Sep 27, 2026 · 13 min · 6 segments
Alan Watts (1915 – 1973) was a British and American writer, speaker, and self-styled "philosophical entertainer",known for interpreting and popularising Buddhist, Taoist, and Hindu philosophy for a…
So then, here is a conception of nature as something you must trust.
Outside nature, the birds, the bees, the flowers, the mountains, the clouds, and inside nature, human nature.
Now, nature isn't trustworthy completely.
It'll sometimes let you down with a wallop.
But that's the risk you take.
That's the risk of life.
What's the alternative? I do not trust nature at all.
It's got to be watched.
It leads to the totalitarian state where everybody is his brother's policeman.
And where everybody is watching everybody else to report them to the authorities.
Where you can't trust your own motivations.
Where you have to have a psychoanalyst in charge of you all the time to think, to be sure that you don't think dangerous thoughts or peculiar thoughts.
And you report all peculiar thoughts to your analyst.
And your analyst keeps a record of them and reports them to the government.
And everybody is busy keeping records of everything.
It's much more important to record what happens than what happens.
This is already eating us up.
So then, here is a conception of nature as something you must trust.
Outside nature, the birds, the bees, the flowers, the mountains, the clouds, and inside nature, human nature.
Now, nature isn't trustworthy completely.
It'll sometimes let you down with a wallop.
But that's the risk you take.
That's the risk of life.
What's the alternative? I do not trust nature at all.
It's got to be watched.
It leads to the totalitarian state where everybody is his brother's policeman.
And where everybody is watching everybody else to report them to the authorities.
Where you can't trust your own motivations.
Where you have to have a psychoanalyst in charge of you all the time to think, to be sure that you don't think dangerous thoughts or peculiar thoughts.
And you report all peculiar thoughts to your analyst.
And your analyst keeps a record of them and reports them to the government.
And everybody is busy keeping records of everything.
It's much more important to record what happens than what happens.
This is already eating us up.
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
Search every transcript — by keyword, by phrase, or by meaning, across every show Radar indexes
Trends — what is surging across podcasts, measured against its own baseline
Alerts — when a name you follow appears in a newly indexed episode
No account is needed to search Radar.