Speaker 0 (0s): Good morning, my friends, I hope your day is beautiful. I have the long awaited Simon Critchley interview coming right to you. However, I must tell you that due to a poor decision on my end, I had a little bit of microphone problems. So I had to use my backup microphone at times. It might be a little breathy. However, I can tell you that the wisdom of Simon Critchley shines through this may be the most important philosopher of our time.

He's definitely one of my favorites. I know you'll enjoy this. So thank you for your patience. Look forward to hearing everything you have to say about it. All Aloha, ladies and gentlemen, Welcome to the TrueLife podcast. We are currently awaiting one of the greatest philosophers of our time. I believe Mr. Simon Critchley who will be joining us shortly. I wanted to give you guys a and kind of an overview of the book that he's got here. The book is called ball and it is a 35 philosophical shortcuts.

Awesome. So ladies and gentlemen, I am here with the one and only Simon Critchley. He is an amazing philosopher. He's the, the moderator of the stone column at the New York times, author of numerous books from the Greek tragedies to David Bowie, the Hahn's Jonah's professor at the new school in New York. And today we're going to be checking out his new book right here called bald, which well, you know what I really like about it from this, from the beginning, it's got an awesome cover, but then you take off the dust jacket and it's actually bald. There's nothing on there.

Speaker 1 (1m 40s): Yeah. Completely hairless objects. Yeah.

Speaker 0 (1m 44s): Nice. Really well done. I think most people confuse in the beginning. You know, it says Balden apparently used to have no hair, which is what most people think the book is about. But in reality, it's, it's more about being Frank. Can you talk a little bit about what made you decide to write this book or put it together? I should say,

Speaker 1 (2m 2s): Well, yeah, I mean, it's been written over the last really being the conceit of me as a funny one, one hand, I am bold. On the other hand, I try and speak in a, in this book in a very blunt straightforward way. So the attempt to speak without weak or a toupee or Scholastic to kind of speak directly also that I was forced to, I learnt to speak more boldly working for the newspaper and the way I did.

So it's bald in fact, as a hook. And then the idea about being you're speaking broadly speaking plainly clearly about masses, which are complex. I think they can be addressed straightforwardly and can be accessible to a general reader. And I think that that's often seems like an easier thing to do. It's actually someone like me.

Speaker 0 (3m 7s): Yeah. I agree. Do you think that I wish more people would speak candidly? It seems to me that that's a pretty big issue in our world today is whether it's because people don't want to hurt other people's feelings or that maybe they don't thoroughly understand, but we tend to gloss over or use language that's so ambiguous. It's a miracle that we can actually communicate with each other sometimes.

Speaker 1 (3m 27s): Indeed. Yeah, I try. And I mean, my, my belief since I was a student, really, it was an awful long time ago was the philosophy philosophy is understandable to people with an interest in it, with benefits. The requirement on philosophy is to make itself, to make itself heard in the public realm in clear and distinct ways. And that's why I try and do it's attempt to kind of not, not hide things away just to speak directly and frankly, and honestly about things which I think are of great importance to not just to me, but hopefully to other people.

Speaker 0 (4m 6s): Yeah. I, one thing I find really refreshing about your work is the way that you argue from philosophy in that, like not all things are only part of life is intelligible. And you say in your other book from the Greek tragedies, you know, we can only know what we can know and so much, it seems to me that there's a lot of philosophy professionals that, that believe in something different than the style you argue from. Can you tell people a little bit about the style in which you come from philosophy?

Speaker 1 (4m 34s): Well, yeah, I mean, it's, I think that the strangely enough, I mean the purpose is to people of the illusions and their illusions about things that people have ideas, huge theories about, about history, about what's going on about the nature of the universe and philosophy is, should set out to kind of question those to disappoint people. And do I see, I see philosophy as a kind of a sobering ex embassy.

Actually we, we know a lot less than we think we know, and that a, the philosophical tradition, I guess, is, you know, I did philosophy a provincial university London then got very interested in, in what was going on in, in France, Germany. And I learnt those Lang studied what was called philosophy, which is much more with philosophy in the industry. World is dominated by what's called the analyst tradition, which is all fine and good, some very clever people there, but it's, it's often fast, limited to limited it.

The philosophy is something which takes place within academic departments, addresses other academics and is, is a discipline, which is kind of, it's more closely linked to the sciences, to the empirical sciences and logic. And the approach to philosophy that I take is much more directly connected with culture with the life that people live the way people think, and philosophy has to address the conditions of his time and place and a place of its emergence in, and just take a captive audience and all of those things.

And in this case, that means addressing an audience audience of people that say read the New York times and trying to kind of go the really quite interesting insights can be formulated in ways that are intelligible to a newspaper reader. Nothing really, nothing huge is lost in translation and a lot is so, yeah, I mean, I've got, I don't know, I've got all these old sets of interests, so I've got an interest in, I come out of this with a whole range of thinkers, people I hate.

And, and also I've got very kind of broad interests for me. It's what I do is loss of where as connected to the music I listened to the sport. I watch, I think about the people I'm meet and talk. So it's kind of everything kind of touches on all sorts of aspects of life. Nothing should be alien to a philosophical disposition in my view. And it should be out there in the culture the way people think about things as, as closed in an ivory tower.

Speaker 0 (7m 24s): I like that. Yeah. It seems to me like there's been a, like a, a huge problem with explanation over experience and sometimes people that are in the ivory tower or that are locked in education, their whole life. They're learning from a guy who learned from a guy who learned from a guy. Whereas if, if you're out there playing soccer, if you're out there like yourself playing in a band and maybe having a good time and having experiences in life, you get to see things from different points of view. And it seems that that is where you can start connecting all the different philosophies together.

I wasn't

Speaker 1 (7m 58s): Trusting, you know, not, not being, I'm not a skeptic, you know, I'm not really a skeptic by disposition. So if somebody tells me something, I'm inclined to believe it and then try and understand the experience. So, and that means that the scope of philosophy for me is very, very broad. It's only includes about 10 philosophers or what I, you know, you mentioned in your email, who's normally seen as, as a Saifai rice, right?

Philosophical interests. He was coming out, it was a garage philosophy. He was, and that's, that's good. I'm all in favor of that.

Speaker 0 (8m 34s): He's such an interesting guy that was out of his garage and just coming up with these ideas that most people would be jealous of. I mean, sometimes they ideas that are so far out there or are the ideas that we can learn so much from which it brings me to a point in your book for the first time I had started thinking about this first off, the way you write is amazing to me, you you're able to pack a lot of information into a short sweet essay that allows people to think in different ways. And one of the first essays you wrote was talking about the Athenians and how the people, they conquered one at hope and the difference between hope and faith.

And I believe that was in one of the, like the third essay there, where the Athenians, they are going to attack the, am I going to pronounce this right? The millions

Speaker 1 (9m 24s): And millions.

Speaker 0 (9m 26s): And could you maybe just tell people a little bit about like your ideas of hope and how it can lead to hopelessness?

Speaker 1 (9m 32s): This was an essay that was written in, was published on, I think Easter Sunday, 2014. So I was using that as a, as a way of attacking is of hope. And at that time, in those distant days when Barack Obama and we were still allowed to have the audacity of hope, and it seems awful long time ago now, trying to kind of press that idea of hope and use the story, which is exclusivities.

Who's one of the two great historians of Greece, the history of the pellet. And he tells the story of the stadiums. They show up on an island. They, they have a very simple message. They say, oh, we will kill you. And they decide, they try to kind of delay and say, we're going to talk to the million governors. And they governors play for time.

And they eventually Indians and they, they kill the males, the dozens, and they enslave women and children as was the custom in the ancient world. And one of the things that they seen in say to the millions is the, you seem to immediately say, we can still hope for things. We can hope that this will end up well, hope for the heaters is project. Once you go down that road, you're never going to be done in the view that I argue in this best day is by clinging to hope.

We often make suffering worse, replace the idea of hope with courage, which is why tries to put me aside. And there's a lot really, that's the first point you made? It's like hiding things. So in racing, I like to have the surface, which if you're some people will know all the references I'm making, there are things going on. You don't need to know anything about that. So it gives me enormous pleasure to kind of give the appearance of something pretty simple and straightforward.

And there's all sorts of things, more tangled things going on, but it's a service, but I think hope is a potentially politically really questionable idea. And it's often refusing to face up to me and see, and we would do better to things up to reality, courageously run away from reality, with some idea of what I'm up to in that piece.

Speaker 0 (12m 10s): Yeah. It's, it's such a fascinating thing to think about to me, hope seems like a stripper that works the day shift. Like she just, it's so sad in so many ways, but so many people cling to it and it's, it seems that that's the one thing they have, but it's such a, I hope this isn't horrible to say, but it seems like such a weak thing to hold onto when you're, so I believe people are so much stronger than they give themselves credit for. And instead of clinging to hope, if they would clean too, I'm not sure belief is much better, but maybe if they could clean to something, I'm not sure what they could clean too.

But it just seems to me that hope, I believe you used the reference later in the book as a, as a read, like we are like reads and just kind of bending in the wind. But

Speaker 1 (12m 54s): Yeah, we're read where the weakest read in nature is Pasco. We can be wiped away with this. I wrote this, this on the last, it's the last piece of the book, which is written during April, 2020 when the coronavirus was really bad. So it was around that. And the idea that we can be the audio of human beings as these kind of strong, rational masters of the universe, no we're weak reads can be blown away with a, with a virus with, and everything can, can fall apart.

And, but our strengths consistent that, that weakness, right? It's, there's, there's a great virtue to that. So believing yourself strong when you're not is actually a real strength, consistent, et cetera, your weakness, and embracing it and embracing it in Thor lined up Pascal says is the consistent thinking, right? And we think in that weakness, the weakness of the human condition, and we should strive, strive to think well or not.

So, so we've got to hope in place of hope. I think we want a really historically informed realism. So if we're thinking about situations, so what's going on in a plane right now to understand that we need historical understanding of that part of the world and its history and the complexity of that situation. Before we immediately run through a response and say, this person is evil this business for this.

And we should condemn that. It's always more complicated than that.

Speaker 0 (14m 34s): Yeah. I could not agree anymore. And it seems criminal to me that we have really intelligent people that utilize media, or maybe the lack of education of some people to simplify things like everybody should know that things are much more complicated than we're being told. And it saddens me to think that people turn to hope and it kind of begs the question like when we were speaking about the audacity of hope and Barack Obama is such a beautiful speaker and the rhetoric that he used in order to get people to think things was magnificent and in how he did it.

I don't agree with that, but philosophical standpoint, doesn't it seem almost criminal that people so smart can use rhetoric to change the behavior of such mass amounts of people to do core horrible things.

Speaker 1 (15m 23s): Yeah, I think is I wrote a piece I got into terrible trouble for this 2008 called Barack Obama. And the American void broke about Harper's magazine. And it was, it wasn't that attack on a bother. It was an attempt to understand him. And that's why I read, I read all of his autobiographical. There was already a lot to read. Now there's a lot more, he had the extraordinary ability of appearing to be something that people wanted.

So he could to liberals, he would appear liberals, more conservatives, people that were concerned with let's say the politics of race he could appear to be because some of the palsy for bracing was kind of like a mirror that reflected it reflected about what people wants to see. And that's brilliant when you can do with such soaring rhetoric, what was at the heart of that was something deeply empty. And he was doing that for, let's say understandable reasons in the sense, in which, in the context of Bush too, there was a no, again, this seems terribly kind of old fashioned.

I think we think these terms, but the, the kind of division that was experienced in the early parts of nine 11 and the, you know, the campaigns in Afghanistan, Iraq had led to this real beginning of a divisiveness in the United States and Obama was offering a kind of a bond. So I got to heal that and it works. It works, but it doesn't mean that we should. But if that hope is just the kind of a nice thing to say, that couples over the same operations of power, let's say the same policy, the same, the same drone strikes the same, the same use political assassination, the rest.

Then I think there's a mechanic accuse you of being hypocritical to say the least. I don't know whether I think some, if you think of someone like entities, it's actually quite elite, right. There is human affairs always going to be defined by conflict and the attempt to tell lies and foster illusion. And all we can do really is point that out and try and take with us. And, but is that going to produce the kind of change that is often talked about politically?

No, I don't think there's such a thing as possible. So think I'm, yeah, I'm a little bit of a realist and a pessimistic, a skeptic when it comes to political talk and political from whichever side actually.

Speaker 0 (17m 59s): Yeah. I agree. I think it's fascinating to think about, and I wonder what two cities would say today about what he might, if he was telling the story today about the story he told about the Peloponnesian war, I would think he would be telling the Ukrainians the same thing. Like there there's, I don't know. I often wonder what it would if the time of facilities and the wars that happened are no different than the wars that are happening now. And it seems to me that human conflict, as you said, is something that is always with us and it's so devastating, but it seems to be the one thing that propels us forward at the end.

Would you agree to that?

Speaker 1 (18m 39s): Yeah. I mean, war is the, you know, it's that kind of in a way, the mother of invention and even esophageal invention, but you can also be in relationship to war. War is one thing I'd say would be that there was a wonderful in one of the people, I don't know, but I was really endorse. The book was, and the Tarion who wonderful movies, but one movie must be around 2000 fours of war.

And the fog of war was that was a long interview. Ernie has a very particular kind of interview technique and even camera technique, really good, who was with McNamara, who was a defense secretary and they all section under next. And then the film's done in the American involvement in Vietnam and was seen on the left as the great evil figure, the great Satan of the America's involvement in Vietnam. Okay. So tomorrow's just interviewed and he's asked these questions is a very intelligent man.

And he says, the first rule of war is very simple sympathy with the enemy sympathy with the enemy. And that's what the Greeks were very good at. We're very bad at that. So if we're in, let's say for example, in what's in Russia and Ukraine in with sympathy for the enemy in this space, the Russians, and try to understand how world they're not crazy, they're not diluted.

There's an Oracle picture that drive deep sense of a grievance. And there has to be understood if anything like conflict or diplomacy, or if he would just go around saying is evil or satanic figure. He's a detective you're missing the point, the context out of which he's speaking and trying to understand that before you get a full picture. And that means with regards to the news media, it does mean going deeper than the information that we're provided with that's for sure.

So I'm not saying we should defend the Russians or the country, but you have to understand the way they see the world and the sense of victimization that they have the grievance and the sense that in their minds, they're defending Ukraine against what they see as a nationalist, even nazified in a government, which is, and they're trying, they're defending the Ukrainian people against the government. I think there's a wildly to say, but you have to understand it before you can engage.

So the first thing you do, if you're thinking through concrete situations is for the enemy,

Speaker 0 (21m 37s): I think this is a as crazy as of the time it is right now. It's such a beautiful opportunity to understand philosophy. Like it's, I think you're giving people an education right now on philosophy and how to see the world in a way that is more complex and in a lot of moving parts then in, and in reality, which brings me back to your book, I've noticed through your book that there's this beautiful ebb and flow. And just so everybody sees it again, this is the book right here, ladies and gentlemen, it's called bald. And it is a book that you definitely want to read. And I've noticed throughout your book, there's this ebb and flow of like wonder and disappointment and this movement that goes between the divine and time, that seemed to kind of run through the book.

We've already spoken a little bit about the ebb and flow of time from the Ukraine to the Peloponnesian wars, but there seems to be another strand that I've noticed, and that is the divine and time. You know, we, we go from Dostoevsky's inquisitor to Philip K Dick, which both have a element of the divine in them. And I was wondering, what is it? Is it, do you find those particular two things to be fascinating? Or do you realize that you wove those stories in between each other?

Or what can you tell us about

Speaker 1 (22m 53s): It's a lifelong fascination with, with religion, from a perspective which is a faith perspective of people who say, yeah, I don't have a UN fascinated, oh, I feel most closely the kind of Christianity. And in fact, I'm just opposite. Where are now in New York is opposites and Patrick's cathedral. Oh, wow. You know, we are beautiful, not Rockefeller censor. Those are the street.

Yeah. And I'm fascinated with that. And I don't, I'm impatient with what I see as evangelical atheism, which was maybe not now, but was very much the mode with Christopher Hitchens. And so there's an attempt to, I guess, very simply just see religion as a social phenomenon, which is shared and which is real for that experience it and to take us kind of in the way that an anthropologist would.

And so there's religion all many of the essays, but just to pick one, you mentioned in your email that perhaps we could think, well, it's, I wrote a series in 2019, so it was the biggest things. And I'm working there for a few or then form this idea of writing four essays from Athens. And I did about, and this was not my idea at the time I began to get interested in what's called LFC left, says for Ellucian people sometimes saying in English, it's the ritual site, just outside of Athens where weather, the place.

And I went, the woman that runs the site with a couple of friends and was studying it and then reading through. And we have interesting conundrum. On the one hand, we think of persons in place of democracy, which it was the idea of a political rule based on the equality of all citizens before. But that's what the team is. And they were intensely legalistic people, very litigious, and they made decisions to get in the public square.

They declared the law. And on the other road from Athens is this place Alexis, which was, there's an obligation on all of us in the ministry. And we don't know what happened. And I try and as it were, explain what We all saying with some degree we essay, but there's a connection between develop rule of law and participation ministries.

These two things contradict consistent with each other and frost by tricky, between being a citizen and take in a secret mystery. The thing about the mysteries is the weather in left. I just stayed alive and nobody could portray cause they will be, they be killed. And so to take serious, the dimension of ritual in society and to, and not to be dismissive of religious, I can just try and understand it and to try as a assess of states in the sense of which, you know, when people that don't understand where we will meet a religious, let's say, what do you believe that the existence of God, you believe that the life to come, people unclear about participate in the practice, they'll see the rituals.

And it's that ritual that when we're doing things together without necessarily, and how those weird mysteries could be connected to the lifeblood of democracy, kind of interests me as well.

Speaker 0 (27m 5s): I love that the series you did on a Lexus, that like it was a little disheartening because everybody wants to believe that there was this incredible, mysterious, psychedelic experience that happened there that overwhelmed everybody. And the truth may be a little bit more sobering. However, when I read your essay on that, it really made me believe that that in fact is what we're missing. And it ties together religion. You know, when you have a ritual or a Rite of passage like that, it's something that, that not only points to the mystery, but you get to participate in the mystery whip.

So it's like everybody gets to work together and not, and see themselves through this Rite of passage. And it seems to me that that is what religion is. Religion is this understanding that we are all part of the whole, regardless if you call it God or Buddha or all, it's this understanding that we participate in something that additionally points to the goal. And I think that even reading your book, it seems to me, if I peel back a page or two or some of the beautiful artwork in the words that you've used, I can see it pointing to that.

Like, I think we're moving towards that towards a type of awakening. And I hate to use mystical terms like that, but it seems that there is this new spirituality being developed and it comes from the conflict that people like Hitchins and Harris have put out there, like, no, you can't have this. This is where all evil is from. And I've got that topic from your book. And it, I just wanna say, thank you for that. It's it's well done. And I really liked the part on elusive and the fact that you went there and you got to see the little, well, where Demeter would pop out of, or a present, then you would pop out of, and maybe you could explain a little bit more to the people about what it was like to go there.

Speaker 1 (28m 48s): There was a, the mysteries were over eight days and the participants in ministry, a series of active, slow procession, there would be also various kind of sacrifices and offerings. And then eventually they would make their way along the sacred way. And, and that'd be out the temple site and the temple theaters, like a series of stages. When you go through a, there's a kind of, there's a drama, the stages it's, it's extraordinary.

And also as well as the break break, tragic poet was from Jessica pricing. Them use some of the, some of the ritual activity onto the stage. So outside the night is falling there. Some fire people are fasting. They'd been fast a long time, and there is dancing. There is fine. The Richfield should begin and brink, which is called then this is where a lot of the theories take root the cookie on was some people have thought.

And therefore, when the went through tripping, I mean, that might be the case. There might have been a psychoactive ingredient in the string, but people were, they were hungry. They were engaged in fruitful venture participation, the mystery that you got to do once or twice, but most people did it once. And they knew that some region potence was going to be shown to them. So they were in a susceptible state and what they experienced experienced gala's herring.

So for example, the Oracle at Delphi, very rich to get into, to tell fees were for massive extortionate fees. They're required. Alexis was basically, there could be slaves that could be children, men, women, when young bulls together. And in that. And then there were a series of things that you basically get the site of a lesson, where to her, after she'd lost her dozer in LSS, and she's crying, falling into this well, and then go to Perez, says to her, you know, there's a way and will intercession.

And then eventually her doors turned to meet. It has returned to, but she's tricked cheats, a handful of pomegranates obligers to return to the Heidi's to the world the months, every year. And so that's the story. So it's about a mother who returned to the underworld every year. And the word, the name Greek is series in Lassen and linked to cereal, right?

To grain, to cereal. And in Greek cereal is Dimitri ARCA, right? So the, the idea of Siri. So what another way of looking at this, this mystery, it's about it's the reenactment of foundations of society, and this needs to be reenacted in order that they will be pain. And there will be food. This idea, which is sort of lost to us, which was there in just about every society, every kind of Neal it ages with the society rituals that people revolve with were about the reproduction of this social form.

How does continue and social form requires food? So at the censor of all of the, the mystery site is a huge, and the goddess is grain. The goddess is food. And by participating in this risk with the continuation of life, so nourishment, maybe there may be a more what mysterious aspect to it in terms of this could be an idea of eternal life for it was reborn renewed.

What happened in the students go through this series of stages. It takes an awful long time. They're hungry. They're being given this water grain, drink, active substance in it, moving through these stages and they get to the essential steady on it's like a numerous, you can just see the remains of it, enormous a in the center, huge space, what would have been darkness, torches, flaming, or something called the nectar on and in the next room was where the priests, the heroes who were just from two families would think age in the rituals.

And we don't know anything about what happened, but there are three words or reports that I think from a Christian source, a light and enigmatic words, which are drumming and ligament, Thring, things, done, things, things said, so things were done. Things were shown that what was, what was shown, what was said, we don't know, just be, and this is the opinion of, it might just be the brain is ahead of barley or wheat.

And this means showing this means that there is food and there will be more. And so the religious ritual is the, the possibility when new ration of life finds an ECMO in all of ritual connected with Christianity and with many other religions, right? We get the death, we get the death of on, and then the resurrection on Easter Sunday. So this is not lost to us.

Is there a spirituality emerging? Maybe I think there's a, I think we have to accept the religion is not going away. Religion has to be understood and grub. It's a social phenomenon and respected. So yeah, that's, I guess why say for a sign, I think in this country, in the United States, that means extremely seriously the Bible and Christianity, because the extraordinary fact, Chris, it's not just the religion of the people from Europe.

It becomes the religion of the former slaves and it gives a common metric to the oppressor and the oppressed to, which has all sorts of cross-racial possibilities. And so I think if you're, if you're interested in understanding this place is understanding what might be possible to became with a kind of full understanding of the, the Bible is the Bible has possibilities, which maybe we take a little bit more seriously.

Speaker 0 (36m 19s): Yeah. That was really well done. Thank you for that. It's a great, I'm envious that, and it makes me inspired to want to go there and have that same new form of elusive trip, you know, and it reminds me in your book, you, you're a big footballer and there's so many similar. Have you thought about the similarities between being in a football match and being at elusiveness like, they're both kind of psychedelic. It's like, you're this team together and you're experiencing life and loss and the potential to win. And in so many ways, it seems like sports is something that we can in a weird way.

It has taken the place of the ritual. And those of us who have gone to a big game and been part of a crowd. I use an example of going to the horse races. That's like one of the only spots you'll see a millionaire hug, a homeless person who, you know, it doesn't matter if you're a, an emperor or a slave, but we find ourselves in these moments, be it elusive or be it at a football match or at a horse race where we can let go of the labels that were put upon us and just enjoy ourselves as the unity there. I think that's something to be said about elusive.

I had one more point that I wanted to ask you, are you familiar with this idea of ontology, recapitulates, phylogeny? I think I'm saying that right where we start off as like a sperm and we meet the egg and then we become this little tadpole. We relive every stage of our evolution in the womb. And might that also be, what's kind of going on at elusive. Like we go there and we, we become one and we see that everybody has lost, like people lose their children, people die.

Would we see that it kind of breaks down? The barriers will be come together. And then at the end, like you say, we're given food or like, look, it's going to be all right. As long as we work together in order to do this. And I just wanted to bring that up.

Speaker 1 (38m 9s): So in a re-enact so replaced in the history of the, of the society. So yeah, I agree with that and shipped too well. And in particular soccer spend my time reading about watching and thinking about it's one powerful place, which will activity goes on. It's mainly interesting. So one does soccer in the book and one of them is from in a fight.

There's a bar, a little football club bar, and I know all the people and there's a whole ritual connected with that really know them. I mean, I don't, most of them don't speak English and my is we're supporting the same team we're together. And the levels of, I don't know, frenzy, collective frenzy, which we're engaged with they're extraordinary and also choose my team, Liverpool Chelsea in the league cup fund.

And I was in the one of the little Pepsi bars in the Grafton. And absolutely while with when we, the noise, the kind of joy, the shared joy that we experienced at that moment, it was extra. And then singing the way in which small soccer works through song. And we are Liverpool. We have a lot of songs and some will begin the song and then be watching the game and singing.

So the ways of dealing with the anxiety or tension of watching the game, or if you're going to lose, but you hope you can. And so I think you can learn a lot through that and these people, you know, so the people I've watched the game with on, on Sunday and this, this happens a lot to me, there's two or three, quite close to strangers for the purposes of watching their game. We're friends, we're on the same team. We support this crowd and this isn't just the whole set of values beliefs.

And it means a lot more than men kicking a piece of stick around on the pitch. This is a lion. And also with me, this is really important. What living areas of my life enact me past. I can say, I can remember the past my father on my grandmother's grave emblem when I showed it to someone and she was a Liverpool fan.

And then, so we've got, if we say, just say my grandmother, my father may sound, who's 30, that's a hundred years support for this team is not just about the team. It's a commitment to a whole or framework and that thing, and it's passed on as you are watching it and celebrate it. We're a very few areas of life that resonance, it seems, you know, this brings up

Speaker 0 (41m 33s): Such an amazing point to me because we were talking about in your book, you spoke about time and how all our idea is that we move forward through time. But what you just explained to me is that, is it possible that you have experienced the same time as your grandmother, your grandfather, and that your son will, by going and experiencing these games and singing the same songs and hugging the same stranger when so-and-so scores a goal, or you're the first point or whatever. Like, isn't it amazing to think that we can see and experience time we can move through time, but no one talks about that.

But I think you get into that in your book a little bit. Like, what do you think about

Speaker 1 (42m 9s): Hi, it's right. I mean, it's, I was sent, I was offered a ticket to the game by my cousin, David and I couldn't get back because of work here, work commitments in New York, he went, his father go to see games in the 1950s and Ray and my dad went to local play and my cousin and I maintain this post connection around the team. And he looks a lot like his dad. And I suppose I look so we're both ghosts at that point where we're being ghosted by the past.

And we're trying to pass that on down to the next. Whereas the order of time gets very confused. We have an idea of time as a, as a linear time is a line no longer. Now the past now the present and not yet now the future. And that is a kind of linear idea of time, which is how we get through the days. But there's also an idea of time as a circular as a time when time when in a sense merge and mix.

And this is something that, I mean, Phillip K Dick calls orthogonal time, which explains as a circle, that things, everything, and which I think is a lovely image from the end of the book, we're talking about, he's thinking about all planes, everything, if any, he compares the walls just as grooves on LP, contain that part of the music, which has already been played off the stylist track.

It does have an image of an LP that in say the seemingly final chord at the end of the beetle Sargent pattern, which on the original chord, which is people want to gather an intensity point, which begins to blur. And that's both a plight in a sense that we are ghost and we are ourselves ghosts, maybe we'll hold others.

Shakespeare's handler. And I'm very preoccupied with ghosts. That's what I meant to be doing today. Anyway. So yeah, the time isn't a line, it's at least a circle or a loop. And we can't simply past present. Most importantly, if we think this is what I put on tragedy, if we think we're through with the past, then we're ruined because the past is going to destroy us.

So we have to respect the past, embodied the past, live it, pass it on to the next generations. Yeah.

Speaker 0 (45m 14s): It's beautiful. First off, thank you so much. Is there, I've got all your links below. Is there anything else that maybe you could leave us with before you leave? Like what do you want people to get out of this book that if you could tell people or, or hope that maybe not hope

Speaker 1 (45m 26s): Yes. I'd like them to, well, it's the, the idea, the open-mindedness and open-minded fearlessness. That's what I hope is communicated by. If you mean you can live in, it's easy to live in fear. And in a sense, the world makes more sense. It's as of living in fear, you live in fear of what's going to happen. What someone's going to say about you, you know, so on and so forth.

So he was social media and the rest. But I think there's a, I think if we can have a kind of a fearless, there's a fearlessness and open-mindedness and connected with that might not come through in the book so much, but it's certainly what's behind. It is a kindness to treat with a kindness and not to assume that, you know, assume, you know what they mean, and you can already interpret it, but to allow price by phenomenon.

And that's this, this is like a version of Dave Chappelle's mantra. Be nice. And don't be scared if I could get people to think philosophically, that would be great. So I try to encourage it's very hard to encourage is yet is courage it's fearlessness. When it comes to thinking, and this doesn't belong to any elite people, this is completely accessible, most fantastic things ever written, initial the world instantly available.

And, you know, you can just swim in them or listen to them or whatever it might be. And it's, and also I think that I'm very passionate about, which is kind of how the job is in a way I believe in teaching, but I believe much more importantly in self-teaching and being also didactics. And I'm very fond of people that have cultivated Amazon knowledges of things. And I wish there were more what we need. We need education and that used to be what puppet, but now we can do useless.

Speaker 0 (47m 48s): Fantastic. I think you accomplish that. I think that your words paint a picture of fearless experience and instills in people, a curiosity that helps to inspire their own exploration. I've read multiple articles multiple times, and I keep getting things into there. So thank you for your writing style and your mission to come out there and try to help people help themselves by investigating more. And I really thank you for taking time for me and my audience, ladies and gentlemen, by this book, bald, it is a masterpiece it's fun to read.

Where is it? It's fun to read and you'll learn a lot. I know that I did. And Dr. You're welcome back here. Any time I know you have other books, I would love to talk to you about them. I hope you have a great day. I hope you have a good afternoon. Thank you so much. Bye-bye now.

Speaker 1 (48m 37s): Bye.