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Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal

Slavoj Zizek: “Buddhism Can’t Explain This”

4/27/20261 hr 35 min

SPONSORS:- Accelerate your efficiency. Sign up for your one-dollar-per-month trial today at http://shopify.com/theories- Go to https://shortform.com/toe for a free trial and an exclusive $50 OFF on your annual subscription- I subscribe to The Economist for their science and tech coverage. As a TOE listener, get 35% off! No other podcast has this: https://economist.com/TOESlavoj Žižek doesn't answer your question — he dismantles it, rebuilds it, and hands you something stranger and more useful than what you started with. Philosopher, provocateur, and self-described pessimist, he's spent decades insisting on something most thinkers shy away from: that freedom isn't the absence of necessity — it's the moment you choose what you fundamentally are. The fall comes first. Paradise was never real to begin with. Reality is the gap, not the thing on either side of it. FOLLOW:

Clips

Hegelian Chopra? Prove it
Einstein was the idealist
Quantum caught God lazy
Burn my book on freedom
Freedom chooses your identity
No quantum–Oriental mashups
Death drive before morality
I avoid ChatGPT entirely
OnlyFans bait and identity fakes
Saving the drowning child

Transcript preview

First 90 seconds

  1. Speaker 00:00

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  2. Slavoj Žižek· Guest0:29

    I like you very much. You know why?

  3. Curt Jaimungal· Host0:32

    Why?

  4. Slavoj Žižek· Guest0:32

    You did the first what I always ... You did this that I'm doing all the time.

  5. Curt Jaimungal· Host0:37

    What do you mean?

  6. Slavoj Žižek· Guest0:38

    This. Scratch your nose for a second. [laughs] I, because I am the one, uh, uh, people laugh at me all the time. Like, [laughs] "He cannot go five minutes without scratching." So s- you, you began. Okay.

  7. Curt Jaimungal· Host0:51

    Okay. What would it mean for a stone to have freedom?

  8. Slavoj Žižek· Guest0:55

    Well, the, to answer you properly, I would have to explain why for me Socrates is the first f- philosopher for me, nonetheless. Because, you know, instead of going directly at the topic, no, probably not, for freedom you need awareness or, and so on and so on. I would go back to what do you mean by freedom? Because freedom is not simply opposed to necessity. It's even,

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