076 Jordan Luke Collier: Subjective Vs Objective Beauty

Jordan is the head instructor of Ars Amorata. He and Ruwan philosophize on beauty as a heuristic for navigating life.

This was recorded from Ruwan's home in Chiang Mai where Jordan also lives.

Please note: This podcast contains explicit language.

Transcript

Today's guest is Jordan Luke-Hollier.

Jordan is the head instructor of Arza Marada,

Which is the company that teaches men about women and beauty and how to live the life of an adventurous human being.

You may know Zann Parian who's been on the podcast,

The visionary behind that movement.

Jordan is a good friend.

We've known each other for quite a while.

I think right when he was starting to work with Arza Marada and lead his own workshops,

This was before I even started many years ago,

We met in Brooklyn.

He's been on the podcast already as well.

He lives not too far from me here in Chiang Mai.

We had a really great discussion over pizza and beer a couple weeks before this conversation.

I really wish that I had recorded that one as well.

We tried to recreate as much as we could and go off of those tensions.

We're speaking about beauty,

Which is something that if you follow Zann or Arza Marada,

They speak about that much more than me.

I find it interesting.

We had Hans Komen on last year.

We used to work with them.

He also speaks a lot about beauty.

It's something that I don't think about day to day,

But I think it's a really awesome and fun way to look at the world,

Not just in terms of relating to women or in relationships,

Although there's plenty of practical application.

This conversation with Jordan in particular,

It goes beyond that,

Which I think is part of the man's journey.

I think every guy who says he isn't as confident as he wants to be and isn't connecting with women as much as he wants to be,

In the beginning,

There's a stage of development where we have to conquer that.

Then there's another stage where you're getting your needs met and you have a lot of choice.

Now you can choose to be with the type of women you want to be with.

You don't have a feeling of scarcity in that area of your life.

Jordan and I started speaking though about what's the level after that,

Where women and seduction and sex and that stuff is taken for granted,

But it's a given in your life.

You no longer feel like that's the primary problem you have to solve.

Well,

What do you solve?

Then there's other,

It's not just with dating.

You apply the same exact model to money.

You don't have it.

You finally do have it.

Then what happens when you don't need it anymore?

This is where our discussion went,

Where it's certainly a more philosophical one of what is beauty and is it subjective,

Is it objective?

He references the worker of Sir Roger Scruton,

Who I am not familiar with,

I'm becoming more familiar with,

But I guess he's working with Arzam Arad on different things.

Anyway,

This is a fun discussion.

A little bit of a speak on pop culture,

Which I don't normally comment on at all,

But it's fun.

Do I have any announcements?

The archetype challenge is still available.

There are coaching sessions available this month with it.

Anything else?

I think that's it.

If you didn't join my new members area,

Which is free at Rwanda.

Com,

I'll put in your email,

Join my email list and you will get free access to my archives of five plus years of interviews and other things that I don't publish online because as you know,

I don't keep a blog or anything like that.

So anyway,

That's available at Rwanda.

Com.

Right now you're listening to episode 076 Jordan Luke Collier is beauty subjective.

You're listening to the Rwanda podcast,

Part of the Gotham podcast studio network in New York,

New York.

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Please subscribe and rate it wherever you listen to podcasts.

This makes sure there's no spinach in my teeth.

No spinach check.

Fries,

Chicken check.

Cool.

Great.

So we're here in Thailand.

So for everyone watching,

Listening,

You may be hearing the sounds of Thailand in the background.

We're not sure how sensitive the mic is.

There's some neighborhood Thai boys playing in the yard,

Playing with the eight puppies.

It's another story.

Probably won't get into it.

And yeah,

Airplanes and stuff.

But it's just a disclaimer nowadays.

I guess so.

Just like with anything and dating you,

You own up to it upfront,

Then it's not a big deal when it happens later.

Cool.

How have you been?

Good.

Cool.

Yeah.

So we had an amazing discussion over pizza.

I guess it was an Amorati meetup,

But it's just us hanging out for that evening.

And we spoke about a lot of things and I really wish we recorded it.

So I hope that this conversation can do justice to our private one a few weeks ago.

But we were speaking on beauty and I remember us kind of,

I guess we were philosophically pondering objective beauty.

Do you have anything off the top on that or if you remember some of our fascinating points before?

Objective beauty rather than subjective beauty.

Right.

Because you were speaking about,

I'm going to mess up his name,

Sir Roger Scruton.

Sir Roger Scruton and he was arguing that classical music is the pinnacle of beauty.

Is that right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Depending on what you're listening to exactly.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I was thinking about that with an area where maybe you and I spent more time thinking about women dating.

That's probably the entry point when a guy starts pondering beauty is that,

And certainly there's a wide variance of what men are drawn to in music and women and all that sorts of things.

I was wondering if you had any thoughts since on this topic of seeking beauty.

Yeah.

I mean,

We can start off and follow the breadcrumb trail and see where it leads us.

I think when it comes to men in this conversation that we're in about women,

Sex,

Relationship,

Attraction,

One of the big things that men in our communities start to discern is like,

She's hot.

There's a hot woman,

But here is a beautiful woman and it's a categorically different kind of experience.

So one is like the lustful eyes feasting on some imagined,

You know,

This woman is hot and I've been brought up or taught to believe that this woman is hot,

But then there's beauty,

Which strikes us in a very different way.

And so I think when we come across an experience of seeing a woman whose beauty hits us through maybe a different sense,

Even a sixth sense than just the eyes,

Because she's got the right face or the right colored hair of the season or the right curves that are in fashion because of what's happening in pop culture at the moment,

Then it raises a big question like,

Wow,

I've been looking at all these kind of iconic women all these years thinking that's beauty,

But when I actually get to know them,

There's not much real juice or revelation or transcendence or excitement or anything nourishing for the soul in that.

Yeah,

I can meet a woman who might totally belie the cultural standards of hotness and yet she gives me something that's so much more fulfilling.

And then it's like,

What was that?

That's the question and the meditation,

Like the multi-year thing that I don't think we can still put words on.

Yeah.

And you know,

I mean,

We could go in circles,

Philosophical again,

The subjective beauty thing,

But like if a woman has that,

Isn't it?

Not every man is going to see it that way in a given person or given art piece.

But I guess the Roger Scruton argument is that there are some things that have just like,

No matter what it will touch you.

And if it doesn't,

It's an imitation of some something else or pulling on heartstrings that aren't like quality heartstrings,

I guess.

Yeah.

I think maybe to frame the conversation a little bit,

There's this,

If we're completely following the cultural script,

There is an objective standard of beauty.

So in the late nineties,

When I was a teenager,

Pamela Anderson was the hottest.

Yeah.

And then it was like Britney Spears and everyone else was just like a weak imitation.

Right.

Right.

So if you wanted to be a hot girl,

You had to have big boobs,

Long blonde hair,

But didn't really matter too much.

It was 10 years later where that came into fashion.

Mengele.

Yeah,

Exactly.

She changed the cultural script.

So there's an objective beauty.

And I remember being at school with my friends and like we'd rate the girls out of 10 and all that kind of stuff,

Or how close they got to that objective beauty.

And then we see beyond that a little bit and then it's like,

Well,

Actually there are other women that break the mold that are interesting and taste refined and develop.

And once we get out of that cultural norm,

We can start to think for ourselves what's most beautiful.

And then we can have all kinds of different subjective tastes.

And I can't say yet why I could say like,

Ruin tasting women is a bit strange,

Whatever it is.

And we might have a fight about that.

But all of a sudden the notion of what's beautiful has been deconstructed.

And so we all follow our individual preference.

And that's a massive evolution.

Like we could talk about women's beauty or men's beauty,

Or we could talk about art.

It's the same thing in art.

They used to be like really strong standards of,

You know,

This is a good painting.

This is worth putting in a gallery.

This is going to give you the qualification needed to get into art school or like you don't make the grade or whatever it is.

Right.

So it's like we could objectivize that art and have really good criteria that everyone nods their head and strokes their chin and agrees on.

And then it all disperses.

And then we've got,

You know,

The French guy with the urinal in the museum.

People didn't know if it was really a urinal,

Like a piss pot or a piece of art.

And for him it was a piece of art and it was this great trick.

Art doesn't have to be beautiful.

It's just whatever we put in an art museum,

We can proclaim as art.

That's the post-modernist,

I don't know,

What do you call it?

Perspective or yeah.

Yeah,

Totally.

So that's all well and good.

It's like,

Yeah,

We have these constructs,

Traditional trends of art and beauty,

Modern trends of art and beauty.

Now you've pulled the rug from underneath that.

And we could say that that kind of laundry basket that that's upside down.

Sorry,

We haven't got it in shot.

Because I thought it was pretty ugly.

It was actually here.

For your enjoyment.

So this is probably a really ugly thing to have in the shot.

Anyway.

So we could put that in a museum and say that's art.

And even more so,

Like in Chiang Mai,

We could say,

Oh yeah,

It's art from an unknown and undiscovered culture.

Even more valuable.

So amazing things have happened because we've pulled the rug underneath that form of beauty.

But the problem in this age when everyone's subjected to,

Well,

I like this and I like this woman and I like that woman and I like this and my preference is this.

And anything is art if you put it in a museum.

All of a sudden we get to this kind of level playing ground where nothing is more valuable,

Nothing is more beautiful or nothing is more true than anything else.

Yeah.

And then everything's kind of meaningless.

Arbitrary.

Yeah,

Yeah,

Yeah.

This is,

I don't know if anyone can hear the airplane,

But I don't know if I can say that anymore.

It's reminding me of when I was in college I had to take a photography,

I had to take an art elective and I wasn't interested in art at all so I picked photography because it seemed like the most practical art.

And every art project I got a D and I didn't know why.

Sometimes I tried really hard to make the clouds look cool.

I took all these pictures of clouds and I got a D.

And then on the last project I was so fed up with this class and I was reading this psychology book about how the left side of your face demonstrates your emotional brain and the right side of your face demonstrates like.

.

.

It's actually really fascinating,

I could speak more on that.

But I was like,

I'm just going to take three pictures of my roommates and split their faces and then tell the story.

And I got an A.

And a part of me was kind of upset that I know I bullshitted.

I put zero effort into this,

But I told a good story and the professor liked it and she gave me an A.

And I was like,

Is this.

.

.

I guess there is no.

.

.

And I was very,

Very cynical about art for a long time.

No kidding.

So it's a technically inferior piece of art with zero effort,

Almost no effort.

And I told a good story.

Yeah,

There you go.

This is my perception on postmodern art and the art world that we're in at the moment.

And this has a massive influence on other fields.

We could explore how that goes,

But it's like there was technique that you were trying to apply and you weren't being that successful.

But then you come to the art table with a trick of the intellect and all of a sudden you get an A.

So it's like,

Well done,

Ruan.

You've won the game,

Which means you deconstruct everything that's kind of normal and that you're trying to achieve in art and you deliver an intellectual trick and then you win.

And I think like why the average man on the street feels so dissociated,

Cut out of art.

Why the art world is like this stuck up kind of affair happening in expensive mansions on hills with very skinny people,

You know,

With weird fitting clothes.

And they're all like talking to each other about art and we can't get into that.

So we can't care about art.

So we miss anything useful and beautiful that art might have because it belongs to some academic elite.

And it seems that a lot of this academic elite are just trying to outwit each other with slight of mind.

It's like the art world seems like this very disembodied affair where it's like,

Yeah,

But if I cut a photo at different angle to you,

Then I've got a twist and I've got a twist,

I don't know,

Deconstructed your thing and I've one up to you in a very abstracted kind of way.

Yeah.

And the hard thing is that this is like the go around is like,

What if there is something that we're missing and we just wouldn't,

I mean,

How could we not know too?

But I think,

I don't know if we were speaking about this the other day about how I've been reading a lot of like the classics in literature and I'm like,

None of these books would be popular today because people don't have the attention span to really appreciate the average person my age or millennials or younger don't have the attention span to appreciate the long drawn out things of Dostoevsky or something like that.

And I don't even,

I've been trying to read it.

I know this is a good book.

Everyone says it's a good book,

But I'm like,

I don't think I can really appreciate it.

And I'm like,

Yeah,

I don't know if something is perhaps lost or the attention span to appreciate classical music.

Yeah.

We're heading into Sir Roger Scruton's area now that,

Cause that's one of the big crimes that he's talking about.

And it's just the way with,

With coalesced around this instant culture,

Like this instant gratification,

I can click on this.

Even for me,

If I go on Facebook and it's like,

Oh yeah,

This article is 10 minutes long.

So I don't want anything to do with it.

So I want it,

I want it 30 seconds or less cause so it's,

So I'm in that I get it as well,

But.

Or I,

Sorry,

I was just bringing this up because I was thinking maybe the intelligentsia of a hundred years ago was masking what could have been said,

Like written like Hemingway,

But they were using these like long drawn out sentences to keep certain people away from reading literature.

And like that was their version of the people in the Hills wearing weird fitted clothing.

Like you,

You are,

Most people can't understand it.

So we're going to keep this like quality writing to ourselves.

Whereas in the modern age of copywriting and like getting clicks,

It's like they're actually coming down to the people for the first time so they could get your money.

Yeah.

They actually say,

Hey,

Make spelling mistakes in this cause you'll be more relatable.

Yeah,

Yeah,

Yeah.

What's his name?

Richard,

Richard,

Sorry.

It's Russell Brunson says that all the time.

Yeah.

I can leave your,

You leave your typos there.

Yeah.

But some,

Something is lost.

Well I guess it's a question.

I don't know if something is lost.

Something is definitely lost.

You're sure?

Yeah.

Okay.

I'll put money on that.

Okay.

And so this,

This goes into Roger Scruton's philosophy very much.

I want to say,

You know,

Like self disclosure,

I'm not like an art theorist or anything like this.

So I actually did an elective in philosophy of art.

And the university don't remember very much,

Apart from they,

There was a Soviet painting in the twenties and they just painted the canvas red.

And so the communists considered that the best piece of art of the decade.

Like look how red it is.

Resplendent.

It just backs up our political ideals.

So it was like art is political.

That was the frame they wanted to put on it.

And so,

So we're in this situation now where people are saying there's no greater or lesser beauty.

There's no greater or lesser truth.

Everything can be deconstructed.

Everything is up for grabs.

So you know,

Just put what you want in.

You put your unmade bed or you can just stand up on stage and burp and that is valuable because you say it is.

And then,

So with the long form thing and also with the social media thing of like my attention span is not so big.

What we're missing out on is the attention needed to grapple with complex human emotions and dynamics.

And get the big payoff.

The massive payoff.

So one of the,

I haven't read Dostoevsky,

One of the novels I was very impacted by is a hundred years of solitude.

And so that's not just a story.

It's like a saga of many different generations of this family.

And it's this way a story will come in and then it will leave and then it will twist and someone else will come and then a new character will come in and you don't know them at first,

But they're in your heart within 30 pages and then they're dead.

And it's like,

You know,

What am I to do?

Like the heart is kind of aghast with just in a way how slow moving this place of Macondo is,

But then how quick it actually starts to change.

And it's like,

I,

I,

I'm just taking root here and now it's being pulled out from underneath me.

It's like so much gets transmitted in this story about the nature of your life where it's like this pioneering thing of childhood that you march into with all this gusto.

You go through all these different mistakes.

And as soon as you get a sense of stability and culture,

You start feeling it getting tugged away from you.

And it's like,

How can you not just describe those facets of human experience,

But how can you make another person feel that?

So they're like,

Holy fucking shit.

This book is speaking my life that I know so intimately that I've never shared with anyone else in my life.

How can I ever share these feelings with another?

It's so difficult.

And then a great novelist comes along and says,

Through story,

It's like show,

Don't tell.

Right.

But he draws the picture of like,

This is what happens to this,

These people and these pioneers.

They make this,

They make this town,

This city,

And then this happens to it and you feel parts of your life through it.

And all of a sudden we've got a way to be like,

Wow,

There was so much grief and anguish and difficult feelings that I suffer completely alone in my own life.

I've got no way to express that,

But thanks to reading this book,

I feel somehow like someone out there gets me and I'm not alone because at least I've got my book.

And that's the gift of a great novel.

That's why Masterpieces are masterpieces because millions of people have read those pages and had a similar experience of,

I've read about Garcia Marquez's Columbia and I was transported to,

And I feel enriched too.

And I feel less,

You know,

Even if life is this devastating thing,

Which it is like,

I've got some,

Like something in my soul is heartened or connected or can relax because I'm not the only one with this experience.

Yeah.

You're not going to get that no matter how good your Facebook posts are these days.

Yeah.

I wonder.

Because I think you were saying,

I believe you're maybe sharing Roger Scruton's idea on classical music isn't pleasant.

We were talking about it.

I remember it's like,

You kind of have to suffer through like monotony.

It's like,

Oh,

This is just sounds by violin and twisting and then I was sharing,

Like I haven't listened to enough classical music to know,

But I was sharing the,

I'll put it in the introduction.

I forget what it's called,

But Yo-Yo Ma's most favorite song.

His top song on Spotify,

Most people will recognize it.

I think it's just like,

It's been used in commercials,

I believe in stuff like that.

And listening to it,

It's in my workout playlist.

I have like hip hop and I have other things and I have this song because it's like,

You know,

Whatever classical music doesn't do anything for me at a certain point,

It changes octaves and I get so emotional.

Like I just like suffered and I finally made it.

I always have this feeling every time I have to pay attention to it though,

Because in the background,

No emotional experience.

But if I'm paying attention to the music and that change happens,

Like my eyes well up and is that what quality is?

Is that what beauty is?

I don't know.

I think there's something about beauty,

Which is we really know beauty at its most resplendent,

To give it a word,

When it's juxtaposed against something else.

So you know that with,

In love,

In romance,

So much better to get the girl after a period of torture.

And you know,

We don't want to play games and we don't want to go through that kind of old school,

You know,

Like playing games and hard to get and all that kind of stuff.

But there is something about the tension,

Which is if you don't sleep with someone the first night,

If you let it simmer slowly,

If you go through these moments of like,

Oh wow,

It felt like she really liked me and now I'm not so sure.

And I feel really confident and now I'm starting to feel insecure.

And then after all of that dance,

It comes to fruition.

Like the first night you have together,

There's such a,

Like the heart's just ripped apart and vulnerable and you're both vulnerable and you're together in it.

And it's like,

That's a rush.

Very few people have that in a one night stand.

So there's beauty in relationships.

We don't want to play games just to ham up the circumstances.

But I feel that the more mature I get,

The longer I want to leave it before I sleep with a partner because I like to feel these different textures play out over time,

Like a piece of classical music.

And then all of a sudden when you want to suffer for a little bit or not,

Not have the immediate payoff is a bit.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And so in music literature as well,

Music's such a good example because we relate to it much more immediately,

I think than any other kind of music and any other kind of art.

But you listen to maybe five minutes and for two or three of those minutes,

It starts getting excruciating.

I've had the experience of like inviting a friend around putting on this and I'm like,

This is the best piece of music you can ever hear.

Like let's listen to it.

Two minutes in I'm like,

Oh my God,

I forgot that six minutes of this song is like literally awful.

And I'm watching the poor guy's face and I'm just praying that as soon as it kind of drops into the sweetness or the relief part of it,

He's going to get off on it as much as I do.

And he might absolutely not.

But yeah,

It's that thing about art is at its most valuable.

So I believe there's a hierarchy of beauty and a hierarchy of truth and value in art.

Not everything's equal.

You can't present that and say,

This is an indigenous upside down wastebasket.

Therefore it's better than anything out there and we need to view it as well.

Because I think if we can see the mirror of our complex emotions through a great piece of art and then feel like this soul soothing,

We feel consoled,

Like life is right.

I've got spirit to continue to the extent that we can feel that we've got a good work of art that is worth topping those lists of best hundred books of the century.

Right.

Because they grade them against some criteria.

And that's what I take to be the criteria.

And so for a piece of music to be like one of the greatest pieces of music,

Like a transcendent piece of music,

There needs to be an agony so that the ecstasy is so much more sweet.

You can't just put ecstasy on loop.

And you feel modern music,

Like hip hop,

Techno house music.

If you ever listened to a DJ that just puts on hit after hit after hit,

After 10 minutes,

You get bored.

It's like,

You can't start your set with the most banging popular track because everything you place after that is the energy is going to come down.

Yeah.

The surprise.

Yeah.

Any DJ worth his soul is going to like take you on a journey and to be on a journey,

You need points of uncertainty or David Lynch.

I recommended to you the other day to watch a movie by David Lynch,

Like Mulholland Drive or Inland Empire.

You've got 45 minutes and you're like,

This is fucking horrific.

Like watching this movie is viscerally painful.

Like I don't know how much more I can take before I stand up and leave the cinema.

Then all of a sudden something dissolves and he puts on a piece of music and it just goes into you.

Like I did not see that coming.

Like the relief.

It's very S&M.

That's how I felt about There Will Be Blood.

Have you seen that?

Daniel Day-Lewis?

No,

No.

I thought it was super monotonous and then there's like a punch at the end and you kind of appreciate the rest of the movie.

We were speaking about like the one night stands versus the immediate gratification.

I was actually trying to explain this to my girlfriend recently because she's been meeting guys that I've worked with and stuff or like in the past,

Like guys who I am like helping in some way and I know how much getting laid means to them.

When you say it like that,

Especially to a woman,

Especially to a woman who maybe gets hit on a lot and like is like trying to fend away,

She's like,

Oh yeah,

These boys just want to get laid.

But like I know and I'm sure you know like when you're a say years of struggle or self-esteem issues or challenge or feeling not the man you want to be like,

It actually means a lot.

It's like a guy who's like eating shit in the dating world for five years when he gets laid by a woman he really admires and thinks is so beautiful.

It's that same like the beauty that means more because of the agony.

I know like just one guy,

He came to hang out.

He got laid and it's just like whatever.

I think he was speaking in the just crass terms,

But I could recognize the tears in his eyes that this meant something to him.

I would just wish people could understand.

Yeah,

Totally.

Yeah,

That's an experience that women I think do struggle to empathize with.

Maybe that's why I love beauty so much now because I had so many years in the desert,

But so many of us are in the desert because there's getting laid and then there's like a moment of you didn't just have sex with someone,

But the hearts opened and you got to see a bit of each other's soul like that vulnerable moment where it's like,

Oh yeah,

You're not just like this face and this body that I had,

But like I felt something in you that was more human.

Yeah,

And you go away and it's like,

I mean I had several moments of this where it was like,

Oh wow.

Like I was asked an interesting question.

What's more intimate?

Having sex with someone or being naked and looking at each other?

Yeah I think most would say the latter.

Are you familiar with the book Radical Honesty?

Read it a few years ago.

Many years ago.

Wait,

And I actually haven't finished it.

I got the idea of the book,

But there's two exercises he suggested to couples,

Which is one,

Spend three hours telling your life story one way to each other and the other person just listens,

Which I've done with some close friends.

It's actually really like,

It's a beautiful experience.

The other one,

Which I haven't,

Well,

It's like masturbate to completion in front of each other and he says that's more intimate than sex for most people and most people,

That's like a big,

Way bigger challenge than entering each other's bodies or anything.

Yeah.

So it's amazing like that thing of,

Okay,

I'm going to literally,

You're going to watch me as I masturbate to completion and I have to feel myself being watched with all the embarrassment and shame that that's going to bring up.

And then you saw a window into the most secret part of my humanity and that's like terrifying.

And yet in that level of intimacy,

We'll both,

Whatever happens,

We'll both leave the building like,

Like today was something that that kind of intimacy is just so higher.

There's a higher order of truth.

You know,

Not all one night stands are equal.

Right.

I'm curious about,

You know,

Obviously we're philosophizing about beauty and whatnot,

But as far as if you have any guidelines for the way you live your life or maybe any principles around like how you seek beauty or maybe how you actually let it guide you.

Maybe some examples where you can go back and like,

This is kind of how I let beauty guide me.

Oh my God,

Don't quite know where to start with that.

Well,

I was particularly interested in,

You shared a little bit with me about your nomad life pre-digital nomad.

And then like,

That seems like an adventure that anyone from now can't really have.

And I,

You know,

It was just a few years earlier than,

You know,

And if it seemed,

I might be over romanticizing it.

So you tell me if whatever,

But it's like,

It's like,

There's something about not pre-Instagram traveling the world where you're really just doing it for yourself.

Like there's no,

And that seems to be something I'm fascinated by.

There's no personal brand building that you do on these travels.

It was just,

Yeah.

I think if there's one word that I could bring back to secular society and have people understand the merits of it,

It would be soul.

So a lot of people might think that's a very weird new age concept or this ancient kind of traditional thing.

But there is a part of us that knows something that is deeper than the day to day reality that we see.

Not everyone is going to stay with me on this conversation.

And yet some people will like straight away,

Like,

Yeah,

I get it.

We all know soul because it's in music,

Right?

This is this tune has soul.

This one really doesn't.

So even if you're very secular and skeptical,

You probably agree that there's something called soul.

So a part of me always knew that there was a reality greater than the one I lived in in modern United Kingdom during the early,

What are they called?

The early two thousands like that era,

The kind of George Bush,

Tony Blair.

And everyone was like feeding off this really strong economy.

Like that's hedonism central.

The 2008 crisis hadn't yet hit.

There was like no reflectiveness in the broader,

There was very small pockets of like,

This is what we're actually doing with our lives.

But everyone was just in the feeding frenzy of the good economy and money.

And that's just in England.

Oh,

Wow.

It's Friday night.

Let's get on a flight and go to Prague,

Czech Republic,

Spend a few hundred pounds on beer and women and then come back on Monday morning,

Just work hard,

Play hard in that degree.

And this is when you're in university around?

Yeah,

University.

And then just after.

And I'm like,

Well,

There's no soul in that.

Cause I feel the way that just work and study is a big competition and then even drinking is a big competition.

And so there's a part of me that knows that there's a deeper beauty that is at stake.

I didn't know where it was,

But I saw Penelope Cruz in movies.

She was really objective.

Yeah,

There was a muse,

Right?

There was a muse.

And I heard like somewhere between all of the dreadful pop music at the time,

Who was top in that period.

I don't even know,

But it was like hip hop,

Like really kind of,

But the Buena Vista social club kind of found their way into the circulation.

And I'm like,

Wow,

There's like this really fucking like organic,

Beautiful Cuban music.

All these musicians like 70 years old and they're producing something of more work than the biggest selling artists in the world.

And like,

There's something out there that speaks to me more deeply than this,

Right?

In the modern life.

So I just knew I had to go and seek it.

Go traveling.

I went to South America,

First stop was California,

But it quickly crossed into Mexico and I spent about three years in South Central South America.

Just searching for that.

Like,

What is that?

And to my young mind,

It was all about finding the Penelope Cruz.

Like okay,

If I have a Mexican or a Colombian or an Argentinian woman like this,

Then like your man who's got laid after five years,

He does it.

My wonderful perfect woman is going to be that.

But as I reflect on it more now,

There's a deeper quality of romance that I longed for on the road,

Even more than finding the dream girl.

And I saw this in,

Maybe I'm getting a bit off topic,

But we were in Taiwan the other day and in Taiwan,

When the people that run the islands fled the mainland China,

They took a lot of the great historic Chinese pieces of art with them.

So communists were burning it all.

So they wanted to preserve it.

And they do in Taiwan,

They've got this big palace full of ancient Chinese art.

There was a great exhibition on the elegant gathering.

And the elegant gathering,

All of refined society at that time cultivated people.

They would get together and they would share the games of the day and the poems that they had written and the calligraphy that they were drawing and the way that they were serving tea and maybe the martial arts that they were developing.

And so people would come from all these different provinces,

Sit together in this elegant gathering and for three or four days,

They would just have this merging of the minds.

And it was in this gathering that culture got moved forward because it's like,

Oh,

Why you're doing calligraphy like this.

I'm doing it like this.

Or if I take what you're doing and what I'm doing,

Then we're going to end up with this.

And you'd be like,

Yeah,

But there's also this.

And so there's this great,

And every gathering that they did would advance the culture further.

This is like nearly 2000 years ago,

Like in the fifth century,

Approximately.

And so one of the pastimes was they would float teacups down a river and they'd fill up these teacups with a little bit of wine.

And then the teacup would float down the river and I would have to stop it with a stick when it came to me.

And then I spontaneously stand up and have to recite verse,

Right?

Give poetry.

This is my,

What do they do in New York?

It's like that face off of beatboxing or whatever.

Yeah.

So I'd have to stand up and deliver some verses and then drop the teacup.

And if I couldn't spontaneously come out with good poetry,

I would have to drink the wine.

So these people are half getting smashed by the Riverside,

Beautiful pastime.

And then the others are like,

Literally I want to impress everyone.

So there's this element of competition in the cultural advancement.

And so what a lot of the men were doing,

And we saw great,

There was just great drawings that illustrated this.

A lot of the men would be like,

Okay,

So I want to impress in the next elegant gathering.

I want to put my mark on culture and be seen as a good mind.

They would go off on these benches to like really horrible,

Inhospitable lands.

And they'd go with a donkey or a guide or whatever it was.

And they would just go to the edges of hospitable,

Like wherever they could get to.

And then they would sit in that nothingness of poverty and abandon and loneliness.

And just like,

This is the edge of the world and I'm lonely and my soul is being brutalized here by these conditions.

And from that,

It's like the soul or the heart would be opened or tenderized,

Or you would face like the bleakness of life and the bleakness of your existence.

And in that moment,

You'd be open to something new.

Like wow,

That was the crucible in which I could find my human depths.

Then they would go back into civilization and be like carrying the energy of what they saw and being able to spurt the poetry of the things that they'd seen and the depths of the soul that they had now encountered.

Another round of art and culture would kick off.

And I'm saying this because there's obviously like the wave of tourism and traveling,

Which is like,

Just want to go fit in with my friends or get laid or get drunk and have a crazy time and tell everyone about it.

But then there's a different form of traveling,

Which is the travel that I always did and that I like to talk about and the kind of group around me talks about,

Which is,

Yeah,

But we were kind of crazy and we wanted to fling ourselves into the abyss to get a taste of life or soul or the transcendent.

And it seemed very spooky and ill-advised.

All the women are like,

Why don't you stay at home with us?

Why are you doing it?

My mum never got it.

My girlfriend thinks it's weird.

All of the women I met along the way were like,

Why don't you live with your family?

And why don't you stay with one of your girlfriends?

But it was like,

I have to know this unknowable thing.

And men get it.

Because as soon as you said that,

I'm like,

Everything I said about there being no objective beauty,

I don't believe that.

I mean,

This is like when I was like,

Oh yeah,

Of course a vision quest puts you in touch with something that is true regardless of our perception.

And that's the closest to truth.

So what is that that we feel when we're like,

I'm on the mountain pass.

I don't know if I've got enough food for tonight.

I don't know where I'm going to stay.

I've had this hitchhiking in Mexico.

No one speaks English.

I assume they would.

And I don't speak any Spanish yet.

I hope someone kind of rescues me with some generous hospitality because if they don't I'm screwed.

And they always did.

But I got to be on midnight sometimes before that had actually happened.

And it's just that like bleak uncertainty.

I'm fucking alone and life might get me like I'm that close to death,

The void.

In there is something that has to be found.

Yeah,

And it's like the monomyth and the hero's journey that every movie goes by.

The hero always gets the truth in the dark night of his soul.

That's the only,

When everything is stripped away.

And that's so universally recognizable that every movie follows that structure now because it's so in us.

And perhaps that's what's getting lost with our extra things that distract us.

Because you need an attention span to recognize something in a void.

Yeah,

Yeah.

So to go back to your question,

How do I organize my life to seek beauty?

Some people are really going to get this conversation and be like,

Oh yeah,

I have a soul that knows that there's a beauty and I want to move towards it.

And then some people might just not get that.

Like whatever their concerns are,

Are their concerns and they're not concerned about this thing that we're talking about here.

And so to talk of beauty to someone who is really not concerned with it is,

You know,

Preaching to the deaf.

Like you're sermonizing,

They don't want to hear that message and you're trying to convert them.

So generally don't go there.

But there are some people it's like,

How do I move my life towards beauty more and more and more?

At the big decision points in my life,

I always chose like,

What does my soul need to move towards?

Is it this place which is stable and functional or is it this place which somehow romantically is a bit mesmerizing and draws me to it?

Like Argentina was not the best place for my economic prospects as a 24 year old,

But it was definitely a place that my heart was like,

There's something here,

A tremendous soul and it is,

I mean,

It's a phenomenal country,

Culture,

Aside from the women who are gorgeous.

There's a depth there.

Yeah.

I think it's part of the fascination with dystopian fiction is that in those realities,

Like The Walking Dead is maybe a more recent,

In those realities,

Apocalyptic realities,

Everything that's unnecessary is stripped away and then people can be people.

It's like,

Actually I was just telling a buddy,

I was trying to convince him to go to jiu-jitsu and he's hesitant to it.

I don't know if you know,

I'm getting a little evangelical about things I'm into,

But he was saying like what he did appreciate about the one class he went to is that when he was getting choked by someone,

He did not care about anything that was on his computer.

Like all the things that were stressing is like,

Well yeah,

When someone could snap your neck,

You don't think,

You know,

Really it was like,

That's what's important,

Not the email yet to get back to you.

He got in the moment.

Yeah,

Yeah.

I couldn't get him to come back a second time.

He could tell me the beauty of the experience we just had,

But he wasn't going to come back anyway.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So beauty,

Beauty pools.

I think if anyone's made that decision in their life that they want beauty to be a priority,

And that can be a decision you make now,

But I don't know about you,

But when I'm working,

I put on headphones and I usually just put on YouTube,

Like click on the song that I want and then it's got a playlist.

After a few songs,

It's in a place that I don't recognize.

All these different other songs come through that I never heard before.

Then it's like the randomness,

Right?

Total randomness of what YouTube is going to provide.

And then sometimes I'm working away and something starts pouring through my ears and it's like,

What is that?

Because I didn't search for it,

But you're feeding me with something and there's just several times where I have to stop,

Put down what I'm working on,

Watch the video that's in front of me and just allow myself to be mesmerized by it.

And then it's like,

Okay,

There's a new artist on my radar.

I can go and check out their new album or their back catalog and the rabbit hole opens.

And yeah,

Beauty comes in and in the midst of my plans,

All of a sudden my spirit gets hijacked by this other thing that comes in and enriches my life immeasurably.

Then I have to know when to put that down and actually get on with something.

Yeah.

That's why I can't listen to music because either I don't care or I need to pay attention to it.

Yeah.

Not when I'm working.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So huge serendipity effect.

Do I follow my will through life or do I open to what might come?

Yeah.

The path of beauty is not the best paying path.

Yeah.

But it's also like,

What's the money for?

Exactly.

And then you're like a billion trying to buy art to get a piece of your soul back that you weren't in touch with the last 20 years or however long it took you to.

Yeah.

Well,

I mean,

On the whole agony piece,

Like I appreciate money so much now because I went so long without any,

Like I don't know.

I mean,

I might be,

This might be a silly statement,

But like I really enjoy looking at index funds now where it's like it was the most boring thing when I was 23.

I was like,

That's so stupid,

Like seek the beauty.

And then I,

You know,

Anyway,

You said a couple of times to me recently that you're playing in basing back in England and it seems to like,

You're kind of like returning back to,

Can you speak a little bit about that?

Cause you've spent all this time,

It's been how long?

How long?

15 years.

Yeah,

Like the first long term trip abroad that I made would be about 16,

17 years ago.

And I left England kind of for good 13 years,

Let's say,

Pop back for a couple of months here or there,

But that's about it.

And yeah,

I following my soul,

I guess to give it a word when I think about what's the brightest way that I can give my gifts and the things that I found to the world and what's going to fill me with a great sense of goes beyond accomplishment,

Fulfillment,

Like a deep fulfillment is to really reconnect with my culture of origin and give my gifts back to it.

So I left the UK because I wanted to rid my own system of the shit that was going on there at the time,

The way that I had been formed by my cultural upbringing and the things that were going on in that decade of time,

That decade of time between the year 2000 and about 2012,

I would say it's like the cultural fucking cesspool.

Worldwide or in England?

In the West,

In the West,

Definitely in England.

And then something seems to have been shifting over the last few years.

Like people are actually getting more reconnected to their hearts.

Culture seems to pop music and so on.

Seems to be coming backwards out of some kind of a this more beauty is coming back.

I think that's my perception.

Maybe it's just my perception of how I'm with my own soul.

I was packing up under YouTube.

Yeah,

The YouTube didn't have a good algorithm.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But you know,

People of my country seek me out because they want to do the journey that I went on.

So,

I mean,

I work with a lot of Americans,

Germans,

Scandinavian,

Like there's obviously a worldwide edge to it,

But English,

British people seek me out and they're struggling with the thing that I was struggling with most as well,

Which is we live in this polarized society.

We live in this polarized society.

We've been taught to suppress who we are.

Sexuality,

Yes,

But sex is not even the most important thing here.

We're taught to repress our love and our beauty and our soul and our longing.

Most people that I speak to are like,

Yeah,

I want to have the one night stand,

But really I want to get the sense that she kind of likes me as well.

And it was for real in the heart.

So yeah,

In my culture,

The amount of people that are suppressing their hearts is incredible,

Incredible.

And how to win at the dating game,

I.

E.

How to meet someone that you actually really connect with and feel fulfilled with in a dating game where both men and women are like chronically walled off and they don't know how to express themselves well and there's terrible insecurity and then any fear of being confident because you might be perceived as being arrogant.

There's just so many layers that get in the way.

So yeah,

It's easy to have a few drinks and hook up or whatever,

But men in this perspective,

I know very well looking for a way through.

How can I get through her walls?

But they're still behind their own.

There's a massive process,

Not only for us to like get rid of our own layers and defenses against the love and intimacy that we long for,

But also to peel hers off along the way.

That's a massive job.

So massive.

And I'm trying to understand your everything.

The biggest way that you can contribute to beauty is going back to England?

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

All right,

Cool.

Nailed it.

So you might not want to oversimplify what you're saying.

Yeah,

No,

I mean like they talk about medicine,

Right?

We carry a kind of medicine and if we go out on our hero's journey,

We find we beat,

We defeat our own dragons and demons along the way.

Then we figure out what kind of elixir or what kind of medicine we can bring back to the village folk.

And it's like,

My journey will be different to yours.

They're big things in common,

But they're slightly different.

And when I come through the other side,

It's like,

These are the things that I discovered.

This is medicine I've got now.

And my medicine goes best to the people of my original town.

Yes.

Not completely.

I'm not sure about others,

But there's a particular way that the English disconnect with each other.

And it's just like,

I can do so much good work in that and help these amazing people because it's a beautiful soul that people have.

And I see it so vibrantly.

The men I work with are like,

Yeah,

But women are like this and women are like that.

And I like coming to Thailand or I like going to South America because the women are vibrant and open.

Well,

The women are vibrant and open back home as well,

If you know how to relate with them in a certain way.

Yeah.

You got to bring a certain foot forward in order to do that.

And I do think that,

Yeah,

I'm just going to run away to Columbia or Thailand where the women are easy.

It's going to enrich your life with a lot.

It's an easy relationship dynamics,

But then it's going to complicate them further because you're still going to come up against yourself.

Like the whole thing of,

I'm just going to move to a foreign country because I can run away from the problem of women.

As soon as I get out of New York or the States or London and go to Eastern Europe or South America,

I'm going to sidestep all the horrible cultural problems with women.

And then it's going to be easy in my fantasy world.

But no,

You get there and wherever you travel to,

You're still going to come across the same kind of issues.

Like,

Okay,

Your dating life might really go up when it comes to intimate relationship.

You're not going to just uproot your terrible,

Terrifying fears and attachment patterns because you move country.

You're going to get hit with a lot of other cultural conflicts as well.

So it's difficult whichever way you do it.

To cut a long side road short.

English women are fucking remarkable and the men are missing that.

And English men are fucking remarkable,

But they've got so many ways of disconnecting and taking the conversation elsewhere.

So you can't feel who they are.

But do you feel there's value to changing locations?

Like even with all of that said,

You go back to England,

You bring back the medicine that like I'm asking if someone has the means or the opportunity,

Don't you think it would benefit them to go to Columbia or Thailand or something just to maybe see what they can experience outside of their.

.

.

Definitely.

I mean,

I did it.

I wouldn't say don't do this.

But I think it touches me quite deeply.

I get to,

Maybe this is just like a result of living a life of beauty and really considering what is beautiful and what inspires me intrinsically from the inside.

But it's like going back to a hundred years of solitude,

You know,

You could write a hundred years of journeying around the world and maybe all these travels were the precursor of that moment of ultimate relief.

Like this always was my home.

It might not be my own for the rest of my life,

But I've got something to give back to my home and the sense of relief in that,

Like here you go.

Like you're my brothers and sisters here,

You're people that I know on a deep fundamental level.

I've been kind of running away from you for many years because you remind me too much of myself,

Which I didn't want to face.

Now I get to like give something out of compassion to you because I actually feel,

Wow,

My people they're so amazing.

And a lot of people need some support and I can give that.

And that is soul-stirring.

Like object,

Like there's a beauty to me,

Which is,

Is it objective beauty?

Yeah.

To reach one's completion and come close to their purpose.

Yeah.

I can resonate a little bit.

Lately I've been focusing just on men and most of my email list is actually women from things I've done before.

And I recently I've been getting emails from women like,

How come you're always talking about men?

And I just told them like,

As I go deeper into this work of wanting to help people,

One I mean,

I think knowing things can only take you so far.

There's a certain level where I think I can really only help when I can empathize with a story.

And as much as I think I may or may not give advice to a woman or someone who hasn't,

Like,

I can really like go into the hole with someone who's had an experience like I've had and it's just more interesting and I feel more impactful.

And like when I forget about everything else and just like,

What is the best use of my attention?

It's got stuff that I can relate to.

Yeah.

I don't know if I'll ever want to go back to New York,

But maybe in a few years I'll have the same feeling that you have.

You grew up there,

Right?

I grew up in New York.

Yeah.

Okay.

We'll see.

Yeah.

The thought of going back for a long period of time still makes me like,

Ugh.

You're pretty recent that you got out of New York.

It's only been a couple of years.

Yeah.

So it's not even three or maybe coming.

Yeah.

Maybe a little more than three years now.

But yeah,

So we'll see.

Yeah.

I'm not saying that every hero's journey has to culminate with going back home to the place of origin,

But yeah,

It inspires me a lot.

Yeah.

Cool.

What are you working on now?

You might be leaving Thailand?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Might be moving to Bali at the end of January and having that as a kind of our half year hub.

And then we'd go back to Europe,

April,

May,

Between London and Romania.

Yeah.

At this moment,

Planes keep flying lower and lower.

You're pretty good for mosquitoes out here usually this time of day we get.

Oh yeah.

Well,

Yeah.

I think not quite yet.

Anyway.

I'm working on an intimacy program at the moment.

And yeah,

Just spending every day trying to get a lot of the thoughts and notes that I've collected over the last four to five years together in a way that I can present to take people on a journey into my perception of intimacy.

And yeah,

It's testing beautiful,

A lot of beautiful things.

And can I do justice to these things that I've discovered and I've been impacted by over the years,

Bring them together in a way that's going to do them justice and impact other people.

That's my creative conundrum at the moment.

Gotcha.

So that's what I'm working on.

Yeah.

Is there anything out on that project yet that people can check up on?

No,

Not unless they find my scribbles over the years somewhere in a forum,

Like in the Azamarata group or something like that.

No,

There will be.

Okay.

There will be.

Yeah.

I'll just figure it out.

Sure thing.

Yeah.

Well,

Thanks so much.

This is always a pleasure.

Any final thoughts you want to share?

Yeah.

Tony Braxton.

This is the one thing,

Because I came over to Ruin's house and I'm like,

Yeah,

I didn't prepare anything.

I don't know what I want to talk about.

I hand it over to you.

But Tony Braxton,

Because we were talking about Tony Braxton,

Because this is what is beauty?

What is useful,

Transcendent,

Transformative beauty,

A beauty which enriches and nourishes and transforms the soul versus a pseudo beauty,

A fake beauty that keeps it in place and entrenches someone's neuroses or their patterns.

So I was trying to tell you about Tony Braxton the other day.

And I was not really successfully finding the way.

So Roger Scruton picks on Tony Braxton.

You know,

Unbreak My Heart.

So all across North America,

All across the UK,

Probably even the world.

I think collectively women,

I've also resonated with this in my teenage years,

Come home drunk from the club at four o'clock in the morning,

Realize that the lover has not written a message.

They're still out of touch and cracking open one more bottle of wine.

They'll drink themselves into oblivion at 4am in the morning at the kitchen table singing Unbreak My Heart at the top of the lungs,

Waking up the neighbors and the rest of it.

So it seems like a really beautiful song.

And say that you love me again.

And there's been moments as well where I've been like,

Well,

I'm drunk at four o'clock in the morning and I feel kind of sentimental and I'm thinking Unbreak My Heart and I'm lonely too.

You know,

I've been on that wavelength.

It's been a moment in my life that that song resonated with me.

Very popular song,

Iconic.

It's almost a cultural archetype.

Tony Braxton,

You know,

The terrible heartbreak.

But Roger Scruton slams it.

He says,

This is not beauty.

This is not uplifting or nourishing to the soul whatsoever.

And if you listen to Tony Braxton,

So I listened to this song the other day being like,

Okay,

Let's get a fresh hit of that.

And I'm like,

Yeah,

There are moments where she's really put an effort into some of the lyrics or like she's like,

She's in this tender verse and she's hissing into the words.

Like there's an over dramatism in Unbreak Your Heart and it's melodramatic.

So as a performer,

She's trying to make it more impactful.

A lot of the great American singers of the nineties,

You know,

Like Mariah Carey,

Whitney Houston,

Like how can I,

Like this song's already got impact.

How can I overkill it?

You know,

To really hammer it into people's hearts.

But when you listen to Unbreak My Heart,

You can listen to it 5,

10,

15 times and it just goes around and around and around in a loop and keeps you in that loop.

And she's in denial of her pain.

She's like,

Unbreak My Heart,

Say you'll love me again.

Turn back the,

You know,

The years of her and all this kind of stuff.

She's basically saying in that song,

I'm in pain and I don't want to feel it.

I'm a victim.

Get me the fuck out of here.

And so if you're the kind of person that puts this song on repeat,

You are also doing the same thing to your soul and your psyche.

You're sitting and stewing in your own pain,

Denying your pain,

Not actually going anywhere with it.

And so the phenomenon of Toni Braxton is really unnourishing to the soul.

According to Roger Scruton.

I,

All right,

We need to touch this a little.

I'm thinking now,

Like what are,

What were my versions?

I'm thinking of like music that when I was a depressed teenager,

Really at the same frequency of depressed teenager.

And I remember at some point I had this rational split with my emotions was like,

Emotions make me feel bad.

And I,

You know,

I've,

I think many,

Maybe many people have this when they get into personal development and I was like,

I'm never listening to rock music again.

I only listen to hip hop as they talk about getting laid and making money.

And those are positive things to put in my head.

But still,

I mean,

I,

I mean,

I guess more recently as I've gone through certain cycles,

I'll,

I'll list,

I have a play,

I have a playlist on my phone called second puberty and it's all of my puberty depressed songs,

Nirvana,

Whatever,

Smashing Pumpkins.

And I don't know if I have a point with this.

I've just been listening to them again and allowing myself to feel certain sadness,

But I,

It's almost like I want to feel the sadness.

I can't,

I can't drop to the level that Smashing Pumpkins made me drop when I was 16.

Right.

And I want to feel that I love nostalgia.

I don't know why I,

It's one of my favorite.

You speak Portuguese,

Right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's one of my favorite words and emotions.

And I think I think of taking it as a pen name because I love the idea of like missingness or nostalgia anyway.

So there's a deeper level of nostalgia that you want to drop to.

Most music that you know,

Cannot actually take you to.

I have to really,

I try hard if I listen to like creep by Radiohead to really feel like,

Try to remember like getting rejected and I don't,

I don't quite try because creep has been played so much.

It's almost a cliche,

Right?

Right.

So it doesn't have that nourishment that you look that your soul is looking for.

And so the search is,

Is there a deeper form of art or a deeper form of music that can take me to my deepest?

Salda de that I've never heard before that can impact me afresh for the first time.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So it's a more refined kind of music that you haven't found yet.

It has to be Yo-Yo Ma.

For the moment,

Yeah.

But I found,

I literally,

Do you know FKA Twix?

No.

British artist.

She's been going for most of this decade,

But she's just come out with a new album called Mounted In.

It's pretty phenomenal because she's like,

It's like in a way kind of abstract hip hop,

Very experimental electronica,

But she is a deeply informed by classical music and real kind of artistry with a voice.

And so there's some very musical elements into this,

Even though it's very almost avant garde,

Modern thing.

And I listened to her album,

There's a track in it.

And I was like,

This is the antidote to Toni Braxton.

This is the real soul of Toni Braxton.

So Toni Braxton is like,

She so wants you to get to the pit of the soul of despair that she's willing you in,

But it's just the fucking victimhood again and again on cycle.

But what FKA Twix is doing,

Maybe you could put this in the podcast somehow,

But she,

She has a song called Mirrored Heart.

And she's talking about the same thing that she was in a relationship.

She's not in it anymore.

And it's incredibly painful.

And what she does with her lyrics is the lyrics are accepting of the pain and the poetry of it.

She's like,

Yeah,

I'm in so much pain.

You don't have to unbreak my heart.

You don't have to tell me sweet nothings to take me out of it.

And so feeling the pain to the point where I can find consolation in the pain,

Like I've gone all the way through the pain that I can eat.

My heart even breaks open and you possibility.

And I,

And I'm sat there like I moved,

Like it was first time I heard the last few bars of that song.

I'm also moved to tears.

Like that was fucking breathtaking.

She totally nailed it.

And then the performance rather than like trying to dramatize a song to hammer the emotions of the song home,

She sings her lyrics with much more of a surrender and much more of a softness and a much more of a revealing.

So rather than say that you love me,

Say that you love me,

It's much more of a,

Like you can hear her voice kind of cracking and the heart kind of softening and her revealing herself and surrendering.

And so the impact,

I believe that if every drunken person at four o'clock on a Saturday morning,

4am on a Saturday morning,

Who's listening to Tony Braxton would swap that track for FKA Twigs,

Listen to this,

There would be a reduction of alcoholism in the Western world.

Cause it's a piece of music that actually takes the soul.

It sounds like it has you confront the pain rather than sweeten it.

It's like,

Thanks to your singing,

You put the heartbreak of loss of a romance so clearly on the table for me that I could actually feel my own heartbreak and I could drop to the bottom of like what you were saying.

I want to feel more nostalgia.

I just can't get there sometimes.

The song actually invites you to the depth of the thing.

And because you felt the depth of the pain through her feeling the depth of her pain first and you're a mirror of her,

You know,

You resonate on that same level.

Then all of a sudden that clears something in you like,

Wow,

You took me somewhere.

And I can literally like,

So one thing I do with art,

I'm just going to throw the light on.

I love it.

I love this topic so much.

I can just keep going and going.

Beautiful fluorescent light.

The sky is amazing.

So one thing you can ask yourself,

Which I started to ask is when confronted by a piece of music or when seeing a painting,

Sit there in a meditational state,

Meditative state.

So I can look at art.

This is shit.

I don't like it.

Oh,

This is a piece of art.

I don't know what to do.

Art is for artified people and I'm just a plebeian.

You know,

I don't know how to deal with this thing in front of me.

Most people enter into a noise in front of art.

Can you quiet the mind down and feel your heart and breathe and look at a work of art for a minute?

Just breathe into your own heart and breathe into the imagined heart of the painting.

Just see what comes up as an object of meditation.

Same with music.

I turn off all distractions,

Shut my eyes and let this music penetrate me.

So I become as receptive as possible to the many different depths and layers that are transmitted in this piece of music.

And then what does this piece of music do with me?

And then I've got,

Now I really have a barometer,

Like my body and my being as an instrument for receiving this art and then having a form of knowing or having a form of I was moved or I experienced this because,

And so you can listen to,

Um,

There's another person Roger Scruton loves to trash,

Katy Perry.

So you can meditate on Katy Perry.

Okay.

Going to breathe into my heart,

Put myself in a receptive state and put on Katy Perry and just see what Katy Perry's industrial commercial artwork is going to do with you.

And then you can do it to like something really different.

Something more,

I don't know,

Well seen by the critics or a piece of classical music or the FK twigs that I'm talking about.

So I do this quite a bit and I'm listening to this and I'm like,

Fuck,

Like the messages are just penetrating me at all these different levels.

And yeah,

There's a,

There's a,

There's a different depth of beauty and transmission that comes through like an FK twigs than a Tony Braxton than a Katy Perry.

And your soul will know it.

Yeah.

And then you hear a song.

The first time I cried my tears,

Finally I got over my heartbreak over that last relationship because I listened to this piece of music and it,

It said the thing that I was trying to say,

I was telling all my friends about it.

I was telling all the therapists about,

I was talking to all the coaches,

Reading all the books about it.

And yet through this one piece of music,

Just like Garcia Marquez,

She,

She said the thing that I needed to hear so that my loop could be closed and my soul could actually move on rather than having to steward it.

Listen to Tony Braxton,

You'll never get over your former boyfriend.

Snuff out of it.

I'm just trying to think,

Did Radiohead help me at all?

Maybe not.

I thought they did.

I don't know.

Yeah.

Well,

It's funny.

The story of Radiohead,

They're from my,

Pretty much my hometown.

They're from a town called Abingdon,

Which is literally five,

10 miles down the road from where I grew up.

They became very famous with,

You know,

Like,

Okay,

Computer and as the years went by,

They got more obscure.

But Tom York,

I've been listening to Tom York's solo stuff as well this week.

And he's on a different wavelength now and taking in his music,

That there's a track.

Fuck,

I can't say it,

But it randomly came through YouTube.

Like dude,

Tom York,

Like you need to be put in a museum as one of the greatest relics of the 21st century.

You know,

Maybe my grandchildren will hear that YouTube video of you cracking open at the piano with so much tenderness and sensitivity.

Yeah.

Wow.

Wow.

Lots of songs to listen to after this.

Yeah.

Hopefully you'll never listen to music in the same way.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Cool.

Yeah.

Well,

Thanks so much.

The sun's down.

So it's time to start a Christmas party.

Yay.

Hey,

Thanks for listening to the podcast.

If you want to catch the rest of my work,

Go to Luanda.

Com.

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At Luanda.

And please do not forget to subscribe.