Modern Wisdom

And they have a kind of philosophy around anti-racism that comes out of critical race theory and their philosophy is that you know a white guy like you should be more or less constantly thinking about how your whiteness has uh given you privilege how your how how your whiteness blinds you to the realities that a black person like me can see

And on di angelo's account you are supposed to be constantly different to black people in conversation so she literally says in her book if you and i are talking about race you as a white guy me as a black guy you were not supposed to disagree with what i have to say about race you're not supposed to argue back you're not supposed to remain silent you're not supposed to get defensive

Robin DiAngelo, in White Fragility, makes the case that racism today is a way worse than Jim Crow because it's invisible and only people like her can see it.

If you came to my home and you saw "Seven Habits of Highly Effective People" or you saw "The Power of Habit" by Duhigg you'd go look at Jim man he's successful he's at the top of his game but he still wants to sharpen the point of the sword, this guy look at him you know, he never never satisfied.

If you just Google The Power of Habits, which was the first book I wrote, you will definitely find my website.

I remember Rhonda Byrne, who wrote The Secret.

And she said that the reason that the tsunami had hit the people of Indonesia or Thailand was because they were attracting that energy.

That went down quite poorly, perhaps unsurprisingly, that hundreds of thousands of people had been displaced by a tsunami, and it was being blamed on them for sending out energy that then got this tsunami to come.

Rhonda Byrne, the author of The Secret... Horseshit, as far as I can see. Encourages people to take a passive, low agency, low sovereignty, victim mentality.

Which is another great book, Invisible Women

It was an established problem ... that is actually one of the things that my friend, Carolyn Criado Perez wrote in her book, Invisible Women, that one of the things that these studies won't do often, they will often exclude women from them.

I would say, go on and get yourself a copy. They're great. There are some excellent translations. And the most recent Penguin one is an excellent translation. And Aristotle's ethics is, I think, one of its real strengths is that it's incredibly realistic.

There's a chapter in Nicomachean Ethics that whenever I'm sort of teaching it, I occasionally go to speak at schools and teach things.

There's a great book called Dopamine Nation by Awesome and I love this idea that The way the dopamine system works is that you can get addicted to anything whether it's chocolate cake or heroin or the example She gives in the book is vampire novels, and I think if you're a anxious person it's very easy to go down the rabbit hole and get hooked into anything and For me, it's like health podcasts. If I don't restrict my access to health podcasts I will start beating myself up every single day that I'm not doing my vo2 max training and I'm not taking self I did my Norwegian 4x4 this morning exactly right? There's always something

You know, there's a really interesting book by Anna Lembke, Dopamine Nation, which really gets into the addictive elements of dopamine.

And I think at least Anna Lembke makes a pretty compelling case that this is really a case of being addicted to dopamine.

The Stranger is often brought up when talking about Camus.

Camus's early novels, like The Stranger is kind of the novel that he's most known for. It's sort of about a really depressed person or somebody that really struggles to connect with reality or other people in any way.

I was reading the housemaid's tale, you know, that iconic story about a totalitarian future.

they get perilously close to the handmaid's tail stuff.

when Matthew Hussey came on the show, he has this quote from his book Love Life where he's talking about how he is a internal tyrant

It's so good. It's a really good self-development book masquerading as a relationship book.

Go read Little House on the Prairie. Okay. She's not just keeping house. Ma is out there making things of economic value that then Pa goes into town and sells.

I was really obsessed with horses and then Laura Ingalls Wilder, which is really, you know who she is? The Little House books. Well, there was Little House on the Prairie...

There is a muse but he's not going to come fluttering down into your writing room he lives in the ground he's a basement guy you have to descend to his level

David Goggins, Never Finished, and his first book, Can't Hurt Me.

I was reading seven eaves, this great book by Neil Stevenson.

I read Seven Eves Again, which is just this outstanding scifi book.

Dude, love Seven Eves. I read it at least three times now.

He, in 1992, published this book called The End of History and the Last Man. What he famously argued in that text is that the final form of human government is liberal democracy.

He, in 1992, published this book called The End of History and the Last Man. What he famously argued in that text is that the final form of human government is liberal democracy.

You could read The Odyssey 500 times in the course of your life.

The Odyssey

She mentioned Elizabeth Gilbert's book, Eat, Pray, Love, noting how it follows the author's brutal divorce and her later spiritual practice.

She was a successful author of Eat, Pray, Love.

Dale Carnegie wrote a lesser known second book that's called How To Stop Worrying And Start Living

It's Dale Carnegie who wrote How To Stop Worrying And Start Living--a much less popular book than his big one--but in it he has this idea of worry time, scheduling a specific window to think about worries so they don't dominate your day.

I'd be so curious what he has to say about this now.

There's a there's a great book called by neil postman called Amusing Ourselves to Death and it came out in 1984 and it's him kind of railing against they put music on the news it's a show now this that's that's the beginning of the end for him they put music on the news and you go yeah this is its entertainment I really enjoyed that

She wrote Anxiously Attached.

I learned from Jessica Baum's first book, Anxiously Attached. She's got a new one out called Safe.

He's got this new book, We Who Wrestle with God.

I've been reading the gospel of st. Matthew I'm I'm writing a book at the moment called We Who Wrestle with God and one of the things Christ says to people continually is to not damage their vision is to not put that's the best way of putting it don't occlude your eye you can see what's in front of you if you're willing to see it and if you're willing to see it the terrible many of the terrible obstacles in life you can just walk around but if you blind yourself purposefully to follow your own narrow self-serving delusion you're going to run into terrible things and terrible people and the terrible part of your own soul all the time that's what you should be afraid of but the best thing that you can hope for if you do do that is to fluke success living somebody else's life right right great wonderful yeah exactly you get to be you get to be a successful fraud

I'm very excited about this new book I'm hoping it'll be the best book that I've ever written it's it's going to be more difficult book than the last two were but not as difficult as maps of meaning which means to consume yeah it's it's it's more it's heavy it's it's deeper have you been fighting with trying to make it accessible no not really right i've been i've been i've been just trying to lay the argument out as clearly as i can like and i think that'll do the trick and i i i have to go over it again and edit it and make sure that it's no more obscure than is absolutely necessary no i want to lay it out so that it's comprehensible and i've had a lot of success with the biblical ventures that i've already embarked on i did a series on genesis in 2017 which turned out to be quite influential and then i just did a seminar on exodus with a group of thinkers and i know there's a hunger for analysis of deep stories and i also have good people around me that can help me grind my way through the stories and understand them and so i'm very much looking i've been having quite a good time writing this book actually it's very difficult to write but it's been extremely exciting and interesting and i'm hoping you asked me earlier what would i consider success with this book i don't think that you'll be able to read this book and understand it and be atheistic i think i can demolish the atheistic argument permanently and it's partly it's a weird thing because it's not like all of a sudden people are going to throw themselves at the feet of god in worship it's like it requires a reconsideration of what we mean by belief and i walked through some of it it's like do you believe in the good well there the difference between believing in good and believing in god is it's a very narrow difference now there are important differences but it's still a narrow difference and the thing is if you don't believe in the in good you're aimless and if you're aimless you're hopeless and if you're aimless and hopeless you're anxious and fractionated and people can't unite in their beliefs like the alternative is not good reversing the enlightenment is no small task well hopefully we can save the best of the enlightenment as well it's like uh the uh chested and fence of chested and fence like how many how many different fences are in the field so to speak and if we've thrown this one out and we're trying to plug it back in but which bit of it's going back in the ground things that's very interesting and i think i think people like dawkins have started to realize this and i know that people like douglas murray and i on her c alie and neil fergusson have recognized this is that with the death of god many other things die things you don't expect and one of the things that dies when god dies is science and no one expected that how so because science as a practice is a religious practice it's predicated on religious axioms is it well you have to believe that there's such a thing as truth you have to believe that the truth is understandable you have to believe that understanding the truth is good you have to believe that there is such a thing as good right so imagine to be a scientist you have to imagine that first of all that the world is comprehensible to the human intellect but more that if you investigate the mysteries of the material world that that will be beneficial right those aren't scientific claims those are metaphysical claims and that metaphysical claim is nested in a story you know and the the enlightenment types they've portrayed the scientific revolution as something contrary to the religious substrate and that's not accurate that's a french revolution that's a luciferian intellect history it's not true the universities grew out of the monasteries that's where the universities came from and science as a widespread enterprise got its start in the universities and they grow to the monasteries that's not questionable like if you go to harvard or if you go to oxford and cambridge it's just starkly evident the layout of the of the colleges is a monastic layout so the idea that there is some fundamental contradiction between religious belief and the scientific enterprise it's it's there's nothing about that that's true and part of the reason that we're loo part of the really reason that we're losing the scientific enterprise right now is because we've unmoored it from its metaphysical substrate and it can't survive if you're going to be a scientist you have to put the truth above all else scientists are very rare you have to believe in the truth to be a scientist i think docens believes in the truth by the way so he's an atheist but a very he's much less of an atheist than he thinks that's my impression lying scientists are atheistic or just malevolent docens is a truthful scientist and insofar as he's pursuing the truth and insofar as he believes that pursuing the truth will set you free then he's walking down a path that's christian to its core now i know he doesn't like that idea but he also doesn't like the fact that the scientific enterprise seems to be collapsing in terms of it's what would you call reliability and validity everywhere so

my book's out in paperback, Trouble the Memoir, Foster Care, Family and Social Class.