MARK WALSH ｜ Why Modern Men Are Disconnected
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 3 minutes
Words per Minute
201.70306
Summary
In this episode, my guest Mark Walsh challenges the modern habit of living entirely in our heads, cut off from sensation and boundaries, and even responsibility. We talk about embodiment, not as fitness or aesthetics, but using physical training to develop character, and to develop emotional regulation and presence. From stoicism and shadow work to doing hard things on purpose, this episode is about reclaiming awareness, expanding your range and capacity, and building the discipline required to choose better behavior. We also confront the cult of modernity, hyper-individualism, the happiness culture, pleasure seeking that often or almost exclusively produces pain, the loss of religion, community, and moral formation. Mark makes the case that happiness is secondary to meaning and commitment, and that true freedom is forged through discipline, not the absence of limits.
Transcript
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Today's conversation is a homecoming, so to speak.
00:00:03.720
It's back to the body, back to character, and back what it means to be a man.
00:00:09.400
My guest today, Mark Walsh, challenges the modern habit of living entirely in our heads,
00:00:15.280
cut off from sensation and boundaries and even responsibility.
00:00:19.600
We talk about embodiment, not as fitness or aesthetics, but using physical training to
00:00:25.320
develop character, to develop emotional regulation and presence.
00:00:30.180
From stoicism and shadow work to doing hard things on purpose, this episode is about
00:00:35.880
reclaiming awareness, expanding your range and capacity, and building the discipline required
00:00:43.600
We also confront the cult of modernity, hyper-individualism, the happiness culture, pleasure-seeking that
00:00:51.360
often or almost exclusively produces pain, the loss of religion, community, moral formation,
00:00:57.800
and Mark makes the case that happiness is secondary to meaning and commitment, and that
00:01:04.080
true freedom is forged through discipline, not the absence of limits.
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You live life to the fullest, embrace your fears, and boldly chart your own path.
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When life knocks you down, you get back up one more time, every time.
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You are not easily deterred or defeated, rugged, resilient, strong.
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At the end of the day, and after all is said and done, you can call yourself a man.
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We're going to jump right into this one here pretty quickly.
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Very, very excited for the conversation that I had with Mark on just about everything that
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I think we're going to have to do a round two because this one was that good, and I think
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He's also a leading voice in the idea and practice of embodiment, and he challenges just
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purely intellectual approaches to psychology and personal development, but he draws from
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martial arts and yoga and leadership training and psychotherapy.
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He focuses on awareness, breath, posture, physical practice as an idea to shape character, emotional
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regulation, but his work emphasizes that real change isn't something you can just think your
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It's something you have to live and train into.
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He's also the author of How to Become Human, A Guide for Men, and host of The Pharaoh Philosophy,
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where he explores meaning and boundaries and the cultural cost of modern disconnection.
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Again, he blends stoicism and shadow work and discipline practice, and he makes the case
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for strength and resiliency and responsibility and coming home to the body in what he would
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I really enjoyed the podcast that you and I did together for your show.
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You know, part of what I really enjoyed about the conversation we had is just the level of
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thoughtfulness that goes into the work that you do, specifically this idea and concept
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of embodiment, which is where I really want to lead off today because I think there's
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a lot of men who are struggling with their identity, struggling with who they are, and
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I believe that that leads, that incongruency leads to a lot of frustration at a minimum in
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I mean, in many ways, this goes back a lot further than just us as individuals.
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You know, this is, I love Western culture, but this is one of the downsides of the West.
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Like I was at school, we read a lot of books, but no one told me about relationships, mental
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Yeah, here I am, you know, alcoholic, drug addicted at 17.
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And for me, my beginning for this was me as martial arts.
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You know, I went to university to study psychology, but I thought, you know, I don't think I'm
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going to find the answers I'm looking for in the library.
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So I thought, you know, I'll study martial arts.
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I was doing some slightly illegal things at the time.
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And I thought this might be useful, practical skills to have.
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I saw as I saw the martial arts about, wow, this is beautiful.
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And I realized that it was character development, which the ancient Greeks would have understood
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the gymnasia to be character development, not just body development.
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And of course, the samurai understand that, you know, it's in several cultures.
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Even the Victorian British would understand, you know, modern sports were essentially character
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And it opened up, I realized we're, we don't just have bodies like bodies have us.
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It's not that we have a body like we have a pen or a car.
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And that's the area of embodiment, which I've really given my life to, is the, we call
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The body is part of who we are rather than just like this hunk of meat that we abuse
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Well, and I think when we think of the body, we generally think of the, the factors and
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You know, we don't think about our mind being part of our body or our nervous system being
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But I am interested in this idea though, because, you know, you see a lot of men who are physically
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They've got great physiques, they spend a lot of time in martial arts or the gym or
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They're running marathons and they're good physical specimens.
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You know, I go to the gym, eat right, that kind of thing.
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There's nothing wrong with that, but you're really missing the bigger picture there.
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Like if we look at the martial arts, yes, they're about physical skills.
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It's good to defend oneself and there's basic masculine kind of potency is a good thing.
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But they're also a way to train oneself, to develop one's character.
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We, I think in modern world, we don't really talk about virtue very much, but this is a
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Like I run a group for young guys and they do cold showers, right?
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It's one of the practices they have to do was as part of the course.
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And yes, there's a physiological benefit to that.
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You know, people have been doing that for a long time, but there's also a skill we're
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So as you hit the cold water, it's like, you know, you have that emotional physiological
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response because those two things are linked deeply into over the emotional and the physical.
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If I'm teaching business people or coaches or soldiers, you know, the package that comes
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in is going to look very different, but there are a set of skills one can learn through the
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body that are a little bit more than just the body as a brain taxi.
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You know, the body is an object of beauty, the objectified body.
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And in many ways, our culture, modernity, I say our culture, I mean, all of Western culture
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since the 1600s, is really a culture of objectification.
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So we see a sort of dead world, a disenchanted world.
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So we act psychopathically, you know, treating people as means to ends rather than ends in
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And of course, you know, this is also the secular world.
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The world where there's no God in that this, we could say, material modernity
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I think it's actually a cult is the best way to describe it.
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And we're all in this kind of materialistic cult of objectification.
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And my beginning way out of that was to discover like, wow, the body is more.
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If you imagine the Odyssey, they go and they fight the Trojan War.
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And there's certainly a poetic definition of embodiment is coming home to the body.
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And I think it's the same when we come home to spirit, when we come home to community,
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So on the one hand, we can say, yeah, embodiment is a set of skills.
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It'll make you a better leader, make you a better coach, make you a better parent.
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Like no one respects a leader who's a head on a stick, right?
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There's a real depth here that's really began to open up with me with the embodiment piece.
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You said it's this idea of objectification really started to take root in the 1600s.
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I imagine that men, for example, have always objectified women.
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And I imagine that there's always been people who are looked at as fit.
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And those people are probably going to get more than those who are not.
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So I'm not sure what happened during that time.
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I mean, the growth of modernity is a long historical story.
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And there's different parts to it, different parts.
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Secularization is kind of mixed in with it as well.
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The idea that meaning is not inherent to the world.
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So, you know, in business, they'll talk about human resources.
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I've got an asset, someone will say, instead of, that's not relational, right?
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I mean, she is an asset in the sense that she cooks great.
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But that isn't the basic, deepest level of humanity.
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I mean, anyone who's a Christian, certainly, you know, the idea is it's the relational God, right?
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And certainly, the body as an aspect of the divine is about an aspect of who we are.
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Now, on some level, occasionally, it's okay to treat yourself or other people as an object, right?
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Sometimes we need to – I'm not a fan of you have to feel all the feels all the time.
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You have to always be crying and expressing yourself.
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I think some sort of more Californian or Canadian-style men's work can be a bit like that.
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You know, we're constantly doing therapy out loud.
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It's like, you know, sometimes you just got to get on with it.
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I've spent a lot of time in Russia and Ukraine, and those cultures, they know how to be stoic.
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But if we're denying our basic humanity, that will lead to burnout individually if we treat ourselves as an object the whole time.
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It's this machine, as sometimes it's been called, the machine paradigm.
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Equally, if we treat other people like that, I mean, that's a user paradigm.
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That's a psychopathic paradigm to treat other people as objects rather than relating to them, building connection, community.
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I mean, another way of looking at this is in terms of connection, right?
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So disconnection from the body, disconnection from other people, disconnection from, we could say, ecology or the planet, and disconnection from God or spirituality, if you prefer.
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And those are, they define what the Greeks called eudynamia, like human flourishing.
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Or if we look at it through a sort of nervous system lens, we could say we're self-regulated, co-regulated, eco-regulated, and theo-regulated.
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It doesn't sound like you made them up on the spot.
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If you want to sound clever, just ask your Greek colleague what's a posh way I say.
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I started it and supervised it in the war there.
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And we basically had to develop a model of sanity that was sufficient.
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It's not just, you know, if you're in a war zone, it's not just decent mindfulness tips.
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You know, mindfulness is great, but it's a bit more than that.
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I mean, equally in my own family, kind of, there's so much mental illness in my family.
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And over my life, I've managed not to kill myself, to, you know, get sober.
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Multiple members of my family have killed themselves or had schizophrenia.
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Like, I'm, you know, more or less functional most days, I think my girlfriend would agree.
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So it's, you know, just because I've basically had to sort of enhance the model of what it is to be human
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And the really interesting thing is in my life, I think the world's caught up with me.
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So I don't think I grew up, you know, I grew up in the 80s, 90s in the UK.
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But what I've seen is a pattern of the sort of cult of modernity is breaking down.
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And I don't know what it's like, Brian, there for you, but everyone's nuts now.
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I mean, levels of mental ill health, drug addiction, alcoholism, suicide, these levels are through the roof.
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Like, I'm living in Croatia, which is relatively wholesome, a Catholic country, nice nature.
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People have a healthy sense of nationhood here compared to Western Europe.
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Lower levels of migration, which is significant.
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But even here, you still see the rot, particularly in the big cities.
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Are you in the countryside, right, or in the city?
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Yeah, and it's fairly rural, and it's fairly conservative by nature.
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So I think those two facts alone, and it's a very religious area and community as well.
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So those factors alone tend to ward that off a little better than larger areas, metropolitan areas, blue cities and states, that sort of thing.
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Like this question of my basic questions my whole career have been how to get in your body and how to stay sane.
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And how to get in your body is a good anchor for staying sane, right?
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Well, let's talk about getting into your body and what that actually means.
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Because, like, on a practical level, I could go to the gym or I could go to martial arts, but that's not really the depth of what you're talking about.
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So how does one come home to their body, like you're talking about, to use your verbiage?
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We do training courses over six months, and we've sort of turned it into a fine art over the last 20 years.
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So it might be any body awareness practice is good.
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So if you love jiu-jitsu, if you love kickboxing, if you love, I don't know, hippie conscious dance or yoga, great.
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Like anything where you're, like, getting in your body, developing a relationship with your body rather than just pushing and abusing your body.
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Now, that might depend on the yoga school because some yoga is purely performative, physical.
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They're just, you know, interested in winning or whatever.
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It's not just – they've lost maybe that more Asian awareness-based sense of things.
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I do have a question actually on that before – I know I want you to go further.
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But on that, have you found that it's useful to be in – I don't even know quite how to word this – more dynamic physical aspects?
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You know, for example, I would consider jiu-jitsu a more dynamic practice than I would lifting weights.
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Whereas if I'm training with another person who is also into jiu-jitsu, I've got to think about it.
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I've got to read subtle cues that may not be readily visible.
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Yeah, so different arts build different muscles.
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So the way to look at it is that not any of them – you know, most of them have some strength, whether it's, I don't know, acro yoga, concept intro dials, jiu-jitsu, they all have strengths.
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So, for example, solitary arts are going to build awareness much better than social arts, but they're not going to build social relational awareness, right?
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Things that are difficult build the skill of dealing with regulating intensity.
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So it could be breath holds, cold showers, martial arts, more intense yoga.
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So that's a valuable skill set for men, for everyone to deal with intensity.
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So not enough intensity with the weights or whatever, you don't get to build that skill.
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Too much intensity, you're just going to be overwhelmed.
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You're going to be just surviving, maybe even traumatized.
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So that is also an issue here of sort of dosage or, you know, it's the same as if you take someone to the gym.
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You don't want the weight to be too heavy or too light.
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So, you know, what we do is we send people out of their comfort zone.
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So if someone comes to me and says, hey, I do, you know, tough martial arts, rough kickboxing, Thai boxing, I'm like, brilliant.
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And actually, you're going to learn the follower role, right?
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And so that would be like, whoa, or improv comedy.
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There's, you know, one way of thinking about embodiment is a collection of all these great fields.
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So my girlfriend does improv comedy, for example.
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She's done a lot of work in conflict zones and NGO sector.
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So it's also getting in your body, but it's also what are you embodying?
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Yeah, so she can do serious and organized all day, but being a bit lighter.
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You know, for me, it might be, you know, I don't know, more sensitive listening practice or being a voice to a lot of structured martial arts and yoga because I'm chaotic.
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You know, I'm, you know, recovering alcoholic, alcoholic dad, Irish family, just total chaos.
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And what was great for me as I hit my teen years was getting that structure and discipline.
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And then after a while, I almost got like two structure and discipline.
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So I kind of started doing hippie dancing and, you know, going crazy.
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It's something called Five Rhythms and all the hippies, you know, in Brighton, which is kind of like Boulder or San Francisco.
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And it was more the expressive side rather than the contained side.
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So we have all these different embodied skill sets.
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I have models of embodied intelligence in my books.
00:19:01.840
And if I'm working with a coach, we'll look at, okay, where are you strong?
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I mean, I think that's a great point because you, I would say that I, I do hard things and I would say that a lot of the guys who are in our orbit would say, I do hard things.
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And it's like, okay, objectively, those are hard, I would say.
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But subjectively, they're not that hard anymore.
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Salsa dancing, like you said, or improv might actually be a hard thing.
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Jujitsu is not hard for you or for some people.
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And the problem is we generally deepen our own neurosis, right?
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So an aggressive guy is going to do an aggressive martial art.
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I was pretty good and had my black belt and I was pretty swish, you know.
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And then I went to jujitsu and I was just getting choked out.
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This is another side of my being, this competitive side.
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And then I went to Tango and there was like, you know, fabulous Argentinian women with great shoes and perfume.
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You know, this is much scarier than dealing with some black belt, you know,
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And it's like, oh, my God, I have to kind of keep boundaries and, you know, be brave.
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But you can do, you know, I believe in doing something for a while.
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And if you're new to embodiment, I just say fall in love with anything.
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But then after a while, like someone, you know, mature practitioner like yourself has been doing some stuff for a while.
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You might go, okay, is this still challenging me?
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And you may need to change how you do it or you may need to add a supplementary practice, you know,
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So, and this is, you know, this has been my life for years is really looking at these different practices
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and how they build who we are as people rather than, you know, the practical skills are great too.
00:21:03.000
You know, a man should be well danced as well as well read.
00:21:05.880
But there's something else at work here, which is the character formation.
00:21:10.640
Oh, I also think it's in my experience and, you know, some of the things that I've done
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that are outside of my comfort zone just make me a more interesting person.
00:21:25.660
I'm willing to translate hobbies, new hobbies into taking risks in my career, for example,
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or being able to strike up a conversation more easily because I'm just a more interesting person
00:21:46.540
So the basic equation we run is awareness, range, and choice.
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So you need awareness of your current embodiment, which most people don't have.
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I've worked with managers who have no idea they're super aggressive or super passive.
00:22:00.380
And then we need to build range so we can have some choice, some freedom.
00:22:05.320
I mean, you know, freedom is a key value of mine.
00:22:08.040
And if all I've got is a hammer, not only does everything look like a nail,
00:22:14.340
So this idea of actually being sort of ontologically free, free in our being,
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having some choice around how we are, how we live.
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And, of course, we still have personalities, cultures.
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But I don't want to become a character joy, you know, like a New Yorker cartoon of myself
00:22:34.300
And I think particularly in the context we're in, I mean, the cult of modernity is really
00:22:39.780
not leaning us in the direction of embodiment and sanity.
00:22:43.320
So we are, to use Buddhist phrase, swimming against the stream somewhere.
00:22:47.500
When you say cult of modernity, what aspects of the cult or modern times are creating some
00:22:57.360
of these rot, this rot, that's a term you used earlier, and creating these problems that
00:23:01.680
we do see, drug abuse, violence, mental illness, et cetera, et cetera?
00:23:07.540
Yeah, I mean, we're essentially in a near hell-like condition psychospiritually.
00:23:11.740
So modernity has been very successful physically, like we're using wonderful technology right
00:23:17.680
now, you know, I'm not hungry, I'm guessing you've been well fed, we're materially very
00:23:21.440
well off, but we're psychospiritually maybe the most insane culture in human history.
00:23:28.140
Over 50% of young liberal American women are now on medication.
00:23:32.960
And some of that is a diagnostic issue, overdiagnostics, but it's also like, you know, if you've got
00:23:36.800
suicide rates and sort of hard measures like that, people aren't just pretending.
00:23:39.800
So we live in a culture which has denied those four connections, it denies the body, it says
00:23:46.660
you are a mind, like you can be, in this culture, people say you could be a man in a woman's
00:23:50.760
Well, that's a very Cartesian body-mind split, you're a little ghost in a machine, it doesn't
00:23:57.920
Actually, philosophers should have said much more against this trans work.
00:24:01.680
So it denies the body, it denies the humanity of the body while celebrating the objective body.
00:24:07.880
All right, so it's missing the personhood of the body.
00:24:12.080
It also denies the humanity or the body of others as well, because if your body is whatever
00:24:17.420
you think it is or separate, then that means other people's are as well.
00:24:23.480
Well, one term I've heard often is, you know, people just using each other as masturbatory
00:24:30.020
tools, you know, instead of actually treating that person like a human being who has feelings
00:24:39.600
So this is the resubjectification and empathy, just on a mechanical level, empathy works through
00:24:45.960
So people who are traumatized may have a numbing of the body and not always, but sometimes that
00:24:51.500
can lead to a lack of empathy, which is why abuse can circle around.
00:24:54.580
But certainly the second connection there is just ahead of me actually was the body is
00:24:59.840
equally after that is other people, empathy, but also community.
00:25:03.920
And you'll see this particularly in Europe, there's a real demonization of tribe or extended
00:25:12.800
You know, we can talk about the three hells, mental state, moral state and denation state,
00:25:17.000
you know, the nation state being destroyed by this sense of that we're, we don't have family
00:25:22.060
or tribe. And that doesn't have to be unhealthy. You know, the Croatian church I went to this
00:25:26.600
morning has a Croatian flag and they're all very Croatian, but they're friendly to outsiders
00:25:32.160
They're not ashamed of who they are, but they're, you know, we have my girlfriend's Italian,
00:25:38.280
Yeah. It's not a, it's not a false dichotomy that if you're Croatian or if that you're in
00:25:42.380
the U S then, you know, we don't like anybody else. We could be proud and also hold space
00:25:47.680
for other religions and cultures and ideas, as long as they don't conflict with ours.
00:25:54.420
Yeah. And I think we're being proud of culture is a really important thing. And I had a guest
00:25:59.980
on my podcast called Benedict Beckhold. He wrote a book about weakophobia, which is the
00:26:04.140
opposite of xenophobia. Um, a term from Roger Scruton, late British philosopher, conservative
00:26:09.520
philosopher. And this is the idea of really self-hatred. And you tend to see this, uh, self-hatred
00:26:15.220
in periods of decadence where you also get the gender confusion and you get various boundary
00:26:20.680
issues essentially. And you also get it, there's various aspects going on simultaneously. So
00:26:25.420
there's also the feminization of culture, which is where sort of boundaries are made
00:26:29.040
bad in boundary setting is one of those masculine features. Uh, and this comes from various things.
00:26:34.360
It's a, it's a sort of distorted version of Christianity, which is the Christianity always
00:26:41.180
balance the love of tribe with the love of the outsider, the acceptance of difference,
00:26:45.800
you know, uh, personally, I think I draw the line at tax collectors, but, uh, certainly,
00:26:50.220
you know, the Christian, the Christian message is, you know, to be accepting and not to throw
00:26:54.140
the first stone. Uh, but that was in the context of a sort of hyper-national sort of Jewish context
00:27:00.140
in that day. So it was bringing balance to the sort of natural in-group bias that we have.
00:27:06.460
Now what's happened is actually an out-group bias, uh, combined with a sort of hyper-feminization,
00:27:11.880
which is essentially toxic to all boundaries. And this is culturally, this is postmodernism,
00:27:17.600
uh, in terms of historical cycles, it's always decadence in terms of masculine feminine,
00:27:22.600
it's the movement towards the feminine. And this is, I know this is quite convoluted and quite
00:27:27.040
philosophical, but it's very helpful if people understand the post-World War II consensus,
00:27:32.260
which is now breaking down. So essentially we defined evil as Nazi, as opposed to Soviet.
00:27:38.860
So we defined it as the hyper-masculine, as opposed to the hyper-feminine, um, the over-boundaried,
00:27:43.720
as opposed to the over-communal. Um, people can look up Jonathan Peugeot on this,
00:27:48.320
he's an excellent Canadian Orthodox thinker. Uh, but essentially we sort of, we defined the
00:27:53.300
masculine as bad. And then we had a slip of lowering the bar of everything's, you know,
00:27:57.980
the British government are crazy for this now. Everything's far right. Going to the gym is far right.
00:28:01.540
Families are far right. Religious people are far right. It's like, look, not everyone.
00:28:05.020
Talking about how you look is far right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Putting on a jacket, whatever.
00:28:08.580
It's like everyone's Hitler, right? Like this is the sort of slip. Uh, we could see this as a sort
00:28:13.580
of hyper-Christianity, like a distortion of Christianity. We can see it as the post-World War II.
00:28:20.880
Do you think that part of it is, um, that, uh, there's this, we live in relatively easy times.
00:28:29.200
I know we're talking about the mold decay of society, but relatively, you know, you talked
00:28:33.840
about earlier, the fact that we all have food and a roof overhead and this technology, and even the
00:28:38.320
worst of us tend to have it better than a large percentage of the humans that are walking this
00:28:43.740
earth. Do you think that part of the demonization of men is due to the fact that we have it so easy?
00:28:49.320
So there's no, there's no enemy. There's no, there's nothing for men to do, so to speak.
00:28:56.480
Man, I know you're enjoying this one. I'm going to step away from the conversation briefly and get
00:29:00.680
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00:29:20.200
where you actually do real work with other men. And over the course of those several days in the
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forge, you'll be challenged physically and mentally and emotionally alongside these guys who
00:29:30.340
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He's been on the podcast several times and he focuses on resilience and responsibility and has this
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this conversation. For now, we'll get back to it with Mark.
00:30:41.740
Yeah, that's part of it. I mean, there's a few reasons. So the sort of historical cycle,
00:30:45.180
everybody knows the meme of, you know, good times create soft men, you know, this kind of
00:30:49.480
cyclical. So there's something in there. I don't want to overstate it. I think the other thing to
00:30:53.960
understand is that the state has grown throughout time, you know, like the colonies there, you know,
00:31:00.340
revolted against the crown. Was it a 3% tax? And it's like, now I lose half my income in tax.
00:31:06.240
50% of my income has got to put government in tax, you know. So it's, the state has just
00:31:11.140
grown, the state is in direct competition with men for protection and provision. So I think that's
00:31:16.260
another part of it. And it's certainly, you know, for example, if I'm, there's the Ukrainian
00:31:21.280
psychologist who I work with, right? They love their men. They, they, they say our men are brave
00:31:27.460
and strong and they protect us and we love them. And I, you know, that compares to the average
00:31:32.300
British or, you know, New York American liberal who would just think it's totally normal and
00:31:36.980
just shit on men. I saw a post today. It was so awful about men just on Instagram, came
00:31:43.580
up as a psychologist. My field sadly is completely feminized as a field. And what she was saying
00:31:51.200
about men, you could not say about any other group. In fact, it would be illegal in the UK
00:31:55.720
to say it about any other group. Certainly, you know, white men in particular, but men
00:31:59.620
more generally. And I thought, God, isn't it sad that there's this divide, this, because
00:32:04.960
most women are great. Most women like their dads and their brothers. I get on work with
00:32:08.540
my niece and my mom. This is normal, right? This is normal. I'm not oppressing my sister.
00:32:13.520
I was giving her some advice yesterday. She's having a difficult work thing. It's just normal,
00:32:17.360
right? To love, to have that love between men and women. And whether it's as an uncle or as a
00:32:22.100
boyfriend, all his son, all these forms. And the driving a line between men and women,
00:32:27.840
I think we should start saying it's demonic. I mean, it's utterly satanic to divide a line
00:32:33.480
between the basic team of humanity. And who benefits from that? Well, the tax man benefits
00:32:40.500
because women being in the workforce is a huge thing, like doubling the tax, right?
00:32:46.040
The same with mass migration. Like who benefits? Well, wages go down. So the man who runs the
00:32:53.200
factory and wants cheap labor benefits, house prices go up because there's more people. So
00:32:56.820
the landlord benefits. You know, I don't blame the migrant who wants a better life. My grandparents
00:33:03.780
were Irish migrants who fought in World War II in order to come to the UK, which was a much richer
00:33:08.340
country then. Not anymore, but it was. And I don't blame the migrant who wants a better life,
00:33:13.140
but I do blame the politician who does it for profit, or because they just want a population
00:33:19.280
that's confused and doesn't have that family coherence, or the liberal psychologist who just
00:33:25.240
doesn't have any boundaries. I mean, this is why all the arguments we see, you know, Trump's wall was
00:33:30.560
symbolic, as well as real, because the idea of masculine boundaries has become demonized in the
00:33:37.080
current culture. And a world without boundaries looks like heaven, but is hell. Do what you want
00:33:43.680
is a curse. You may you get exactly what you want is demonic. It's a curse. And I've had neuroscientists
00:33:52.320
on the podcast say the same thing. And Anna Lemke on who wrote Dopamine Nation. And she said,
00:33:56.600
if you seek pleasure, you will end up in pain, you'll end up in hell. And this is the unboundaried
00:34:03.180
modern world, which is essentially the in terms of that yin yang masculine feminine balance. It lacks
00:34:10.220
boundaries around sexuality around behavior around technology around substances, and the sort of
00:34:17.280
consumer culture of just do what you want. Money is the only God, money and fame are the gods of the
00:34:22.920
West, really, particularly in the States, I find. And if you follow those gods, those idols, you will
00:34:28.400
end up in hell psychologically says, I've come through this, not really through a religious lens,
00:34:32.760
but I've come through this just from a well being lens, just going, how do you stay sane?
00:34:40.720
Completely not. I mean, human flourishing requires spirituality. Atheist cultures have never survived
00:34:46.600
more than 100 years. And you know, a lot of my friends say,
00:34:49.940
I think I saw a video that you had posted about how much I can't remember if you use the term
00:34:56.460
religion or spirituality. But I think you did say religion and how it is. The title was something
00:35:01.800
like, it's more important than we than than we thought or than we than we thought we knew or
00:35:09.540
Yeah, I mean, a lot of my friends say, hey, I'm spiritual, but not religious, man. But it's like,
00:35:13.220
no, no, you need to be both. You need the experience of connectivity with profundity with
00:35:18.360
meaning with a divine that that we need that like we need bread.
00:35:21.980
Well, you need a code too, right? Like that's the thing that always confuses me, right?
00:35:27.980
It's interesting when people will structure, you need a tradition that that's not just a church.
00:35:34.880
Yeah, it is always interesting because you'll, you'll, you'll hear guys talk about sports,
00:35:39.720
for example, like I really like football. And it's like, okay, well, if you were on a football team,
00:35:43.560
you'd be expected to show up to practice to be able to commune with, to be able to develop and
00:35:49.280
build skills, to be able to learn about your teammates, to be able to operate within a
00:35:52.900
structure, to go through the playbook and be on the same page come game day. I mean, you would
00:35:57.300
and every man understands that principle. But when it comes to religion, it starts to slip a little
00:36:04.160
bit. And we forget that there, the structure is crucial for any functioning team, whether it's a
00:36:13.380
Massive. I mean, I, you know, it's Sunday to stay and I, this morning I was like, I don't really fancy
00:36:17.520
going to mass. And I was like, it doesn't matter what I feel like. That's not the important thing
00:36:20.920
here. There's a commitment. And even if it's not my favorite mass, cause it's in Croatian and,
00:36:25.200
you know, I kind of don't understand most of it. You know, I prefer the one in Lubiana in English,
00:36:29.140
but it's, you know, I know the priests there, but it doesn't matter. Cause this isn't consumer
00:36:32.920
culture. This isn't, there's a deep commitment here. Uh, and there's structure and there's
00:36:37.880
accountability and there's traditions. It's not just, I'm the boss of me. The hyper individualism of
00:36:43.280
modernity is hyper isolated. I mean, I, sometimes I say we ended up dead, deracinated, so cut off
00:36:49.600
my roots, but it just leads to us being exhausted, just exhausted, anxious, and sparing this
00:36:54.640
deracination. And part of that is the secularization. And we've been running on the fumes of Christianity
00:37:01.640
for a few hundred years, really since the reformation. And everyone's a Christian in some
00:37:07.320
sense in the West, like if you believe in human rights, women's rights, these kinds of things.
00:37:10.900
Um, Tom Holland breaks this down, British historian, you could look at his book on this,
00:37:16.580
but that starts to run out. And, you know, Nietzsche identified this. He said, you know,
00:37:21.940
if God is dead, what the hell do we do? Where do we get our relationships from? Where do we get,
00:37:26.640
how do we decide what to do? What's the big center of your marriage? What's the center of your community?
00:37:30.960
Which is literally a church in every British village. That's the center of every community
00:37:34.560
traditionally. And yeah, you know, I look at the state. Now it's the courthouse.
00:37:38.040
Yeah. Well, now it's the government, some government building. Yeah. That's true too.
00:37:44.740
I think 19th century was the government buildings. They were the tallest buildings. Now it's the
00:37:48.560
mall or the bank. You know, look at the center of London, the tallest buildings are banks. I was in
00:37:53.380
a mall the other day because there's something I just couldn't get locally. I had to go to this
00:37:56.260
mall and it was like being in a temple, this weird idolatry kind of consumer temple. I just fell
00:38:02.960
awful after I'd left there because I'm just not used to it anymore. I live in the, you know,
00:38:06.660
I live on the Croatian coast by the sea, but even my lifestyle, you know, it's kind of
00:38:10.900
ridiculous. I'm living the digital douchebag lifestyle of, you know, working online abroad
00:38:15.040
and I'm really, you know, I'm actually, unfortunately, because of Brexit, my partner's
00:38:19.680
Italian. We can't go live in the UK just yet. We have to get married first. And it's, um,
00:38:24.260
it's tricky because these aren't my people, even though they're perfectly nice people
00:38:28.720
and it's perfectly beautiful and it's cheap here, but cheaper, but it's, um, I'm not with my
00:38:34.520
tribe and I want to be around my elderly mother and shoot the shit with my best friend. And
00:38:39.100
I think the sort of the dream of, uh, the world is run by, the world is run by nowheres rather
00:38:46.780
than subwares. You know, people are either nowheres or somewheres and the nowheres of the BBC and
00:38:51.360
channel four and the Westminster politicians who they don't have that sense of community that
00:38:56.920
you'd find in Salt Lake city that you'll find in a village in, in the Cotswolds in England.
00:39:01.900
They don't have that. Um, because of that, they're kind of crazy, but they also don't
00:39:06.440
understand the roots of place. You know, they don't understand the English people have lived
00:39:12.180
there for a thousand years. Right. They don't get that. So that is crazy making in terms of,
00:39:19.740
uh, we are always situated. We're not just lone individual consumers. That's going to send
00:39:25.360
everyone nuts. We are situated in place and community in our own bodies and in faith. Those,
00:39:30.160
uh, we could say body, biome, belief, and belonging for bees.
00:39:37.240
It's interesting too, because, you know, uh, America is known for and founded on this idea,
00:39:42.840
this concept of rugged individualism. And I think that there's a lot of merit to that,
00:39:48.680
you know, to tug, tug, tug up your, your life by, by your bootstraps and, and, you know,
00:39:53.680
find a way or make a way. Nobody's coming to rescue you. You got to be gritty, tough, resilient,
00:39:57.980
hardened, hardened, and all of that is wonderful, but taken to the extreme, it creates this isolation.
00:40:03.080
And what I think we see now is what, what I've heard of called the happiness culture. And you
00:40:08.400
already alluded to this where everybody's just pursuing individual happiness. And so I can do
00:40:14.060
anything I want to get happy as if that's the end result. And I can hurt people in the process.
00:40:20.680
I can distort reality. I can take advantage of and manipulate truth and morality as long as I'm
00:40:28.020
happy. I just want to be happy. That's one of the central features of the cult of modernity,
00:40:33.320
as well as saying the only stuff exists and then immediately contradicts itself by saying the purpose
00:40:38.220
of life is your individual happiness. Now, happiness is to me far secondary to meaning and to God.
00:40:45.080
For me, if you pursue happiness, you won't get it. That's the irony. Whereas if you're a service,
00:40:49.800
if you're in relationship, you know, my thinking on a podcast is how can I be of service to people
00:40:54.620
listening? I'm teaching some young guys today, how can I be of service to them? Who am I in
00:40:58.140
relationship with this? This will make you happy as a byproduct. But certainly the pursuit of
00:41:03.440
happiness, which is kind of written in. I mean, listen, I love the States, right? If it wasn't for my
00:41:08.600
America, some American teachers, if it wasn't for them, I wouldn't have had that American pursue your dreams,
00:41:14.460
you know, you go, you do what you want to do. You want to put babies on spikes, you put babies on spikes.
00:41:19.280
You know, there's a crazy Eddie Izzard, like crazy, like a mergulious. I love it. I love it. And that ruggedness
00:41:25.260
that I love it. And you guys also have this worship freedom a bit too much. And I say this as someone from an
00:41:30.760
Irish family who likes freedom too, right? The view of freedom we have, we need to mature. It's like the view of
00:41:37.180
strength we have needs to mature as men. Yes, we should be physically strong, but also mentally, emotionally,
00:41:41.660
spiritually strong. And the view of freedom can't just be like a teenager's view of freedom. Like,
00:41:47.700
I want to do what I want to do when I want to do it, dad, don't tell me what to do. You know,
00:41:51.280
like I've tried that. And what it led to was addiction, mental illness and despair. Like it
00:41:56.280
doesn't end well. And I mean, in a way, this is the good, this is good news, right? If people say
00:42:01.200
it's not depressing, I'm hopeful. We're hitting what they call it. Alcoholics Anonymous rock bottom.
00:42:06.120
Like our culture is hitting rock bottom. This is great news. Like modernity is obviously not
00:42:11.620
working. I was in Austin last year, great town, some good friends there. But the homeless drug
00:42:17.700
addicts I saw in these zombie poses under the bridges, I was like, these are, someone has
00:42:23.420
described them as the saints of modernity, meaning they are the ultimate result of worshipping
00:42:29.600
materialism, of worshipping hedonism. Like that's where you get to if you worship it. And I've,
00:42:34.700
you know, I've been that Gollum. I was watching Lord of the Rings the other night and my girlfriend
00:42:38.140
was like, you're a little bit like Gollum sometimes. I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. I get
00:42:41.600
it. Like we're, we've all got a little bit of precious in us, you know, like we want what
00:42:45.740
we want and we want it. And, uh, you know, I've got the others, hopefully Samaragon and a
00:42:50.820
few other bits to me too, but that's where we end up. And the good news is it's not working.
00:42:56.300
It's obvious it's not working. Modernity is broken. Now the problem is we've got this idea
00:43:01.300
of progress, right? Like you keep going West in America. We keep inventing more and more
00:43:06.140
tech. We, you know, keep having more and more genders until we identify as a lesbian seagull,
00:43:11.140
you know, it's like, it gets crazier and crazier. Uh, but that is not progress. This idea of progress
00:43:17.120
as being more and more liberal, more and more technological, more and more isolated. I think
00:43:21.420
we're realizing now that something's up. So like the young guys I'm working with around,
00:43:27.300
you know, this work around, they're surprisingly based, like things have changed. Things have
00:43:34.260
changed. Like the boomers are dying out. Thanks for ruining the planet. Goodbye guys. Um, but
00:43:38.920
and like now people are talking about remigration in the UK seriously, which hadn't occurred, you
00:43:45.160
know, a couple of years ago, uh, people are really realizing the body matters. People are coming
00:43:49.580
back to faith in droves. You know, I have a colleague who's Orthodox, like this is just normal
00:43:54.780
now. And, um, so I'm like deeply hopeful that we've turned a corner because we can see that it
00:44:01.580
like material and modernity is just not working. I mean, my, my fear though, is that when you talk
00:44:07.280
about the state being as large as it is and other institutions that do not have our best interest
00:44:11.320
at heart, the prescription for the problem is more of the problem. And that's, that's the issue is that,
00:44:18.020
you know, the government will come in and create this problem and ask us, the taxpayers to fund
00:44:24.160
the solution. So we do, uh, inevitably we do fund it. And then the government says, well,
00:44:29.940
it's not working. We, because we need more, right. We need more, we need to do more of what's not
00:44:36.460
working for it to be better. It's like, no, you created the problem. You diagnosed the problem,
00:44:41.520
you prescribe the problem and it's all on you now. Listen, I'm a small state guy as well. And
00:44:48.220
I'm still a tax resident in the UK. Frankly, whenever I fly home, I'm embarrassed not to
00:44:54.180
have been arrested yet. Like the reason so many people have been arrested for free speech for
00:44:58.740
their YouTube, for their tweets. It's almost getting, it's almost getting to the point where
00:45:02.440
I'm embarrassed not to have been. I'm like, am I not saying anything interesting? Um, and no,
00:45:07.960
but at the same, so anarcho-tierity as a trust breaks down in this society, as people get less and
00:45:14.160
less cohesive because they have no religious center. They have no extended family, no sense
00:45:19.060
of tribe, no sense of ethnos, uh, no tradition holding them together. And this is little things
00:45:24.220
like just, I don't know, people making noise on the train in the UK, right? It's just not a British
00:45:28.080
thing to do, which is now totally common, uh, right up to the really big things. And some of the
00:45:32.720
appalling things like the, uh, the predominantly Pakistani gangs, like right from the tiny to the atrocious,
00:45:39.160
the society breaks down and then the state has to become more tyrannical. So we have
00:45:43.860
cameras everywhere. That's why we have all these strict laws. They're trying to hold it together,
00:45:48.000
but it just doesn't work. And, you know, my fear is that there's going to be a bloodbath. Like,
00:45:52.760
you know, I'm in the Balkans right now. Yugoslavia was a multi-ethnic state until it wasn't. And
00:45:57.640
they, when it collapsed, it collapsed badly in the nineties. I remember that there's still the
00:46:02.560
scars from that here. And I, I don't want that to happen in the UK. Um, we see this all across
00:46:07.480
Western Europe. There's this tension. We have to have, you know, I'm never advocate for violence in
00:46:13.260
case. Uh, Mr. Starmer's listening. I certainly don't. I've, I've been around too many war zones
00:46:18.540
to think that violence is a good idea. You know, sometimes I think there is a case for the just
00:46:23.360
war. There is a case for ethical self-defense. Uh, there is a case when there's violation at such
00:46:28.180
a huge level. So that could be looked at as a case, but I certainly don't want to incite violence
00:46:35.440
because I've seen how horrific it can be. But I fear that things are getting to a point where that
00:46:40.380
breakdown will happen and things may get worse before they get better. Where I have hope is
00:46:45.280
that I see people kind of actually finally starting to address some of these concerns,
00:46:50.280
um, and starting to realize like what actually keeps us sane, what actually makes us well.
00:46:56.900
Well, you know, I, I think the best solution, and this isn't, this is no easy solution. I'm not
00:47:01.040
just saying it's so it's, it's, it's easy. It is very simple, but the state needs to back up
00:47:06.620
and start advocating for the nuclear family, start advocating for churches, uh, that teach
00:47:13.280
morality and then start advocating for social institutions that teach moral principles. For
00:47:18.480
example, the Boy Scouts was such a great organization for so long. And then, you know,
00:47:25.260
and, and I, I was a, I was not a boy, uh, I think I was a Boy Scout for one year, but I went all the way
00:47:30.100
through Cub Scouts and it was so good for me in the absence of not having a permanent father figure in
00:47:35.080
my life. And then, you know, the state gets ahold of it. The, the progressives quote unquote
00:47:39.880
progressives get ahold of it. And all of a sudden it's an institution that just is completely
00:47:44.560
backwards and dangerous now relative to what it was.
00:47:48.740
Also, they can't hold boundaries. So of course, you know, Scouts in the UK lets girls in.
00:47:52.720
So boys don't have that space to get boys together. Uh, which is, which is a problem instead of
00:47:57.380
getting, you know, if they don't have a dad, they can get a male role model there. Maybe it was
00:48:00.780
positive. Yeah. Yeah. I'm with you on this one. And what you have to understand is this is a death
00:48:06.380
cult. So I say modernity is a cult. It's a death cult. And I mean that on several levels, the death
00:48:11.940
of the soul. If you look at Starber, he's, he says he doesn't dream. He's a kind of gray managerial
00:48:19.300
institutionalized Demi man. Right. Like that's the, that's the sort of interesting watching the
00:48:25.500
office, but without the comedy, like that's the death of the soul. Right. The second death is just
00:48:31.600
the mass killing of children. It's a Holocaust 10 times over every single year globally. If we look
00:48:38.040
at the, the, the right to life, uh, and now the killing of old people, which, you know, is very
00:48:43.600
common in Canada and, um, sadly has just been voted for in the UK. Slovenia happily just voted against it
00:48:49.880
here and Croatia wouldn't even consider a vote. Uh, but euthanasia because the Christian idea of the
00:48:55.500
right to life, the sacredness of life is now, uh, those fumes are running out. Uh, and the third
00:49:01.660
way it's a death cult is just people aren't breeding. So birth rates across the West are down, which is
00:49:07.780
another thing pushing, pushing mass migration. And those birth rates are so low because, you know,
00:49:13.220
we're like pandas in a zoo that are so over socialized. We won't fuck like, like we've
00:49:19.040
gotten, you need God to get one. It's just, yeah. Like, like, and there's no meaning to like,
00:49:24.900
why would you have kids? It's not practical. It's not like, Oh, I'm going to have kids. Cause
00:49:29.080
that's going to be fun. It's like you were talking about earlier. It's not going to make
00:49:32.000
me happy as in fun, happy. It will provide meaning. It will add depth to your life. Meaning
00:49:36.100
and fulfillment for sure. A sacrifice to it. Like, why would you sacrifice? Why would you perpetuate
00:49:41.080
life if you're not in touch with your own life or the bigger meaning of life? Like,
00:49:46.140
so of course, no one's breeding. Now there's multiple reasons why the birth rate's going
00:49:50.340
down. You know, the, the frogs are gay, testosterone levels, blah, blah, blah. But it's the sort of,
00:49:55.660
the, the, I have to laugh cause this is stuff so horrific. This is a very, it would be a lot
00:50:00.940
more funny if it wasn't so horrible. Right. But I, for me, it's like, we can't lose our sense
00:50:05.420
of humor. Like you've got to keep a sense of humor on this stuff. And you'll notice like comedians
00:50:09.900
are some of the best truth speakers around this stuff. So you've got to keep your humor.
00:50:13.120
But, um, why would we, why would we reproduce if we don't have a sense of meaning and faith
00:50:18.760
and, you know, a community to help a village to raise that child, all the things you mentioned.
00:50:23.080
So like, this is like an existential threat, not just on the level of, you know, the UK,
00:50:28.620
even most of Western Europe, uh, uh, essentially this is, this word could get me arrested, but
00:50:34.380
invaded. Like I would define invasion as a non-consensual movement of people into a place,
00:50:40.440
right. It's pretty common sense view of what an invasion is. They'll call it like a demographic.
00:50:45.840
Yeah. It's pretty reasonable. Right. So again, not calling for violence, not calling to be mean
00:50:50.160
to Ahmed, who's at your corner shop is probably a perfectly nice guy. You know, don't be mean
00:50:54.200
to random people. And in the face of the sort of mass national violation, the sense of a lack
00:51:01.060
of meaning, like this is existential threat. Why would people not respond to this? And this is
00:51:07.280
where you see the government's having to clamp down to try, but it's, that's just putting,
00:51:11.400
this is like Tito did this in Yugoslavia. It's just putting a, a tying a tight lid on something
00:51:16.120
that's going to explode. And I really hope we can find this sort of peaceful, loving way out of this
00:51:20.920
because it's, um, it's rough, but, but as I said, it's rough, but it's also like the darkest before
00:51:25.720
the dawn, you know, uh, what's his face? Gandalf's just about to come over the ridge with the
00:51:31.020
Rohirrim. Uh, you know, we're pretty, we're pretty deep in Helm's deep, deep surrounded by
00:51:35.560
orcs at the moment, but it's, um, you know, Hobbiton still hasn't totally died out in Europe.
00:51:39.820
And also on an individual level, it's like, guys get offline, touch grass. Don't spend all your time
00:51:47.600
listening to me and Ryan's podcasts, like all the time on the internet, like be with some actual
00:51:52.540
people, like in your men's group, like in the group of young guys that I run, you know, join a
00:51:57.000
local church where you can meet people, learn to dance, do jujitsu. The real world's okay. You know,
00:52:02.980
the real world, there's still plenty of nice human beings out there. And, uh, and this is how we stay
00:52:07.760
happy, healthy, and sane. I think. Yeah, I would, I would agree with that. And just trying new things,
00:52:13.760
just making you a more interesting, well-rounded person. It brings some creativity and fun to your
00:52:18.460
life. You know, I was going to go back to something that you had talked about earlier. I had made a note.
00:52:22.540
Um, I think there's a, you had said something about stoicism and I think there's this misrepresentation
00:52:29.180
of what stoicism is, where we're led to believe that it's a suppression of emotions when actual
00:52:35.840
stoics talk about understanding your emotions for productive outcomes. And I think that's part,
00:52:40.920
correct me if I'm wrong, but that would be to me, part of the embodiment process. I'm assuming where
00:52:46.280
you start to know why you feel and what it does to you on a physiological level. So you can start to
00:52:51.620
address it rather than just tamp it down and hope it doesn't impact you in a negative way.
00:52:57.200
Yeah. I mean, stoicism, not broicism, right? Like the sort of misunderstanding of stoicism on the
00:53:02.820
internet is there. I'm not expecting that. Uh, what I would say though, is this, I'm all for
00:53:08.300
emotional repression. We need to be more Victorian. This, this idea that you shouldn't repress an emotion
00:53:14.100
is a Freudian idea that America took on as a culture. Cause you guys are pretty expressive,
00:53:19.220
you know, just in terms of cultural variance. I like that, but it's there. Um, and this idea that
00:53:24.720
the worst thing you can do is repress a feeling. It's a sort of Californian ideology that worships
00:53:31.180
at the cult of feeling. So if you say modernity is a cult, the cult leader is oneself. I couldn't
00:53:38.280
figure this out for a long time. I said, modernity has all these features of a cult. They punish you
00:53:41.720
if you leave, they have, you know, dogma, they have all these priests and weird words, you know,
00:53:45.520
the woke stuff. But I thought, who's the cult leader? I thought, who's the cult leader? I was
00:53:49.540
like, Oh, the cult leader is oneself. Like the arrogance we have as individuals. I don't need
00:53:53.720
church. I don't need a community. No one tells me what to do. Um, you know, that piece of the
00:53:58.880
kind of narcissism at the center of modern culture says that my feelings are the most important thing
00:54:04.620
in the world. And it's like, no, they're not. It's yes. We need to, you know, the body is a great
00:54:09.320
way to tune in. Feelings give you a message, right? Like if I'm passionate right now, it's telling
00:54:14.060
me this is important to me. If I'm scared, it's telling me I'm worried I'm going to get arrested
00:54:18.320
at Heathrow. If I'm angry, it's because my boundaries, a little bit, I'm a little bit anxious.
00:54:23.300
If I'm angry, it's because like, okay, my boundaries have been crossed, right? So that's
00:54:27.940
good to know. It's good to know my boundaries have been crossed. That's why I feel angry.
00:54:30.580
And I feel that in my body. But I mean, I think this sort of Freudian idea of you have to never
00:54:35.100
repress an emotion is, it's all part of the sort of narcissistic cult of my feelings of God
00:54:41.060
and, you know, it's overdone. It's overdone. I think that's a, yeah, I think that's a fair
00:54:45.020
point. You see this idea. I just did a podcast a couple of days ago on the, um, my case against
00:54:50.900
vulnerability because of what it often represents is just performative emotion. Everybody's out there
00:54:57.880
just like crying on camera. They actually set up their phone with the right lighting, the right
00:55:04.240
angle, the right shot, started crying, then stopped the recording, watched it, probably
00:55:11.380
reshot it one or two times because it wasn't exactly how they wanted it to look. And then
00:55:16.480
they say, well, I'm just being vulnerable. I'm courageous. No, you're just performing.
00:55:20.280
No, no, no, no, no. It's performative. It's toxic femininity. You know, it's, it's controlling
00:55:25.080
people through, through that victim position, uh, is again, toxic Christianity.
00:55:30.240
I've seen men do it too. So I don't think it's exclusive to not real men, Ryan, not real
00:55:34.740
men. They're probably Canadian. Fair enough. Fair enough. I think the problem comes when
00:55:40.680
we over index our emotions, right? Where we, we place too much of an emphasis. I think your
00:55:45.940
point is well taken. Hey, you know, I feel sad today. Okay. So why? Well, I, I had a loss
00:55:54.020
of a family member. I had a relationship breakdown. I had a, a business goes sideways. Okay. That's
00:55:59.780
good information to know. How are you going to make sure that doesn't happen again and,
00:56:02.980
and, and do and be better next time. But it's when it's like, I'm sad. And that gives me an
00:56:08.300
excuse to self-destruct and to treat other people around me like garbage. That's where it becomes
00:56:14.440
a process. It's not that big a deal. Yeah. The telephone's ringing, pick it up, get the message,
00:56:19.940
put it down. Yeah. Maybe I'll spend 10 minutes meditating, just sitting with like, Oh, okay. I'm
00:56:24.340
really grieving my dad right now. You know, like, Oh, you know what? I'm really pissed off. I'm really
00:56:28.640
anxious about whatever right now in the world. And sitting with that for 10 minutes can be good.
00:56:33.500
But then I get on with my day, you know, and I think that's partly what a man does. Can I tell you
00:56:39.260
a quick fun story I thought of earlier? Quick fun story. Absolutely. Yeah. So I'm in Krakow,
00:56:44.840
right? This is week three of the main invasion of the big invasion of Ukraine. And we're going there
00:56:50.740
to set up a trauma charity, but we set, we started Krakow in Poland, across the border. And
00:56:55.840
we're collecting medical supplies. So I'm talking to doctors, they're quite illegally giving me all
00:57:01.040
these drugs. I'm using all my old professional talents to sort of illegally source medications.
00:57:05.900
And at that point, it sounds, it sounds like you're a, you're younger years to me.
00:57:10.820
Younger years were a lot of fun, but I don't recommend them to anyone. But I had some skills,
00:57:14.640
had some skills. Anyways, we're sourcing all these meds. And we're going to take them to the
00:57:17.940
hospital in Lviv because the hospital's cut off because Kiev is surrounded and they need some meds.
00:57:21.820
And we're like, okay, we'll deliver them while we're, while we're going there. My Pietro, my
00:57:25.400
Polish friend from martial arts. And, uh, I'm spending all day getting these meds and we're
00:57:30.860
buying them all this money. We fundraised and doctors are giving this to us. And it's really
00:57:34.360
late. I've been doing this all day. I'm going to one late night pharmacy and taxi drops me off and
00:57:38.520
I get out of the taxi and I realized that I've left the bag with all these like life saving drugs for
00:57:44.120
the children's hospital in the taxi. And I have to go the next day. And I just thought, shit,
00:57:48.740
what am I going to do? This is a moment of panic, quickly resent us. I stand in the middle of the
00:57:52.120
road, flag a car down. It's the right guy. It's a young guy in a souped up sports car, right? He's
00:57:58.540
there with his hot Polish girlfriend. I literally just opened the car door, jump in the back seat.
00:58:02.560
I say, follow that cab. This kid has obviously grown up. He doesn't speak English, right? He doesn't
00:58:07.940
understand what I'm saying. He just sees me pointing. And this kid has grown up with Grand Theft Auto.
00:58:12.740
He doesn't say a word. His girlfriend's screaming because a strange man just jumped into their car at like
00:58:17.700
11 o'clock at night. He just puts his foot down, chases the cab, runs it off the road, right?
00:58:24.860
I jump out. So I listen, man, I'm really sorry, but I left the meds here. We need this to save
00:58:28.400
kids' life. We need these meds. And the taxi driver's like, what the fuck? What the fuck in
00:58:31.560
Polish? You know, korwa, korwa, korwa. And we get the bags. I'm really sorry. Here's 10 bucks for
00:58:35.940
your trouble. I say to the guy, look, can I give you some money just to say thank you? And he doesn't
00:58:39.880
really speak English. He's just, I just say, zhankoje, zhankoje bardzo, you know, thank you very much in Polish.
00:58:44.500
And he just puffs up and his girlfriend like clings to him. Like he's the hero because they
00:58:48.900
figured out what's just happened, right? Like she clings to him. And he was just like zero head,
00:58:54.120
like proper East European masculine man. And he was just like, no problem. And I never saw that guy
00:58:59.960
again. And I was like, that is healthy masculinity right there. So I thought of that story.
00:59:05.060
That is, that's a good story. We need, we definitely need more of that. And you know,
00:59:10.240
what's interesting is you see how people respond. You were gracious. His girlfriend thinks more
00:59:14.400
highly of him than she did, you know, 10 minutes prior. That's just a good thing individually.
00:59:19.460
And I think for humanity as well. And in his body, he was like, I trust this guy. I don't know what
00:59:24.980
the situation is. He had that embodied instinct and he had that courage to just go, okay, like he
00:59:30.240
trusted his gut, but I wasn't a criminal. That was, you know, I was a good guy. I was doing good
00:59:34.380
thing. If you didn't understand the words, he kind of just got it on a gut level when I trust this guy,
00:59:39.020
let's do it. And he had that like action mode. He wasn't like, you know what, should I do this?
00:59:42.940
How do I feel about this? He just floored it. You know, like, I just so lucky I got the right
00:59:47.780
guy at the right place, but it's serendipity. That's amazing. Well, Mark, I appreciate our
00:59:54.660
conversation, man. This is, uh, we'll have to do another one because there's so much to talk about.
00:59:59.080
And, you know, I like to get into the philosophical and I also, like you said, like to touch grass and get
01:00:03.980
out into the real world. And I think I could probably stand to be a little bit more thoughtful at times.
01:00:08.320
And I think there's a lot of guys who could stand to be a little bit more physical at times. And I
01:00:11.880
think it's, um, I think it's about finding what you need, right? Just like we talked about earlier.
01:00:17.740
It's not that it's, it's not the thing that's the world would say it's hard that you should be
01:00:23.200
doing. It's the thing that you think is hard that you should be doing.
01:00:26.840
That you need to, I mean, if you're like your dad just died, you're seriously ill, just do what you
01:00:31.980
enjoy, you know, cruise, right? But if you've got a little bit of energy and you want to grow,
01:00:36.240
this is where we need to run that. And I think there's like a barbell. I kind of like both ends
01:00:41.120
the barbell. One is like the highly intellectual talking about, I don't know how the 30 years war
01:00:46.080
led to the state of modern man in Europe. You know, that's great. It's great. And the other side
01:00:50.180
though has to be, there's a lot of talk in men's circles. It's like, okay, what are our practices?
01:00:55.300
Like what do we do every day? Um, Oh, this is what my American teachers taught me.
01:01:01.060
This book, how to become human, a guide for young men, uh, has got like a load of ways to
01:01:06.900
break that down. Um, it may actually be illegal in the UK, this book. So it's just by a guy called
01:01:12.140
Mark, uh, this book. Um, but yeah, there's a load of ways in there. People can look up and if people
01:01:18.340
want to get it, uh, for free, like if they have no money, it's only like 10 bucks, but if they have no
01:01:22.760
money, uh, they can use code skint, S K I N T on the website. I mean, I'd rather they bought it and
01:01:30.020
paid money for it, but if, if they're genuinely broke and they need some help, you know, then
01:01:34.160
they can get it for free just on, on my website rather than Amazon. So that's how to become human,
01:01:39.020
uh, a guide for young men by Mark. So that's, that's got more kind of concrete stuff in.
01:01:46.400
I'm writing that down real quick. Yeah, absolutely. I'm glad you said that. So I want to pick up a copy
01:01:50.360
as well and, um, check that out, but yeah, we'll make sure we direct guys to that. Where else can
01:01:54.600
we send them to learn more about you, Mark, and what you're up to and, uh, get them connected.
01:01:59.120
Yeah. I mean, if people want to train as an embodiment coach, just put in embodiment
01:02:02.040
coaching, embodimentunlimited.com is the website for that. That's my kind of main work. And then I've
01:02:06.600
got a YouTube channel for young guys. So people look up Mark Walsh channel. There's an old one,
01:02:10.660
a new one. People can find a bunch of kind of free videos and the feral philosophy podcast. So that's
01:02:16.680
the podcast. Uh, you're on Ryan, people like podcasts. They might like that. So it's feral
01:02:20.680
philosophy podcast, Mark Walsh on YouTube, uh, embodiment coaching. If they're interested in
01:02:25.620
that professionally. Excellent. Mark, I'll sync it all up for the guys. Thank you for joining me
01:02:30.040
today. Powerful stuff. And I'm looking forward to having a continued conversations with you.
01:02:34.580
Right. And this has been fun. It's been fun. Real pleasure.
01:02:38.060
Gentlemen, there you go. Mr. Mark Walsh. I hope you enjoyed that one. I was on his podcast several
01:02:42.340
weeks ago or maybe a month ago or so. Very, very glad to have him on my podcast. Um, obviously
01:02:48.500
a deep thinker, somebody who understands the ramifications of the society that we live in,
01:02:53.480
but he's not just speaking in theories and up in our heads and just being intellectual about it,
01:02:59.000
really teaching us how to put this into real practice in our real lives to create real results.
01:03:05.740
So make sure you follow him, make sure you leave a rating review for the podcast, and also make sure
01:03:10.640
that you, uh, take a screenshot right now, post it up on Instagram and Twitter or Facebook,
01:03:15.720
let people know what you're listening to and, uh, where they, where you heard this, uh, this
01:03:20.900
conversation. Also make sure to check out his book, how to become a better human, a guide for young men.
01:03:26.120
And the last thing is the men's forge.com. I hope to see you there. All right, guys,
01:03:30.380
we'll be back tomorrow for our ask me anything until then go out there, take action and become the man
01:03:36.480
you are meant to be. Thank you for listening to the order of man podcast. You're ready to take
01:03:41.920
charge of your life and be more of the man you were meant to be. We invite you to join the order