men as pieces of shit. Society has been increasingly all the social policies for many, many years. And it's like now there's always controlled opposition. They're pushing out some tired liberal New York psychologist or some comedian to tell us that it's actually guys, if you could just be nice, that would be great. And the young men's are like, crusade, crusade, crusade. Like there's no way they're getting the back at this point. Okay, let me take a step back. Have they been radicalized? All right. All of society has been radicalized since the 16th century. Okay, so the cult started then. That's the radical bit. It's normal to love your family, your nation and God. That's normal. So anyone who. Let's think the most of your ancestors were not retarded. Sorry, if you have to people this actually we're okay with retard YouTube's healing. Most of your ancestors were not idiots, Right? This was normal. And it still is if you go to Ohio or Croatia, like most of the world. So the radicalization is from one is the movement of culture leftwards and leftwards and Leftwards. Since the 16th century, like my grandparents would be considered like inverted commas far right by the UK government and arrested, no doubt just for normal views. The evidence also shows that a lot of young guys have just stayed in the center. So what we really should be asking is who benefits from the division of men and women so that the gender war, the breaking of this sacred bond, like men and women were made to need each other. Like, if you think of it biologically, that's actually quite weird. We don't need another human being to breathe or digest, but we do to reproduce. Like, we need men and women need each other. We need the other sex. And most women I know like men. Most women I know, like if I took my sister or my niece or my mom, they could mention a bad guy or two, but generally they'd say, I like my husband, I like my uncle, I like my brother. That's normal. So the Gender war. Who benefits from sending women to work and doubling taxation? Who benefits from us being at each other's throats? I think that question needs to be asked. And the other piece I'll say is the young women are trading up, they're catching up fast. I mean, women will always follow the social trend because that's where the most safety is. Women are absolute geniuses at tuning into the zeitgeist, actually just unconsciously in many cases. And I, what I now see is young women leading the charge. So, for example, like anti mass migration demonstrations in the uk, it's women on the front lines now as well, because they've realized this isn't good for them. And if you talk to women, they nearly always support strong men, men's work, but, but it is noticeable. Like the psychological team I support in Ukraine, I started a charity there dealing with trauma work in the war. And it's lineal women because the men are off fighting. And all the young women in their 20s, and they'll regularly say things like, mark, we love our men, they protect us, we adore them. And I, when the first time they said that, I almost cried. And I got used to it because they say it so often and I thought, God, I don't hear that very often. And to hear it from women, because when this shit hits the fan, women want masculine men, right? They don't want weak men. And they're still feminists in Ukraine, of course, but their agenda is very different than the ones in the west who are dealing with first world issues. So, yeah, I mean, it is, it was, I was so emotional, just, just recounting the first time I heard them say that. So, yeah, I don't know. That's, that's my take on it. Connor.

So do you think that the, that a lot of men, I mean, I, I think I would probably, I think I would agree with that in the sense that when I look back historically at my, we could call them political choices or, or beliefs where I've stood, nothing's really changed. Like my, my position in my stance, my stances have largely, largely stayed the same from when I was in a Bachelor of Music singing opera. You know, like, my stances have largely stayed the same and it feels like the political environment has shifted around me. And I think that that's where I see a lot of young men saying, I feel politically homeless. You know, I don't, I don't know where I, where, where I stand anymore, but I do think that, I do think that. And I've, I'VE talked about this. I'm curious to get your thoughts. Do you think that men, young men specifically, are missing a vision? Like they're missing a, a story or a narrative culturally that they can, that they can be a part of?

Yeah, I mean, they need religion, not just spirituality. I mean, being spiritual but not religious is just pure narcissism and doesn't work. You need the container of community, tradition, ritual. So there's, there's that piece. They need an ultimate meaning. We have to worship something, as others have pointed out. And worshiping oneself is a bad idea that, you know, the sort of self obsession, psychological narcissism we see every day on Instagram is just doesn't make people happy. Right. Like it's, you know, it's not helpful. So they need a mission. They also need a tribe. And particularly white men have been told you don't exist and if you do, you're bad. And they feel violated as a group. That is a sense of violation, particularly in Western Europe as a group. And that needs to be addressed seriously. You can address that compassionately and without going crazy. Mid 20th century German, you know, chill out. We have a hyper vigilance to everything since, you know, we have a hyper vigilance to borders since World War II. You know, that's why the arguments are always about the wall, excluding people or whatever. So I think they need a sense of tribe, of nation. You know, in Croatia, for example, they fought a war over this. So they're not ashamed. It's not like in Eng or Germany or France, like at a Croatian wedding, they fly. They have like the biggest creation flag they can hold and they wave it in front of the couple outside the Catholic church. And everyone's cool with that. And, you know, they can actually go a bit far from my comfort here sometimes. But it's, you know, there's no shame in tribe here. It's interesting. There's church bells that chime really loudly in this town I live in. And I talked to my Croatian friend, I said, why do the church bells ring so loudly? You know, I mean, it's fine for mass, but it's just all day long. And he just looked at me like I was weird and just said, well, that's our tradition. End of explanation. He didn't say, well, I'm an individual and I have an opinion and here's my thoughts on that. He just said, well, that's what we do. Now. That's dangerous because sometimes traditions get outdated. You know, people get watches and don't need the CHURCH BELLS But I think that the humility of tradition, and for me, a true conservative is someone who, I follow Roger Scruton in this example, who loves home like the hobbits love Hobbiton, you know, who loves tradition, who dislikes orcs, who dislikes people who are going to cause ruin in one's home. And yes, young men need a sense of personal mission. I've been doing coaching work around purpose for many years and in a decadent culture where survival isn't on the equation, we need that. Like I need that. I go crazy if I don't have a sense of mission. Like for me, my life before and after getting that sense is radically different. This is a few thoughts. I don't know, man. I'm just a pudgy middle aged man who's got enough ridic hair, but I'm. I'm not sure if I'm making any sense, mate.

Do you think that men, that young men have become more misogynistic? Because I've noticed this push to frame young men as dangerously misogynistic. So much so that in the UK they're, they're now going to start teaching anti misogyny classes in school, which I think is absurd, but I'm curious to get your thoughts.

Well, feminism is cancer and unfortunately it has infected, you know, many of the systems. Sorry, I've been in Croatia too long, but I've forgotten where the Overton window is for Americans. Listen, what's happened is the, the normalization of various things that aren't normal, right? Like women like men to be man and strong men. This is just normal in their behavior, if not in their words, around the world. But I think unfortunately there are, there is a culture that's developed which is man hating and it sees normal male behavior as somehow bad and wrong. Now, there are also a few misogynistic men, not very many, but there's a shadow that's being created if you repress and you do shadow work, you know, if you repress healthy, normal masculinity, you get Tyler Durden, right? You get the sort of hyper mask, you get the Andrew Tates, you know, these weird guys doing men's work with their top soft, so gay with their tops off. And they're super like, you gotta do it like American. Yeah. You know, and they get this like weird. But then they put masculinity because of the shadow that's being created. And some young boys who don't have dads or male role models, like you see this in a lot of the black community, America, like embracing like violent hip hop or whatever. So they don't have a healthy view of masculinity. So they think that's what a man is, the 10 year old's caricature of a man. And they think that sort of macho ness and that sort of, you know, women hating the other thing is just consumerism includes women. So like the hookup culture is a consumer objectified culture. Like materialist modernity suggests we treat each other as objects to masturbate with, as objects of consumption as opposed to human beings to relate to. So the sexual Louise Perry, for example, I don't know if you've had on. She's fantastic on the sexual revolution. She's great British woman. Her and Mary Harrington are both fantastic and two smartest people in the UK as far as I'm concerned. And Louise talks about the disaster of the sexual revolution for women and part of that disaster is the demonizing of men.

Yeah, I think, I think that it's hard for young men to have a vision in today's world or have models or role models or have anything that they can propel themselves towards. And it's. What's interesting is because I've been thinking about this a lot as after Charlie Kirk was shot and then Nick Fuentes has sort of had this ascension into mainstream media and you know, here's some dude that's, you know, on, on Twitch and Rumble, you know, dropping the, dropping the N word and just. He kind of is this like nerdy, hyper religious version of Tyler Durden. Like, I don't give a. I mean, it's wild, right?

It's wild like Trump's trying to marry his son to the princess of Denmark. I mean, like, like it's, it's really, it's like mad. Like the Middle Ages are back, right? We've lost the sort of Christian respect for life, normality, respect for the rule of law. And what we're left with is just this like old school pagan, not in a good way, like power gods arguing. I mean, I didn't even know who's controlled opposition anymore. Like this, this is the crisis of trust in postmodernity or late modernity, which is we say, you know, I don't trust the church, I don't trust the government. Clearly they're, you know, they're a bunch of criminals. I don't trust the media. You know, it's like Diddy's Diddling and Epstein's Epstein. You. I don't trust any of those guys. Okay, sorry. If I just got you canceled and all of those things, we go, I don't trust anything. We don't trust science because they lied to us during COVID So now we look at the media, we go, I don't even know who this clown is. Who is he? Like, what? What's he about? So what I will see though, is as sanity breaks down, all we're left with is a clown world where the crazy people have a voice. And I couch my message deliberately in a sort of provocative and comedic way, because it's like, that's the spirit of the times, that's the zeitgeist. And unfortunately, that also means more extreme voices get amplified. Tate just says more extreme things than other people. And as a result, you know, there's an ethical line for me that I won't cross, but there's an amplification of the more extreme people. And also as young men, society offers young men nothing. Particularly if you're a white guy in the uk, you're going to get discriminated against. So you're not going to get a job at the BBC or the police or the civil service. They actively discriminate. This is a fact. This is not an opinion, this is a fact. They're racist discrimination. You're not going to buy a house, you've got no money, right? You're probably anxious and addicted to vaping, porn, gaming, gambling, right? So you're psychologically a mess. You just don't really have anything. You can't get a girl because the sexual marketplace has been wrecked by the apps. You know, we put dating for, in if we put for profit companies motivated to not make long term relationships in charge of dating. That was right. So what we've now, like young men have so little to gain by society. They're just like it, let's burn it down. Like, who's the craziest guy you got? And Charlie Kirk, in some ways was a voice of reason. I agree and disagree with him on different topics. But, you know, we got Fuentes now and you know, once someone shoots him, we're going to get a crazier version. It's like this is, this is, this is sort of spiraling into madness. And again, this isn't a black pill. It's good news. Like the train of clowns is hitting a wall. Like the car wreck of culture we're seeing is the end of this madness. And the sane people now are just going off and buying little farms in Iowa, they're having communities. You're going off, I think somewhere Right. Soon they're leaving the cities, they're leaving the Internet. I post on Instagram, then I just run. And that's a neighborhood I don't want to be in for my own sanity. So it's like the same people are coming through, and the young guys, they're going to be fine. They're going to be fine. But it's wild. In the meantime, it does.

It does seem like the era of the Joker archetype, you know, and like the rise of the Joker. I think that's why the. The Batman with Heath Ledger was so popular and timely from like a collective conscious standpoint, because everybody liked Heath Ledger's Joker. You know, everybody was really like, there was there. It created this dilemma. And I'm not saying that I like, I'm not like, don't dry the. The line between what I'm saying and me liking Nick Fuentes. That's not what I'. But everybody kind of liked the Joker because the. The society had become so decrepit and. And faulty and broken that he was kind of taking a torch to it.

Yeah. And it.

It does feel like a lot of young men, in the absence of any cultural appreciation and respect, any absence of mission, role model, purpose, function, meaning, there's a lot of young men that are like, okay, like, we're just gonna wild out. And I don't think that's a great idea. But I'm curious as to how you foresee this playing out.

Yeah. Do. I mean, do I look like a podcaster with a plan? You know, like, you want a serious answer? I actually did a breakdown of Heath Ledgers joker on my YouTube. His embodiment is just so well played. I mean, it's genius. But sadly, he embodied that a little bit too well. You know, the problem with being a method actor is you. You take on the role, you embody it. You don't just pretend to be it. So the tragedy in there too. Yeah. I think there's things to be cautious of here. Right. So even if it's just like, we live in a world where addiction is so normal, as someone in recovery, I have to be careful. Right. We live in a world where this various sins are so much more available. It's like, you know, my granddad, there was three Irish girls at the dance in the countryside. He hooked up with one of them, got her pregnant, had to marry her. They lived happily ever after. But he wasn't taking easyjet flights to Riga and using Tinder and all the rest of it. The temptations of substances of Women of all these things are much more now. So again, the good news is that men have to be spiritually mature in a way that wasn't necessary before. And I've been late to the party. I'm a late mature to my shame, actually. It's like there's a lot of growing up as alcoholic for 10 years, the stuff that took me a while. And I do see young men getting the message earlier. Like, the young guys that I work with, they're mostly, you know, pretty sensible with dating and monogamy, this kind of thing. They're mostly pretty sensible around substances because they've got, you know, there's one guy I was taking to the gym. I did some coaching in the gym with young guys sometimes because, you know, therapy is gay, right? Just like sitting and talking to each other is kind of weird. So, like, it's much easier to do coaching in the gym. And he was 15 years old and an ex. Drug addiction. Crazy. And most of them are, you know, the porn stuff, you've done good work on, on your channel, you know, like, we've had to address that. I'm glad I didn't grow up with that. And suddenly in the AI world, this is. This is taking on like a next level that you. I think you could only call demonic if you have any spiritual belief. So, yeah, it's tricky times for young men in that sense. And as I said, we're hitting rock bottom. It's all gonna be fine. Pizza tastes good. Go outside, kiss your girlfriend, call your mom, everything's fine.

What, what do you hope that young men start to learn? Like, when you work with them, is it just a matter of teaching them the skills of resiliency and, you know, being able to create some structure and order in their life to drown out the chaos of society? Like, what, what do you give them? What do you do?

Hunting liberals with crossbows? No, I'm joking. Don't. Like, I'm gonna. But I'm slightly embarrassed, Connor. Last time I went through and England, I didn't get arrested at Heathrow by Keir Starmer's Thought Police. And I'm. I'm. I'm slightly embarrassed by that. So nothing violent. We don't encourage that. The four reconnections. So something's called about the four Bs. So body, that's the anchor. Get an embodied practice. Lift weights, do martial arts. You know, do yoga. If you're, if you're in California, like getting in body practice. That's great. Bees. Body. Belonging. Find tribe. Like build a village. Right. Like online, offline, in person, you know, plus online we've got opportunities now that we've got opportunities that no one ever had before. It's so cool. Like, the availability of information, you know, is so good. But we need that belonging. We need that village. Third big biome. Spend time in nature. Minimum for me, like three hours a day, minimum. All my coaching. Outside, barefoot, walking, swimming in the sea, just breathing fresh air. Doesn't have to be a big hippie thing, you know, Like, I deliberately live somewhere as next to a park or next to the sea if I can. They people are in different situations. And the fourth is belief. People need a religion, not just a spiritual practice. They need to embrace a religion. And the one of your family of origin is usually best. If you can return to one. Sometimes that's too painful for people. There's been abuse or some problem, and then they might need to shop around. But, you know, it's a consumer attitude isn't the one for it. We've got to be careful.

Why. Why do you think that's so necessary? Like, double click on that. Why do you think? Because I think that that's. That is sort of anti. What people would think that you can have a robust, meaningful life in every sense of the word without a formalized religion.

Well, you will have a religion. It would just be a bad one. It will just be the default religion of. Of demonic modernity. It'll be, I'm the center of the universe. Narcissism. Hedonism is a bad religion. I've tried that. You know, it ends badly. Had Anna Lemke on my podcast talking about neuroscience, and she was just like, look, if you chase pleasure, you'll end up in hell. Simple as that. It just doesn't work just neuroscientifically as well as spiritually. So hedonism is a bad religion. Materialism is a bad religion. I mean, you can get a Bugatti and shag a load of girls and die lonely with syphilis. I mean, no, that's not a great religion. So what's your religion now? If your religion is. Well, yeah, I've got this loose spiritual thing, and I did ayahuasca once, and I went to yoga once. It's like, okay, but. But that risks massive narcissism, right? Like, if we make. We're on our little cult leaders and there's no accountability, there's no challenge, there's no community that says, hey, stop it. There's no community when you get married. Like, I went through a Divorce. And one of the things we realized is we didn't have anything at the center of our marriage. So when it was no longer expedient, it was like, why are we married? And there was no community to hold us, to say, hey, you guys need to get couples counsel. You know? And there was no. She was a great person. Still is. I don't hate her in any way. But it was. We didn't have that holding of faith. We didn't have, like, hey, you're Catholic, you can't get divorced. And by the way, here's a priest to talk to you now. And here's a whole bunch of people who got married with you in a church ritualistically. And they're gonna, like, make you talk to each other and work it out. We didn't have that. So the village needs a church. Like, you know, America's, you know, isn't built like this generally, but in every British village, in every Hobbiton, there's a church in the middle. And there's a reason for that. That's the center of the village. Same in Croatia. That's the center of the village. That's why it makes the loud noise and it's got the highest tower. And if we don't have that, society doesn't function. The individual doesn't function. We need the accountability, we need the ritual, we need the traditions. Like the massive narcissism of, like, I'm gonna invent my own religion. It's like, dude, you can't even pick your own clothes without your Italian girlfriend telling you what jacket to wear. Just random example. Like, we can't make decisions about, like, not eating at midnight. Like, like, really, you're going to make your own religion? Like, good luck with that.

And when you, when you say make your own religion, are you referring to the ideology that people then adopt?

Well, it's either the default religion of materialism, the sort of second matrix of the sort of fake Christianity of woke, Right, Which Height and others have pointed out is just like a shit Christianity with its priests and its magic words and its special groups. And, you know, it's. It's just a. A cult of the victim. You know, Christ being the original victim. It's a sort of extreme, unhealthy version of Christianity. So because we're still running the operating system of Christianity, right? Like, we're not Roman. This is. Again, people can look up historians on this. What's the book? Dominion by Tom Holland. So we're still running an operating system. So we're probably Going to be like weird pseudo Christians. If we're Western, most of your listeners will be doing socialism's weird pseudo Christianity. It's just Christianity done bad. Or we're gonna make ourselves and our head and is in the center of the world, you know, or we're going to do some sort of spiritual thing and just be confused, you know, you've been to Northern California, right? You've been to Berlin and Brighton and these kind of places, I think, and you. It's confused at best and it doesn't end well.

It's interesting because I think what would you say to the average person that. Or not the average person, but just the person that's listening to that and says, my life is very happy, I'm very content. I feel very fulfilled without modern religion in my life. I don't. I don't need those things or I don't need that thing because I'm. I'm good.

I'd say, why are you desperately distracting yourself every single day then? Because honestly, some people are sort of spiritually talented, but the norm is to be addicted, distracted, depressed. Like sometimes I say dead, you know, deracinated, exhaustion, Anxious and depressed. Like that's the norm. So they may be talking about one person who's naturally spiritually talented. Like, I'm not spiritually talented. I'm a spiritual moron. And there are those people do exist who are just wise and calm and connected and, you know, they needed less than I needed. But most people are like me. Most people are crazy. And, you know, we're medicated, we're distracted, we're mentally unwell. And they say, I'm fine. You know, like, what is it up? Insecure, neurotic. What's the E like? I'm fine. I definitely don't need this. Please pass the fast food porn vape. You know, like, it's like I don't believe it anymore. And then I meet like religious people. Like, I don't know. In Ukraine, I work with these nuns, right? I got adopted by these nuns. They're cool. I was teaching them trauma work and they were just calmer than everyone. They were just better regulated. And I'm teaching self regulation and they're what I call theo regulated. So there's co regulation, self regulation, eco regulation. We're just talking about that and theoregulation. And I was like, wow, these ladies are shiny. My mum was a nun for seven years actually, but fist bump to my dad. But it's a true story, so I've seen that. I grew up around her old nun friends, and they're shiny even though it's like 60 years after they left the convent. So there's really something in it. And yes, you also get religious people who are bad and there's abuses in church and no human institution is perfect. There's corruption at all levels, of course, and sometimes that is too painful for people and they, you know, they might need to become a Buddhist or something like that.

In, in your frame. And then I want to talk in a moment about the sort of more I think what you've called like a traditionalist approach to psychology, which I think is. Is very interesting, but in your frame it sounds kind of like what you're saying is that modern day feminism is a replacement of religion for some people.

Well, I mean, the whole intersectional frame. Right. So probably you've come across Jonathan Peugeot and the post World War II consensus, but this really goes back to, you know, Jesus basically said, hey guys, I know you're all massively ethnocentric and racist, but maybe calm down a bit with the judgment. Don't throw the first stone. You know, he talked to kind of adulterous women, even tax collectors, which I think is a step too far, Connor. But he was like, look, just chill out with the ethnocentrism that you'll still see in Orthodox Jewish communities. And that was the human norm to be massively ethnocentric. And he said, chill out a little bit with that. And then we took that and run with it. And then when we lost the religious frame, that kind of love of the outsider became the worship of the outsider and the hatred of oneself. So instead of saying, hey, it's okay if you're foreign, that's fine. We're, you know, like I get, I go to the universal Catholic Church full of Croatians and they don't hate me because I'm English or my girlfriend because she's Italian, but they're proudly Croatian. So that's the healthy balance, right? Like we're us and this is our culture and the mass is going to be in Croatia and we're not going to accommodate you and welcome foreigner. Welcome the foreigner. But that's a healthy integration of the love of norm. Like we need to bring normal back to psychology. Right? Because you can't orientate to the exception. Yeah. Like the exception is not to be abused. Right. You don't pick on the gay kid, that's fine. But it's, it's like you can't orientate to the exception. You certainly shouldn't worship it, you certainly shouldn't hate the norm. And unfortunately that's what modern sort of woke culture has become and that's what psychology has become. You know, the psychological field. Years ago I did my psychology degree, right? But I've been in coaching and mindfulness and embodiment, all these things. I've interviewed, you know, most of the top teachers in the sort of psychological field in various ways on my podcast over the years, hundreds of them. And I think the statistics from the states are 17 to 1, liberal to conservative. So the field is utterly biased and it's, it's missing a lot of the picture. Because for example, one way of looking at left and right, this is Ken Wilber's way, is that this, it's a different framework of causation. So why is someone poor? The left would say it's society, it's culture, it's oppression, and there's some truth in that, right? Like there's a class system, which by the way is the one. This is the leftist anti woke analysis class and money is the one that always gets forgotten when everyone's obsessed with gender and race and sexuality. And that's the only one that really matters when you talk to rich people. But anyway, so like yes, that matters, but then the right wing people say yeah, but what about your choices and personal responsibility and you know, the virtue. This is really important. And they're right. So both of those things cause any particular issue. So we're missing half the picture at best, if we just look at one side of things. And often the right part is what's missing. The other piece is all of psychology is coming from material modernity. So it doesn't have a conception of human flourishing. It has a. John Paul II would call it an inadequate anthropology. It has an inadequate understanding of what makes a human being flourish, the eudaimia of a human being. So it takes out beauty, for example. You know, have you seen how ugly most activists are? How they dress, how they eat, their bodies, everything. They just this, like that wouldn't fly in Italy. Like the aesthetics are just not there. Like aesthetics matter. It takes out love, it takes out nation, it takes out community, it takes out faith. Like these are the things that make us well, right? Like if you took a human being with the best psychological knowledge TikTok can provide and put them in isolation in a room with no sunlight, no nature, no friends, and you made them nihilistic so they had no belief in God, that person would go crazy very quickly. Correct. Even if they had like the best therapist in the world visit them once a week. And the best yoga class once a week. And all the. Even, like, the embodiment tools, right? This all very, like, solo individual. This, like, deracinated view of human. It's not adequate. It's not adequate.

So what is a more traditionalist approach to psychology? I know you're sort of touching on some of those things as you were speaking before, but what does that mean to you? What is modern psychology missing from your perspective?

That needs to be most of what matters to be human, most of what you love, most of what you care about. So we could go for the four Bs again. It needs body. We can't think our way out of this. You need a praxis. Western culture, though. I love it. Western culture. It's hypercognitive. It misses the praxis, you know, Like, I went to my therapist for the first time after doing loads of embodied work a few years ago. And it's okay to go to therapy. It's not bad. Particularly certain trauma therapies can be helpful. But I went to him and he. We got this big insight and I said, great, that's a really good insight. What's the plan? And he just looked at me like, what now? I know not all therapy is like that, you know, but I was from the coaching world, I'm from the embodiment world. I was like, what are we going to do differently? What's the activity? How are we going to build a new muscle? You know, that's what I help people with generally as a coach. And that was missing. And the body is just an anchor of sanity, right? Like this whole thing of being a. A mind in a body, this ridiculous ghost in a machine Descartesian notion you can be a turnip in a woman or whatever it is now. I don't know. It's like, that doesn't make sense philosophically. Philosophers should have. The only reason philosophers didn't push back against it is because they were scared. Because it's a cult. It's a violent cult. And I had philosophers on my podcast and I said, oh, you do body mind stuff. Can we talk about this? You know, can we talk about, you know, the holism of body mind? They were like, no way.

Way.

We're not touching that. I can see it stop breathing, right? Like, it's like, this is a hot button topic. Even though most people think it's silly. A man cannot be a woman. A woman cannot be a man. Most people understand this is a. Maybe a humiliation ritual to Try and just to get us to say something ridiculous. It's silly and it certainly from the point of body mind holism, Anyone who studied yoga, martial arts has a sense that the, the person we are is embodied. We're not a little mind that can be uploaded to a cloud. Right. That's where transhumanism is heading. Right. That philosophy is the tech side of things. I think the trans people are often doing their best under quite difficult circumstances and often traumatized and should be treated with sympathy and compassion. Or I think they're actually a distraction from where that's really going. So that's number one body. We need to anchor in the body. Daily body practice. This is what I break down very, very practically for people in my books and work. Like really, like there's a. I know I'm being sort of a little provocative and joking and philosophical, but actually there's a concrete way you could do that. Like I could give you a set of instructions to how to be more embodied. Right. And it's reliable. We've Tested it for 20 years. The next one, community belonging. Second B. How do you build that? And that also looks like not hating your nation. Right? Like I was with a group of Germans. I was like, sing the national anthem them and they're like, no, no, no, we can't do that. I was like, sing it. It's fine, it's fine. You don't, you don't have to get all mid 20th century on me. It's fine. It's just this things. Germany has things to be proud of. That's the post World War II hyper vigilance, right? The World War II, World War I and 30 Years War. All of them really, but particularly World War II created this hyper vigilance to tribe. Yeah, this hyper vigilance, like what is ethnos? It's just extended family, right? Like we all have an in group bias towards extended family. And co regulation isn't like a counselor with a neck that doesn't work. Nodding. You know, co regulation is 100 creations in a church singing a song. They all know. It's eating food together. It's a Portuguese old man in the town square flirting with the old lady while they eat an ice cream. And they have a shared culture, right? Co regulate. Like I was in London recently and I was totally co dysregulated. But I was just surrounded by people with different norms, different languages. That's a very simple one. Again, we don't have to hate anyone. My family are immigrants. We do not have to hate Anyone? I certainly have sympathy for people who want a better life or they come somewhere safer or where they can make more money. But diversity is not a strength. Cohesion is our strength. We need a little bit of diversity. It's quite nice to date a hot Latina who's a bit different from you or something like that. It's nice to visit a foreign country and, and eat exotic food. But I'm sorry, Piers Morgan, but curry is not a good reason to destroy the Western world. It's not a good enough reason to say, like, hey, I just want to eat curry. So therefore we have to destroy the shire, we have to destroy the cohesiveness of the world. Like, this is how we regulate. This is how, like we're kept saying, like, diversity is insanity. It's not strength. Strength is cohesiveness with a little bit of spice sometimes. Right? Let's not get too right wing. Third thing, ecology, touch grass, go outside. Even on the pagan level, like, you know, I live by a river in the UK and I every, this is kind of hippie, but every morning I would feed that river rose petals and it was like a grieving process. I was just breaking up with my then wife and there was a grief of sort of crying into this big river and having this loving relationship with the river as the sort of feminine, the healing of the feminine, like that sort of deep relationship with nature is really important, particularly if you live in the new world and you know, maybe you've moved abroad like I have and you know, I feel rough here being essentially because of Brexit, my partner can't live in the UK right now and I, you know, I'm a digital douchebag. And it's, it's that it's rough not having those roots in the land, you know, So I really try and build that relationship with the land. And as I said, the last one is get a religion. Put yourself out of the center of the universe. Like in 12 Step. This is necessary, right? If you go to AA, they're like, get a higher power or you won't stay so powerful. And essentially how I feel is like when I was young, I was addicted and mentally ill and now the world's caught up, right? So it's like, we all need those tools now. And they're actually relatively simple. And these can be, a lot of these things can be concretized, like with the young guys, like, I was like, get outside 10 minutes a day. And even that made a huge difference to their mental health. 10 minutes a day without their phone Outside.

What are some of the things? I mean, I think you've pointed out a couple things, but I want to just sort of go a little bit deeper on some of the tools, some of the resources. Because I think men hear the term embodiment a lot. We see this a lot with men that come into organization. Right. They're like, oh, I hear all about embodiment. I don't know what that means, really. I don't know how to do that, really. So what are some of the tools, some of the resources, some of the things that a man can do to actually be more in his body? Yes, obviously, go outside, touch grass, spend some time in nature. But what are some. What are some other things? Things that a man can do to. To. To develop a more embodied way?

Yeah. Okay. So the philosophical, subjective view of the body, that's what we're talking about. We need to develop a relationship with our body. Right. Let's be clear what we're doing. You could look at it from an embodied intelligence model. There's a map of that in my books where people can look at the skill sets involved. If you're kind of a bit on the spectrum, you want it concrete. Look at the skill sets involved. There's eight skill sets. You can break it down. Embodied intelligence poetically. Before we get back to the practical. The Greeks would call it a nostos, which is a term from the Odyssey. It's like a homecoming so that, like, you know, you're fighting. We're all fighting the Trojan War. We're all hearing the sirens of our iPhones trying to. Trying to sing us to our deaths. And there's a developing that loving relationship with the home of the body, the home of community, the home of nature and the home of God. Like, that's a choice on some level. And then. Okay, concretely, let's start with the body. That's maybe the. That's where I started. It's the easiest one. Get an embodied practice. And I'd say a little bit of embodied meditation, a little bit of gentle movement. This is good. Fall in love with something. Like, for me, it was aikido at first, and then later on it was tango and jiu jitsu and other things. Right. Different things. Conscious dance, yoga. But whatever you fall in love with is a good place to start. Like, don't feel like you should do jiu jitsu, because Joe Rogan does or whatever. Right? It's like, just fall in love. Love with something. Like, that's fine. And as long as there's some degree of body awareness in it. It's not just totally mechanical. It's not just fitness. There's some, you know, some of the martial arts, for example, some schools of yoga are more like fitness, which is fine, but it's not really bringing awareness to the body that's the key piece. It's. It's. Yeah. So as long as there's some degree of awareness and feeling, you're going to be building embodiment. And then, then the second group of people listening to this will be the people who already do some thing. So maybe it's like, yeah, I've done yoga for years, or, yeah, I've done, you know, aikido for years. Great. Now let's look for balance. So go from basic embodiment, feeling the body more deeply more of the time. We could, you know, there's another definition to what am I embodying. So for me, for example, I was, believe it or not, more crazy than this and more kind of all over the place and addicted. One for me, like, traditional square, get back in the box. Japanese martial arts was perfect for me, okay? But after a while, I became really disciplined and a bit like warrior, like. And I was a bit, like, fighty. And I was like, okay, now I need to study something else. So I went off to tango, and there was women with perfume and beautiful shoes and Argentinian attitudes. And it was like, wow, this is great. This is like a whole nother side of myself I have to develop that I couldn't develop in aikido. And later on, I did competitive stuff like Thai boxing and jiu jitsu, because I was like, okay, this is competitive thing that I'm denying, and it's part of my masculinity, and I'm like, avoiding that in aikido. So I went and did that for a couple of years. So I'd say for people who are already in something, the problem is we love the smell of our own shit and we deepen our neurosis. So if you're a more mature practitioner, you know, you've done something for a while. I would say picks a secondary thing. You could have it additional or instead of. And that's kind of like an arranged marriage, you know, it's like, look, we need each other. This is a good fit. But maybe it's a bit awkward at first, you know, and like. And then just commit to it. That's the other thing. Because we're in the supermarket of, you know, Charles Taylor's term or in the sort of spiritual supermarket of modernity. And it's, what that means is people just like do a little bit of this, a little bit of that. It's like, no, no, get a black belt, you know, do it. Do five years of yoga three times a week. Right. So yeah, that's what I'd recommend. The short answer, any embody practice. The slightly longer answer is what is the embodiment you're trying to build? You know, we use a four elements model for that, for example, on our courses. And what we do with our students is they, they come in and they've nearly always done something if they want to build, be an environment coach. So then we say, what have you done? Great. You built these skills, these virtues. Beautiful. Keep that, that's great. And then we challenge them to try some other things. So we send the kickboxer off to salsa or whatever, or we send the improv comedian to kickboxing. And then they try a few things, they sort of date a few practices and they pick one and then they have to do it for like four months, which is like minimum to really taste it. Yeah, I could really geek out about this stuff. I think I get kind of boring on this stuff because, because it's my sort of technical expertise. Connor.

No, it's good, I think, I mean, it plays into some things that I've been, you know, I've been thinking about, I've noticed, I mean one, I, I really encourage men to develop those embodiment practices that are juxtaposed kind of like what you were talking about. You know, I like doing yin yoga, which is super slow, focusing on the breath, holding a pose or posture for four or five minutes. It's, you know, while you, you know, curse everybody's name because it's so uncomfortable and your body's like, get me out of this pose. But it, you have to slow and then release the sort of like deep tissue and fascia. And then, you know, I do kickboxing Muay Thai every single week. And so there's sort of this juxtaposition between the two. And I noticed, I noticed that that is incredibly rewarding and fulfilling because there's sort of, you're having to be embodied in a way that is, is using force and then using, you know, using surrender. Maybe not using surrender, but using force and then playing with surrender. And so I think for a lot of guys that that polarity, that juxtaposition is going to serve them very well. The other thing that I think might be a good thing for us to close out on is I'm, I'M noticing that my guess is that in the next sort of like three to five years, maybe for a longer period than that. But we're going to see more and more men who really embody a kind of second wave Renaissance man. You know, the guy that has, you know, that, that's training martial arts, but is at home on a Thursday night doing, you know, artistic painting, you know, or some, some sort of dance or writing poetry and that this kind of multi dimensional masculinity is going to make its way back into our culture because we've gone through this period of just being this, these single dimensional units that have kind of hollowed us out. And I see a lot of young men and a lot of men in general that are pursuing a more rich depth palette of existence which is causing them to explore a multitude of adventures, experiences, you know, skill sets. And so they're becoming much more multidimensional than I think their fathers have or you know, their grandfathers fathers before them. I'm curious to get your thoughts on that. Do you think that there's merit in. Not that you're trying to be a Renaissance man, but do you think that there's merits in, or meaning and fulfillment in going down that path?

I mean a man should be well danced as well as well read, right? Like you should, you know, like you should be able to like fight, flee, you know, there's a few things you should be able to do well. And what you're talking about is building range. So most people, as I said, really just deepen their neurosis. The people who are doing rocket yoga should do yin and vice versa. Same with different martial arts. So building range I think is wise as one matures. I think there is just a wonderful availability of choices like in any major city, like my mum did Catholicism because that's all she had. And then years later she discovered a younger yoga class she had to drive 50 miles to. Right. Whereas, you know, on any given night of the week in a major town, I can do a hundred practices plus another, you know, 100 online. So I think we've got a wonderful opportunity. The problem there is lack of depth sometime and people jumping around between things and thinking they can do everything. So I, I'd say it's, it's good to sort of, you know, marry a practice at least for a while and then maybe, you know, maybe take a second wife later on. But I think it's good to, you know, this analogy probably doesn't work for Catholic, but it's. Yeah, it's that's helpful to build range, to build awareness within that. I think that's, yeah, suddenly super useful.

Is that like skill set polygamy?

Yeah, like, I mean, you can be date a few practices first. I mean, John Vervi talks about ecology as a practice, which I like a lot. And you know, certainly like, you know, stillness practice plus a movement practice. You could look at a practice for the different areas of embodied intelligence. I'd say trying to get one practice to do everything is tricky. And yeah, like, like there's an art form to that. And you know, I break it down in books and things. If people are interested, you can geek out on that topic. But again, I'd say for the average guy, I just say, just do any embodied practice you love. Like, that's a great way of, you know, coming home to the body.

Nice, nice. I think that's going to be my new Instagram bio. Is just relationally monogamous and. And a polygamous practice.

Polygamy.

Listen, I practice polygamy in my hobbies, not in my relationship.

That's nice, I like that. But again, you've still got to commit. Can I tell you a little story from Ukraine, which I think kind of shows something about it. So I went out there, I'd already had a lot of links there because my ex wife was Ukrainian. I've been teaching stuff around trauma there for years because there's been, you know, the small invasion before the big one and whatever people think about it politically, you know, it's like, you know, that's your business. But for me, it was like I just knew people, I wanted to help people. People went there, started a charity teaching trauma work, just turned up, rocked up, got a bunch of psychology graduates to be my assistants, you know, made some money to get the flight, put it together. The nuns were there and we're in the training room and it's on the first day of the training and then there's an air alarm and it's the first one in Lviv, which is the city we're in, which is quite far from the front line. You know, it's the other side of the country. And it's terrifying, you know, it's terrifying. Like I'm really scared. And then I remember Pietro, who was my Polish friend, who I used to be in aikido dojos with, and he was my driver there, and he was. We used to aikido together. We didn't even speak the same language, but we had like a real brotherhood, you know, best man. His wedding. I actually Buried his wife some years later. So we had a really tight friendship. And I remember him saying, like, mark this. We're driving there, we're driving there. It's a little bit dodgy how we're doing and what we're doing. And he said, this is what we trained for. For. This is what we train for. And then I'm in the room, I'm in the training room. The air alarm goes off, and we don't know if there's nuclear weapons or big bomb attack. No one really knew what was going on at that. It's like week three of the war. It's really early days. And I saw the nuns were kind of calm internally. I'm doing a cross. And I remember Pietro, I remember the hands on my back of my father, who was a teacher, my friends, the trainings. I've had the mentors in Aikido. And I just kind of feel my feet on the ground, relax my belly. And I'm scared, right? And I take a deep breath and I say, guys, we need to walk to the bomb shutter. Because what often happens in these situations, I've been in a few, Is that people run and then there's a panic and people get trampled, and it's not. It's not good. And this is. A lot of people were scared because they hadn't been in that situation before, most of them. And what was really interesting is internally I'm thinking, I'm really shitting my pants here. But externally, I was relatively calm and centered, and my voice wasn't too high pitched. And what I saw was all the people in that room looked at me with trust, and they said, okay, this guy is a little bit more centered than we are, with the exception of the nuns, actually, but other than them, a little bit more centered than we are. And after that, they just followed me to hell and back. And we did the best training ever, because that was embodied leadership. And it wasn't that I wasn't scared, it was that I was able to center myself. And all those years of aikido training, I went, okay, finally, this is where it shows up. And I. I really remember that moment.

That's beautiful, man. Thank you so much for sharing that. And, you know, I think one of the things that I appreciate about you, and we'll close out with this, is I. I think it's. I think for the listener, maybe depending on where they stand, it's probably hard to sort of pin you down, which is nice.

Good jiu jitsu.

Jiu jitsu, man.

Philosophical Jiu Jitsu. Don't get pinned. Philosophical. Go.

Identity based. Jiu Jitsu. You know, I think, I think in our world is so. In our extremely polarized world and culture and narrative right now, it's so easy to hear one opinion or perspective from somebody and write them off as something. And I think one of the things that I've really liked, you know, about you and coming to know you is just the, the breadth of who you are and what you've done and the life that you've lived.

And my curse, my philosophical girth. I told you that. I told you that. Jokes.

That's right.

I mean, listen, here's the thing. If you're predictable, your opinions aren't yours. If you pre. Like, if I know your view on abortion, I shouldn't know your views on migration. Right now there's coherences. But if we're predictable, it means we got our views in a package called the left or the right, the blue team, the red team, whatever. That's boring. The other one is we do want to naturally put people in boxes because it makes them easier to. I mean, I'm an. With a heart of gold, right? Like that's, that's basically who I am. And I also joke a warrior. Archetypes are a bit weird to go together, you know, a little bit joke, a little bit warrior. The teacher. I mean, I would say this, like, like I don't have any particular expertise. I'm not like a Harvard neuroscientist or an ex Navy SEAL or anything, right? Like, I'm just someone who came from a really crazy family and got really interested in how to stay sand. And now a lot of people need that knowledge. I would say, like it's becoming the luxury. The luxury. Knowledge has become a necessity. And I, I would say for this, anyone doesn't like my attitude or my jokes or one of my views, that's fine. I probably said something else that might be useful. I'd rather just be of service that way. And also the other, the other piece here, I think like personal growth takes itself way too seriously. Like this whole, like Connor, we earn a living talking about embodiment and attachment like there are people with real jobs, right? Like, this is hilarious. Like, let's just laugh at the, like, absurdity is a good way out of nihilism philosophically. And I think it is necessary without becoming the cynical, violent joker, it is necessary we keep a sense of humor for insight insanity. Humor creates space between the terror and yourself. It creates that little bit of space so there is method to the madness. And that is the best rationalization for dick jokes you will ever get it.

Outstanding, man. Outstanding. Well, we'll have the links to all your work, but where. Where can people find you?

Okay. If they read this, how to Become Human, my lawyers aren't sure if it's legal in the UK by now, so it's just by a guy called Mark. Okay. We just call it By Mark. If they do YouTube, we have a podcast, the Feral Philosophy Podcast. And there's a channel, the Mark Walsh Channel, that's there. Feral Philosophy Podcast. And if they want to train as Embodiment Coach, that's my actual job. Really? Then just look up Certificate of Embodiment Coach. No longer on Tinder or Grindr. So none of those places.

Outstanding, man. Outstanding. We'll have the links to that in the show. Notes for everybody that's listening to this. Don't forget to mend it forward to somebody that you know would enjoy. It might spark a meaningful conversation and dialogue. And as always, until next week, Connor Beaton signing off.