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.

Appearances

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The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett · Atheist vs Christian vs Spiritual Thinker: The Paperclip Problem That Exposes Religion! · 29 Sep 2025 podcast

It's not just some kind of purpose.

It's not just even some kind of purpose which is given to you by an authoritative creative source.

It's something which is further than that.

Yeah, but if I can just relate this to the God question, the problem that arises is that you have to answer the question of why God infuses life with the meaning that he gives it.

It's either something which he has sort of arbitrarily plucked up and chosen to create, in which case we have this problem of arbitrariness, or no.

Or, in fact, there is some reason why God had to give us a particular kind of meaning that's endemic to the human condition, that he had no choice but for that meaning, that more important kind of meaning, to be given to human life.

But if he was beholden to that, if he had to give us a particular kind of meaning, it seems like there's a standard of meaning which exists outside of God.

Right, right.

I get that.

I'm not sure, in other words, the mechanism by which being created by someone who says this is your purpose would be fulfilling in the way that people want it to be.

Literally trying to discover, like it's the stated purpose, right?

It's literally just artificially given purpose by being designed in a particular way.

We're going to get together and we're going to have a conversation and see if we can figure out this meaning stuff.

Right.

And by the way, like we're not going to solve that problem.

I think it's worth pointing out that like these conversations have to be exploratory and subjective.

If anybody thinks that the four of us sat at this table are going to solve the meaning crisis and give people a five-step guide to finding meaning in their life and that will be the sort of case closed, then they're delusional.

I think it's possible to come to conclusions.

I think so too, to be clear.

But I think what I'm trying to say is this will be something that one will experience for themselves and will discover for themselves in their own life.

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