RadixJournal - Richard Spencer - The Bicameral Sports Brain

May 24, 2023 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer

01:25:47

The Bicameral Sports Brain

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit radixjournal.substack.com“Uberboyo” joins Mark Brahmin and Richard Spencer for a discussion of the unconscious mind! What are the implications of the bicameral structure of our brains? Do things like athletics express an “intelligence” or “rationality” that is far more sophisticated than what our language centers can produce?

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	Yeah, well, I guess I'll just present one thing I was thinking about.
	So the context for what me and Mark were talking about, the context that I think is maybe philosophical and quite interesting is from this book by Marty Samuel.
	He's a Jewish man from New York and he wrote something called You Gentiles.
	It's actually a brilliant book where he constantly compares the Jewish experience of the Gentile.
	It's the outsider looking in type thing.
	And there's one paragraph in it where he talks about sports.
	And it's surreal reading it because my whole life I've essentially lived as what he's lived, but it's been completely unconscious.
	I've never really understood what it is, but I've always grown up in sports and it's always been a highly emotive thing for me and all the boys.
	And all the lessons you learn out of it are so unbelievably important.
	He explains that the Jews don't experience this stuff.
	I have other Jewish friends that I know, and I would ask them about this.
	I'd be like, what's going on with this?
	And they would describe the same thing, where they would find themselves in classrooms of Jewish guys studying Talmud or something like this, or whatever they do.
	And my friend is very much into Nietzsche, and so he'd always laugh, and he'd say, they're all there describing how much they hate matter and how much they're very intellectual people, you know?
	And he would find it hilarious and he would explain that we would actually come across this naive, innocent people to them.
	And we're not aware that we're so sporty and why it matters to us so much.
	So I'll probably dive into that quite a lot.
	I should read that book in general, but that's actually fascinating.
	It reminds me of this joke about a Jew in New York who ultimately changed his name to something like McPherson.
	Or something like that.
	And he did all of this effort to become more waspish and less Jewish.
	Name change is the dress.
	He started wearing seersucker suits in the summer and these plaid wool vests in the winter.
	He went the whole nine yards and he was actually invited to join this Episcopalian dinner.
	Their supper club, I should say.
	And he really had almost done it.
	They had taken him in as one of their fellow WASP.
	And just before he was about to be allowed to be a member, he was asked to give an after-dinner speech to his new WASP colleagues.
	And he stood up and he was going to make a toast.
	And he said, fellow Goyam!
	So anyway, it didn't work out so well.
	Maybe that joke didn't work out so well.
	But yeah, so I'm curious, you, growing up in Ireland, what sports did you play?
	I played quite a lot of them, so I have an interesting background because I'm like a Catholic, born underneath a cabbage.
	But I was in a Protestant school for a period of time.
	There's a lot of Protestants in the pale.
	I was just on the fringes of the pale.
	And so I played an awful lot of rugby.
	And rugby is very much like a proddy sport, fucking Anglo sport.
	That's what they'll be playing over here.
	So I played an awful lot of rugby.
	But rugby is, if we want to talk about virtue and manliness, my God, is rugby an incredible sport for learning this.
	It's essentially...
	Got feelings inside of it that I can only assume is the same as medieval warfare because you're just this big team of guys standing across these monsters and you full force charge into each other and just smash each other with your shoulders.
	It's amazing.
	The only sport close to it is fighting.
	That's been my experience.
	So I played a lot of rugby but also played an awful lot of soccer.
	Soccer was a big one.
	Ireland's actually interesting.
	Oh, you don't?
	Go ahead.
	Go ahead.
	I don't want to.
	We call it soccer, but it's supposed to be called football.
	But we have our own private Gaelic football.
	Again, this could be quite interesting to get into because Gaelic football is like our rebellion against the English.
	So we have like a sort of special football, football and hurling, we call them.
	And they're like a different type of ball sports.
	And they're again like another thing.
	So in Ireland, there's actually quite a lot of sports.
	It's extremely politicized as well.
	Like, as I said, those Irish sports are for Catholics and you're supposed to play them.
	As they're like they're part of your heritage and like screw the English and soccer is a little bit of a middle ground because it's just so universal but it is ultimately an English sport and then rugby is like very much a kind of pompous you'd see that stuff in like South Dublin motherfuckers you know you're like oh you're of course Anglos Protestants that thing so I've had a broad experience with them.
	Interesting I didn't know well of course I should have known.
	Sports are politicized, as you say, but the religious war takes place in terms of which sport you do.
	That's, I guess, not surprising.
	We have some of those stereotypes.
	In America, it's probably not even close to being as intense.
	Yeah, that's a great sport.
	I mean, it's interesting when I think back on it, because I played American football, which I presume doesn't...
	I mean, you guys probably have seen it, of course, but I doubt anyone plays it in Ireland.
	It's a very American sport.
	It's interesting.
	I think you'll occasionally see it in Germany and some other places, but it's very rare.
	It's kind of like taking up fencing or something in terms of its uniqueness.
	You don't really find it anywhere outside of America.
	But anyway, I played baseball.
	I loved baseball.
	I wanted to be a great baseball player.
	I was obsessed with the game when I was younger.
	And actually, in the 80s and 90s, I was a Boston Red Sox fan, which is kind of funny.
	This will please Mark, of course.
	But they were very good in 86, but then they were always just out of reach of being good.
	For the next 15 years or so, and they had this long tradition of never winning a World Series after they traded away Babe Ruth and all this kind of junk.
	But I was actually born in Boston, and I kind of just loved the ancientness of the Red Sox, and I followed them and knew everything about the players, and I loved it.
	But I don't know.
	Baseball is a very difficult sport.
	Just to hit a curveball is extremely difficult.
	So I was always disappointing myself.
	I wasn't good enough at it, but I loved it.
	But I played football as well, American football.
	I remember hearing from my father about...
	He went to a...
	I don't know if they still do this.
	They probably don't.
	But they required you to play football.
	It's almost kind of funny to think of it now.
	They couldn't get away with it.
	But you played as a house.
	So you played with your dormitory.
	And everyone played was the rule.
	And so they didn't expect any great athletic feats to occur, but they wanted everyone to participate.
	And so even if you were an 80-pound weakling, you still kind of had to go out there and fight because it's not rugby exactly, but it is a violent sport with pads.
	And I thought that was a great tradition.
	It's funny when you look back on it because now football is becoming, at least in some circles, it's becoming almost taboo because of the concussions and just the violence and all of that kind of stuff.
	And I suffered a concussion or two, although I can't remember them for some reason.
	But I look back on it and I don't know if I even want my son to play football.
	I don't regret anything about it.
	And it is that concept of team building, that concept of fighting, also learning to lose.
	That might sound like a weird thing to say, but getting beat by someone who's better than you, that's really, really important to experience.
	And I still remember to this day, 25 years later or something, of that time I beat the guy.
	I can even retell the story of this guy I was blocking, because again, I'm a mediocre athlete, so I was relegated to blocking.
	But this really good defensive end who I was blocking over and over and over, and at the key moment, I really got him.
	And again, I was probably...
	I remember it to this day.
	I relive it in my mind.
	So it's just hugely important.
	And yeah, I think we've lost something.
	We've lost something very important.
	When you don't learn, learn what it feels like to lose.
	I would stress that.
	So you know that there's a bigger fish out there.
	And also just experience, even if it's in a controlled way, experience danger In violence.
	You know, I mean, I think all of us, it's funny, I'm not stressing the, you know, victory and getting carried off the field by your teammates or something, because that's very, very rare.
	But just that being afraid to go out there and not knowing who the other guy is and facing off of them, I think that's something that...
	Particularly Gen Z are not experiencing.
	They're experiencing that on a live stream of a video game or something, which is okay, but it seems like a pale substitute for the real thing of going out there and facing someone.
	A hundred percent.
	I think actually what you're digging into there at the end is, if we're to get waxed philosophical about this, which I guess we're going to have to do, is really where things become fascinating.
	So again, in this book by you Gentiles, I was describing that when I was reading it.
	It was just so insightful.
	I was like, wow, this is amazing.
	This is really, really brilliant.
	I love finding stuff like this.
	Because this guy is describing it from the outside.
	And he basically says that, you know, he's a Jew and Jews are bookish and they're not sporty and they're not engaged this way.
	And Jung would even describe this, that the Aryans, if I'm allowed to put it this way, the Aryans are more unconscious and innocent and perhaps have more potential.
	But the Jews are actually more conscious and mature.
	They're sort of like a sunset.
	Civilization or people.
	Their symbols have been taken out of themselves.
	They're kind of a finished product in some weird way.
	They're much older people, spiritually, I guess you could say it this way.
	They're like old souls.
	And for this reason, their maturity leads to consciousness.
	And their experience of life is very much like that.
	Like the Jews...
	All get together and read and they study history and they study the Bible, not the Bible, the Talmud or the Torah, and they understand themselves and they're aware.
	And their approach towards morality, this is so fascinating.
	Is that it's declarative, you know?
	You explain to the Jew that he is supposed to be moral in this way.
	Like the Jews would explain to each other is what I mean.
	They'd sit down with a young guy and they'd sort of say to him, hey, this is how you be a good boy.
	This is what good and evil is.
	This is what you're supposed to do.
	And it's declared to him.
	And then it forms a conception inside of his head.
	And then he has to sort of act out this declaration.
	Whereas this guy Maurice was explaining that when he sees us go to sports, he realizes that we don't learn morality.
	Us Europeans or Aryans or Westerners, we don't learn it.
	Be the book.
	You know, like the priest don't let us read the Bible.
	It's the sort of stereotype here.
	Learn it that way.
	We actually go and we learn it in the sports field.
	Like virtue is embodied for us and it's completely unconscious.
	It's never declared.
	In fact, we have this scorn towards declaration.
	Why be all talk when you could be action?
	We consider that a pathetic thing.
	You know, like blather braining, reading your books.
	It's all, you know, it's book sell, word sell, cope.
	Like don't do that stuff.
	Go out and experience it and develop.
	And morality is like important.
	Implicitly imposed upon us.
	I really think this is very close to sort of Nietzsche's understanding of maybe morality.
	He kind of has moral predicates in some sense, but they're not.
	He's very against this declarative idea.
	And so our experience of sports brings us into this experience.
	You go out into the field and you come in contact with these amazing things, you know, as you described it, the failure.
	Like, how do you deal with failure?
	How do you be, quote-unquote, a good sport?
	How do you be a good sport in sportsmen in the face of defeat?
	That's actually incredibly moral attitude when you think about it.
	You have to be sophisticated.
	You have to be capable of, you know, putting your ego aside.
	Like, all these things that we'd celebrate is if you'd said that stuff in church, everybody would be like, you're so good.
	You're such a good boy, but to actually demonstrate it is a much different thing.
	And even dealing with pain, like that was one thing I remember from my sports career is that before I really got into it when I was a teenager, like I remember my first couple of sports games, rugby games specifically, like I was afraid, you know, I'm stepping up and I'm going to get hurt, man.
	That's for your head when you haven't been hurt.
	You're afraid, man.
	You're like, what's this going to feel like?
	And then you go and you clash full speed against other people and you smash against people and you get hurt and you realize, first of all, it doesn't hurt as bad as you thought it was going to hurt.
	It definitely hurts, but you kind of recover from it.
	You start to see that you're able to overcome pain.
	You realize that you're much more anti-fragile than you thought before.
	Of course, this is reinforced to you as like, you're not a lump of sugar.
	It's never this grand moral declaration.
	You're just sort of like, Shout it out.
	It's like, you're not a lump of sugar now.
	You learned that, didn't you?
	You're all right.
	You'll get up.
	You're tough.
	You can handle it.
	And then fear as well.
	Fear is another thing.
	I remember before the games, we would see the other team, rugby specifically, we'd see the other team come into the dressing room.
	We'd see their bus show up at our school if we were going to do this.
	And we'd all be looking at them.
	And the second you see the bus, there'd be this adrenaline drop through your spine.
	You'd feel the chill going.
	You're like, oh, fuck.
	It was like a team arriving.
	I can only describe it as, As I said, in the medieval times, it's like watching the other army show up in the hill and you're like, alright boys, here we fucking go.
	And the next...
	Two hours, there was just a different mood among everybody.
	And all the boys, we'd be looking at each other in class and then we'd be getting ready.
	And there was tension in the air.
	And I remember feeling that stuff.
	And that's not a normal feeling in your life.
	And then you start to get nervous.
	And then you start to feel that lump in your chest.
	And you have to go and you have to overcome that.
	And you have to fucking show up and stand on the field.
	And then you have to look across from them and overcome that fear and act despite it.
	It's such a profound thing to teach yourself, to learn to do.
	And then, as you said, those moments of triumph are definitely not in it.
	Insignificant either.
	I have many memories of, as you were saying, you beat that dude.
	I remember in rugby, I just gave some dude an absolutely horrific tackle.
	I think I broke his ribs.
	I tackled him that hard.
	But I was just like a legend for a week.
	I was like, yes, let's go.
	And it stuck in my mind forever.
	It was like the kind of ecstasy of triumph.
	I remember reading Nietzsche talking about the old God of Israel.
	And it's like, what would a God know?
	What type of God?
	Could you relate to if you didn't understand the ecstasy of triumph?
	If you didn't understand that feeling of conquest, like to tear the scalp off your enemy and hold it up in the air type thing.
	And so all those virtues are in that experience.
	None of it is declarative.
	None of it is pontificated.
	You can't bash people over the head with a book.
	And interestingly, you can't really learn that stuff as efficiently within a book.
	You have to go and experience it.
	It is something that must be done.
	It must be experienced through action.
	There's something incredible there.
	And again, Maurice Samuel was basically saying that sports is your church.
	That's actually where you do it.
	Your church is sort of like a hilarious, utter institution, but sports is really what you are.
	And he says, even though you're Christian, the ancient Greeks knew this.
	The ancient Greeks had the gymnasium as a religious center because they actually understood what they were.
	That was the nature of your spirit.
	So there's a lot of profound things in there, I think.
	Yes, I'm definitely taken by that.
	That problem of believing that morality is rational, and that's definitely something Nietzsche would associate with Kant, but that notion that you could ever, as you say, declare a morality with words is...
	On one level, extremely deceptive, but also on another level, it's kind of killing it and so on.
	Real morality is felt between the community, and it's not something you can exactly even put into words.
	Beating the guy and helping him up, it's good sportsmanship and so on, but there's a connection between the two of you that You can't really describe by putting that into a kind of legalism of like, "Thou shalt defeat thine opponent, but not too much should always help him off the dirt." That ruins it.
	It destroys it, in fact.
	But when it's felt, you understand what something like that means.
	It's weirdly like romance when you think about it.
	If you go in with a girl and you're like, babe, I'm going to do this.
	Maybe that would work.
	But if you're too blunt, too spurgy, too autistic, you destroy something.
	It just doesn't work that way.
	It must be embodied.
	It must be experienced.
	The right action, which I guess is sort of what morality is all about, actually has to happen without words.
	The whole problem of consent, these types of things, always come into this.
	And sports very much teaches you that.
	I think it's a fascinating thing to look at.
	I look also at psychology, because in psychology, later in my life, I learned many of these principles from a different angle entirely.
	So, for example...
	The problem of our brains is that our brains are split in half.
	We've got this left hemisphere, this right hemisphere, and our left hemisphere tends to be a little bit more conscious.
	And it's the part where our broker's area is.
	If you've got your concussion on your left side, you might not be able to speak as well as you used to.
	And this conscious left hemisphere, very close to our concept of the ego, is sort of...
	It's not really as in touch with reality as maybe the other side of our brain, the right hemisphere, which is more subtle and more wrapped up in the moment, I guess you could describe it.
	And so what you see here is this very, very deep problem where declarations don't really connect us with the real world as much as we would like to say it.
	And there's this constant issue we have in human civilization overall.
	This is just part of our nature is that we think that...
	Being able to say something, being a word declarer is some type of virtue in and of itself.
	It's almost like a failure of understanding what we are.
	It's like our own Brain matter, our own makeup gets in the way of what we would like to be the right thing to do.
	We would like to be able to declare beliefs and then think that that's the right action.
	But we just know that that is not how things work in practice.
	The true art of life is your ability to be subtle and your ability to get involved in the moment, as we said, and actually embody and demonstrate virtue.
	And oftentimes, as I was describing with the sports earlier, the more somebody talks.
	In some sense, you want to castigate that out of people.
	You want to give out to people if they talk too much.
	Boxing, I think, is a way better example of this.
	When it comes to boxing, you can have your opinions.
	Tyson would always say, everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.
	But when it comes down to it, you're going in there and actually going to have to beat somebody up.
	You're going to have to fight for your fucking life.
	It's so scary.
	Rugby is scary, man.
	Boxing is...
	It's terrifying.
	Boxing makes you shit yourself.
	Man, before you go into a boxing ring in the dressing room, some of the toughest dudes I know, I'd be talking to them about this and they'd be like, yeah, I just wanted to jump out the fucking window and run away.
	They just can't do it because the tension's so great.
	Oh, I can absolutely imagine.
	I have never experienced that.
	I have kind of gotten into boxing weirdly through YouTube and watching particularly some of the older fighters.
	But yeah, that is something else.
	I mean, that is archetypal.
	Basically, mono a mono.
	And your ability just to survive, not to mention win, is something else.
	Yeah.
	And this is it.
	I guess the reason why I came to this, because maybe my stream of thought is not so clear here.
	What you'll notice in yourself.
	As a psychological problem is that you've got this propensity to rationalize and you always have to have a story going on in your head about what the world is.
	This is so fascinating to think about because this is what your ego, I guess you could say, is generating.
	It's generating rationalizations about reality.
	But what things like sports and, for example, boxing forces you to confront is that an awful lot of that is just meaningless chatter.
	It's just pointless.
	And you really understand this on the most pure level when you're forced to do something scary.
	So, for example, you're in the dressing room before the boxing match.
	It's scarier in the dressing room than when you're actually fighting.
	That's the weirdest feeling of all, but that's actually true.
	The worst part is in the dressing room, because you're sitting there and your head just starts to spin webs of, I'm going to get fucking, I'm literally going to die.
	Like, that's the big one.
	You know, what if I die?
	What if I get beaten up in front of all these people?
	What if I start, like, you know, foaming at the mouth or something like that?
	What if I start crying?
	You know, all this stuff starts going through your head, all this bizarre stuff, and you start to blow out a proportion of fear.
	That's your brain rationalizing.
	You're creating, you're narrating, you're blathering, you're creating scenarios in your head.
	And then when you walk out, it's really intense.
	But then the second you step in and you throw that first punch.
	Something happens where that part of your brain gets so overwhelmed that it just turns off.
	It's like the Buddhist or the flow state.
	That part switches off.
	And then it's actually amazing.
	It's almost like you start to enjoy yourself.
	Once maybe you do it a few times, you start to enjoy yourself.
	You start to really experience.
	And your adrenaline is just...
	You're 150%.
	You're just absolutely wired to your tits on this natural drug, but you're completely present.
	You're completely there.
	There's no thinking about anything else.
	And you're actually having a bit of a blast in the most sadistic way possible.
	And that part of your brain shuts off.
	The very same thing that a Buddhist would sit down and try to meditate on and kill inside of himself, shut off that monkey mind.
	You actually achieve that through bravery.
	And there's no way that you can declare that.
	How can you explain this to someone?
	How can you get someone to...
	To think that they can just declare the words inside their heads and achieve that experience.
	That experience is really what you're looking for.
	It just falls so short if you surrender your world conception to that rationalizing part of your head as being, in some sense, the priority or the value or something like this.
	Just a curiosity, have you ever looked into the work of Julian Jaynes?
	Oh man, yeah.
	Oh yeah.
	Oh you have?
	Okay.
	So I felt like that you were referencing him when you're talking about the hemispheric theory of mind, basically.
	But yeah, I mean, really, I'm not even positive I buy it or not.
	But when I opened up that book around a year ago, actually, it really blew my mind, so to speak.
	Cut it in two.
	It's hard to summarize his thought in just a few sentences, but I'll try, I guess.
	We've had this assumption for quite some time that it's homo sapien, the rational man, that what makes us human really is this consciousness.
	Our ability to explain ourselves or have a sense of ego or rationally deal with the world consciously, that is through thinking and ultimately through using language.
	But so much of our life is unconscious.
	I mean, you can be driving a car at 70 miles per hour down the highway and having a phone conversation.
	And you are basically going to be just as alert and just as good a driver as you would be.
	Sorry, I just got distracted there for some moment.
	You can be having a phone conversation while you're driving down the highway at a very high speed.
	And you're basically doing it.
	You are unconsciously, and through peripheral vision in many ways, like adjusting, making slight adjustments.
	Your reactions are there.
	What is sport but a kind of right-brained, unconscious ability to find that little gap to run through or to know just when to twist to get out of a tackle or something like that.
	And so it's that...
	Your spinal cord and your whole nervous system really is your mind on a much bigger level than that language left brain thought processes.
	This is such an amazing topic to get into.
	I might go on a little bit of a tirade.
	Yeah, please.
	I've been enjoying the conversation.
	I mean, I think that you've...
	So I'm reluctant to, because I think a lot of what I would say would be redundant or just kind of affirming some of the points that you've already made.
	I mean, I do think an important aspect of sports is the sort of ethos that's developed through athletic competition, especially, I would say, team sports.
	But I think that there are different lessons learned from individual sports that are also valuable.
	So ideally, A young man would have experience with both individual sports and team sports.
	Individual sports, I think, are, you know, because ultimately we are individuals and we have to kind of carry our own weight, be self-sustaining, be successful as individuals, and develop that self-discipline.
	And I think that that perspective of being one against the world is valuable to inhabit as a younger man.
	To become accustomed to it.
	But I also think that team sports are very valuable as well because they allow people to learn.
	I mean, these are all kind of like cliches and they seem like simple things.
	But there's simple things that a lot of people don't learn, right?
	And we think of morality and ethos generally as a kind of simple thing.
	And on some level, I am a little ashamed even to talk about it.
	I mean, this sort of goes to some of the points that you were addressing, but I'm almost ashamed to discuss morality because I feel like a lot of the points are kind of so obvious.
	But I think that sports has a way of kind of instilling I guess it has a kind of humbling effect on some level as well.
	You realize that some athletes are better than you, or you realize that you can't do it yourself.
	These sort of things, I think, are valuable lessons of sports, but also that you Yeah, but to accomplish the goal, you have to be working with one another.
	And to Richard's earlier point, I think that a lot of that, you know, I famously will criticize the DR, what we call the dissident right.
	But one of the problems I find with the dissident right is that there is, you know, especially with people who are ostensibly Christians, which you would think that they...
	Would have a special interest in being moral or showing themselves to be moral or virtuous or ethical in behavior.
	I find that that's often absent with people who are very demonstrative of their Christianity, especially on the right.
	You know, a lot of times they're just not, you know, not in every case, of course.
	But they're just kind of unashamed to call themselves Christian, yet behave in kind of unethical.
	And bad ways, essentially, right?
	And which to me is kind of like, well, you know, I don't go around saying how Apollonians are more moral than everyone else or that sort of thing, right?
	But I try to conduct myself and I don't, I mean, I think that, again, I think a lot of this is just learned behavior.
	It's how you're raised.
	I think sports are helpful for developing that ethos as well.
	And so that's the only thing I would say, is I think that there is a kind of ethical component to it.
	I did read that chapter that you were referencing, and yeah, I think that there's a lot of truth to what he's saying, definitely.
	There's a little bit of a kind of caricature in there as well, and he emphasizes as well that really we're warriors and we're about war, which I think...
	You know, I think on some level that is true, of course.
	You know, Mars is an Aryan figure, certainly, and we are descendant of warriors.
	But, you know, I think with a figure like Apollo, I mean, I don't think that we are, I don't think that we should develop a sort of idea of ourselves as brutes then, as a consequence of that, right?
	I think that there is room for balance there as well.
	And, you know, civilization...
	You know, I think competition, you know, I think that this sort of competitive spirit that you gain through athletics can be transmuted or sublimated into other activities in the world, too.
	And therefore, that background in sports has a useful function.
	So you can become more valuable to your company, for example.
	You can become a more successful entrepreneur with this sort of competitive spirit that you learn, at least in part from sports.
	So, I think you understand my point.
	And also in intellectual activities, to the extent that they're required.
	I mean, I take your point about us not...
	I mean, I think that we should speak when there are valuable things to say only, right?
	And we live in a time when there are valuable things to say.
	But yeah, we don't...
	I think that we should be men of action as opposed to...
	Blatherers or yammerers, right?
	Anyways, I'll hand it back.
	There's some great thoughts.
	Just on that idea of men of action versus yammerers, I think the actual real problem is that you're dealing with...
	Two incredibly important forces.
	Like, you know, the sort of declarative part of our mind is a real part of our mind.
	It's not like we want to lobotomize, you know, our prefrontal cortex or something like this and become all sports grugs.
	I don't think that'll get us anywhere.
	But we also need to understand that that's a more unconscious, action-orientated part of ourselves is God has an awful lot more dignity.
	As you were pointing out, even Christ himself basically says, don't be some Pharisee walking around blathering that you're just the best person ever.
	Like, that's demonstrate your morality type thing.
	Demonstrate that you're...
	We're a follower of the law.
	And the real difficulty, I guess, is trying to make those two things work together.
	It's really trying to humble your declarative rationalizations, your talking mind, to the groundedness of a more complete brain, I guess you could say, something like this.
	I'll go back into McGilchrist.
	I think everything's been sorted out with the Zoom meeting.
	Maybe you'll just read one or two quick pieces, short paragraphs from you Gentiles, because...
	It is, as Mark was saying, maybe a little bit of a parody, but there's just some very fascinating things that he puts in here.
	So, for example, this is him speaking now.
	Your spirit is sport.
	Particularly your young men who are not yet absorbed in the struggle for existence, and whose emotions are therefore, for the largest part, free.
	They must find them in sports, in games, in contest, the most satisfactory expression of their instincts.
	Hence the comparative weakness of your organized churches, which are founded on a misconception.
	Sport is, for you, a serious spiritual manner.
	It is the proper symbolization, the perfect ritual, wherein your spiritual forces find expression.
	And they also find exercise in sustenance.
	They were cleaner-witted who, before the advent of Christianity, associated sport intimately with your religious life.
	Today you are practicing on a vast scale the troubled hypocrisy of unhappy converts who have been convinced in reason of a new religion.
	But whose proper and healthy instincts drive them to surreptitious homage to older gods.
	And I've always, I just find that such an interesting way of framing things because it's exactly the sort of experience.
	Like I went to church when I was younger, even in this school.
	Like I went to Protestant church, Catholic church.
	It's the same feeling where you sort of go through the motions in the church.
	You don't ask fucking questions.
	You let the dude up there, do his little ritual.
	You know, it's obviously important.
	It's kind of got style and everybody gets together and you sing some nice hymns.
	But then when the real work happens, you go out in the sports field and you go out and you beat the shit out of each other and that's where it actually happens.
	That's where the energy is going.
	And there is that sort of hypocrisy.
	And again, talking to these people I know who are Jewish and listening to this guy, their approach towards the Torah and going to synagogue is far more, I guess, serious.
	They actually study and they try to understand what's going on with this thing and they actually try to make sense of it.
	But we had never had any of that growing up.
	I find that one quite fascinating.
	If you have any thoughts on that...
	We've solved it so they can read us and they don't have to pay as much attention to the tour in the future.
	Let's go.
	We fixed them.
	If you have any thoughts on that before I go into the hemispheres?
	Well, so one thing I wanted to point to, because I think that...
	And this is a...
	So returning to this idea that you develop teamwork...
	An ability to work with one another.
	I mean, these things should be attractive or interesting to people who call themselves nationalists, right?
	Even if they consider themselves petty nationalists or whatever the case may be, sports should be meaningful to them because of this, right?
	Now, I think that a lot of the people in the dissident right are not interested in sports, or that's what I perceive.
	And I do think it is one of the problems, is that you have these pencil necks or these nerds or whoever who...
	You know, don't really know how to get along with other people and can be obnoxious as a consequence, right?
	Now, of course, a lot of this is due to the online milieu or nature of a lot of what we call the dissident rights.
	So that's another aspect of it.
	So there are good lessons there, but I think one of the criticisms that they make, which has some validity, of course, is that they call it sports ball, right?
	So there's this criticism, and I'm probably sure you've heard this expression as well, this idea that it's sports ball, right?
	And I think a lot of that criticism is related to the manifestation of sports in the professional world as part of the media cosmology, as it were.
	Non-white athletes, for example, that are celebrated in professional athletics.
	So the criticism is rooted on that, that it's a sort of celebration.
	Of other groups, I think, is part of the criticism.
	The other aspect of the criticism, which I think is legitimate, too, is that there can be a kind of sedentary aspect to watching or vicarious aspect to watching sports, right, as opposed to actually participating in sports.
	And those are legitimate sort of criticisms of sports as a phenomena in the society.
	Now, of course, we don't live in an ideal society.
	The institution of sports, even as a professional institution, has kind of been turned in some negative ways, you might say.
	It's not that sports itself is corrupt, no more than media, for example, by itself is corrupt.
	The communication of humans or expression of humans through whatever medium is not by itself corrupt.
	Humans communicate.
	They make art.
	They make plays.
	Whatever.
	These are all part of a kind of healthy, functioning aspect of humanity.
	There are arts.
	There are sports.
	You get the point.
	But each one of those institutions can become corrupt or start manifesting bad values, as it were, on whatever basis, for whatever reason.
	So I think that that's important to remember, that we're looking at sports in a kind of idealized way.
	We're also looking at sports as something that someone participates in as a youth.
	But I think that also in an ideal society, you would have professional athletes.
	I think that there is a kind of larger community aspect to professional sports that has a lot of positive benefits or aspects to it.
	Cultural dimension in the way that, you know, cinema or the other arts do and can be positive.
	But it's just a matter of balance, I think, on one level.
	And also, you know, I mean, obviously, some people are going to become addicted to sports and becoming addicted to anything is is not, you know, as a especially as a viewer is not a good thing.
	But I think you understand my point.
	I think that what people are reacting to.
	Is a corruption of a aspect of human life that is ultimately positive and necessary.
	So they're reacting to a corruption of it.
	And I mean, they may as well.
	You know, I mean, so I think you understand my point.
	It's not what they're reacting to, I think, are some very real things.
	First off.
	Yeah, sure.
	There's the brutal quality of the jock or something, and, you know, fair enough.
	But I think in the contemporary time, they're reacting to this problem.
	Okay, first off, there's the obvious kind of racial angle to all this, which is the elephant in the room, and I probably don't need to go into it too much, particularly in the United States, but you actually see this all over the world.
	I remember, actually, I was in Europe for the World Cup in 2000, I believe.
	That's when it was, maybe.
	Yeah, it was 2000 when France won.
	And I just remember seeing this non-racially or traditionally French team.
	And that was an interesting experience thinking about that.
	I think that probably got my mind going.
	But in the United States, I mean...
	70% of the football players or basketball players, etc., are African American.
	70%?
	Yeah, yeah.
	Yeah, I think that's probably the right estimate, don't you think?
	At least 50. And basketball, although basketball is changing, that's kind of interesting.
	There's a European influx into the NBA.
	Baseball's different.
	It's always been just a different sport.
	There are actually, I think, fewer African Americans playing baseball now than there were previously.
	But it's long been a kind of big sport in South America and things like that.
	So it has more of a Latin component to it.
	But the racial component is that you have your average Southern SEC football fan.
	Watching these teams that are, in effect, all black.
	And so it's the white fan, black player dynamic.
	And I think there are some unhealthy aspects to that.
	Another criticism of sports is just the corruption.
	And just to kind of, like, let the rubber hit the road is, you know, they're just paying these people.
	Some people who are actual criminals to play sports for you.
	The recruiting process in college football is in many ways worse than what goes on in the NFL.
	And it's actually quite bad involving prostitution of students in some cases.
	I mean, it's just horrible.
	And so I think those are all good criticisms.
	There's this other kind of deeper criticism of just the lack of participation.
	And I think this is a bigger thing that we've experienced.
	But how do you participate in sports most of the time?
	You're not actually playing.
	You're sitting on your couch watching someone play it.
	And you're experiencing it vicariously, but you are experiencing it.
	I mean, watching a...
	NFL game and you see some big run or big hit or whatever, your mind, there is a kind of virtual reality quality to that.
	Your mind will feel it.
	Sometimes when you see a player get hit, you'll wince.
	And certainly there's a thrill when your team does something good that you feel like you're a part of it.
	You've done it.
	You want to jump up and high five and all that kind of stuff.
	So there's something good about that, of course, but there's also something bad, that vicarious kind of abstraction away from the physical.
	I mean, it's very similar to the development of music where there was a dramatic change.
	Concerts always existed, of course, but there was a dramatic change when at some point in history, participating in music meant listening to a record.
	As opposed to playing it yourself, or perhaps playing and even dancing while someone's in the same room playing with you.
	That's how you participated in music.
	And we're getting to this realm of music as Muzak, background noise, it's in your headphones while you're at the grocery store, or the kind of audiophile with his big ear cans on, listening.
	You know, to the precise beats and tones of some recording that he has.
	All that's fine and good.
	I do all of those things, but certainly you have to recognize that something has been lost, that you're participating passively and you're participating vicariously.
	And so I think that's a deeper criticism of sports culture.
	You experience nationalism through sports, but again, it's a...
	Kind of fake nationalism.
	You're cheering on a team of Algerians, you know, wearing the French colors, and you're experiencing the glorious civilization or something.
	You know what I mean?
	Well, so, I mean, I think that some things you've pointed to, I would call kind of corruptions of the institution of sports.
	But I think that...
	And I did point to that sort of vicarious, sedentary aspect of sports viewership, which I think should be limited, of course.
	But on some level, it's also a kind of civic activity where people come together and venerate the best athletes, the people that are most accomplished in their endeavor.
	So in this way, it's similar to theater or cinema.
	Or anything like this.
	And what should occur more often is a veneration of scientists and accomplishments and this sort of thing.
	There should be more of a balance there, of course, right?
	But I think that the civic aspect of sports is also very positive, even though it means that there will be spectators as well as participants, right?
	But, you know, again, it's not, I mean, I think if the ethos of the society is such that people are atomized and the only thing that's interesting to them is sports, then, I mean, there are other deeper problems there that cause, you know, something like sports addiction or, you know, whatever they would call it now.
	One other thing I wanted to talk about that was that concerns sports is, so in Maurice, I mean,
	the athlete exists as preparation for the warrior, or he becomes a kind of, he's the warrior in training, as it were, in ancient Greece.
	And I think that that is, so it becomes a kind of vestigial reference to our warrior nature or warrior character.
	You know, the idea that, I mean, because we've pointed to this, the sort of racial issue with American sports and sports in the West generally.
	You know, I think probably the most ideal scenario would be that groups would be competing.
	As teams or whatever.
	Or nations would be, for example, nations would be competing as teams.
	And ideally, there would be a kind of ethnic, you know, homogeneity or uniformity there among teams.
	So the races would be like fielding teams, I think, would be in a kind of utopian vision of sports.
	And it's one of the reasons that I like, because it approximates this very imperfectly, but it's one of the reasons I like the World Cup.
	In soccer.
	Now, the teams are becoming more diverse, but it used to be the case that Germany, for example, they might have had a couple of token blacks, but they were a relatively white team.
	And they would, in France, for example, has for a long time been a kind of multi-ethnic team, whatever the case might be.
	But generally, if you saw a Russian team or an Italian team or a German team, that they would represent the people of that country.
	And so, in a way, it's a kind of pseudo-war, but it's a kind of good-natured way for nations to interact and to celebrate the members of their own society, and especially the accomplished athletes.
	So I think that that...
	That is, that approximates a kind of more ideal development for sports.
	I mean, because obviously, I mean, I think that people would have interest in seeing, like, Germans compete against Blacks on a different team or whatever, because that is kind of interesting in that that goes to our instinct for competition or, you know, and also to a kind of tribal and racial sort of jingoism or,
	you know, that sense of Yeah, there's a lot of really interesting things that have come up across the board there.
	First of all, I was just looking up what was said about the racial representation.
	So yeah, 68.7% African American in the NFL, which is, I was amazed that it was that high.
	That's absolutely crazy.
	And I guess, To kind of lead into this conversation is the ideal of the institution versus the actualization of the institution in the context of a culture.
	So if we were to look at the institution of sports in its ideal sense, maybe like what Maurice Samuel might be pointing towards, I think of ancient Greece.
	Like how would this show up in the Hellenic world?
	Maybe even the word sports is a bit of an issue altogether because back then it was fundamentally tied to something practical.
	Like they were getting trained.
	Like if you train a rugby team, it's not too different from you working together with a SWAT team squad.
	You know, you're learning communication, teamwork, all these types of things.
	It's quite important to understand this.
	Now, that's still a little bit abstract because you're using guns versus, you know, throwing a ball around.
	But back then, like a sports team, it's fundamentally tied to the phalanx.
	You know, it's the same thing, essentially.
	When you work with it this way.
	So I think it's quite important to link into this.
	But overall, the Greeks...
	Sort of pedestalized sports or experienced sports as a part of religious worship.
	Like it's a part of the cultural experience of being Greek.
	It's part of the cultural experience of celebrating Greekness and celebrating the gods indeed, you know?
	It's a hard thing for us to wrap our heads around.
	And this is not trivial at all.
	The Olympics, for example, there was almost like their great anti-egalitarian representation.
	It was like the pinnacle of their spirit in some sense, you know?
	Everybody stops fighting and then they all go to this place.
	And then they compete to prove who's the best man, who's the best individual.
	Nietzsche would often look to the Greeks and celebrate them for this sort of radical, competitive individualism that they had.
	He really, really liked this about them, that they're all fighting against each other to be the best.
	He loved this energy inside of them.
	He loved this.
	This is the culture that he considers one of the apexes, the thing to be modeled upon.
	And at the center of this was something like the Olympics.
	Now, the Olympics was banned.
	In 1391, when Christianity basically The Olympics showed up again, of course, at the start of the 20th century, end of the 19th century, when the likes of Nietzsche and all them were saying that we're returning to an old spirit and whatnot.
	I've always found that very, very interesting.
	The idealized sense of the institution is important to understand.
	It is a way to represent many of these values.
	And I think even a spectator can definitely benefit from that.
	You go and watch the Olympics.
	I'm not going to compete.
	I'm not going to be able to...
	It sort of shoves something into your face.
	I'm not, like, the democratic ideal is very, very weak in the face of something like this.
	I'm not good enough to be a javelin player.
	And if I was good enough to be a javelin player, I wouldn't be good enough to be a sprinter, you know?
	There's something about human excellence that's shoved in your face, and I think it's very healthy for people to be exposed to this.
	Sports even does do this.
	But, of course, there are those problems with consumerism and the sports ball problem, and then, of course, saturating sports with negative cultural values.
	But I'm not sure I can criticize the institution itself for this.
	Because as we would say, it's just like it's not a priestly institution at all.
	It's not something that controls the values of a people.
	The churches, for example, have all succumbed to the culture that we have.
	This is really, I think, a problem that's much higher up and sports is a victim of it.
	And sports will never be something that dictates the value of a culture.
	And I don't think it should be understood as this way.
	In some sense, sports is the process that...
	It improves people, that sort of idealizes people in some sense.
	Very, very powerful this way.
	There's also a side of it as well.
	You're describing nationalism, which I think is fascinating being Irish.
	Our experience of sport as Irish people is just so hilarious because we will go and we'll be losing 6-0 in soccer, which is huge, but we'll still all be together singing Irish nationalist songs.
	Sports is probably the last outlet for the Irish to experience obnoxious nationalism.
	Right now they're instantiating all those hate speech laws and all this crazy stuff and trying to beat down and make everybody part of the new project of transforming the West and all this.
	But then we'll go, we'll have the World Cup next year and we'll all go and we'll all be Irish again.
	We'll all be dressed in green and stomping our feet and celebrating what we are obnoxiously.
	There's something quite fascinating about the way it pulls you together.
	Watching an army or something like this is very interesting in this way.
	And there's also something in this that tells you about elitism, like even politics constitutes largely a lot of people spectating and then a couple of people acting.
	Sports is a couple of people acting, the professionals acting, and the rest spectating.
	And many facets of life are like this, so I think it reflects it back to us in some sense.
	But of course, it's absolutely correct.
	I think it's very weak if it is not aware of...
	The fact that it's, well, it's very weak because it can't control, they're not priestly.
	You know, this is not the priestly type we're dealing with here.
	The warriors are fundamentally unconscious.
	They're not aware of beliefs.
	They're not aware of values.
	And so they will succumb to whatever is going to pass down to them from the elders, from the high priest.
	And sports has definitely succumbed to that altogether.
	But the virtues it installs in people, I think, is where the rubber hits the road.
	So if you have any thoughts on that, and maybe I'll go into the hemispheres then eventually after that.
	Yeah, no, I mean, maybe it's more the difference between, you know, petty virtues and macro virtues or micro morals and macro morals, right?
	So sports would be responsible for instilling micro morals, good sportsmanship, bravery, these sort of things, right?
	That's very true.
	Yeah, but less related to kind of a bigger direction established by, you know, sort of the brains of society, as it were, the priests, as you were putting it.
	100%, yeah.
	It'd be like Nietzsche's brand politics.
	You know, I don't think the soccer players would be really understanding and comprehending that stuff.
	No crusades, but certainly kind of making people worthy, teaching them the kind of foundational ethics that they could participate in a crusade.
	And it's interesting how...
	You know, things have to be, like, institutions must be separated out.
	Culture happens almost like an octopus in many different directions.
	Arts and theatre is a completely different realm that has significant impacts.
	The political world, another one.
	And they're all, like, different in the way that they manifest, but I guess you could say equally important and very vulnerable if negative ideals get installed inside of them.
	And that's certainly what you're seeing happening right now.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	Maybe this point was correctly emphasized, but sports too, you learn failure, right?
	So you learn to fail and get back up.
	I think that that's one of the most important lessons of sports, right?
	Yeah, big time, big time.
	Well, I guess I can get into the hemispheres then, since we'll call all the way back to what we were talking about there a while ago, and I'll try to get into it.
	Maybe we could talk a little bit about the Greeks.
	As well, because that is a fascinating thing, but I'll go into this first of all.
	So yeah, Richard was bringing up the Julian Jaynes, which is a brilliant book.
	I like people who assert bizarre theses with decent evidence.
	Even if they're a bit wrong, I still find them fascinating.
	I just love entertaining crazy ideas.
	I think Nietzsche is brilliant like this.
	I'm not sure if everything he says is perfect, but at the same time, he...
	It definitely makes you think, and you come out the wiser for it as a consequence.
	Julian Jaynes is very much like this.
	He sits down and he studies recent evidence in the hemispheres, which is absolutely bizarre when you get into it.
	I'll talk to you about some of it.
	An awful lot of this comes from epileptics.
	So, for example, when you have epilepsy, you have this storm of electricity running through your noggin.
	And you have a problem.
	Like you've got this big storm going through your head.
	So what you need to do is stop this storm.
	So what people would do is cut their brains in half.
	That was something they used to do back in the 60s and 70s.
	They'd go in with a knife and they cut the corpus callosum, I think it's called.
	And this would separate the brain into its two hemispheres.
	This would stop the storm reaching a sort of cascade or a tipping point.
	And then the epileptic seizures would stop happening as a consequence.
	So would it be localized to one brain and then one side of the brain, then the person could go on and continue their life.
	Talk about a bizarre thing to do, first of all.
	Like that's just wild in and of itself that people used to do stuff like that.
	But there you go.
	Oh.
	Thank you.
	Function perfectly fine afterwards.
	They'd go into their life and you'd talk to them and they'd be like, yeah, I'm still here.
	And there'd be no brain damage.
	Nothing seemed to go wrong.
	So they're like, all right, well, that's pretty okay.
	Now, of course, they did this to a lot of people and they'd eventually start to get back.
	Some weird side effects, you know?
	So people would get this surgery.
	They'd go out and live their lives.
	But they'd say weird stuff would happen where they would pick up a chocolate bar and their other arm would come over and slap their hand and throw the chocolate bar on the floor.
	And then their other hand would reach down and try to get the chocolate bar and then their other hand would start slapping it.
	And they would explain, it's like, I literally can't control it in some sense.
	It's almost like I'm fighting against myself.
	And loads of instances would happen with this.
	Loads of experiences of people, you know, like putting on a shirt and then one of their hands starts taking the shirt off and then the other hand starts to try to fight to put it back on and they're like, what is going on here?
	And so they began to study these people who had this surgery done on them and they started to find astounding things with it.
	So, for example...
	This was very interesting, obviously, with the hands, but it really got interesting when they started to work with language.
	So they'd sit down people and get them to look at these computer screens and they'd flash two things up onto the computer screen and get them to write down what they saw.
	And so people, for example, would get their two hands and if you flash like an egg and a brush, their right hand would write the egg and the left hand would write the brush.
	And they would all, they would sit and they'd look at this and it's like, that's weird.
	What's going on here?
	Then they would do stuff like where they would flash, they would try to test what exactly was happening.
	So they'd flash two things and then they'd ask the person, what did you see?
	And so they flashed the egg in the brush and they'd ask the person.
	The person would say egg, but then their other hand would write down brush.
	And this started to weird them out a little bit because they're like, wait a second, why is one side of their brain not answering me but telling me the brush?
	And why is the other side of the brain able to declare egg?
	And they started to realize through a variety of experiments like this that your left hemisphere, the language center, where you have your Barocas area, your Wernix area, is the one that's actually conscious.
	This is the one that when me and you, Nark, Richard, everybody here, when we're talking...
	I'm talking to you out of the left side of my brain.
	That's weird, but that's what it seemed to look like.
	And it seems like the other brain...
	Pretty close.
	Although your left brain wires to your right hand.
	So I don't know.
	This is one of those crosses the boundaries, I guess.
	The other brain is there.
	And it's paying attention.
	And it's taking in information.
	And it's conscious in a separate way.
	And it's processing things in its own way.
	And it has its own perspective.
	And you can talk to it and it will answer you.
	But you can only talk to it using writing and symbols and images.
	You can't use declarative words.
	It can't use your mouth.
	But it's completely there.
	But it's essentially outside your consciousness.
	So you could say unconscious, but it's more like unaware.
	It's very close to the idea of what we call the subconscious.
	And they would sit down and do these experiments.
	These are just so crazy.
	They would show people, they would flash stuff up on the screen because your eyes are wired to each side of your brain.
	So your left eye is wired to your right brain, right brain to the right.
	So they'd flash things up on the screen.
	And they would not flash anything to the left eye.
	And they would flash something to the right brain.
	And they would flash this and then they would ask the guy, what did you see?
	And the guy would say nothing because obviously his left brain didn't see anything.
	Then they would ask them, write down So they're like, wait a fucking second now.
	So there's something in here that's able to pay attention that is not part of your conscious identity or ego.
	And this became the foundation of the whole hemisphere thing, which just has so many bizarre connotations when you dive into it.
	I highly recommend Ian McGilchrist for this.
	I think he's better than Julian Jayne, certainly for exposing this theory.
	And he he shows how, for example, the.
	Left hemisphere is declarative.
	He studies like schizophrenics, for example, and how the schizophrenics basically display symptoms of being trapped in the left hemisphere.
	He shows these experiments people did where they would get them to describe themselves.
	And the right hemisphere would have this really realistic down-to-earth self-conception, whereas the left hemisphere would have this either like bizarrely arrogant one or bizarrely demoralized one.
	It was very rarely accurate, which is scary because your conscious mind is...
	Prone to delusion is what we're starting to see.
	This conscious, declarative, rationalizing brain is prone to delusion.
	And then this is the kicker, right?
	Another part of these experiments was trying to force the left brain to confront this reality.
	Think about what happens here.
	So what they would try to do is try to trick the left brain to confront the fact that the right brain is there.
	So they would give...
	An object to your right hand and say what's in your hand and say there's an egg in my hand and then they would Take the egg and put it in the left hand, which is the right hemisphere.
	And it's like, drop the egg and he put it down.
	And then they would say, why did you drop the egg?
	And the conscious mind would start to rationalize because it wasn't in control.
	So it didn't do it.
	So the conscious mind would start to rationalize and it would make up stories.
	It would be like, oh, I didn't like that egg or that egg was too heavy or all this crazy stuff.
	Instead of confronting the fact that there's this other entity watching him, this type of thing.
	So we start to see this.
	We start to realize that our brains are split this way and that we have these two forces going on.
	It just starts to change.
	Chew at you so much about the Freudian theory of the id or the unconscious, Jung's idea of the dream unconscious.
	All of this stuff starts to play into it.
	Even dreams, man.
	When you are recalling dreams when you wake up in the morning, your right hemisphere switches on and almost sends the dream to the left hemisphere, making many people speculate that the right hemisphere is the thing that produces dreams.
	And dreams are your right hemisphere communicating with you.
	All this crazy stuff.
	The point being is that we have this bizarre split.
	What we identify as consciousness seems to be very much tied to, consciousness is maybe not the best word, but front-end awareness is tied to declarative statements, words, we can't use words with the right hemisphere in the same way, abstractions.
	The ability to get lost in delusion.
	The ability to not be in touch with reality.
	All of this stuff seems to be wrapped up with our conscious egos and there's this other side on top of it.
	And there's a good reason why we would do this.
	This is the same reason as you have two hands.
	The same reason as you have two legs.
	The same reason as your laptop has a dual processor.
	Because you're more dynamic in reality when you're split in half.
	The two arms are better than one giant.
	Like imagine walking around with one big arm sticking out of your chest.
	You just wouldn't be that.
	You'd die very quickly.
	So the world obviously understands that a sort of platonic ideal is dynamism is more important than one giant blob of a brain is not as valuable as two separate consciousnesses.
	But this seems to be the way that we were built and whatnot.
	And so an awful lot of fascinating things happen as a consequence of this.
	As we said, that ego can get shocked.
	That rationalizing mind can get shocked when you're playing sports.
	And this also ties into the idea of flow states.
	If you have a flow state, what it seems to happen is that your hemispheres sync together and they work almost like as a perfect team.
	And then when you go back into normal life and you're not using your brain, you seem to default back into simplistic consciousness and your right hemisphere switches on every now and again but turns off is what it is.
	It seems to the way that these things work, which is just bizarre in and of itself.
	So there's a lot of interesting study here.
	Yeah.
	I mean, who is the second fellow you mentioned?
	McPherson?
	Ian McGilchrist.
	You can check him out.
	Ian McGilchrist.
	Yeah, I will definitely check him out.
	There's an interesting component to Jane's, which is that he talks a lot about the origin of language.
	And, you know, injunctions and maybe even at some point naming, that was probably a development where we started to name, you know, a bear or name someone unique, you know, like Mother or something like this.
	But what he was saying as well is that earlier in human history, we would receive...
	Probably injunction-like statements from our parents or from perhaps an elder.
	And the left hemisphere would continually repeat these throughout our lives.
	And they might be as simple as don't go in there or take care of your little sister or something like that.
	They're probably that.
	Simple.
	And they could develop from there these basically kind of repeating voices that you would hear.
	They would develop from there to be a kind of voice of God.
	And so his really bold theory, and I hope I'm representing it properly because it is bold and it's very complicated.
	The origin of God, in a way, were those voices in your head.
	He connects this as well with schizophrenia and people who actually do experience that, experience someone talking to them, someone ordering them around, someone giving them a little devil or an angel on their shoulder, so to speak.
	It's interesting.
	James mentions that because you have The two hemispheres, actually right there with that image of the devil and the angel on your shoulder.
	So you have this godlike figure that is directly talking to you.
	And he suggested that humanity went through a...
	Tremendous revolution during the collapse of the Bronze Age.
	So he also asked these questions.
	I mean, this book is just incredible, but he asked these questions about how was it that you have these Bronze Age societies?
	So well before the ancient world as we know it, if you consider that the time of Plato and Jesus and Caesar and all that kind of stuff, these Bronze Age societies that were actually How
	was it that we could...
	Manage such a workforce to construct something like this.
	And what he was saying is that it was an unconscious society.
	So you had hundreds of people all receiving the same injunction.
	They were all on the same page, all being ordered through a kind of God or higher mind that was actually in their heads.
	He sees the end of the Bronze Age as this breaking down and people crossing paths with different cultures, this kind of economic collapse of the civilization and conquest, and it broke us apart.
	And we seem to develop a new way of using the left hemisphere, which was the interior monologue.
	And it ultimately had the grammar of the I in it.
	And so we go through our whole day.
	And this is my experience.
	I imagine it's yours.
	You're kind of narrating your day to yourself while you're doing it with language.
	And you will contemplate things in your left hemisphere using language ability.
	And that is, in a way, what we...
	That is what we mean when we say conscious.
	We are conscious.
	But of course, what Jane's...
	There's this whole level of reasoning and awareness, if that's the right word, of just psychic life that is not conscious and is non-linguistic.
	I use this example many times when we were talking about Nietzsche at Alex University.
	A baseball player can hit a...
	A fastball thrown at 100 miles per hour, and he can hit an 85-mile-per-hour curveball that has this really unique motion that is created by the spin of the ball and aerodynamics, and a great baseball player can hit that.
	He can't explain to you how he does it because it's not operating on a linguistic level, and yet he just does it.
	He does something that's actually rather miraculous.
	Even something like a Excuse all the sports metaphors.
	Like a pop fly to center field.
	The fielder hears the crack of the bat.
	He sees in the first few milliseconds the flight of the ball.
	And he can lackadaisically adjust to where it is.
	He can just jog over, hold his glove up, and catch it.
	The amount of calculations.
	That he has performed in order to move, you know, 10 feet to the right, sit there and catch the ball is incredible.
	I mean, the amount of processing that takes, you would need to, you know, program a robot and have microprocessors.
	It would be a huge event.
	And yet he just does it.
	And obviously the animal world, they reason, although they are at least 95% of the time.
	Obviously, animals, they have a certain language.
	A dog can learn English, human language, etc.
	But you know what I mean.
	They're engaging in reasoning and calculation and all sorts of things without using the linguistic mind.
	Another experiment that I found fascinating is that you also engage in judgment.
	So there is an experiment that was done where there were Two different objects before a subject.
	And the subject was blindfolded or something like this.
	And the objects had different textures.
	And so they were asked, which object is rougher?
	And so they picked up the one by their first object.
	They picked it up and felt it.
	And they picked up the next one, which was smooth.
	They said, oh, the first one, that's rougher.
	And then they asked, Which object was heavier?
	And they always got it.
	Now, this almost seems simplistic or stupid.
	It's like, of course they got it.
	But you have to look into what that experiment proves.
	You engaged in judgment while your conscious mind, that is your linguistic mind, was engaging in something else.
	So you engaged in judgment.
	Basically, his whole point is that your psychic life is so much bigger than mere language.
	Language is this kind of late development that seems to affect us.
	And I think that's what, to kind of bring it back around, that's kind of what sports is in a way, is getting in touch with your psychic mind that is pre-linguistic.
	Yep.
	I have no idea what a pop fly is, by the way.
	I was wondering what in good lord is that?
	It's a, you know, you hit the ball in the air and you catch a pop fly.
	You sit under it and catch the ball.
	Yes.
	It's when you hit the ball and it has a kind of steep upward trajectory.
	So as opposed to like a line drive would be a ball that...
	You hit in a straight line, essentially, right?
	So pop fly would be a big, you know, looping shot, essentially, that you can camp under and catch.
	Okay, like camping under, I've got enough left to learn about these American sports terms, my lord.
	Get into this because, man, this is such an interesting topic.
	Man, you're going to love Ian McGilchrist.
	You're going to absolutely love him.
	But I'll actually go into Julian Jayne's theory a little bit more because it just adds such amazing context to this.
	So first of all, about Julian's theory, maybe I'll start first of all about what we're actually thinking about here in terms of evolution.
	All animals have their brains split in half.
	Okay, I should say most animals, mammals, for example, would have their brains split in half.
	And there's a very specific reason, you know?
	So if you're, as I said, dynamism is always better than being unitary.
	It's always more powerful to have two things working on a problem.
	Two brains are better than one type idea.
	So splitting the focus is quite valuable.
	Now, you can think of a very practical version of this, that if there's a bird and he sees a lovely puddle and he goes down and he says, I'm going to have a supper, I'm going to have a drink.
	So he flies down and he starts to sup that up.
	His narrow focus left hemisphere, the conscious ego of the bird, will focus on what he's doing.
	Now, what's so interesting is that the right hemisphere basically acts as this vigilant watchman.
	Who's fully conscious, but he's almost like a radar popping out awareness into the background.
	This is even to do with the neurochemicals, right?
	So the left hemisphere is more dominant, more wired for dopamine.
	The right hemisphere is more wired for adrenaline.
	So the right hemisphere goes in the background, doesn't do anything, and it just sort of sends out the radar.
	It's paying attention to the rustling of the leaves, but it doesn't make your left hemisphere aware of this.
	Think about this.
	It's taking in information, but it's hiding it from you while you gorge yourself.
	You go and you go, go, go, go, go.
	The bird sucks it all up.
	He's delighted with himself.
	And the dopamine is filling him.
	He's like, oh my God, the water, yeah.
	And he's getting filled with pleasure.
	The right hemisphere is just pinging, checking out what's going on now.
	He notices the rustle in the tree.
	He notices maybe the wind.
	And then he hears footsteps.
	And that switches on adrenaline because footsteps is obviously some big cat or something like this.
	So the right hemisphere is being calm.
	And then when it hears footsteps, a big dose of adrenaline.
	And all of a sudden, this adrenaline, the right hemisphere, interrupts the left hemisphere, pulls it out of its focus, directs its focus, and sends the brain to focus over on what just happened.
	So the right hemisphere is like a matador.
	It's controlling this dopaminergic bull, this conscious mind.
	Think about what's happening there.
	This unconscious...
	Hidden from awareness brain is controlling the left hemisphere, the conscious brain that you consider yourself.
	There's something in you that is more aware of what's going on than you and decides when you should focus on something.
	And you're just very good at getting wrapped up in things and focusing on specifics, but it's the thing in control of your awareness.
	That's bizarre in and of itself, but this is what it does.
	So it brings the dopamine over to...
	The left hemisphere over to the cat, and then the bird flies off.
	The bird's like, oh, fuck, I better go out of here.
	And then it's filled with excitement and adrenaline and dopamine to get out of there, and then it flies off.
	Now, this is the basic way that it works.
	It's actually quite interesting, because that makes sense.
	That's a very smart way to do things.
	You wouldn't be able to notice the bird if you were too wrapped up and sucking up all the water in the puddle.
	Now, this is where things get very fascinating.
	The more evolved an animal is, the more split the hemispheres are, the more they divide.
	So the simpler animals tend to have more unified brains.
	The more complex an animal, the more they divide.
	Really think about that.
	Now, of course, what are we?
	One of the most complicated animals out there.
	And our brains are the most divided.
	Our brains are the most separated.
	And so Julian's thesis or idea is that we have been evolving this capacity to switch between these hemispheres.
	And we kind of reach the point around about the Bronze Age, he speculates, where that...
	The vision of the hemispheres got so drastic that they actually lost touch with each other in some sense.
	They basically just like cut out.
	And before that, the experience that people were having was very similar to the bird.
	So people were walking around full of dopamine in their little conscious mind.
	And if the right hemisphere...
	Contextualize for whatever reason that they need to go do something.
	It would have this problem.
	The right brain needs to communicate with the left brain.
	So what would it do?
	It would shock the left brain with this big dose of adrenaline, which is what an awful lot of religious experiences are like.
	Do not be afraid, as the angels always say.
	It can't really use language, so it would often give people visions.
	It would often induce dream states inside of them, psychedelic trips with other ones.
	It can actually talk, but the way it talks is very simple.
	It says simple sentences, and it's very rare for this to happen.
	Exactly what schizophrenics experience.
	They don't experience like narration.
	They experience sort of like statements and simple words and they're always scared as well as the other experience of this too.
	And this is how this appears.
	It seems like the right brain jolts in, snaps the left hemisphere out of what it's doing and directs it towards something.
	And of course, Julian's postulating that when people described...
	actually having a higher intelligence lead them towards what they should focus on.
	So in some sense, it was more raw.
	And he looks at like the Iliad and he says that these characters interacting with all these forces, these gods, especially like the early Bible as well.
	You have, you know, Yahweh is showing up and inducing these dream states upon people and ordering them towards a higher goal and stuff.
	This is exactly what happens with the bird when the right hemisphere decides the bird needs to get interrupted from whatever bullshit it's doing.
	The right hemisphere has the power to decide what's going on.
	Emma Gilchrist basically articulates this as like The right hemisphere doesn't act, but it decides what the soldier will do.
	soldier acts, but it has no control over what will, okay, it has much less control than it thinks over what it's going to do.
	Now of course our big problem is that the advantage of this binary is quite extreme.
	The more you can, for whatever reason, it's...
	Expanding on this binary, it's like developing institutions.
	You can become more sophisticated in individual senses, so it makes them better.
	But it also has its own problems because it's like compartmentalization issues.
	This happens inside your head.
	Eventually that gets to a point where we evolve so much that we basically get trapped in the left hemisphere.
	The left hemisphere's ability to suppress the right hemisphere gets so strong that it can actually shut it out altogether.
	And Julian Jaynes is sort of speculating that that happened at some point.
	And that's when we started to arrive to this, what he actually sort of maybe considers, or many people who would follow this line of thinking would consider the incorrect assumption that we have individual egos, that we have rational, unitary individual egos living inside of our heads.
	When what we've been experiencing for a couple of thousands of years is actually just the left hemisphere and we're sort of trapped inside of it.
	It's like Plato's cave type problem, you know?
	And this evolution in our...
	Unconsciousness has thrust us into this issue.
	And this is where we start writing.
	All of this starts to show up around about these times.
	You get an awful lot more self-reflective, introspective writing.
	Ecclesiastes is the famous example.
	I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing that right.
	And it's the severance from the unconscious mind.
	And we've basically been trapped in this to a large extent over the last couple of thousand years.
	And there's an awful lot of pontification about what does one do about this, you know?
	Because obviously our right hemisphere is important, and it's still there, and it's been there the whole time in our recent history, but we've been sort of separated from it and really struggling to interact with it.
	We maybe call it God an awful lot of time, or our conscience, or the angels, or visionary experiences, or as people are now calling it in modernity, which is maybe a little bit more accurate, and the unconscious mind or the subconscious mind or something like this.
	It's weird, like, what do you make of this?
	This is sort of Julian's take on this.
	And then this is where I get into Jung.
	I think this actually contextualizes an awful lot of Jung's work very, very well, where Jung would sort of prescribe that you pay serious attention to your dreams, your intuitions.
	He would prescribe that you pay serious attention to the art that attracts you and stuff like this.
	Because he's basically saying that that's stuff that your right hemisphere is naturally bonding with.
	He would call it your unconscious.
	And it's almost like a way that you can begin to reestablish that connection.
	You know, you can begin to talk to that, listen to what that right hemisphere is saying, because it can't speak in words, but it does speak in symbols.
	It is drawn to symbols.
	In fact, and this is such a fascinating book by Jung, the book Ion.
	Jung dives into Ion and explores this idea that the reason why Christianity was so compelling to people back in the day is that there was something symbolically significant to...
	Everybody's right hemisphere at the time.
	He obviously calls this the collective unconsciousness.
	Everybody was sort of pregnant and ready for this big sort of apex symbolic story.
	Maybe the Jews had reached the fulfillment of their inner drama and they had reached the sort of blossoming of their narrative.
	And Christ was sort of like the finishing touch on the Jewish world story or the Jewish unconscious symbolic story.
	What you see in Christianity is the fulfillment of all of the symbols united in one thing, because this is what the story of Christ is, is he fulfilled all the prophecies.
	And that's what makes him such a sort of perfect figure.
	He's perfectly ironic, but also kind of cancels out many ironies and ends up being the savior, if you want to put it this way.
	And Jung was exploring this in Ion and saying that all the symbology before this was leading up to something like this in the Levant specifically.
	There's this sort of pregnancy waiting for something like this.
	And he argues that that's the unconscious is working something out.
	Our unconscious is literally evolving and you can trace it through the arc of symbols.
	And maybe you could say this is the right hemisphere's language that you can detect in this weird, awkward way.
	And then Jung, further in Ion, says that this has continued to happen.
	And the Christianity, it's not like the symbol evolution has stopped.
	The right hemisphere is still, all of our collective right hemispheres are still figuring things out.
	And so he points to things like alchemy and talks about fascinating things inside alchemy.
	So, for example...
	One big thing about alchemy is that there's this constant assertion of wanting to try to find a stone that is alive, which is basically making matter alive.
	This is some type of irony inside of the alchemical exploration.
	Now, alchemy famously began the project of science, and he goes through many other things to kind of build this up.
	But what do you see happening with artificial intelligence?
	There's this almost will inside many of these people to take a load of stone, which is minerals and metal, which is what these laptops are.
	And put life inside of it.
	They want to bring it to life.
	And all of these people sort of see themselves as creating God and fulfilling some type of archetypal process and concluding the project of science towards where we create God on Earth and then artificial intelligence takes over and sorts everything out for us.
	We give birth to the next level.
	And Jung was sort of pointing that out back in the 60s that he sees that there's some type of...
	Symbolic pregnancy inside of that that's leading up to some type of cadence.
	And you see all that language is drenched around these guys in the AI sphere.
	Hertzwell saying that we will make God, the guy calling Elon Musk, a speciesist because he doesn't believe that artificial intelligence could be the next species and stuff like this.
	And it's very, very bizarre to see this style of thinking.
	It's obviously a weird Jungian way of thinking, but perhaps there's something to it.
	I've always liked that right hemisphere as an explanation.

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