This week on SOI:
- Do we see reality? Or are we in the Truman Show?
- How to conceive of ideas like good, evil, honor, and righteousness 
- Believing children are worthy of their full potential, without evidence
- The 1619 Project, and the suicidal direction of acting as if we are bad
- USAID, and the man behind the curtain
- What is the value of “acting as if” something is true?
- Why did Gen X and the Millennials never take office?
- Hope for those who have hope

Mike Benz - https://open.spotify.com/episode/2rXdCTkipx2Iu5dX1Gh0s5?si=0ffa07e0d89b434d
Clinton/Goze - https://x.com/notmyfault99/status/1889472320387031103?s=42
Eric on Piers Morgan - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwXHXHRTK-M

Find us here:
x.com/mattmccloskey
 x.com/michaelvaclav
All Matt’s Links - https://solo.to/mattmccloskey
All Michael’s Links - https://solo.to/michaelvaclav
Sovereign Goods - www.etsy.com/shop/SovereignThreadGoods
 Cafe Medici - mediciroasting.com/?srsltid=AfmBOo…9eDe2OliQmjTc2A


Ep 228: Act As If

The age of tolerance has given way to the primacy of the in group. Principles, friendship, even family, matter less than allegiances. This week we grapple with how our culture got here, and what we might do about it.
- The spiritual nature of division in the West
- You’re included in my circle, but I’m not included in yours
- The disturbing social division of politics
- How do we tolerate our neighbors in the age of tolerance
- If relationships aren’t foremost, what is?
- The hierarchy of beliefs and ideologies 
- The end of the enlightenment 
- The false god of science
- Evil is that which believes its knowledge is complete
- The need for a shared belief in a higher power to address simple ideas like, what is best and what is helpful for people
- Student loan forgiveness

Find us here:
x.com/mattmccloskey 
x.com/michaelvaclav
All Matt’s Links - https://solo.to/mattmccloskey
All Michael’s Links - https://solo.to/michaelvaclav
Sovereign Goods - www.etsy.com/shop/SovereignThreadGoods
 Cafe Medici - mediciroasting.com/?srsltid=AfmBOo…9eDe2OliQmjTc2A


Ep 229: Who is my neighbor?

This week on SOI:
- Matt’s experience cleaning his windows
- Engaging the world vs receding from it
- The feeling of failure
- The allure of counterfactuals
- The human need to tend to life
- Resentment and the story of Cain and Abel
- The Kingdom of Heaven is here and now
- Discovering who you are, and what you’re capable of
- Falling short is how we discover who we are

Find us here:
x.com/mattmccloskey
x.com/michaelvaclav
All Matt’s Links - https://solo.to/mattmccloskey
All Michael’s Links - https://solo.to/michaelvaclav
Sovereign Goods - www.etsy.com/shop/SovereignThreadGoods
Cafe Medici - mediciroasting.com/?srsltid=AfmBOo…9eDe2OliQmjTc2A

Ep 230: Clean your windows, discover the world!

This week on SOI:
- Midlife crises
- Wrestling with the question of “Who am I?”
- The end of the enlightenment 
- Cultural lack of curiosity
- Protecting the structures of identity
- Identity becomes aesthetic and absurd when it lacks a center 
- The Fifth Element https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGfYLRCJZ1c
- 22 Senators all read the same script - https://x.com/yalligatorgar/status/1896975161062253017
- The Abolition of Man - https://www.amazon.com/Abolition-Man-C-S-Lewis/dp/0060652942
- Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say - https://www.amazon.com/Speak-What-We-Feel-Frederick/dp/0062517538
- You have to be able to say things that are untrue
- You can’t live life in reverse, can you can’t just live the back half

Find us here:
x.com/mattmccloskey
x.com/michaelvaclav
All Matt’s Links - https://solo.to/mattmccloskey
All Michael’s Links - https://solo.to/michaelvaclav
Sovereign Goods - www.etsy.com/shop/SovereignThreadGoods
Cafe Medici - mediciroasting.com/?srsltid=AfmBOo…9eDe2OliQmjTc2A

Ep 231: The jacket is inside out

“We use a most unfortunate idiom when we say, of a lustful man prowling the streets, that he ‘wants a woman’. Strictly speaking, a woman is just what he does not want. He wants a pleasure for which a woman happens to be the necessary piece of apparatus. How much he cares about the woman as such may be gauged by his attitude to her five minutes after fruition (one does not keep the carton after one has smoked the cigarettes). Now Eros makes a man really want, not a woman, but one particular woman. In some mysterious but quite indisputable fashion the lover desires the Beloved herself, not the pleasure she can give.”
- C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

This week on SOI:
- What is romance?
- Sex as a part of Eros
- G.K. Chesterton - “'I did try to found a little heresy of my own; and when I had put the last touches to it, I discovered that it was orthodoxy.’”
- Sex after marriage
- Polyamory
- The hiddenness of soul wounds
- Memory is like a vibrating string
- Peterson w/ Katy Faust - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-jordan-b-peterson-podcast/id1184022695?i=1000698177286
- Aella on Triggernometry - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shB6ovnjYEs

Find us here:
x.com/mattmccloskey
x.com/michaelvaclav
All Matt’s Links - https://solo.to/mattmccloskey
All Michael’s Links - https://solo.to/michaelvaclav
Sovereign Goods - www.etsy.com/shop/SovereignThreadGoods
Cafe Medici - mediciroasting.com/?srsltid=AfmBOo…9eDe2OliQmjTc2A


Ep 232: Romance, Sex, Orthodoxy

Matt and Michael break their three day fast with whiskey and a podcast.

This week on SOI:
- Michael’s brain is working differently
- Fasting
- Routines
- Turn down inputs and find God
- Perceptions vs reality. Guilt vs using perception as an excuse
- Resentment
- Job, the leviathan
- The biological drives of men and women
- Chess, to win or to live with people who like playing chess
- Parenting after divorce
- Spaghetti Driers

Find us here:
x.com/mattmccloskey
x.com/michaelvaclav
All Matt’s Links - https://solo.to/mattmccloskey
All Michael’s Links - https://solo.to/michaelvaclav
Sovereign Goods - www.etsy.com/shop/SovereignThreadGoods
Cafe Medici - http://mediciroasting.com


Ep 233: Fantasies and Filets

This week on SOI:
- The co-opting and devaluing of words
- Does emotional intelligence exist?
- Not knowing a words definition doesn’t indicate that you don’t know what it means
- Reduction of meaning as a way to avoid life
- Depression, anxiety, racism
- Black Lives Matter
- The coining of new terms like “lived experience”
- Making implicit things explicit again
- Finding yourself unable to defend obvious things like protecting women
- The simultaneous desire to avoid and also rewrite history
- Matt’s desire to grow his heart, not his understanding

Find us here:
x.com/mattmccloskey
x.com/michaelvaclav
All Matt’s Links - https://solo.to/mattmccloskey
All Michael’s Links - https://solo.to/michaelvaclav
Sovereign Goods - www.etsy.com/shop/SovereignThreadGoods
Cafe Medici - mediciroasting.com/?srsltid=AfmBOo…9eDe2OliQmjTc2A


Ep 234: Where does your knowledge need to expand?

Trials, tribulations, temptations, tension. These are the X that marks the spot for where our understanding is limited and we don’t see clearly. If we forthrightly explore that space, we find that what we considered trials, were really invitations.

The Cutting Edge - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104040/
Weights and wings - https://www.crosswalk.com/devotionals/desert/streams-in-the-desert-april-9th.html
Streams in the Desert - https://www.amazon.com/Streams-Desert-L-B-Cowman/dp/0310210062
Veritasium on Entropy - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxL2HoqLbyA
Lex and Chamath on failure - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFQUDCgMjRc
Viktor Frankl - https://www.amazon.com/Mans-Search-Meaning-Viktor-Frankl/dp/080701429X

Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.
(James 1:2-4)

Find us here:
x.com/mattmccloskey
x.com/michaelvaclav
All Matt’s Links - https://solo.to/mattmccloskey
All Michael’s Links - https://solo.to/michaelvaclav
Sovereign Goods - www.etsy.com/shop/SovereignThreadGoods
Cafe Medici - mediciroasting.com/?srsltid=AfmBOo…9eDe2OliQmjTc2A


Ep 235: Toe Pick!

Can we be in relationship with things, ideas, people, politics, and still stand outside someone else’s unique relationship with those very same things?

- Dropping the lens of perception
- Finding the gold in people
- Bill Maher meets Trump
- What is good art?
- Identity is a co-residence of heart
- Gandolf not coming to a conclusion
- Accepting and extending invitations

Matt’s forthcoming book - https://mattmccloskey.substack.com/p/introducing-good-morning
Matt’s dad’s eulogy - https://mattmccloskey.substack.com/p/a-good-man
Bill Maher monologue - https://youtu.be/RxlopbcfXpQ
Megyn Kelly on Kid Rock - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-Bw453hCBI

Find us here:
x.com/mattmccloskey
x.com/michaelvaclav
All Matt’s Links - https://solo.to/mattmccloskey
All Michael’s Links - https://solo.to/michaelvaclav
Sovereign Goods - www.etsy.com/shop/SovereignThreadGoods
Cafe Medici - mediciroasting.com/?srsltid=AfmBOo…9eDe2OliQmjTc2A


EP 236: An invitation to relationship

"Here then is my plea to my fellow Americans. Do not take the bait. Do not feel it necessary to come to a conclusion. Do not even feel that it is your job to follow all the news. Many who think that they follow all the news follow only one slant, and so are more misinformed than those who intentionally look away from the entire circus.

Try to observe without interpretation, avoid certainty, and as you return to your senses quite literally, remind yourself that what you think you know may not, in fact, be true."

Quote from Heather Heying - https://x.com/thedarkhorsepod/status/1913433827055452535?s=46

* The bias of an information rich environment
* The atomization of information
* How can we bridge the cultural divide?
* Heightened sensitivity to shame, lowered sensitivity to hubris
* Perspective bias
* Expansion of the opinion haver class
* Raising kids in a world so different from ours

Find us here:
x.com/mattmccloskey
x.com/michaelvaclav
All Matt’s Links - https://solo.to/mattmccloskey
All Michael’s Links - https://solo.to/michaelvaclav
Sovereign Goods - www.etsy.com/shop/SovereignThreadGoods
Cafe Medici - mediciroasting.com/?srsltid=AfmBOo…9eDe2OliQmjTc2A


Ep 237: Sanity in the Information Age

A podcast by Matt McCloskey and Michael Vaclav

EP 236: An invitation to relationship

Shores of Ignorance

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