Quarrelsome Life Radio

The human condition is bizarre.

There are three huge questions in the world of science that have excited me for years:

• what is the universe within which we seem to exist?
• what is the Life that we seem to be part of?
• what is the consciousness that allows us to contemplate the first two questions?

However, while these questions are truly fascinating, the deepest and most profoundly useful query I have ever encountered relates to what may be considered the “dark side” of human self-awareness:

How do I live when I know we must die?

This is the fundamental question at the basis of what it means to be a member of the Homo sapiens species. And, it is in pondering this enigma that I am driven to curiously explore engaging topics and chat to interesting people.

I am Ciaran The Quarrelsome O’Regan and this is Quarrelsome Life Radio.

Struggle, meaning, death, gratitude. These are some of what make up the core of this juicy discussion here on episode 8 of the podcast.

Gary McGowan is the co-owner of Triage Method with a background in Personal Training, Nutrition Coaching & Physiotherapy, and a current student of Medicine at University College Cork. Beyond exercise, nutrition, and the behaviours we typically associate with "health", Gary has a keen interest in philosophy and psychology as it relates to the pursuit of a good life. All in all, Gary's interests all convene on a common theme: how to live well and navigate the struggles of everyday existence.

We do a deep dive into some truly rich topics including:

• Doing hard things for the sake of them being hard.
• Thoughts about concentration camp survival mentality.
• Christian ideals and the double-edged sword of the Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution.
• Suicide, death, awe, and the mechanization of life compared to actual human experience.
• Professional soccer to murder charge: the story of Gary’s father.

Check out the shownotes below or the newly refurbished www.QuarrelsomeLife.com  for a more detailed list of topics and their associated time stamps.

One mistake that I’d like to correct involves my man Galileo Galilei. For some reason I say that he was doing his thing a “few hundred years before the Reformation”. This is incorrect.  Galileo was of course born in the 1500s after the Protestant Reformation had already been kicked off.

All in all this was a thoroughly enjoyable conversation. I personally gained a ton from it and can only hope that it may be of use to you too.

Gary can be found on Instagram and Facebook @skinnygaz as well as over at https://triagemethod.com/

My details can be found over on www.QuarrelsomeLife.com . There you will also be able to enter your email address and sign up for the fortnightly Quarrelsome Life Newsletter.

Before getting in to our discussion, I will close this introduction with a quote from Ernest Becker’s Pulitzer Prize winning masterpiece The Denial of Death:

“Who knows what form the forward momentum of life will take in the time ahead or what use it will make of our anguished searching. The most that any one of us can seem to do is to fashion something—an object or ourselves— and drop it into the confusion, make an offering of it, so to speak, to the life force.”

TOPICS:

• 4.00 Doing hard things for the sake of them being hard.
• 12.40 Internal dialogue and overcoming physical pain in training.
• 25.15 Thoughts about concentration camp survival mentality.  
• 41.30 Utopian thinking versus the reality of the human condition.
• 44.00 Christian ideals and the double-edged sword of the Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution.
• 1.02.55 The “God Shaped Hole” and the tension between having a faith in life and the avoidance of dogma.
• 1.13.50 Identity politics, the marginalization of disadvantaged white people, “Social Justice” as a cloak for avoiding difficult socioeconomic problems, and reciprocal radicalization.
• 1.37.00 Death anxiety and the role of Terror Management Theory in the reaction to George Floyd.
• 1.53.30 Suicide, death, awe, and the mechanization of life compared to actual human experience.
• 2.07.55 Human potential and the ability to contribute a legacy of action through individual responsibility.
• 2.29.00 Professional soccer to murder charge: the story of Gary’s father.
• 2.43.34 Gary’s powerful experiences with an orphanage in Belarus. 
• 2.53.35 When naïve utopian notions are confronted with reality.
• 3.04.25 Ignorance and death as unifying human characteristics and the danger of ideology.
• 3.13.55 Gary’s closing thought: train hard!

Welcome to Quarrelsome Life Radio episode 7 with Ciaran O'Regan.

What you will hear is an essay about individual darkness and collective survival. I discuss many topics that are both timely and timeless. They include but are not limited to the following:

• The nature of Evil
• Left-Right balance politically
• An insidious mind virus and representations of its spread on both sides of the Atlantic
• Existential risks that threaten the future of humanity
• The role of the pandemic on the explosion of the George Floyd movement
• Death anxiety
• Trump's re-election chances
• The potential for violence in the US in the near future
• Freedom of expression and diversity of opinion
• Woke motivations
• The Black Lives Matter organization
• The Enlightenment
• Science
• Love

To paraphrase John Philpot Curran (1750-1817), the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.

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Instagram: @ctquarrelsome

Twitter: @ctquarrelsome

Welcome to Quarrelsome Life Radio episode 6.

French writer Marcel Proust once wrote that “artists are those who strip away habit and return life to its deserved glory.” I agree.

Quarrelsome Life Radio was started so that I could have chats with writers, musicians, and artists of all forms about their craft. This intention did not last long. Since episode 2 I have used the podcast to discuss current affairs and areas more political, scientific, and philosophical. By no means do I regret this diversion though as I really enjoyed all those dialogues. More importantly, however, I got some wonderful feedback from people about the helpfulness of those discussions in the making sense of the topics covered therein. That said, I must say that I am excited to be at least temporarily getting back to what my original intention was.

In this show I chat to Thomas J Howley about his new book called The Wolf of Clontarf which I am currently reading and really enjoying. It is great fun and essentially a literary action movie grounded in Irish history.

Before I get to Thomas though I’d like to provide some background. This very podcast Quarrelsome Life Radio, my website QuarrelsomeLife.com, my social media handles for Instagram and Twitter @ctquarrelsome which stands for Ciaran the Quarrelsome, and the ink permanently tattooed on my chest are all inspired by a single obscure figure from Irish history from around 1000 years ago—that I may be related to. I learned about this character in 2015 when a man named Ben Thompson who runs a website called Badass of the Week mentioned him in an interview. Ben’s full description of the character is linked in the show notes below but here is the first few lines for a bit of flavour:

 

“Wolf the Quarrelsome was an 11th century Irish warrior who was known at the time as the biggest and most badass motherfucker on the known planet.  Brother of the legendary Irish High King Brian Boru, Wolf's mother was killed by a viking raiding party while he was still young, allowing him to cultivate an unending hatred for everything viking-related.  While Wolf honed his ability to crack peoples' heads open with a gigantic fucking axe and then turn their skulls into decorative wine goblets, Brian made a name for himself by uniting all the Irish peoples under one banner and standing up to the combined forces of viking jackasses across the island.”

 

You can imagine my surprise then when I got an email out the blue by a man telling me he had written a book about this character. I had to do a podcast with him. A full bio for Thomas is linked below as is his website and the Amazon link to his great new book.

 

In this really fun dialogue we discuss many cool areas including:

 

• His military background going from tank commander to army intelligence, and finally to private counter-intelligence work.
• An incident in 1985 resulting in making Soviet soldiers “very uncomfortable”.
• His interest in the Battle of Clontarf and in particular a character from Viking legend called Wolf the Quarrelsome.
• Thomas talks about how seemingly obscure Greek Spartan and Hungarian Magyar military techniques played a role in the fighting style of the Irish in the book. He also talks about how his own background in terrain reading as a tank commander influenced the writing of his fight scenes.
• The difference in military history for ancient Ireland and the Vikings compared to the work of Roman or Greek historians (and the role I suggest alcohol may have played).
• The layout of the book involving Wolf the Quarrelsome seeking revenge against the Vikings, and a female equivalent of himself who establishes a female spy network to gather intelligence.
• Difficulties he encountered while writing the book including the potential role that British historians played in downplaying the importance of the Battle of Clontarf beginning in the 16th and 17th centuries for obvious political reasons.
• The excitement of pulling such an obscure figure as Wolf out of history and making him the central character of a book.
• And much more.

I hope you enjoy it.

Peace.

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Instagram: @ctquarrelsome

Twitter: @ctquarrelsome

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Thomas Howley’s bio:

Thomas Joseph Howley, born in Boston to an Irish immigrant family, is a retired U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel. He began in tanks in Armor branch and transferred later to Military Intelligence, spending the bulk of his career abroad, frequently supporting or leading counter-espionage and counter-terrorism operations.. Key tours of duty included U.S. Special Operations Command and as the only U.S. officer on the primary staff of the United Nations Protection Forces (UNPROFOR) in former Yugoslavia during the height of the civil wars there. 

​

Earning a Master’s Degree in Management, after military retirement he was employed as a civilian operational intelligence analyst supporting U.S. Defense, Federal Law Enforcement and the Intelligence Community. In the course of his career, he has deployed to or supported security and intelligence operations in every continent except Antarctica. 

With an extended Irish family on both sides of the Atlantic, and his training and experience in intelligence and military matters writing about Clontarf was a natural extension of a life-long interest. He lives in New Hampshire with his wife where he is struggling through his sixth year of Irish Gaelic language studies. When not working on a project or in the gym, he can be found making his way through the trails in the deep New Hampshire woodlands with an Irish wolfhound at his side.

Thomas Howley’s website: https://www.tjhowleybooks.com/

To buy his book: https://www.tjhowleybooks.com/books

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Ben Thompson’s review of the book:

 

"...Norse invaders of Ireland discover that the only thing bigger and more badass than a heavily-armed band of Viking beserkers is a man known only as Wolf the Quarrelsome." - Ben Thompson - Badass of the Week

Ben Thompson’s original Wolf the Quarrelsome article: https://www.badassoftheweek.com/wolf

 

 

"Love everyone and tell the truth." - Ram Dass ---------- Shannon joins me to discuss human extinction, social justice extremism, humans as storytelling apes, scientific thinking, the need for open dialogue as bedrock, & more.    Shannon is a nutrition coach for Flex Success who uses comprehensive coaching strategies to promote adaptive self-regulation behaviours within her clients.    She seeks to understand why we do the things we do, particularly when it comes to our eating behaviours, and views motivated choice through a lens of complex interactions between internal and external environments involving the body, the brain and the world around us.   Links: https://www.instagram.com/shannonbeer_/ https://www.flexsuccess.com.au/   ----------   Ciaran's website: http://www.quarrelsomelife.com/ Ciaran's Instagram:  https://www.instagram.com/ctquarrelsome/?hl=en

In this podcast I discuss many areas including issues with both "mainstream" and non-mainstream sources of sensemaking, worries I have with the WHO leadership, dealing with potentially bad information, & sources I currently trust to help make sense of the pandemic. 

I hope this is useful.

RELEVANT RESOURCES

Articles:

• Piece on WHO leader Tedros and China published on TheHill.com
• Piece by Tadgh Nagle and Andrew Pope on "infodemic" that I quoted from at the end of the intro 
• January 26th Paper from Nassim Nicholas Taleb and colleagues warning about the risk of Pandemic 

Trusted sources (as of May 26th): 

• Tomas Pueyo: his Medium account, and Twitter  @tomaspueyo 
• Balaji Srinivasan: Twitter @balajis
• Dark Horse Podcast with Bret Weinstein and Heather Herring episode 15
• The Portal Podcast with Eric Weinstein episode 35 with Balaji
• Sam Harris and his Making Sense Podcast
• Dr Peter Attia and his website page on Covid-19 related content 
• Dr John Campbell and his Youtube channel 
• Rebel Wisdom website
• Daniel Schmactenberger's discussing pandemic situational assessments on Rebel Wisdom: Part 1 & Part 2
• Jamie Wheal discussing existential risk on Rebel Wisdom
• Yuval Noah Harari: his brilliant article for the Financial Times and a recent appearance on Making Sense Podcast with Sam Harris

What are the key cognitive biases that led to so many being blindsided by the virus? What are the future implications? What are some reasons for hope? These are all questions addressed by our guest Brian Cronin in this fantastic article published on Medium: https://medium.com/@brian.cronin.3/making-sense-of-covid-19-20-03-20-1d0336fa709b

I asked Brian onto QLR to discuss some of the key concepts from his article. Just like with Alan in episode 2, the core ideas discussed are evergreen in that they are not time-sensitive. Lessons we can learn from the last couple of months may benefit us for the rest of our lives. 

I hope this is useful.

About our guest: 

Brian Cronin has a professional background in law and seeks to explore the cross-pollination of ideas across applied ethics, moral and political philosophy, epistemology, complex systems and integral theory.

Brian’s ambition is to contribute to enhancing our citizenry’s capacity to think independently by learning the tools of critical thinking, while also promoting evidence-based approaches to public policy in order to enhance well-being and reduce suffering in the world.

Instagram: @_briancronin_ Medium: Brian Cronin https://link.medium.com/Rb94ho9Zp5 

 

Ciaran's website: quarrelsomelife.com

Instagram: @ctquarrelsome

Twitter: @ctquarrelsome 

As you may have heard, we are in the midst of a global viral pandemic. At a time like this with things changing at what seems a minute to minute basis, it is very easy to get caught in the weeds and miss the big picture concepts that are at play. Concepts around governmental policymaking, the role of science in guiding political decisions, the potential weaponization of scientific knowledge by biased actors, critical thinking, logical fallacies, the precautionary principle, and evidence-based practice are concepts that will remain important long after this pandemic has passed.  These factors are of extreme interest to my guest today due to his personal interests and professional history.

This episode is me picking the brain of Alan Flanagan. We chat about the policy-making decisions by the UK government around dealing with the virus. While Alan is not an epidemiologist/virologist/medical professional, the reason I asked him to do this is that he seems the perfect bridge between the worlds of science and policy because he (1) worked as a lawyer for more than a decade and so obviously has a firm grasp of the workings of law and policymaking (2) is currently doing a Science-based Ph.D., works as a Science educator and has written extensively about epidemiology from a public health sense as it relates to nutrition (3) currently lives in the UK (4) has as big an interest in critical and scientific thinking as anyone I know or know of. 

Alan's Links

Instagram: @thenutritional_advocate

Website: https://www.alineanutrition.com/about/

 

Ciaran's links: 

Twitter: @ctquarrelsome 

Instagram:@ctquarrelsome

Website: quarrelsomelife.com

Limerick musician Brian O'Brien on the utility of loneliness, cathartic art, the creative process, and much more.

Here is a small quote from our chat that might offer a glimpse into Brian's mind as it relates to art:

• “Just do something while you’re here… if you try and be creative in something and you feel like it didn’t work, try something else… there could be an amazing actor inside in you, there could be an amazing dancer, an amazing singer, an amazing poet, an amazing painter. All these things could be locked inside in you and you might never know. Why would you want to die and never know that?” – Brian O’Brien

In this episode of Quarrelsome Life Radio we chat about a host of interesting topics included but not limited to the following: 

• - How he ended up playing Metallica in Sunday mass during communion as his first live solo performance
• - His musical influences early on and how they changed over time
• - His early experiences with bands and supporting The Rubberbandits
• - How he ended up in Canada and the benefits of leaving comfort zones
• - Using music and songwriting as a cathartic healing process
• - The utility of loneliness in creativity
• - The need for struggle and the existence of art in tragedy
• - What is special to him about music compared to other art forms
• - The pressures of external validation in music
• - Getting to know yourself as a path to feeling empathy for others
• - How to know when a song is finished and in no more need of alteration
• - The influence of the crowd on a live performance
• - Getting the mind in the right place before getting up on stage to perform and the parallels in sport psychology
• - Learning from active reflection on live performances
• - How he carves out words in his own songwriting process
• - Finding balance in lyrics between factors such as poeticism and palatability
• - His creative frustrations and his search for an inspiring environment to facilitate his artistic process
• - The difference between performing away in Canada compared to playing at home in Limerick
• - Creativity as a way of improving the human experience
• - The realities of the music industry

Brian's song "O'Callaghan" from the start of the podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Az5d5bm8oG0

Youtube: Brian O'Brien

Twitter: @iambrianobrien 

Instagram: @iambrianobrien 

Website: https://www.brianobrienmusic.com/ 

 

Ciaran's links: 

Twitter: @ctquarrelsome 

Instagram:@ctquarrelsome

Website: quarrelsomelife.com