This week I talk about:

• How Trump, Brexit and the culture wars are a distraction

• The real battle of our time is psychological

• Sneering hipsters and piddling technocrats

• Romanticism and western culture

• The war on the human psyche

• The realm of being, ands scientific method

• Enthusiasm and the unknown

• My latest book review about Socrates

This week I talk about:

• Bob Dylan and the death of rock n roll

• How the counterculture becomes the establishment

• Fetishisation and consumerism

• Protecting the soul

• Romanticism and the senses

• What happened to Kerouac

• Being tough without becoming bitter

This week I talk about:

• Olivia Colman’s Oscar’s speech

• How Hollywood crushes individuals

• Bill Hicks and politics

• How my lefty views have evolved

• Consensus and orthodoxy

• Hick’s views on corporate music and yuppies

• ‘Reassessing’ people’s reputations

• Stupid Guardian establishment morons

Great episode of Marie Forleo and Steven Pressfield, definitely recommend.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZToRdS2HRc&t=540s

My ideas of self-validation:

1. You can totally validate yourself

• Only approximate, through rituals, affirmations, making sure you cultivate your imagination and your strengths

2. The buck stops with you

• Not being ignorant, always be open; but you have the final say

• It’s you who takes the responsibility for your failures, so it’s you who decides if something is good or not.

• Only listen to people who see importance of what you are trying to do. If they don’t, don’t share and don’t listen. This is going to be a small number!

3. Success is doing the art for its own sake, it’s own reward

• Minimise what is not rewarding. Only do what is absolutely necessary, but everything else should be that which is its own reward.

• You can’t reach perfection. The test is whether it gives you a job well done.

• The days where you gave it your best shot, and you feel the satisfaction in that

This week I talk about:

• A realisation about my creative process

• The imagination and silliness

• Free speech and privilege

• How bad ideas can only be combated through free speech

• How all good ideas can be abused

This week I talk about:

Turning 38

Why I left news reporting

Moving to London

Following your creative instincts

How nothing’s black and white

Listening to the inner call

This week I talk about:

• My recent essay on Kierkegaard

• The importance of individuality

• Subjectivity and materialism

• Hegel and the State

• The irreducibility of being a person

• Abraham and Isaac

• Faith and paradox and political correctness

This week I talk about:

• The culture war over MLK’s legacy

• A great article by Coleman Hughes

• Christianity and MLK

• The universality of the civil rights message

• How identity politics contravenes civil rights

• Robert Burns’s political message

This week I talk about:

• My rediscovery of The Doors

• How Jim Morrison is a bigger influence on me than Dylan

• The artist as critic

• The Doors Live in Detroit

• Uncompromising voices

• How PC culture is the enemy of art

This week I talk about how the culture has become more creative, but the idea of art is barely valuable. The enemies of the artist are:

• Bombardment

• Neoliberal values/marketing

• Cynicism - compliance through habitual disdain