Alex O'Connor

speaker

2,073 appearances 2 recordings 2 series first heard Sep 2025 last heard 25 May

Alex O'Connor’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.

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On Purpose with Jay Shetty · Alex O’Connor: #1 Shift That Stops Endless Overthinking (FINALLY Get Unstuck) · 25 May 2026 podcast

Have you got any recommendations for how to get into philosophy?

And my advice is always very simple.

Just read whatever you've heard of.

And the reason for that is because if you've heard of someone, it means you've been in contexts where they have come up.

If you listen to loads of Jordan Peterson...

you'll have heard him talk about Nietzsche.

Now, you might never have read Nietzsche, but the fact that you are so attracted to Peterson and the fact that he's so attracted to Nietzsche means it's likely if you read Nietzsche, you're going to find something that you like in there, right?

Likewise, if you listen to Christian apologists on YouTube, you might have heard them talk about

the church fathers or augustine or people like this in which case just read that because there's a reason why you're attracted to the people who are attracted to those bits of content right because to some degree you can read a philosophy and go that's an interesting argument that makes sense but you're not going to read it and and it sort of wash over you with this wave of conviction i think unless you've already got one foot in that worldview and it's just somebody has finally put into words what you were thinking this whole time and so i think that we're very intuitive creatures and i think that our philosophizing often gets in the way

I think that we act according to our intuition and our emotional impulses all the time, and then we rationalize them after the fact, and then we debate about who was right and wrong.

And there's so much to be said about this.

For example, ethics.

Really important branch of philosophy.

What is right?

What is wrong?

You've got meta-ethics, which is like defining what goodness is.

You've got practical ethics, which is like particular case studies.

What do we do in the case of abortion, euthanasia, that kind of stuff.

And if you look at how people do ethics, it's extremely interesting.

They'll come up with a theory, say utilitarianism, right?

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