Florian Bador

Personality / Thoughts
Spirituality
Links
My Music
Quotes
 
Hi, this is my personal website and for now I will use it to describe who I am, and most importantly what I'm about. In a few years I will turn it into a platform where I share my content (mostly music videos) with the help of a full time staff. Until then it will remain this single basic page as I spend most of my time coding for my businesses.

• 37 years old (updated automatically)
• Los Angeles, CA
• French born
• Compose Music
• Coder and multiple SaaS business owner
• Lover of Capitalism and grateful for its beauty (more about this here).
• Completely apolitical, more interested in discovering how reality actually works than formulating opinions about it (although in recent years I started considering moving to Florida to escape communism and the same victim/what-can-my-country-do-for-me mentality I saw in France as opposed to contributing to the GDP by producing something the world needs)
• Reader (of carefully selected books, not friends recommendations — See list on GoodReads below). I have no TV, there are bookshelves instead. I also keep my phone in the kitchen 24/7, on silence, and all notifications are blocked in the settings. No noise for the mind.
• Not a fan of academia, stopped formal education after high school but will be a student my whole life.
• Health, fitness & superfood freak. Strict Vegan since 2010 (not even a single drop of honey in a food bar in all these years). 17/7 intermittent fasting daily. 2 intense workouts a day (never missing once no matter what — See spreadsheet below). Some (few) people might train harder than I do, but I'm quite confident that nobody eats better (see Badass Smoothie recipe below). As a result of compounding all the little things for years I am simply NEVER sick, not even once in a decade. "But how do you treat yourself?" the person who makes sense of mediocrity will ask... With health, that's the ultimate treat. I do not outsource my health to industries that have been keeping people sick for decades. I don't have a "primary care physician" because I know my body better than anyone and trust habits and discipline more than quick fixes or one-and-done solutions. I don't need a mask, I want the natural dirt that keeps my immune system strong. Despite only buying organic I don't need this label because I only buy vegetables that have bugs on them. I trust the bugs more than any label that compromises. Bugs know better than the FDA.
• Time Trial cyclist (see Strava)
• Martial Artist

Quick label-based description of personality, and a few thoughts:

• An artist who learned rationality
• Sigma Male. Intense and quiet at the same time. Lonely and bored in the crowd but in great company alone in silence or with the carefully selected .01% who all have these three things in common:
  • 1. They are brutally transparent, what is in their mind is exactly what you get in its raw version as they have the courage to prefer REAL over pretty and represent this idea in practice daily. I always loved those who told me bad things that were true and always hated those who spoke pretty words that were not. I can usually read straight through them anyway.
  • 2. They are very reliable. If they say "I'll be there at six" you can start worrying at 6.05. The rest of the world will text you "ETA 25 min" at 5.55 and I find it very difficult to respect these people.
  • 3. They are more interested into getting to the next level than into making sense of where they are. In other words they are in constant creation and ownership as opposed to victimhood. This mostly comes down to holding themselves to very high standards.
  Unfortunately, 99% of the population does not make it through these three filters. They would say they do but their actions reveal that they clearly do not, and it is one of the reasons I prefer to spend most of my time alone. I am intentionally an extreme example of these three things and I fail to understand why most of the world has so little appreciation for them.
  Personally, I'd rather be great than "cool". Being cool has never been on my goals list, but looking back from the death-bed and seeing CREATION, having created great things and leaving the world different than I found it has always been on the list and pretty much the only thing I ever care about. Everything else is a distraction.
• Believer of extremes where excellence lives, far from overrated "balance" where all mediocrity is found.
• Poor tolerance for mediocrity, average, neglect, lack of standards or poor work ethic. Mediocrity and average are one, this is why the percentile curve of anything is far from linear.
• Greatest strength: self-discipline. Greatest weakness: dealing with people (although excellent at reading them).
• Full personality test here (1/2) and here (2/2) (7 screenshots). INFJ at the Myers Briggs.
• If you asked me a few years ago to complete the sentence "There are two types of people..." I would have said "Those who divide people in types and those who don't" but I now see this as naive and my observation is that there are indeed common patterns in people's thoughts, decisions, and therefore actions, and the main pattern I observed would be "Those who spend their energy making sense of where they are, and those who spend it getting to the next level." We were all born wanting more, everything in Nature is either growing or dying, or as we say, evolve or dissolve. Those who don't grow may survive but they are spiritually dead. Children know that perfectly but most grown-ups have settled along the way and now make sense of having become a zombie spectator with "it's not that bad after all". The most agile at the mental gymnastics of mediocrity even dare to call this quitting "gratitude". The least agile at it go into victimhood. Mental gymnastics are always easier than the underrated physical gymnastics of effort.
• All that said, I do not have any tattoo for one simple reason: I cannot even predict how my thinking will be just 2 weeks from now, let alone years. So there isn't a single thing I could make permanent in writing without running the risk of either wanting to remove it or much worse, becoming biased by a foolish consistency that forces me into a belief I no longer hold.

Spirituality

I was raised atheist in France (equivalent to the "New York atheist"). Around 25 I had an instant awakening. I lived in Montreal near the St Joseph oratory and often used the stairs of this largest church in Canada to workout. One day I heard there were escalators inside to reach the top because of the scale of the place. Curious to find out what escalators in a church look like I went in for the first time with a tourist spirit and found myself completely alone in the gigantic basilica. I had a very powerful encounter with Silence that changed me forever. From then on I went back every day and made sure to look at the mass schedule in order to avoid them so I can see Her again.
When I moved to Los Angeles I looked for a church that was open all day so I can continue my practice of visiting Her (or allowing Her to visit me) outside of the schedule of a clergy. I knew She would be there too. I found one and sure enough, She was there.
Some time passed and one day I accidentally went during a mass. I got introduced to some young adults group and before I know it I was part of a Catholic church, organizing events, mixing the live music for them, singing in the choir, and so on.
Their eating of meat should have been a sign of their zombie spiritual state but I stayed asleep with them for 5 years until one day I finally woke up. I was in the choir and we started the mass the way we always do, saying "Let's acknowledge our sins". I looked around and started laughing, laughing at myself for having fallen asleep for so long. I left and never went back.
After 5 years asleep I could finally see clear again. I remember some church retreats where we would spend our time dwelling on how "weak and broken" we are... and I thought "But I'm not, 'cause I'm a bad mofo who was born for greatness". Had I said this out loud they would have mistaken this as arrogance, not realizing that they were, too. No one was born to live a small life and simply "make it through the struggle"... Failing to realize this is not humility, it's being spiritually asleep, a zombie soul floating around unconscious of its own nature. Like Michael Beckwith says, we were not born in sin, we were born in bliss.
I managed to wake up because I was still an outsider, but I knew that after having been hypnotized like the dogs of Pavlov by the clergy for generations to make of their spiritual practice a science of sins and smallness, an art of misery and struggles, they had no chance of ever waking up, short of an exceptional miracle. Such miracles do happen but they are very rare, most people simply stay asleep their whole life.
The clergy was founded a couple of centuries after Jesus had already left, and it was one with the state. No man of state ever had any interest in people's spirituality, or a higher Freedom for them which can only be attained through mysticism. Their interest has always been the mere avoidance of social chaos. This is why all religions are loaded with rituals, clerical doctrines, and lack any profound mysticism. You will not hear Luke 17:20 in a church because the words of Jesus have been filtered for crowd CONTROL. I did not want my spirituality to remain at the level of morality and rules of good conduct, and I knew since my encounter with Silence that there was something far beyond that. Or in the beautiful words of Lao Tzu from the Tao Te Ching verse 38:
"A foolish man tries to be good, and is therefore not good [...]
  When the Tao is lost, there is goodness.
  When goodness is lost, there is morality.
  When morality is lost, there is ritual.
  Ritual is the husk of true faith, the beginning of chaos."
This is precisely why, ironically, religions have brought a lot of chaos into this world. They try too hard, and they try in the wrong direction, one that is away from mysticism and therefore bounded by society.
So I returned to Silence just like in "The Alchemist" and I could now practice the remembering of my spiritual nature just as well in a synagogue as in a mosque or a church, but I would prefer a quiet forest where I am more likely to see a burning bush. Just like Rilke said in The Book of Hours, "I don't want to think a place for you. Speak to me from everywhere.". Or if you prefer it from Jesus in the gospel of Thomas, "Cut wood and I am here. Lift a stone and you will find me.".
Lastly, I found that far too many people in "spiritual" communities forget that all their visualizing, contemplating, meditating and praying (which usually means begging a judge in the sky to do things for them) means strictly nothing without action, and that this level of action should be aggressive and radical. I never found an absolute maniac in a spiritual community but I saw a lot of people doing everything at very shallow levels. These people need a Navy SEAL more than they need a priest. When I heard Grant Cardone say "My prayer is action" I knew this was Truth, just like when I've read Rilke say "Only in our doing can we grasp You. Only with our hands can we illumine You.". I do meditate, visualize and dive into contemplative introspection daily, but I make my very best to keep these negligible when compared to how aggressive the level of action I take.
The most spiritually awaken people are usually the furthest away from the status quo, not because they try to as a reaction to it (that's weakness), but simply because the high level of Freedom at which they live naturally distances them from the place where everybody else had fallen asleep, commonly called "The world".
You may want to watch the movie "A Hidden Life" by Terrence Malick to understand what I mean when I use the word Freedom. It's not the freedom of Venice Beach to "do whatever I want" and try to look important, it's one of a very unique kind.
Please do not write to me to debate about spiritual views. I will not answer (these arguments never lead anywhere). Thanks!

LINKS

Email
Photos
Twitter
Facebook (for future use)
Instagram (for future use)
Vimeo (will move all videos to florian.club soon, and on the long term will turn this into a platform where I share a lot of content, produced with the help of a full time staff, running it just like any business for maximum expansion)
Since Jan 1st 2022 I track every workout in This Public Spreadsheet
Tips on the psychology/mindset of working-out consistently (3 pages)
Strava
GoodReads (All Read • Favorites • Please pay attention to my 5 stars in the "Rating" column, and click "view" for my review)
This is how I break my fast every day at 1pm (since 8pm the previous day). I would highly recommend that you search all these ingredients followed by "Nutrition Facts". Make sure to come back once in a while as I never stop improving this recipe year after year and will keep this document up-to-date. 3D-printed scoops

MUSIC

2022 : new music "Amniotic Tone" coming soon.
2021-08 Diary of the Stars
2020-08 B-612
2019-06 Birth of the Solar System
2019-04 Draw Me a Sheep
2019-01 Medley of 2018 Songs
2018-10 Ibiza
2018-08 Funky Improv
2018-03 Ey Yoga Mat!
2018-01 "Extended" version of The Flight of the Dove
2015 Hymn to Grandpa (orchestra)
2015 The Flight of the Dove (orchestra)
2012 Solemn Lullaby (orchestra)

FAVORITE QUOTES

"Almost everything comes down to instant gratification versus delayed gratification, in other words brain versus spirit. We take the marshmallow test every second of our lives." - Florian Bador :)
I believe in this so much that I intentionally made it everything that I'm about. I wired my brain over the years to identify instant gratification as the ultimate enemy in every situation, and the people who promote it are very unwelcome. They usually do so to feel better about themselves having sold their soul to it, if only we could join them... but I never will.
 
"Sign here and you'll go free" > "But I'm already Free" - Franz Jagerstatter in the movie "A Hidden Life" by Terrence Malick, possibly my favorite movie of all times. Once in a few millions comes someone who chooses to embrace a level of Freedom of extreme purity, and I'm in love with these people. They are free from the mind of society and one with Truth. I see these people as the ultimate role models.
"Cowards die many times before their deaths; The valiant never taste of death but once." - Shakespeare
"God made man because God loves stories." - Elie Wiesel
"You were not born in sin, you were born in bliss." - Michael Beckwith
"We don't need spiritual followers, we need spiritual leaders." - Michael Beckwith
"A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the luster of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty." - Emerson (Self-Reliance)
 
"God's work will not be made manifest by cowards." - Emerson
"Only in our doing can we grasp You. Only with our hands can we illumine You." - Rilke (The Book Of Hours)
"My prayer is action." - Grant Cardone
"Don't let your learning turn into knowledge or you will become a fool, let your learning turn into action so you can become wealthy." - Jim Rohn
 
"To really feel alive, you've got to fu**ing push yourself. That's just the way of things." - Tom Bilyeu
"There are a lot of people in mediocrity who have a nice resume, but they're one-timers." - David Goggins
"^$#**ck&~* f%}^?#** {@$$^#*!!!" - David Goggins (any good swearing by David Goggins sounds like poetry to me)
 
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." - George Bernard Shaw
"Life is short, so remember to be super serious, take everything personally and be outraged on a daily basis." - Chad Hurley
"Some men see things as they are and say why, I Dream things that never were and say why not" - George Bernard Shaw
"Walk by faith, not by sight" - John
 
"The kingdom of God will not appear in visible signs, nor shall people say Lo Here! or Lo There! because behold, the kingdom of God is within you." - Jesus (Luke 17:20)
"Cut wood and I am here. Lift a stone and you will find me." - Jesus (Gospel of Thomas)
"All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone." - Blaise Pascal
"Do you want a drink?" someone asked - "I'm making my own" replied Deepak Chopra (meaning from within as opposed to desperately trying to change ourselves from without like most people do)
"Wherever you are, be there."
 
"You must make your future Dream a present fact by assuming the feeling of your wish fulfilled" - Neville (The Power Of Awareness)
"Conquer the mind and you conquer the world."
 
"It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble, it's what you know for sure that just ain't so." - Mark Twain
 
"Great minds discuss ideas, Average minds discuss events, Small minds discuss people." - Eleanor Roosevelt
 
"Mastery is being brilliant at the basics."
"People are rewarded in public for what they've practiced for years in private." - Tony Robbins
"Losers react, Winners anticipate." - Tony Robbins
"Good times create weak people, weak people create bad times, bad times create strong people, and strong people create good times." - Tony Robbins summarizing the book The Fourth Turning (which I don't really recommend - see my review on GoodReads)
 
"Broke people are selfish." - Grant Cardone.
"Find out what poor people read and don't read it." - Jim Rohn
 
This story of the farmer and good news/bad news.