Modern Wisdom - #473 - Tom Van Der Linden - Finding Heroic Meaning In Modern Life

Episode Date: May 14, 2022

Tom Van Der Linden is a YouTuber, video essayist and Creator of Like Stories of Old. Finding meaning in modern life is hard. What glory is there to achieve when all of your existence has already been made totally convenient by technology? Heroic narratives still exist in movies and books, but can we apply these lessons to the real world? Expect to learn how to tell the difference between serving ourselves and serving others, why watching a heroic movie can skew our expectations of life, why it's difficult to ever truly know another person, what Albert Camus can teach us about enduring suffering, why David Foster-Wallace called adult life "the day to day trenches" and much more... Sponsors: Join the Modern Wisdom Community to connect with me & other listeners - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Get 15% discount on Craftd London’s jewellery at https://bit.ly/cdwisdom (use code MW15) Get 20% discount on the best quality Kratom from Super Speciosa at https://getsuperleaf.com/modernwisdom (use code: MW20) Get 83% discount & 3 months free from Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/MODERNWISDOM (use code MODERNWISDOM) Extra Stuff: Subscribe to Tom's YouTube Channel - https://www.youtube.com/c/LikeStoriesofOld  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ulla friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Tom Vandalindan, he's a YouTuber, video essayist and creator of like stories of old. Finding meaning in modern life is hard. What glory is there to achieve when all of your existence has already been made totally convenient by technology? Heroic narratives still exist in movies and books, but can we apply these lessons to the real world?

Expect to learn how to tell the difference between serving ourselves and serving others, why watching a heroic movie can skew our expectations of life, why it's difficult to ever truly know another person, what Albert Camus can teach us about enduring suffering, why David Foster Wallace called Adult Life the day-day Trenches, and much more. Tom's YouTube channel is absolutely fantastic, and he's got this sort of real calm, existential insight thing going on, and he knows far more about philosophy than me. So there's lots to take away from today. Also, personal update, I am still currently in Guatemala. Long story, came out here to get my visa for the US trip. I'm on and it's taken a little bit longer than anticipated.

So I am bodging together a hotel room, set up at the moment. I will be here for, I'm not sure how much longer, but a little while at least. However, do not worry, the show is gonna continue. The internet connection is fast, and I thankfully brought a microphone out with me. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Tom Vandalinden. Dude, I love Yostok. I think that your channel is absolutely fantastic. Thanks.

It's one of my favorite things on the internet for the people that don't know. It's like stories of old YouTube channel. Mm-hmm. How do you describe, let's say you meet someone at a party and they say, oh, you do YouTube? Yeah. What do you YouTube about? What do you say? It's the worst question. It depends on the person, like how familiar they are with the YouTube space. If I can see like they're like a normal person who doesn't have like the super high awareness about what YouTube means. I'll just say like I make short documentaries like or something like that

Sometimes I'll just say like I'll make video essays and they'll of course people ask like oh, what's a video essay? And then it's it's like an essay, but except it has video with it And it depends you can you can often quickly like sense, if a person is like really interested, or if it was just asking out of politeness. So, yeah, depending on how they, when they're at it, do that. We'll expand more or elaborate more on. I think the longer, the more complicated answer would be like, I'll say that it's a combination between like examining philosophy and doing media analysis and sort of exploring the relation between two.

Yeah, I've had the, so what's your podcast about question a hundred times since I've been in Austin? And I still am yet to come up with a good succinct answer that isn't five minutes long. And someone didn't want the five minute long answer. They wanted me to say, oh, it's about ultimate frisbee or it's about World of Warcraft or it's about porn or something. Like they just wanted like a one word answer and I'm sorry, I can't give you that. So tie together, is there a common thread that does tie together all of the videos that you do or is it just your, whatever your curiosity has in store

that day? I think what the channel name originally referred to like stories of old is the idea that you have movies which is relatively speaking a new form of art, like it's been around for just over a century. Video games as well, it's even newer. And then the idea was that even those new forms of art they still have or still carry the timeless wisdom, like the stories of old. So that's kind of what I said out to do. That was sort of the premise of the channel that I wanted to kind of get a sense of the timeless

within the contemporary art forms and also in doing so like explore why I'm still so, why I'm so drawn to all these things. Like why do certain movies become like my favorite movies? Like why do they evoke like deep emotions within me or why do Films from filmmakers like far away resonate with me like very strongly even though I share nothing with them Like on the surface level and so yeah, that's That's kind of how it came to be and I think that's an element that keeps

Being like a cornerstone of the videos. I think that a big part of it, at least for me and from the buddies that I've shilled your content too as well, one of the reasons that it's enjoyable is that digging into the real discomfort, sort of the very normal, very comfortable, very banal existential Anomy that is a byproduct of just being a human and very well may have been for the last you know 50,000 years, but feels like a very particular distillation of that now. You know, really allowing to sit with that discomfort, I think is something that's very interesting.

So one of the topics that you talk about a lot is heroic stories and heroism and things like that. There's one hero in every story, but everybody that watches the story kind of presumes that it's us that's supposed to play that role. Do you think that there is a problem in being too heavily reliant or putting heroic stories up on a pedestal because of that reason? It definitely can be. But, I think it's understandable too. So, even though I would point it out as problematic, I wouldn't say like, it's immediately like a judgment of humanity,

because I do believe that we are naturally like ego-centric. Like, we literally see the world from only our own perspectives, so naturally, like we experience ourselves as the center, like the center of the universe, like almost literally, like the world to us, like the world revolves around, like ourselves and our, like our emotions, our feelings, like everything around us, it's sort of geared towards us. And we don't also have access to other people's minds. Everything else has to be communicated to us. So in that sense, it's perfectly logical that we see ourselves as a central character, as a central hero. Because of course, we also tend to see ourselves as good central character, as a central hero, because of course we also tend to see ourselves as good people generally, like we'd like to believe that we at least have

good intentions or whatever. But yeah, and so heroic stories, yeah, they can definitely indulge that kind of natural self-centeredness in a way that also romanticizes it and maybe chlorifies it and especially in our current day and age of social media and having to present ourselves and being more concerned with the image we project towards the outside. Then, yeah, I can definitely imagine, or at least for myself, I have struggled with, like how heroic stories have set expectations for me that I let do some conflict like in my personal life in various ways.

You say in one of your videos that there's a difference between heroic purpose and grandiosity Between serving others and serving ourselves and you ask how we can know if we're acting to better the world or just to inflate our own ego and Yeah, this line Between the two it is so hard because everything's performative now. I had this discussion I was with Peter Teal found a PayPal this weekend and We talked about this thing, performative empathy, that people do in a way to make themselves look like somebody that's good. So it's more important to look like somebody that's good than it is to be a person

who is good or to even do good. And yeah, yeah, yeah. That, I don don't know that sort of meta game where it's not about doing the thing, it's about people seeing you do the thing, it's not about donating to charity, it's about taking an Instagram selfie while you give a homeless person on the street $5. That plays out and the problem is, everyone knows that performative nature

of sort of charity and stuff, right? Like that's conspicuous consumption meets altruism. You know, it's, it's just signaling. The dangerous thing, I think, heroic purpose and grandiosity between serving others and serving ourselves, that seems to cross a line into something more personal, more existential, more identity focused, and that's a bigger concern, I think, for me.

identity focused and that's a bigger concern I think for me. Yeah, just to go back to the first point you mentioned about the performative empathy, I think there's also it's easy to criticize that. Oh, it's just the Instagrammer doing it for the likes, helping that homeless, but at the same time, if you, you can also argue or like maybe add like a little bit of nuance that if everyone does more performative stuff, then at the same time it also brings that message out into the world. It actually inspires people to do some actual good,

like the kind of fake it-til-you-make it idea that we, if enough people perform, then maybe collectively we start to do better in actual terms. So it's easy to criticize, but I can see there's also a value to it that might be underappreciated if we're all like just hoarding on the one Instagram who seems to do something performative. Yeah, I think that it's easy to throw shade at that person, right? It's easy to say, look, they're obviously just doing it for the likes But you're right. The cash value of the person who gives five dollars to the homeless person But puts it on Instagram is five dollars more than the person that doesn't do it at all

And yeah, exactly like it's easy to criticize but at the same time like I don't give like ludicrous amounts of money to homeless people So who am I to then judge the person for doing it and I agree I agree I think the the example that we were using which was a little bit more Like close to the bone was we were talking about the eco movement and about how many many people are pro green Simply because that's the thing that makes them look good. And they like highlighting the problems of other companies or other people from an iPhone that was built on the back of slave labor around in China from a car which is still pumping a bunch of fossil fuels out into the atmosphere. The point just being that performative empathy can sometimes be more important than genuine empathy.

Yeah, definitely. But yeah, especially in the context of climate change and the green movement, it becomes like there's like a whole other layers of complications because it kind of suggests that it ties your personal actions to the whole continent or the whole world. Everything that you do has connections everywhere else. At the same time, you also know more about what your connections are doing. At the same same time we have a more globalized world like the banana you eat, it's coming from far away or even like the fruits that should grow in your area, they might be grown like two continents over and then packaged somewhere else and then shipped back to you again. And at the same time you have the internet and now every day you hear about all those things. So you know exactly like how you're connected in this global web of endless connections and naturally like all kinds of things that you

would maybe ethically be against, but at the same time like I can imagine like you want to make an effort to lessen that impact or maybe better like align your own values with those implications, but at the same time, it's also hard like you cannot expect someone else to be completely insulated from the world around them. You cannot expect them to disconnect entirely from that web of interaction. So that's kind of a quote of mine that you mentioned. There's such a fine line and everything is so it's such a balancing act between wanting to do good, having to face the implications and then not having those implications like discourage you,

but at the same time also not having the good impact like overly inflate your ego. So this like these endless, it's this constant balancing act between being hopeful on the one hand, but not being like grandiose about it or like being overzealous about it, but at the same time also, I think it's also very important to not fall into like cynicism and all everything sucks and nothing matters. That's something I think people should be extremely careful of because it's so easy to just end up in that fall down into that rabbit hole nowadays. Have you got any idea how people can work out whether they're acting to better the world or just to inflate their on ego? No, that's the reason I wanted to make the video because I didn't have the answer myself. And it's something I struggled with because at the same time

like there were a lot of things that it's not always either or like there can be things that make you feel better and make your like your ego more bad or that flatter your ego while at the same time doing actual good but I think it's just one element that can never do that never would be that's never hurtful is to just maintain some awareness about how you're feeling about what you're doing and seeing like how you're connected to certain actions like emotionally because that's I think the part of us does that we are sometimes most reluctantly to really examine. Like so you know, the Ben Shapiro thing, like facts don't care about your feelings, but I think it very much works the other way around as well, like feelings don't always care about the facts.

So you might be mindful of those as well. I don't think it's constructive to pretend that we're like completely rational persons who gather information, make a reasonable decision, and then act accordingly. I think it's important to have a sense of your own desires and fears and your own biases, your own hidden ideological beliefs, that sort of stuff, the things that trigger you emotionally. Those things, I think think are always worth examining. So, yeah, I guess that's as good to start as any.

Well, I think that is the temptation of the rational movement, right? That people thought that if they became the most educated on cognitive biases and they were able to identify all of the different ways that their thinking might be flawed, that they would actually be able to short-cut the system itself, but the Jonathan Hate example of the rider on the back of an elephant is like, you get to see this tiny little 2% sliver of what's going on, and then the rest of it's just

running on autopilot. You know, okay, so I'm just at the mercy of most of these things, and I went to this, you know, Scott Alexander, right, from Slate Star Codex, or Astral Codex 10. He's this blogger, a very famous blogger, big rationalist guy. And he held a meetup in Austin, and I went to it. And somebody asked him something along the lines of, I don't even think he got asked about it. I think he just said out of the blue, there was a period where we all thought that we could fix our lives through rationalism, right, through the rationalist movement. And it turns out that isn't true.

And I was like, that's really interesting because Danieleman, that wrote thinking fast and slow, he was on stage with Sam Harris five or six years ago. And Sam said, so Daniel, you're a Nobel Prize winner, one of the most preeminent psychologists on the planet that understands the way that the human brain works. After decades and decades at the cutting edge of this research, are you any closer to being a more rational human being? And Daniel just went, not really. And he think, okay, so this is the guy,

Roy Baumeister talks about his willpower, you know, like the guy that wrote the book on willpower. And he think, well, if that's the case, if more knowledge isn't necessarily the solution, then it is something else, and accepting the fact that feelings are going to continue to just plow through however much logic you try to throw at it and trying to hold onto that as a place of wisdom as opposed to something to kind of be ashamed of.

I actually had this concept that I wanted to teach you about. I thought that this would be up your street and it's about right here. So I spoke about this when my newsletter a couple of months ago, about a year ago, and then I released it the other week. And yet again, every time I talk about it, people love it.

It's called the inner citadel, right? So it's, I saw a Berlin is the first guy that came up with this. So I'm just going to read you a little passage here. So when the natural road toward human fulfillment is blocked, human beings retreat into themselves, become involved in themselves and try to create inwardly that world which some evil fate has denied them externally. If you cannot obtain from the world that which you really desire, you must teach yourself not to want it. If you cannot get what you want, you must teach yourself to want what you can get. This is a very frequent form of spiritual retreat in depth into

a kind of inner citadel in which you try to lock yourself up against all the fearful ills of the world. And a simpler example from my friend Rob is, if your leg is wounded, then you can try to treat the leg. And if you can't treat the leg, you cut it off and announce that the desire for legs is misguided and must be subdued.. And if you can't treat the leg, you cut it off and announce that the desire for legs is misguided and must be subdued. Basically, if you can't win the game, then you stop playing, say that you never cared about the game and then create your own game with rules

that you can more easily win at. And I think that this is what's happening with the rationalist movement in part. Don't get me right, I love cognitive biases, F.S. stop blog, Shane Parish has been on the show, all that stuff's great. But there is like a cold comfort of rationality that insulates people from having to feel things. And I think that's where this comes from.

And the funny thing too is that when you look at those people who are the loudest about being about the facts and the truth and the rationality. They tend to be the people who are most obviously driven by emotional responses. But it can be an interesting phenomenon to me. I find it fascinating to see how the interchange between the fact that we have the opportunity to know so much, right? We have the opportunity to kind of wrangle the world into what it is, but the fact that we can't get away from our emotions, the tension

between those two things is funny because we think, well, hang on, science is, let us go to the moon and it's cured some diseases and it's done all of this other stuff we can communicate around the globe. Why can't I be the one that's in control of my emotions or my internal state or my fears or my insufficiency or my ego or my desire for more or whatever? I'm a nod. And I think that that's something that we kind of distaste. We have distaste for two. Yeah, it's like you're reaching certain limitations within yourself in the same way that you might reach like limitations in the external world, which can be, it's like an existential

realization in some way like the idea that maybe if you're like have a tendency towards like jealousy or like envy that that that might not be something that goes away like no matter how much you try to let it go or like even like try to feed into it like try to get all the things that you would want or otherwise be envious about then it's it's still going to be that like there's certain character traits that I think you just carry with you and that you just have to deal with in some way or another. But in that sense I would say like it's the best to have it like right at the surface where you can keep an eye on it instead of just repressing it down and waiting for it to like come up, probably at a moment that's least convenient.

Yeah, there's a bit that you said here, talking about the fact that everybody is fundamentally alone, everybody tries to let the people around them understand themselves as best as they can. But when we really, really do genuinely try to open up, that's often when we sort of stumble over our own words and fall flat on the floor. You've got this quote from David Foster Wallace that saves everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else. What's that meant to you? Yeah, I also. I think that comes, David Foster Wallace is also someone who was really conscious about people

having this ego-centric human condition sort of like nature of their character like. Yeah, I think that's the part where he says that we experience the world as from our point of view, like literally like we are at the center of our universe. And I think the author Ernest Becker, he also goes into that like with real poetic language as well, like you are like in touch with yourself with such like wealth and death and you feel like complicated emotions and complex thoughts and like contradicting ideas. But it's it's much more difficult to get a sense of those, like, in another person, like, it's easy to see another person almost literally, like, as less human than you, because you, you see maybe, like, a handful of, like, surface level traits that they have, and

then you kind of cut it off. You don't deny them, or you tend to deny people from having the same depth within you. I think that's what that means to me. I guess it's also an issue of empathy, the limits of empathy. You can try to understand other people, but at some point, especially if you're not making a conscious effort to understand others, it's easy to cut them off at some point, instead of in terms of character depth. Well, we don't even understand our own emotional states. How do you hope to truly be able to understand somebody else? And the nuance to their very personal

type of suffering, when you can't even put into words your own suffering. Yeah, that's very much true. Yeah. Yeah, for me, I always like, I like to compare like the death of like the human heart or the soul or whatever you want to call it, like to just basically like the depths of the human heart or the soul or whatever you want to call it, like to just basically like the nature of the universe itself, like I think that the most smallest depth within you, it's like comparable to like the grandest mystery of the universe in the sense that we can understand like a lot about it, but we can never quite touch that ultimate essence that is at the heart of things. But at the same time, that may very well be a projection that we cast onto it. Maybe there isn't some secret unconscious hidden death. Maybe

all the things we see and feel it's just all it is, which is kind of even more terrifying. Yeah. Have you seen the movie Drive My Car, the one that won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film? No. It's a Japanese film. It's a three hour movie about basically this guy

who I won't go into spoilers too much, but this is like the premise. There's a long introduction in which you see the life of a guy who apparently knows that his wife is cheating on him and then the wife suddenly dies before he confronts her about it. So it leaves him like with this gaping hole with not understanding his wife and why she did what she did and There's a point later on where another character like he of course He's like trying to get into the depths of her and like what he trying to figure out what it is that he doesn't get about Or what he was missing maybe or what he didn't provide for her that maybe caused her to do that and then at some point

There's another character that kind of points out like, maybe there's no secret, maybe that's just, maybe she loved you and she went with other guys as well or something like that. And that to me got me thinking about, yeah, maybe there is, maybe we try to over-analyze it sometimes, like we can. I feel that's also a thing that happens a lot with people who actively go in search of theirself, like they go to some retreat or like on some journey, like they want to discover, like some hidden essence within them that they feel out of touch with, but maybe that's part of the issue.

Maybe there's nothing like, maybe the whole idea of having one like solid center somewhere that's what I'm talking about. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about that. I'm talking about that. I'm talking about that. I'm talking about that. I'm talking about that. I'm talking about that. I'm talking about that. I'm talking about that. I'm talking about that. I'm talking about that.

I'm talking about that. I'm talking about that. I'm talking about that. I'm talking about that. I'm talking about that. I'm talking about that. I'm talking about that. I'm talking about that.

I'm talking about that. I'm talking about that. I'm talking about that. I'm talking about that. I'm talking about that. I'm talking about that. I'm talking about that. I'm talking about that. I'm talking about that. within ourselves, but yeah. That's even more scary to me. The idea that there isn't, you know, the egoic-less, infinite whole of peace that is to be found, that the conflict that you have,

that you're riding on a daily basis is just that's what it is and you're right I always think about you know when there's missing people someone's daughter has gone missing or whatever and it's been four years and the mother's still unable to hold a press conference without breaking down in tears and what do they always say they say I just want to know, right? What they want is to close that loop. And I wonder whether the, let's say,

with a thought experiment that there is, there are certain, disjointed, discordant elements of ourselves, right? They just do not mesh together. The fact that we want to do certain things and yet our nature or our predisposition or our programming pulls us away from doing them. We don't want to eat the cookie because we want to lose weight, but then we also want to have the cookie, right? Let's say that there isn't anything deeper than that. Let's say that there is no way to close that

loop, right? The missing person, the missing cookie doesn't come back and we don't find out where it went. We don't find out why we wanted it. That's all, like, when thinking about that makes me feel even more scared by it. Yeah, because in the first example or in the cookie example, you can say, like, if you have the one hand, I want the cookie, but I also like, I want to be disciplined because I don't want to lose weight. And then you, of course, you hope like one of those, especially like the latter one is connected to like your true self or like your true desire.

And the other one is just an obstacle that you have to overcome. But yeah, so yeah, I can imagine if that, if that true self is not there, then it's really just the two desires that, what the fuck's virtual, you know? What does that mean? What does it mean about who you are? Maybe you are the cookie eater more than you are the discipline. I think even without that sense of like a true self, you can still choose to not eat the cookie.

It's just I feel like you can still like choose to, you still have that freedom to feed one desire over another. And that's I guess the, even without an essence, there's still like a guiding sort of consciousness or an awareness that can choose between like what am I trying to feed or what am I trying to like avoid or like have there be less offers. There's a, I wanna go back to what you said before because I've had this sort of sense for a little while and I really, really, I really love the idea

that there's an imbalance between how much we're going to see of ourselves, i.e. everything and how much we're going to see of everybody else relatively nothing. And the fact that there is this huge imbalance in the richness of our own experience, and yet we get to see this. We only get to see what other people are aware of

that they choose to communicate that we're around to be able to see at the right time when we were paying attention, da da da da da, you know, you just filter down all of this stuff. And I do think you're right, like that true empathy. When you look at it that way, you go, how are you even supposed to begin to understand somebody else?

I mean, so what do you think with that? Is it possible to ever truly know another person? I think well enough, but to add another layer to what you just said, like this, to just drop another movie, there was the recent one, the worst person in the world. I'm not sure if you're familiar with that one. It's a Danish film. It's about this woman who's in her 30s, and she's also kind of struggling through life and existence and her relationships and stuff. And again, without spoiling too much, too much at one point, a person is on his deathbed and he says to her, like, when I die, I don't know

the exact quote, but it was an ex lover and he says, like, when I die, I'm going to take some part of you with me because there's things that I know about you, like little details that you have probably forgotten or like moments that they've shared that she doesn't remember, but he does and he's taking that with him in death. And that's kind of, I thought that was such an interesting reversal of the idea, like we were trying to get to know other people, but in the same sense where we can lose ourselves like, or we give little pieces of ourselves to others that they then maybe keep to themselves that we sort of, that we lose for ourselves, but that others keep for us.

Which I, that was strangely uplifting to me. I don't know what you're, I think, about it. It's, dude, I just keep on getting existential terror by all of these. These situations, but you're right. There is something that we get to do. And also, you know, when somebody leaves by definition, they're no longer here to be themselves, to be able to see themselves. And yet you have a part of them that's within you. Do you remember, you've seen, you've done a bunch of, or maybe even more than one review of interstellar, right? Oh, yeah. Yeah, and in that, do you remember the, the discussion that they're having

when they're going to make their final decision about which planet to go to? And they're saying, look, he's not going to be there. There's no chance that he's there. And they start having this debate about evolution, about why is it that we love people that have already passed or that are no longer with us? Do you remember this? Oh, yeah, yeah, very clearly. Yeah. So that. Oh, I mean, what does that mean to you? What does that section mean to you? When they're talking about the fact that she's lost this person, he's gone to somewhere else and she knows that he's there and she can't explain to anybody why she knows she's there. And one of the guys tries to explain it away with the rational thing about, oh, it's just pair bonding and it's a way to, he's the group together in

blah, blah. And she goes, no, it's not. There's something going on. Yeah, actually, that my last video wasn't Christopher Nolan, so I rewatched Interstellar not too long ago for that. So, yeah, the scene is kind of fresh in my memory. As a sci-fi concept, I thought it was interesting in the way that the character, its Anne-Hathway character, she's kind of arguing for, like, I'm feeling this longing towards this person. And I think that should influence like my irrational decision, even if I don't understand why. And then there's of course Matthew Mokana, his character who at that point is like, more they did the quote unquote, reasonable person who says like, no, that's kind of silly because

that's not a rational concept. Like love definitely has a function. He says it for like child rearing and like later on the mad damning character is also like speaks of love as a survival tool like if you're like struggling then you think about your loved ones because that gives you that extra push to keep going. So the film does offer a lot of reasons to why love is just basically this chemical in the brain as like the rational sometimes say. It has a function, it's evolutionary, it's nothing more beyond that. But I think the way the film tries to not necessarily dismiss that, but at least add to that, that it's all that, but it's also more is the way that ultimately the whole plot revolves or succeeds because of a more intangible connection to love.

I think it's fine if we spoil the movie right. I think a lot of people have seen it. Because Murph at that point she feels drawn to her old bedroom with the ghost. At that point I'm pretty sure she knows that her dad isn't coming back. I'm guessing everyone on earth they they understand that either they are all gone or they are dead and either way there's no, her dad is not coming home. But then she goes back for that watch anyway and that's also why Magiuma Kanna has character, he makes that decision to like, he codes it into the data or whatever they need for the plot, like that's coded into the watch,

with the sole reason that like he has faith that he will return for that watch, because that's of all the elements within that room that he has access to, that's the connection there, that's the, that's love. That's the one thing that binds everything together there. So, yeah, I think it's just, I think I thought it actually was a nice suggestion

in the way that it shows that love might be a more guiding element than we appreciate it, or that that can be appreciated in rational terms. Or more like a guiding light or a driving force or whatever you want to call it. So yeah, if you go even more science fiction about it, like I personally like the idea just as like a thought experiment that love is like maybe as a part of like a sort of higher consciousness that's multi-dimensional so that we that's something that the filmmaker turns Malik also kind of hinted at in his film The Thin Red Line. Well one of the characters at one point questions like maybe there's one big soul that everyone's

a part of like oh everyone's just different faces of the same man and now I wouldn't like it's not like a belief that I have literally but I do like the idea of because we especially because we know so little about multiple dimensions and multiverse and whatever like possibilities that there are out there that maybe like our consciousness is some in some way, like, also existing in another sliver of reality that we don't have access to. Well, it doesn't pan-psychism kind of begin to take this one step toward actually being reality.

The argument from pan-psychism is that everything has consciousness baked into it. But it only manifests in particular ways, in particular places, that consciousness is a fundamental element of the universe. And if that's the case and we can't measure it, then it knows where it goes to. Another thing that I always think about is kind of one of these imbalances between how much we can see of ourselves, how much we can ever know of other people

is the fact that we're a finite creature that's surrounded by infinite complexity, but the depth that we're able to go to inside of ourselves is also infinite. So we're a finite, infinite creature surrounded by infinite complexity that we only have a finite ability to reach. And all of that sort of mixed together just makes me think, well, why wouldn't you be scared or confused or alone or worried or concerned or in solid territory

on in solitude, whatever it is, all of these different things, all of these experiences seem to make sense to me because you have like this paradox, you're a paradox living inside of a paradox. Yeah, yeah, that's pretty much the Ernest Becker thesis like you. We are like half god, half fleshy structure that slowly decays and ultimately dies, or like half-symbolic, half-physical, yes, there's some interesting ways of phrasing it, but yeah, I think that's one of the things that I still feel drawn towards because I haven't like encountered, encountered a good counter-argument for that or someone who really frames it differently or articulates it in a

significantly different way. But yeah, I think he perfectly captures that the idea of being having two elements that are fundamentally incompatible within us and that we somehow have to make a sense of without destroying each other in the process because that's in his book he kind of points out like how this human condition can drive us basically in the same in some ways or at least it drives like violence and warfare because we are also desperate to like or just to lay out his basic argument is that we are basically trying to symbolically transcend what we cannot transcend physically. So he says like, okay, there's a part of us that fears death. Like if you chase after an animal,

it will go into this death-defying response. It will chase it will like flee away. And then we basically do the same, but because we have a consciousness that is constantly aware of death, at least like conceptually, like we accept like, oh shit, we're gonna die someday. So to some extent, oh shit we're gonna die someday. So to some extent he says we're

basically in this constant death denying state or this death escaping state. And we try to do that through like symbolism or like maybe through love is one of them that's I think the auto ranks the auto ranks, main solution like we try to transcend ourselves through, on the one hand, pro creation, but also through like family members, like living in their memories, all that ever. Yeah, exactly. And of course, legacy more generally, like maybe through work or achievements or leaving something behind, having leaving this world with the comfort that we have at least have done something like that. Although our body is going to go away, like we're going

to have some part of us that lives on. So yeah, that's, you mentioned earlier about cynicism. And I said that I had no desire at all to watch afterlife with the Ricky Gervais, but then you did a video analysis of the first season and I'm tempted to go and do it. And in that you spent a good bit of time talking about Albert Camout. Oh yeah. What have you learned from him or what are some of your favorite insights or takeaways from having spent some time reading Kamu?

Yeah, he's probably my favorite of the existentialists mainly because he's firmly like secular about it like you have existentialist riders like Yurkigat who I also think is great, but he also is He has a more like religious solution, he has the leap of faith that's ultimately like the, his main thing. Whereas for Camus, he's famously said like, I want to live with what I know and that alone, like I don't want to leap into anything, I don't want to make rely on some potential like God or other dimension or

some other like unreachable truth that may be out there and that I must just have faith in, I just want to live with what I know and that alone. So yeah, he, I'm, that's familiar with his book, The Myth of Cicophus, in which he kind of explains the myth of Cicophus, which the guy who was punished by the gods has to push a rock up the mountain, see it roll back down and do it all over again. And he kind of explains like, it's only tragic if he is conscious about that fact, because if Sisyphus, like, if he doesn't know the rock is going to go down, like, he's going to go up each time knowing with the hope that he might succeed this time. But if he knows, like, this is his fate, like, he's going to do this eternally, and then

there's nothing else, then that's the real tragedy, like having to be aware of your predicament without being able to do anything about it. And so I think he takes that premise, which is then sort of the metaphor for life, like we know we go into this world, we're gonna work, we're gonna sleep, we're gonna do other stuff, maybe have some fun, and at some point we're gonna die, like we know, like we see the whole game that's been laid out before us like in general terms. And I think that Camus is mostly trying to find the freedom within it instead of trying to leap towards something else, towards some grander ideal or belief.

And he also really has the, I think the idea of rebellion, like we can maybe, we cannot escape our fate, but we can rebel against it, which I thought was nice, just basically give a, like, give a middle finger to the universe. And I don't have this work like fresh in my mind, but I do like that idea of just, because that's, it's a token of like a very fundamental freedom to just see this whole universe with everything like all the, the nothingness that it kind of impresses upon you., like because if you're really taking the weight of the universe, it really seems to try to make you feel like absolutely insignificant.

Like you are this tiny human that exists for like nothing and even in the span of like, even in the span of like our planet, like it's nothing, like there's been millions of years before us, there's million years that's gonna be after us and on this scale of the universe, it's nothing like there's been millions of years before us, there's a million years that's going to be after us and on this scale of the universe, it's going to be even worse. Everything about the universe screams to you like you're insignificant and then to say like, as that insignificant person, like I'm going to make this half meaning anyway,

I'm going to find significance anyway. That's a very powerful act. At least that's, I think, what Camus is kind of about. And what I personally also find really inspiring about him. They say that in interstellar as well, they rage rage against the dying of the light. That's the same sort of look. Yeah, I guess it comes down to the same concept. Yeah, everything. And so is the line between or is the the reason that we must imagine

Cicifus being happy? Is that telling people who are aware of their own mortality that even though you know, this game is going to end that you have to be able to play the game in a good way? I think so. Or at least you're capable of doing so. Like, you, we must imagine, this is just happy because he, there is freedom for him to be happy. Like, he can defy his faith in that, in that moment.

I'm not, I'm not sure exactly how he wrote it down, but I think he describes towards the end of that book, like the moment that Cicifus walks down the hill, like waiting for his whole fate to start all over again. And then if he finds like a moment of happiness in that during that walk down, then in that moment, he basically defies his whole punishment. He's still, they've essentially filled at punishing him because he still, he's still able to be himself. He's still able to live a of gratitude or pleasure from whatever. This is a discussion with a friend. I have a friend who's a philosopher who, and I quote, is trying nihilism as a life philosophy. Like consciously just decide it.

He was like, well, I've had a crack at a few other things and they didn't seem to work, so I'm just gonna try nihilism. And I was like, how's it going? I don't really know what you're supposed to say. Like what does nihilism is going well as a life philosophy mean? I'm not really too sure.

But he was telling me about David Benatar, who is one of the anti-natalists philosophers, and the argument of anti-natalists is that life is filled with so much suffering that it is basically a crime to bring any human into the world, I think, something like that. Don't have kids. Don't have kids because life's terrible. And I try, I really sort of tried to look at it from the opposite perspective and I didn't realize that that was part of the myth of Cicifus that, well, hang on, you can say that a life of

almost endless suffering, which it isn't, like it's small amounts of suffering and small amounts of pleasure. But even a life with an entirety of suffering with a small amount of pleasure in it, tiny, tiny little sliver of it at some point, consciously, I don't know, like does that cash out? It being better than annihilation or non-existence overall? I would be tempted, the non-ni-list in the room was to say yes. And it kind of seems like the same thing there, you know, if the 24-hour cycle that Sisyphus pushes the rock up the hill, but there's three seconds as the rock lands back in front of him and he takes satisfaction as he begins pushing it off, maybe that is worth it. Yeah, I would be interested to hear what a person like that would say if you,

if they, someone believes like it's, it's bad to bring children into this world, like you can kind of twist that question around, like do you think that you should not have been born at all? Like, would you rather have not existed at all? And maybe if that person says yes, like I wish none of this would have happened, and I'm guessing he's living his philosophy, but Well, you talk but overall I think that that's that's a point where people a lot of people are gonna expose their own hypocrisy like I don't think that a lot of people who believe that We should not bring children into the world because of suffering or the potential for suffering. They would they themselves would not have one

to have not existed. Am I saying that correctly? I have not have wanted to exist. In the afterlife video that you did, you quote Camus and you say, at certain moments of lucidity, the mechanical aspect of their gestures, their meaningless pantomime makes silly everything that surrounds them. You wonder why they are alive. And that is him talking about kind of the pointless daily machinations that people go through

right as they NPC and that way through the world. And it seems, because again, I haven't read barely any Kamu, that to me seems like a much more very sort of cynical view of the world. And yet you're saying that at the end of the myth of Cicifus, he kind of has managed to arrive at a place that seems much more hopeful. What's the arc between that? Is that what Camus does?

Does Camus sort of personally, and also, in terms of his writing, go on this journey of cynicism and nihilism and everything's shit to then come out to something else. Not necessarily. Again, I haven't read him recently, so I'm not in the best position to accurately explain it, but I think he, especially early in that book, he calls out the concept of the absurd, like that we know there's some part of existence that's fundamentally like strange, and that's the quote you mentioned and like some other stuff as well, that's like, I think it's also he

that says like that you sometimes have the realization that something very ordinary seems fundamentally alien like to us. Like there's some things that sometimes you just have these moments where you feel like a little bit disconnected from reality or something just feels weird. And that's basically, that's I think us becoming aware of our like, cicophus like fate, like that's us being, because we don't walk around like day to day, like being aware, like, oh, I'm going to push this, rock up the hill and it's going to come back down again, like, like, how old am I, like, how many years do I have left? Like, we're not

constantly aware of our like mortality and our fate and all those existential things. So when he brings those things up early in his work, he's kind of pointing out that we have those moments where it does, where we suddenly do become aware of that. That's when that sort of journey begins, because that's when you become sissophous who is conscious now, suddenly, he's no longer like, hopefully going about his life now he's tried to, now he's like forced to make, to justify it in some way, to make sense of it. And I think that's basically the jumping board towards the rest of that book? I hope it makes sense. You also looked at, don't look up. And I've got a closet obsession with existential risk.

So one of my friends messaged me and was like, dude, I'm not gonna tell you anything about this film, but watch it and tell me what you think it was about. What do you think don't look up was about? Yeah, so for me, when I made a video, I thought it was out or when I went into the film in first place, like, to me, it was obvious that it was about climate change

because that's also kind of how it was promoted. Like Leonardo DiCaprio himself, he's really into environmentalism and he obviously really promoted the film in that context. And I think even the director that some tweets about that at least like vaguely emphasized like, okay, this is maybe the angle through which where approaching this film.

Obviously it's like about other stuff as well, but that's like the main metaphor with the comment that's set to strike the planet. But, yeah, that's kind of like I went into it with that assumption, so naturally that's what I read into it. But I was surprised when I made a video about it. For context, I did a video on kind of questioning to what extent it was an effective metaphor for climate change and where it was kind of like struggling a little bit or like failing

to capture some nuances and why it did so. But I was actually surprised to see afterwards that there were people who didn't at all think about climate change when they saw that film. So to me that came actually as a bit of a surprise because I thought it was so on the nose in the way they presented the film and then the film itself. Of course, to me it seemed obvious but now I'm thinking like, oh it's probably because that's what I went in looking for. The frame, your prize, you'd already been primed for that. Yeah. So again, I hadn't seen any of those tweets or whatever,

or Leonardo DiCaprio's promotion, but there's one scene in it where Jonah Hill's character, they're sat in the White House. And they're talking about the fact that, like, you're not taking this seriously. This is the asteroid is going to come. It's going to kill everybody. And Jonah Hill starts listing off all of the big existential risks.

And he says, you know, every single week, there's somebody in here telling us about a rogue AI algorithm or a nano bot or an engineered pandemic or a climate change or whatever. And that to me, because I had my priors and my priors were make it a film about existential risk, about proper existential risk, was that's the nod to what's going on. And even if it's not, I found it really, really nice that they had that section in there, because I do think, I had this big,

I said this conversation with Peter Teal and Alex Epstein at this event over the weekend, and he's talking about fossil fuels and the future of climate change and energy and energy costs and stuff like that. And I keep on wanting, like I love the conversation, I think Alex is works fascinating, but I keep on wanting to be like, why is everybody talking about the climate when we've got, you know, artificial intelligence and engineered pandemics and natural pandemics. And we've literally just had one that occurred. And I do think that increasingly, hopefully, we'll see films that are more symbolic, trying to

get people to understand X-risk in a more well-rounded way, like, don't look up. Because the fact that it's open to inter-, at least partially open to interpretation means that it starts to get people thinking in this sort of a way. Yeah. I had a lot of comments from people who saw it indeed as a metaphor for the pandemic, which I kind of I thought about it, but I also knew the film was probably written before the pandemic happened. So I knew that was not the author's intention, So I knew that was not the author's intention.

But it does it fit well to a certain extent, because I do believe the pandemic is a sort of microcosm for climate change, in the sense that it's an external element, like out of nature that's kind of invading our like human society and wreaking havoc and kind of like confronting us with our the way we kind of Thought we could go and have this lifestyle we could go like have this global like everyone's traveling back and forth It doesn't matter, but then there's you introduce this one little virus and you can see how it's the same thing with that you catch the story about the ship that got stuck in the... Yeah, the everything.

So now I think yeah, how like such a tiny event, like so such a tiny screw in the machine could like mess everything up. Like I think it was a, it's also such a reminder of how fragile our system really is and how much we've actually come to take for granted, even though we probably should not have done that. It's a function of the interdependence as well, right? You don't have society as, even though individuals might have become atomized, everything is very interdependent and supply chain issues and problems to do with the personal protective equipment and all of the issues

that we've had over the last couple of years. Everybody is at the mercy of everybody else. Yeah, and we've grown like entitled about it too. Like we're not only expecting that this is the way it, the way things are, but we're also like firmly believed this is what we deserve. Like we should be through again is like, I can do whatever I want. And nothing should like impact me in any way. I have to not be able to travel when I want to be able to travel. Yeah, exactly.

I see my family when I want to be able to see my family. And it not as in the policy is stupid. I'm not getting into that discussion. I'm getting into the discussion around why is there a thing that isn't my choice that is impacting the way that I exist in the world? Yeah. Yeah, I think it has at least for some people like exposed a how we can have a bit of a childish sense of freedom. Like when you're a child, like you have rules that are laid out by

your parents and then you freedom to the child is like I can have a cookie whenever I want. Like I decide when I go to bed, like but I when you're adult and when you're a family man, or a parent or a partner to someone, then you have responsibilities. Freedom is no longer like, I'm going to do whatever I want. You have to get a more mature version of that to make it have, or make it make sense in an adult context.

And so I think the people who are really like concerned about to put it lightly like petty freedoms, like they, those are might also be the people who might need to have a more evolved sense of what freedom actually means in both an adult context for themselves and maybe also for like on a collective level in a civilized society where. Also a broader timeline as well, I think one of the problems, definitely. One of the problems that we have is that life's become so convenient recently, where hyper attuned to any minor reduction in that convenience. The fact that your new car is going to take 14 weeks to arrive instead of 10 weeks to arrive

because of supply chain issues to get the particular type of metallic paint and let the seats that you wanted to go in it. Feels like a huge inconvenience, but only because of how hyper-attuned we've become to being able to have things as soon as we want. Yeah, we're completely living within our own timeframes, which I was actually watching a video today on YouTube from the channel, I change in climate, which is kind of interesting from a environmentalist perspective, but he also pointed out like this that maybe at some point we need to go back to living more in tune with like the the waves of or the currents of like the planet. And so when you go to a supermarket,

maybe we shouldn't expect that everything is always there, all year around, from everywhere around the planet. We've grown so disconnected from the way, the natural ebb and flow that you find in nature, and the concepts of seasonality, and also with work. We're working the whole year around the clock, like nine to five, even though it doesn't always make sense.

Maybe in the summertime, we feel more energetic than in the winter time. Maybe we should account for that. That's a good point. I've never thought of that. There's a lot of those things where we are disconnected. We're completely living in these mechanical terms instead of like going more with like in terms of like flow or like. Other elements that you find in nature, but that we have sort of. Repressed or like done away with in our own lives or in our society.

Well, we never know when we get mastery over something, what is baby and what is bathwater that we're throwing out, right? What is it? And this is one of the most compelling arguments for conservatism that I can think of, the fact that progress doesn't always mean making things better. You can change things and very easily make them a hell of a lot worse. I think that there's probably a pretty easy argument to be made that reductions in norms around casual sex have probably fed into something which was immediately gratifying, but longer term, for most people individually and collectively

probably doesn't make them actually feel all that much better. And yet, it's really, really hard to argue again. So I'm supposed to be a free individual. I thought that we had control over, I can drive myself to work and I can choose where I want to live. And I can have a job, I can get up when I want and I can be hot when it's cold and cold when it's hot. Why can't I have sex with people whenever I want? And you go, well, no, you can, you can't, like you actually can, but like what you want to do isn't always necessarily

what's good for you. And that conflict, you're right, the kind of feet stamping tantrum that is mostly, I would argue, people just realizing that maybe the world wasn't as at the whims as they thought it was. I think a lot of people have probably become quite, and rightly so, you know, you've got pandemic,

crazy American election cycle that lasted for three months or something, war, energy shortage, in the space of two years. So apart from the fact that you're a finite creature surrounded by infinite complexity, you also now have this wild sort of turbulent existence that's going on outside of you. Now is a good time to be freaking out.

That's fine. I genuinely think that that's something that would be a natural response. But up until that point, we kind of didn't have any stimulus that would have caused us to do that. Yeah, it's weird. You'd almost feel nostalgic about like 2008 when we only had a financial crisis. And then a good decade to recover from it. Like now, like Russia has at the border here, even though we're barely getting over COVID. So yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Shit's moving faster, man. Yeah. What I wonder though, if that's actually something that's happening, if there's actually more crises going on or if it's also more that we're like hypersensitive towards stuff that's going on. Yeah, maybe I would certainly say that the last couple of years have seen, you know, I don't know whether we would have ignored the Ukraine Russia conflict. I don't think we would have ignored the Shortage is but I also do think that you're right that you've got you are hyper attuned but the human system isn't designed to consume the entire globe's Information 24 hours a day on a real time basis.

And yeah, I've said this for ages that the most competent people that I know now aren't the ones who are able to find information, they're the ones that are able to discriminate information. So in 2008, we didn't have more information than we needed. It was still a competitive advantage to be somebody that was able to seek out more and more and more. Because the asymmetry between what we wanted to know and what we could know was still imbalanced and we wanted to know and what we could know, kind of was still imbalanced in, we wanted to know more than we had access to. And then there was one month in the end of 2011,

or something, where the balance between those two things was perfect. And then very, very quickly, the balance just pivoted in the other direction. And it was like, it's no longer about whether you can find information, it's about whether you can separate noise and signal apart. And that's kind of the the job broadly of people now, not to scavenge for more,

but to be able to be more discriminating. Yeah, definitely, because it's a tricky thing too, like it's very easy to be fooled by information to mistake like noise for signal, as you said. information to mistake like noise for signal as you said. So yeah, that's something that I that I'm probably most like dreadful about, like I see at least in my country, like there's groups of people who are seeking to be comfy, the Netherlands. So yeah, there's like in the United States or like I'm guessing everywhere else, like there's increasingly you see like people who would otherwise be kind of like maybe individuals or like small communities or like the fringes of like not just

politics but just also basic world view. But they are now like more getting more organized and they're also like feeding each other into this. Like it's it's kind of like they're like they're bordering off their bubble and trying to drift out, slowly drifting away in their own parallel reality with it becoming like increasingly difficult to reach those because that's something that I do worry about and that I don't really have answers to.

Like how do you reach someone who seems to have a completely different world view than your own? Like who's completely like not even more like because politics has always been like a conflict of values, like in the base, maybe what kind of directions we should go. But now it seems like we're not we're not even getting to that because like we don't even agree like basically on how the world works. And that to me, that's kind of like scary because that's something that really, that's not going to bring us anywhere. I think.

It's a fundamental incompatibility. I learned this from a friend who did philosophy at Oxford and he was saying how people that do ethics professionally, I didn't know that being an ethicist is actually a job, but apparently there's, and people who partake in debating ethics. They can have a debate about ethics as long as the meta-ethics that underpin their beliefs they agree on. So you have to agree on the meta-ethical framework before you can have a discussion about the ethics, and that's a really nice framework that I use moving forward that's, look, we can have

a debate about stuff to do with what's going on in the world, but if we can't debate about what the world is, or what the fundamental situation that everything else is being built on top of is, you know, if you're flat earth and I'm lizard people, then we have an incompatible, or maybe we have a completely compatible world view actually. I think in that case, we would probably go along. Yeah, from the point of maybe a little bit better. What do you watch? So, you know, like stories of old your channel, which you'll be linked in the show,

not to below people can go check that out. It's awesome. What else do you really... I also have a podcast now, by the way, I'm not sure if you've... What's that called? It's called Cinema of Meaning. It's, we launched it. I'm doing it together with Thomas Flight, who's another YouTube video essayist,

a really smart guy too. We launched this March, so it's kind of new. It's a weekly podcast that each week we discussed like a single film and we really want to dive into like the meanings and philosophies and the kind of the stuff that we're talking about now, but then specifically tied to understanding an individual film. So yeah, that's something that we're doing. We're congratulations. Welcome to the, welcome to the industry. Who else do you watch? Then online, what are the YouTube channels? If people think this, this Tom Guy sounds all right.

What else do you watch that you think people should check out? I watch a bunch of different stuff. Are you asking me like channel similar to mine or like no one ever thought of mine interest because I just Whatever you think interest that whatever you think that people need to know more about you can shale whoever you want Yeah, okay, so there's one guy. He's also from the Netherlands, but he makes content in English That I recently came across he's called Martijn dola Okay, yeah, no one's gonna to be able to spell that time. Yeah, he has a video series, it's called Two Years on a Bike. If you search for that, I'm sure you'll find it.

It's a four-part video series where he basically accounts the journey he made on his bicycle from Vancouver to Patagonia, I think it was. But it was really just like this great exercise in cinematography and storytelling. And he is now doing a series in which he has bought like a cabin in the Italian Alps that he's really just renovating from scratch. And the interesting thing is it's not really about anything. He makes these long vlogs, but you see a lot of them. A lot of them is just he Or just him doing every day stuff like he's like today. I'm gonna

Do the plumbing or whatever today. I'm gonna build a temporary shed while I work on the other cabin and so It's a really To me it kind of like it took me by surprise like I was watching it and I was thinking at first me, it kind of like, it took me by surprise, like I was watching it, and I was thinking at first, like, oh, this kind of boring, like I was even skipping through a little bit, but at some point I kind of tuned into what he was doing, and it became this. Really, it's almost like an escape into, into someone's life who is more connected to, or more directly connected to his labor and to, to the world to say it like a bit cheesy Lee. It seems like a peaceful way to. Yeah, that would be.

Yeah, you really capture that sense of peace of like and instantly what makes you want to go like into your garden or whatever and work and use it. But you're ahead. Starting building a shed out back. There's a series of books, the name of the wind by Patrick Rothfuss, and then the subsequent one is Wise Man's Fear. And that series is written the same way as the YouTube that you're talking about. So the second book is a thousand one hundred pages. And dude, it goes so slowly. Like you get to know this guy's daily routine, you get to learn about the route that he walks to go and play as a lute at the club that he plays out on a nighttime.

And you can go for, you know, a good while and kind of not much happens. It's beautifully written and the characters are compelling and the protagonist really really fun but I really enjoyed the more pedestrian nature of this book it wasn't super quick cut every three seconds it wasn't and then a dragon arrived and some crazy shit happened you sink into the the piece and the pedestrian sort of pace and cadence that he goes through. Yeah, I think it's good to emerge yourself in content like that every now and whatever it's a book or like a YouTube series because I think it's also something that you then carry with you outside of it like you. When you like stop watching a video like that or you stop reading that book then maybe when you're like doing something for yourself then maybe you bring that same awareness to your own activities which I think is kind of like enriching or at least probably. Yeah, I think I certainly found when I was reading that book that I had that same sort of mindset. I think your your stuff has that

a similar sort of pacing to it that's kind of considered and makes you reflect. I'll give you the best thing that I've found, Melody Sheep, have you heard of them? It does ring a bell, yeah. So they do documentaries in space, but the entire thing is created on a computer in a beautiful motion animation, like 4K, the whole thing is insane.

And the guys that do it, I don't know who they are, they must work professionally outside of this. But yeah, it's called Melody Sheep and they've just announced, they do a trailer before the full length films get released and they've just announced, they do a trailer before the full length films get released and they've just released a new trailer about some new alien worlds documentary that they're going to do. And it's outstanding. Like the fact that it's on YouTube is completely disgusting. It's the, some of them, the sound editing is great, the narration is brilliant, the script writing is really good. It's genuinely interesting, and you learn a ton of different stuff.

So they did this one about how life could have evolved on different planets and stuff like that. And you're compelled to watch, but the main thing is it looks like interstellar. You know, like it's so spectacular. So those, that's two, you said, two years on a bike, we'll find your guy, and Melody Sheep, for me, we'll find mine guy, and Melody Sheep from me will find mine,

and if people wanna get started, the Alien Worlds, I think it's called, is a series that they can get cracking with. Sounds good. Yep, Tom, I really appreciate you, man. I love the work that you do. I hope that you continue to do it. Like stories of old, we'll be linked in the show notes below.

If people want to find out other bits that you do online, why should they go? I don't really have a website or anything. I have a Patreon page that also links to like some of the stuff that I have like the YouTube. I'm not sure if cinema of meaning the podcast is on there, but you can find that wherever you're probably listening to this podcast. So yeah, you can check that out as well. And also on Nebula, the streaming platform, I'm not sure if you've heard of that one. That's a like a creator-owned streaming platform. I'm like, it's something we created with like a bunch of YouTubers. They came together and they sort of

kind of threw our own agency and we started our own streaming platform. It's basically like Netflix, but with YouTubers, you pay a monthly fee instead of having ads, so the experience is completely ad-free. And so we also get a much fairer share of the revenues. That's kind of the principle of it. And a lot of us, including myself, have been posting like some exclusive stuff there or like extended videos. You also see like, you always see like special edit video,

especially edited videos without like their sponsor bits at the end, because like again, it's completely out free. So that includes the sponsor you normally see in the video itself. So, yeah, you can definitely check that out as well. Don't mind. I appreciate you. Thanks for today. No. Thanks. you