PREVIEW-Episode 64: Celebrity, with Guest Lucy Lawless

0:08 Mark: All right, you're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a philosophy podcast by some guys who are at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 64 is something like, what's the deal with our fucked up relationship with celebrities? And we are very happy to have a bonafide celebrity guest, Ms. Lucy Lawless, to discuss the book what the Classics Tell Us About Our Cult of Celebrity by Tom Payne from 2010. My name is Mark Linsenmayer in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:36 Seth: This is Seth Paskin in Austin, Texas.

0:38 Wes: This is Wes Alwan in Boston, Massachusetts.

0:41 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey in Middleton, Wisconsin.

0:44 Lucy: And Lucy Lawless in Auckland, New Zealand.

0:47 Mark: Yay.

0:48 Seth: Welcome, Lucy. Welcome.

0:50 Dylan: Wow.

0:51 Lucy: Thank you. I'm so psyched to hear you guys live. I've been laughing at you for the last year without any interacting with you. Big thrill for me, so thanks for having me.

1:02 Wes: Big thrill for us as well.

1:03 Mark: Now, how do we prove you're not a Lucy Lawless impersonator?

1:06 Lucy: Yeah, I'm real Lucy Lawless. We don't. We're just going to make the leap. We're going to embrace ignorance and just charge forward. I don't know.

1:14 Mark: I think that did it. I think what you just did was the proof.

1:19 Lucy: I'm convinced.

1:22 Wes: You're convinced that's the most important thing.

1:24 Mark: Actually, maybe a good way to prove that you listen to the podcast is to make you recite from memory some of the rules. Do you know the rules?

1:34 Lucy: Yes. We are not going to. No gratuitous name dropping, even though you break that all the time and. Which is always good, always informative. And we're not going to piss on. I can't remember. We're allowed to make. You're allowed to make jokes. What was the rule? I can't remember how you constructed the rule whereby if something was funnier, you'd go with that instead of the truth.

2:01 Mark: I think that's close enough.

2:02 Lucy: No, no. What was it? What was the rule?

2:04 Mark: We will be rigorous and exact and all that we say unless doing otherwise would be potentially more entertaining.

2:11 Seth: Yes.

2:11 Mark: Don't name drop. Just make your point. Don't say you'd understand me if you'd been at my garden party last Saturday and heard Edward James Olmos laying down the law.

2:21 Wes: Oh, my God. Why, Mark?

2:27 Mark: I just wanted to mortify the other guys right. Right at the beginning, just to get that out of the way.

2:32 Seth: Y. That'll happen more than once, Lucy.

2:35 Lucy: I love it.

2:37 Mark: So we're not going to talk about Lucy's what you're working on right now. Because that's what normal talk shows do. This is not an interview. This is her participating in a discussion. And if she talks less than half of the time, that's because there are five people on the damn call.

2:50 Lucy: She's not funny and you've edited it out.

2:53 Wes: No, that's because one of us is dominating a conversation but not letting her talk.

2:57 Lucy: Seth Paskin again, as usual.

3:01 Wes: Just Seth. Never stops.

3:03 Seth: Yeah, highly unlikely.

3:05 Lucy: I want you guys to have a punch up. Like an intellectual punch up, maybe, if. I love it when Wes swears and when Mark goes into Jack black mode and Dylan gets really cross with him and Seth says, I'm really glad you brought that up, and then proceeds to, like, devastate you with his quiet insight.

3:32 Wes: You've summed up the whole show.

3:34 Seth: Yeah, that's pretty much it.

3:35 Lucy: That's it.

3:36 Seth: Well, here's what I would like to know. So, Lucy, how did you come across the podcast? I mean, what. What is your interest? And how did you stumble across. Yeah, it's rare that anybody would listen to an hour and a half long of four, no names, talking about obscure

3:49 Lucy: texts, and yet somehow not rare. How many listeners have we got now?

3:54 Mark: At least a dozen.

3:56 Seth: We've had. We've had over a million and a half downloads of our podcast over there.

4:01 Wes: We get over 100,000 downloads a month now.

4:03 Lucy: That's unbelievable. Fantastic. And I've been talking about you guys with every interview I did, so hopefully in Interview magazine or Entertainment Weekly or something, so eventually

4:16 Mark: some editor will not just say, we don't have to leave that in.

4:19 Wes: Come on.

4:20 Lucy: But I think that's how it works. Like you. You share fame around somehow these days with social media.

4:26 Mark: Well, and you said it was. Oh, we were okay to talk a little bit about that. It's not just listening to stuff like this that you've actually gotten serious about it.

4:33 Lucy: Yeah, somewhat. I went to the UN Summit on Sustainable Development after getting involved in the whole fuck you don't destroy the Arctic. We need it to cool our planet. You know, a big oil protest, which I'm getting sentenced for day after tomorrow, by the way. And I went to this summit and saw all these people working very hard, but seemingly at cross purposes about how do we create a just society, you know, environmental justice and really being at loggerheads and in stasis. And I wanted to know what makes a just society. And I've been listening to you guys for a while, so I thought that I would take up my little baton and go back to university and study philosophy. So it's all because of you. Wow.

5:18 Seth: Congratulations.

5:19 Lucy: Yeah, I'm absolutely. I've never done anything more thrilling in my life. So it's your fault.

5:23 Mark: And then when you start making a lot of cash from philosophy, then you can cut us in for percentage.

5:29 Lucy: I tell you what, it's really calming me down going to school, because I realize there's nothing new under the sun. We've always been going to hell in a handbasket, though perhaps more effectively now than ever. Yeah, you guys are reaching a non traditional audience and making some difference. So I'm very grateful to you.

5:46 Seth: Well, thank you.

5:46 Dylan: So what's your favorite thing that you started reading?

5:49 Lucy: Oh, well, the thing that surprises me the most is the Confucians. I'm really digging Taoism and the Confucians kind of led into that, of course. And sometimes I feel that I'm that little praying mantis that Zhuangzi talked about who's sort of waving his arms in front of the wagon wheel, you know, the Mack truck coming on. And so I'm really loving daoism.

6:10 Mark: And Zhuangzi talked about a Mack truck.

6:12 Lucy: I don't remember. He was so prescient. He knew everything. So, yeah, that's what I'm loving at the moment. And I'm struggling with other things. It's really confronted my ideas of God, and it's all good stuff.

6:25 Mark: So it's not just the political stuff. I know you were saying that that was your. The part you were especially attracted to, but then you just listened to the Leibniz episode and it blew your mind.

6:33 Lucy: Well, no, my mind imploded more specifically because it was too much for me. I still have no idea what you were talking about. And you all sound like geniuses to me.

6:44 Wes: We did our jobs, then you did your job.

6:47 Mark: Actually, that reminds me of the rule number one that we didn't say is don't assume that our audiences read what we're talking about or has any other background in philosophy. So

6:56 Lucy: for that one, yo, that was a mind bender.

6:59 Wes: Or we'll make sense of monads no matter how long we talk about them.

7:02 Lucy: But I didn't understand the Wittgenstein one either. But somehow you take away a little bit something from every podcast and it all sort of knits together eventually, I'm hoping.

7:12 Mark: Yeah, well, you read. Yeah.

7:14 Wes: You should listen to it while you're sleeping. That's really.

7:16 Lucy: I do. I. All the time. I do. I put it on and I fall asleep and I'M hoping it's sort of going in there. You guys put me off to sleep regularly.

7:24 Wes: Yeah, yeah, we get that a lot, actually. That's like the number one use of the podcast is as a people go off Ambien.

7:35 Mark: The nothing new under the sun comment makes me think of our book.

7:38 Lucy: Yeah.

7:39 Mark: What the classics Tell Us about celebrity, since a lot of the point of that was that. Well, at least it was a comparison. That even though you might think that the celebrity culture of today is a product of the media and why would they have celebrities back then, at least he managed to plunge into Homer or James Fraser's the Golden Bough, which describes religious ceremonies. And that's a book from 1890 by an anthropologist, goes into religious ceremonies from various cultures where they all make their kings into gods and kill them, and into Faust and into mostly in ancient Greece, but also a big section on the Roman emperors. Other things that there's at least something that can be compared fruitfully back then to your own experience.

8:21 Lucy: Yeah, but don't you think it's the drive for prestige and the need for significance to stand out in a group of any size? It's a little bit of a human need. You know, we need to belong. This is. Okay, this may be pure Tony Robbins, so I'm just giving you a little dispos disclaimer here, but that need to stand apart from your peers and yet be one of them is so entrenched in us that it doesn't really surprise me that people sought celebrity way back then. And I thought about people like Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, who remained actors their entire lives.

Well, sort of. She didn't do much in their later days, but you could take those people out of Hollywood and put them back in a Welsh mining town. They're still going to be celebrities. There's still going to be stars because they just have crazy charisma and wouldn't accept being also ran. So, yeah, I think celebrity is sort of a desire for prestige and to stand apart and have the admiration of our peers, because you don't really want the admiration of people that you don't respect. You don't care about that.

9:21 Dylan: I wondered about that with the emperors, and I wondered if that was one of the distinguishing features with the kind of fame that Paine was talking about, is that they seemed to be pointing to people who were famous amongst everybody, and in many cases, they didn't respect them. They didn't seem like they were their peers necessarily.

9:40 Wes: Well, also, for most people, it's a need to actually have famous people that they can identify with or have some sort of relationship with. They may not be driven to try to become famous themselves, but there's a sort of cultural or societal need as a whole that goes back to some very primitive needs which according to. Well, pain is sort of giving us a. He's recounting Frazier's Golden Bough and then Walter Burkert, who wrote this book called Homo Necans. But the idea is that we have this relationship. In the case of Burkert, it's to a sacred sacrificial animal, or in the case of Frazer, to a God which helps us form a community.

We can't even form a community without this sort of relationship. And so fame sort of takes that over. Once we get to a stage where religion is no longer as significant as it used to be, fame and celebrity sort of fulfill that function that goes back to religious shamans or. Yeah, go ahead.

10:44 Lucy: I remember you saying something about that now, about human sacrifice, that we need to sort of imprint or project all our aggression or desires outward onto some other person and then sacrifice them at some point when they displease us. So it sort of helps us exercise some of our own aggression as a society.

11:05 Wes: Yeah, we need to sublimate that aggression. I mean, to form a community, we have to have these sort of libidinal or friendly bonds to one another. And to do that, we have to find a way to get rid of aggression, sort of.

11:19 Lucy: Yeah, turn it outwards.

11:20 Wes: Yeah, turn it outwards.

11:22 Lucy: It's much safer than turning it on one another, isn't it?

11:24 Wes: Yeah. One way of doing that is to direct it towards a sacrificial animal. So for Burkert and Payne sort of recounts this, the sacrifice is what he sees as sort of the foundational moment for a community and even for the development of language for symbols. A sacrificial animal, in a way, is the first symbol. The reason why that's important is because. So Burkert talks about going from a hunting community where you basically, you need to kill things in order to live. And there's a fundamental conflict there. And when human beings become conscious that they're going to die, they strongly identify with these animals they're killing.

And they're driven by this conflict between having to kill things to live and then their own desire to live. So part of the atonement for that guilt of killing and for the anxiety that to kill one living thing is to kill life itself and to sort of deplete the cosmos of any life giving qualities is to Engage in this sacrificial ritual, which in a way, is like a kind of undoing, an honoring

12:27 Lucy: of the life force.

12:29 Wes: Yeah, it's an honoring. And it's a way of undoing the idea that you're killing off life itself. So you elevate this animal. You make this animal important. So at the same time, you're dealing with anxiety about mortality and then you're channeling these aggressive impulses to something outside of the community.

12:48 Lucy: Yeah. And we love seeing those wounded animals in the magazines. I was looking at Demi Moore in the Chinese food store last night, and she was on the front looking really thin, but smiling. And she had her hands on the shoulders of a little African boy saying, I want to adopt. And you're just like, yeah, okay, that's gonna make you complete. That's what every crazy woman should do. She should adopt a child, you know, and. But it's that wounded creature struggling to get up and do something in her mind that's really good. We just wanna watch that and kind of be snooty about it. Well, maybe that's just me. I don't know. But I do recognize what you're talking about in the Demi Moore headlines, you know, because she's such a wounded creature right now.

13:35 Wes: Is she?

13:35 Lucy: Yeah, she sort of lost her marbles when her toy boy left her because, you know, he's 12 and he wanted to find somebody his own age to marry.

13:46 Mark: Right.

13:47 Lucy: Ashton Kutcher.

13:48 Wes: So now I have this image of Lucy Lawless reading all the celebrity tabloids. Not only a celebrity, which you're in. Into celebrity.

13:58 Lucy: Look, I'm just explaining to you.

14:01 Mark: She was researching for the episode.

14:04 Lucy: I tell you what, I bloody sacrificed myself last week, man, because I went and watched the True Hollywood Story of Britney Spears. Because I did it for years.

14:15 Wes: Well, that is. That's legitimate preparation for this episode.

14:17 Lucy: I tell you what was fascinating is that I saw how those paparazzi really did make her life much more of a hell than I would ever have believed. And it's a way that we, as consumers of these shyty magazines, we buy them, but we abrogate ourselves of any of the responsibility for the way those images are collected. You know, like our hands are clean. I just paid two bucks. 30. That's all. You know, I'm not stalking her. Oh, yeah, we are. It's horrifying how we turn these people into. Whether they ask for it or not. And there's a lot of complicity in it, of course, but we have turned them into animals that we're hunting down, man. It's like get a wicker, man, and stuff that kid in it so we can bloody laugh while she burns.

15:01 Wes: Yeah, there's this impulse to. I mean, I think this is part of what pain is. Trying to understand why we have this desire to idealize and worship and then suddenly turn that into demonization. And there's a Huffington Post article today or yesterday, I think, on the slut shaming of. I forget her name. Is it Kristen Stewart?

15:21 Lucy: Oh, over having an affair with the director or something?

15:23 Wes: Yeah, yeah. So that's a perfect example of you idealize. And she sort of has this. She was a child actress as well, so there's kind of a little girl quality. And she's also. There's a reticence to her. She's sort of the perfect object for these sorts of fantasies and for.

15:41 Lucy: Because we all loved her when she was an awkward teenager who looked like she might cut herself in her spare time. Like she looks so sort of on the edge. We're gonna love her and support her because she's bloody talented, actually.

15:54 Wes: Right, I agree.

15:55 Lucy: But you're right, she goes and makes an adult mistake and we're gonna. In a very CS Lewis kind of way, we're gonna punish her and making a mistake that 50% of married people in America do.

16:05 Wes: Right. The first sign of sexuality and it's this sort of hysterical reaction. And of course the media sort of loves it. They glom onto that and that creates headlines for weeks.

16:17 Seth: Let me ask the question. I mean, the assumption then of Paine's book, right, is that we are violent creatures. It endorses a particular view of almost a state of nature. Right. The nasty, brutish and short point of view that we're violent creatures and that somehow in forming communities in order to be civilized, we have to have an outlet for that violent aggression. And that fame is somehow this relationship between individuals and the community whereby we are able to enact or live out certain kinds of violence. So are celebrities set up then specifically for the purpose to fail or to be caught in these traps to find the flaws that we need to set somebody up in order to have this failure?

17:02 Lucy: The book really explores all the different ways and reasons that people become famous. Court fame. Court famous people, don't they? So, yeah, it's interesting to see kids who didn't ask for fame. Oh, you know, let's see what happens to Tom Cruise's child. Don't you find it so disgusting that we know people's 3 year old's name and we're Acting like we know them. We don't know our neighbor's kids, but we know Suri Cruise and what the hell she's wearing on her feet this week. It's really perverse. What's that about?

17:33 Wes: Yeah, yeah.

17:33 Mark: Well, I like that you pointed out the sort of self hating aspect of it that we all, even though, you know, most of us participate to some degree in this culture that puts celebrities in this position that we sort of blame. Oh, it's the media's fault, it's the hoi polloi. And yet who is the hoi polloi? I mean, is it, is it just that I'm saying this from an isolated position and there really are sincere, non self hating celebrity worshipers?

17:58 Lucy: Yes, I think there are.

17:59 Mark: And that is the mass of the issue. Or is it. I tend to feel like it's us reflective ones, as you were saying, are sort of to blame as well. I mean, even if you're just economically supporting it a little, I don't think

18:08 Wes: any of us escape celebrity.

18:10 Mark: We're talking about it. The fact that we're talking about it.

18:13 Lucy: Yeah. Whether it's sports stars or whatever. Right. Does it go back to that thing who talked about Zeus splitting us with a. The double people?

18:21 Wes: Was it in not Symposium, Plato's Symposium?

18:26 Lucy: We sense some lack of wholeness, so we're trying to fill it with all kind of delicacies, like the stuff that can't possibly nourish you. And this is just another one of those addictions that we have to.

18:36 Mark: Lucy, could I tell you a story about Jesus?

18:38 Lucy: Tell me a story. Tell me about Jesus.

18:40 Mark: I'm just saying that's exactly what a significant portion of our listenership. And we'll just say, you know, well, that's part of human nature, is this having a hole in you. And that's exactly what religion jumps in to take advantage of. And you know, talking from Paine's point of view, actually. Yeah. What you're saying, like that is the appropriate role of religion and he considers this celebrity worship as a religious phenomenon. It's not really that different. Even if you're completely secular and you say, oh, I don't want to make these crazy metaphysical claims about God or whatever. The role psychologically that these things had historically is very much the same role that celebrities have now.

19:16 Wes: Yeah.

19:17 Lucy: That's interesting. Sometimes I think that not talking about what God is, whether there is a God or not, but the structure of what certainly what I was raising out the God belief is almost like just replicating that inner sense. So If I get up a la Descartes and I'm going to doubt everything that I ever was told about God. And I look around and I see so much chaos and people are kind of doing bad things and they might cut in front of me. I want to think that there is some Big Mac daddy in essence out there that is going to take revenge and they'll get what's coming to them. Then my God is like a means of revenge for me. And that the God will take the revenge.

20:00 Mark: The Furies.

20:01 Lucy: Yes, the Furies will come down on you. I'm gonna will them down on you. I know them personally. I did a few episodes with them.

20:09 Wes: I like the fact that your example of evil in the world is people cutting in front of me.

20:16 Lucy: Don't mess with me always.

20:19 Wes: It really is evil. I agree. I don't disagree with it.

20:23 Lucy: No, but it's dumb stuff like that, you know, Somebody's making me so mad I want revenge on them. Well, I'm not really going to chase in my car, but I'm gonn the Furies. I'm gonna sic my God. Hang on, why am I talking about that? Because you were talking about

20:36 Mark: I'm using God. I'm using I'm sick Lucy Lawless on my enemies.

20:40 Lucy: No, but I'm using God like a big black dog that's gonna come after you. But on celebrities, I'm the big black dog that's gonna get rid of the celebrity. I've built them up and now I'm gonna vote them off the island. Like, as is in this book.

20:55 Mark: When they displease you?

20:56 Lucy: Yes, when they displease me.

20:58 Mark: That's the way he puts it. He says normally we have this cycle of celebration, consecration and sacrifice is one of his things. But in other places in the book, it sounds like that's not inevitable. It's just that when the celebrities displease us, then we're so willing to turn against the ones that we worshiped. He also kind of puts with that that we kind of set them up to fail. That we have these impossible standards of beauty and we sort of expect people's peak age to fade. I just think of all the. How many people sort of look at their favorite bands or something and don't think like, oh, well, their early stuff was good and then they sold out at some.

You know, they're looking something. I sort of am aware of that I go out of my way to try to be generous and like, I'm not really sure whether the sacrifice part is built into the phenomenon of celebrity. Or just like you're saying that once we've given our heart to something, then when it pisses us off, then we

21:47 Lucy: overreact or when the beauty fades. Yeah. You want to get a fresh one. Get a fresh virgin. When she cuts her hair off, which I see is, you know, in the book, it goes on about Britney cutting her hair off very publicly. And that's the sort of thing women do when they're wanting to get a divorce. They go and cuddle their hair off. Right. It's about taking back your power, I think. And you take on a male role and cutting your hair off is a very significant thing for a woman.

22:10 Dylan: Part of this all sounds a lot like we're conflating generic schadenfreude. You know, being happy that other people who have success get brought down to us. Sort of the phenomena of wanting to cut all the strands of wheat that stick out, it seems to be related to what happens with fame, but it doesn't seem to be exactly that. And part of the deal with fame is that people wanted. So part of the story in Paine's book was that you had virgins that were sacrificed and the way people turned on celebrities and stuff like that. But it seems to me that a big part of it is that they want it.

22:49 Lucy: Yeah, yeah.

22:50 Dylan: So the virgins who were being sacrificed fought over the privilege to do that. And the athletes who are going to be tossed out after they lose a fraction of their batting average or whatever, fight tooth and nail to get there. And the politicians and they're all trying to get there and enjoy that fame, whatever that is.

23:13 Lucy: Oh, that's right. In the book, he talked about glory over death. We're gonna die anyway. I might as well die sooner with a whole lot of glory. Go out and do something spectacular with my life.

23:24 Wes: Yeah. I think part of celebrity worship, it's not just like there are celebrities and they're these sort of gods or demigods, and we worship them. There's often the idea that if we get lucky or if we work hard enough, we could become one of them. And that's part of the identification that's going on. Is that what you're getting at, Dylan?

23:45 Dylan: I'm not even thinking about identification. I'm thinking about the whole part about fame, which is distinguishing yourself from other people. If you really want to be famous, you don't want to be like everybody else. I mean, if you crave being famous, you want to make sure that you are different and distinguished from everybody else. So if you want to be famous by being famous, being the one chosen to be sacrificed, you're fighting for that. And you don't want somebody to get cut in line for you for that. If you want to be the most famous band in the world, yeah, you want other people to be successful, but you really want your band to be the most famous. You're craving notoriety, you're craving success. And it gets all smudged together, right, that you want to be successful for the right reasons and stuff like that. But fame doesn't distinguish between those things.

24:32 Wes: How typical is that motivation, though, for. For people? I mean, how many people are motivated by that?

24:37 Mark: I think resentment is a pretty key part of. And it's not just, you know, because I know from my own experience that I will feel like sort of, why is that band getting pressed? My band isn't getting, you know, that. That immediately can kind of jealousy. But then people also have it just with their. They don't have to be creators themselves to feel like that they could have it just, you know, I have a limited amount of attention, and if something is intruding itself upon my attention. So think about the songs that play on top 40 radio that, you know, you're just walking around and they're just thrust upon you.

You don't seek that out yourself, but yet you find yourself knowing this. Or commercial jingles are even worse. But just anything that's an unwelcome entrance, you know, so why do I know about Jeff Gillooly or something? You know, just. That was the first bullshit celebrity name that came up because there was some big news story that went over and over and over back in the day. And so that is irritating. You feel like that at least some portion of the celebrity crowd does not deserve it. It's supposed to be meritocratic that they're supposed to be so charismatic or so talented.

And if you feel. And of course, people's opinions are always going to be different. So. No, honestly, talented and charismatic. Some particular celebrity is. There's gonna be a significant portion of the people that that person's image is thrust upon that are gonna disagree and are gonna be just like, cheering if they go down.

25:48 Wes: I mean, these days, it's not even that it's meritocracy is not. These days. People are famous just for being famous, right? That's the common complaint.

25:57 Dylan: They've always been famous for just being famous.

26:00 Lucy: Here's the thing, though. Here's the thing. I. Okay, there is a certain amount of currency in. I mean, the only reason I log into Twitter ever is to. You've got to kind of feed that monster a little bit or you might want to get out a political point of view or whatever it is.

26:17 Wes: A little bit. Are you ever unlogged out?

26:20 Mark: Oh, don't put it on the spot.

26:25 Wes: I'm sorry.

26:26 Lucy: Shut up, Wes. I'm sick of you.

26:31 Wes: That was Dylan.

26:32 Mark: I'm hanging up Wes on Wes. I'm excluding him from the.

26:36 Lucy: But there is currency in. You've got to be recognized, you know, in order to be cast in certain shows. It's not a meritocracy anymore. It's not just enough to be talented to get cast in a certain movie. You have to be on a list of actors that none of us have ever heard about, of people who are considered hot right now, whether they're good or not. Yet there's this bizarre little list in Hollywood of young, the next up and comers. You have to have some kind of profile, some kind of worth in the media in order to get cast. And my girlfriend and I both learned that when we cut our hair and went blonde and were no longer recognizable as the entity that made us famous, we were nowhere until we let our hair go dark again.

27:23 Wes: You cut your hair and went blonde.

27:24 Lucy: I had very long blonde hair for a while and. But was not recognizable. So, yeah, recognition counts.

27:31 Wes: It counts in the office world as well. Those sort of petty sorts of political considerations to getting anywhere, whatever field you're in.

27:39 Dylan: It seems that there are a couple considerations here. One would be the way in which you have to sort of resign yourself to nurturing a kind of reputation that may or may not trade in the same currency as fame to get places that you want to get and be successful in a kind of sincere way full of integrity. That's kind of a pragmatic, realistic view towards the way in which any practically given occupation works. But then there's also the desire just to be famous and have notoriety for the sake of itself or for the sake of its place in your current society.

Paine talks about emperors who wanted to make themselves gods and the way people rewrite their memoirs in order to try to influence their place in history and that kind of thing. And there it doesn't seem to me just a question of their notoriety, but them wanting to be famous and craving the adulation of people they don't know. They like it.

28:40 Seth: I was reading what Lucy said there a little bit differently, Dylan, that, you know, I felt like she was highlighting Payne's point about how fame rests in the community as much as in the individual. It's not just about the individual's desire to be famous. It's about the fact that who is famous is determined by the people in the community, not by the famous person themselves. And what fame does is people who are famous are willing to give the broader community what it is that they're looking for in fame. You can create fame in a certain way, but at the same time you also have to satisfy a certain set of needs or desires that the people have for the famous.

29:17 Lucy: Yeah, it won't keep you working, you know, unless you're good, unless you're talented. You won't keep a career past that sort of honeymoon period when your beauty fades or they've rubbished you enough and you just fade into the distance. You better be something other than beautiful or a good sportsman, whatever, to keep working. But you do have to service it somewhat in 140 characters. That I can do, but I cannot. Write a blog or

29:44 Wes: Twitter is your medium.

29:45 Lucy: Yeah, I'm quite a lazy person. However, isn't it funny on Twitter or Facebook now anybody can get that feeling

29:53 Wes: of being famous or with a podcast.

29:55 Mark: We have no basis for comparison.

29:57 Lucy: Yes you do. Yes you do. I mean, you get lots of feedback.

30:01 Seth: Nevermind.

30:02 Lucy: Are we getting off track? Seth? Bring us back to the book, baby.

30:06 Mark: Just go back to just praising us. That's what this should be about.

30:12 Seth: This is actually a very interesting topic to me because I don't consider us to be famous at all. Like, I don't think of us as having.

30:20 Wes: Not in the least.

30:21 Seth: Not in the same way that you are. It's almost like I don't even think of it as two ends, you know, of a spectrum or a continuum. Like whatever it is that we're doing, we are not famous in the way that you're famous. It just doesn't seem like the same thing to me.

30:33 Lucy: Oh, well, maybe it is.

30:34 Wes: We're famous to like 10 people.

30:35 Lucy: Yeah, well, the same with me in this big scheme of things, you know, I'm not. I cannot imagine what it's like to be Tom Cruise or any of those people. And also I have an extremely private, private life, so there's no fame going on in my immediate environment. But that's. I think if you're a smart celebrity, you are also going to have a very normal life. You go off and be famous in order to service your work as a tool. But it's a terrible folly to think that all those images are real. We just had a woman in New Zealand in Australia who was attacked really viciously on Twitter and nearly committed suicide.

She was on 60 Minutes blubbing about it, but was absolutely unable to disengage. So she was a very willing participant in it. And she's on one of those sort of modeling shows where she gets to be the Simon Cowell kind of the bitch character. And then even though that may be a Persona, it comes back at you tenfold. So she was participating in her own. It's very self harming kind of thing to do, you know, if you believe in it too much.

31:38 Mark: Well, let me ask you. So just the fact that you're in the public eye so that you have all this stuff that's very easily followable about you. And I found when I got in touch with you and was just talking with you a little bit casually, I felt like I should. I wasn't sure, you know, I just read your webpage. I knew how many kids you. That you had, what the ages were, but yet I felt like it would be rude to indicate I knew that.

32:01 Lucy: No, but you did. Because the way you said something indicated that you knew something. And then it made me go and look it up. And I was absolutely amazed by the absolute schlock that was on Wikipedia. And my friends and I decided we'd just zhuzh it up and like put some really ludicrous stuff on there. I'm not sure if we even got through the. I guess there is a dragon at the gate at Wikipedia, but we were gonna really make it creative. But it's pretty nutty stuff. I don't know what webpage you read because I haven't been on a web page in years.

32:38 Mark: I just, you know, I did a search on you before I talked to you. I saw about the Arctic stuff and the trial because you just had referenced things. And in some ways, like, I could see how it would be kind of convenient for you that you don't have to keep re explaining yourself because anybody, if they could just prepare themselves before talking to you. But on the other hand, so it sort of seems rude to indicate that I knew this stuff, but also rude not to because, like, really, I'm gonna make you say that stuff again. Even though I know that, like, it's a just a weird thing.

33:06 Lucy: I don't know how other people would feel about that, but. But I wouldn't care. I don't expect people to know. And it's not important to me that they. If you can talk like a normal human being to somebody, then that's normal, isn't it? That's good.

33:18 Mark: So the reason we chose this book is because we wanted to have you on the show. You were interested potentially and I wanted to find something that we could talk about. Just the process of getting in touch with you and you tweeting about us and things led to this whole like just sense of existential weirdness that you don't get in other situations. Like, why should I be nervous talking to this person? It's just a person. I don't know if there's anything like what philosophical comes out of that. I don't know.

33:43 Lucy: No, you do get a funny reaction from some people, but I've learned to recognize that now. Like some people get a bit aggressive with you and I don't take that as an offense. That's a defense mechanism in them. But like they'll try to aggressively pretend that they don't know anything about you at all or because Xena was such a lesbian fave. You know, I get these dear little lesbians sort of standing off to the side, never making eye contact, but always their bodily energy is going towards you. It's another type. And I know exactly what you mean, but it's fading now. You know, that was a. That was from the 90s. You guys are hip now.

34:23 Seth: You've been working a little bit recently too. You have plenty of. Plenty of Spartacus fans and.

34:30 Lucy: Right. Oh my God, that's amazing. The minute I take off the costume and go, I just forget all about it, but.

34:36 Mark: Flight of the Conchords.

34:37 Lucy: So now I'm sitting in lectures and oh God, I love it so much I can't even tell you.

34:43 Wes: Are you recognized? Are you anonymous?

34:45 Lucy: I didn't really think about it too much because it's like, oh, it's New Zealand. So yes, I'm recognized, but people very quickly don't care. And I'm sitting with a bunch of 18 year olds. So when I was big there were three. So it's really rather delightful. And they just take me on as this kind of class pet. Yeah, they're really cute. Except there was a big boy in front of me, Samoan boy. And he was totally psyched to see me in the lecture class the other day. It was really cute.

35:18 Dylan: Well, you must have a couple things going on besides being famous. Also being an older student. You're going to regular classes with 19 and 20 year olds. That's also a completely different dynamic.

35:33 Lucy: Yeah, because I'm that pain in the ass, will ask the questions. I've calmed down, by the way.

35:40 Mark: The young people just sit there and take it and you gotta say.

35:45 Lucy: But there are some real advantages to being a bit older too, because they are all spending so much energy worrying about where their money's coming from. They're doing a full course, so they're absolutely stretched in every direction. They're worrying about relationships and what am I going to do in my career and my family. Whereas I'm like, like I don't care. It's all taken care of. I'm fine, you know, so I'm just loving absorbing all these ideas. It's really confronting.

36:12 Mark: Your comment about New Zealand reminds me of, I guess what, maybe Dylan was making the point earlier. So there's two sources of the fame phenomenon. One is we all want to kind of stand out in a group. So even if there were just four of us on an island, you'd still have that urge to stand out. And then on the other extreme is like the mass media, that we treat people in the mass media as if they aren't even people. That we treat them like they are TV that we are just passively watching. And so we can complain to each other and the person will never hear it because it's a one way medium and. But it seems like New Zealand is kind of, you know, since it's smaller and more. I don't know, I don't want to characterize a place that I've never been.

36:51 Wes: It's a shire, a shire model.

36:54 Mark: It's more like Aristotle's place.

36:56 Lucy: We're a really homey version of Canada. Is that what you say? No, I tell you what, you put me in mind of something we were talking the other day about, about tweeting and trolls and people objectifying the celebrities as if they're not a real person. And I told you about how in the early days of Xena, in the 90s, when the Internet was really just starting to burgeon, my husband went and downloaded some stuff. Somehow it came to my attention where a gentleman was, or somebody who purported to be a gentleman said, I'm a such and such a kind of surgeon.

And I can tell by looking at Lucy's hands that she's going to suffer from X, Y and Z in the future. Those are very marked signs. And over the next two or three months I started to manifest these problems with my hands, right? And I knew where it was coming from. I knew there was nothing wrong with me and that this person was just a bullshitter who I felt like they were trying to get at me. Eventually I reasoned that in fact they weren't trying to get me because I don't really think I'm reading this crap. But they are trying to upset the real fans, so they just want to cause toxicity everywhere they go and probably in their real lives.

It's just their pattern. Right. But I realized from that moment on that I would never admit any of this stuff into my house. Nobody's allowed to read it to me. I'm not interested. It's not real. That's been a real strength for me. The lesson was cheap at the price, but, yeah, people want to. They don't think the celebrity is real.

38:25 Mark: Well, and the way you described trolls like that is. It's an ego issue, so it's a resentment issue. So it seems like it's part of the same desire that goes into wanting to be famous. I want to be somebody, you know, is. Well, if you have no easy route to do that. So there's a sort of Nietzschean picture of the strong, successful celebrities through their own talents are the masters. And then the Internet trolls are the slaves who have no talents or whatever to no opportunity, whatever the case is, but still have that same urge to mastery. And so the.

38:58 Lucy: Right.

38:59 Mark: They're gonna end it is the only thing you can do.

39:01 Lucy: Yeah, that's that Nietzsche thing you talked.

39:04 Mark: And in fact, saying being popular is bad, that you're. You're a sellout if you're popular. You're right.

39:10 Lucy: Wow, that's. Oh, God, that's deep, Mark.

39:14 Mark: So I just used Nietzsche to suck up to Lulilaza.

39:16 Wes: All right.

39:19 Lucy: I have called myself that, by the way. Hey, and then there's the other thing. If they can't make you love them, they're going to go troll on. They're going to hate you, and they're going to. I've had them move to this country just to be closer, just to get in my face.

39:36 Wes: Wow.

39:37 Lucy: So what's that? What does that correspond to?

39:39 Seth: You know, in the book, he talks about how the animal sacrifice was sort of a. An occasion to eat meat and that there's this transference almost through the blood that there's, you know, there's a sort of. There's a sort of power thing. I mean, maybe what these people want to do is they feel like if you're holding something, I'll call it transcendent or unique or some sort of spiritual power and that if they can somehow tap into that by virtue of their fame. Yeah, exactly.

40:07 Wes: Actually, we have to distinguish the typical person's relationship to celebrity from someone who could be psychotic or have a serious mental illness. Right.

40:18 Lucy: So we don't want to see it

40:19 Mark: just as an extreme of the norm

40:20 Wes: that sort of demonstrates people with schizophrenia or psychoses typically have issues relating to delusions of grand grandeur and the idea that they're a celebrity. Some sort of paranoid ideation towards a celebrity. If you want to understand celebrity, I think understanding schizophrenia and psychosis is actually a great way to start.

40:44 Seth: Well, Wes, just trying to think through some of the lines of argument in the book, by the way, for any of the listeners. It's not as though this book is like a legal treatise. It doesn't take you from argument to argument. It's kind of a little all over the map.

40:57 Wes: Yeah, I agree.

40:58 Seth: There are definitely some themes. One major theme is, is that as Dylan mentioned earlier, celebrity has always been around. Fame is a function in our society and has been throughout history and throughout different cultures. But the way in which it manifests has changed over time and made a marked change with the Enlightenment. And he talks about the cult of the individual or the elevation of the individual at one point about how when we moved into a zeitgeist where the reasoning being took center stage that celebrity didn't change, but the way in which we related to it did.

I would say that it's maybe not as extreme that these people have these reactions to Lucy in the way that they do. It's just that they are now have avenues for manifesting themselves now that they never did before with media. This is part of the negative side of it is that people have much more access and they have much more freedom to act on that.

41:57 Lucy: Yes, that makes sense.

41:58 Mark: So what do we think? Going back to the Pain's original thesis of. I mean, it sounds like. If you want to say that a lot of the things that stand out in the poor treatment of celebrities is just schizophrenics or people with unusual ego problems.

42:11 Wes: No, I'm not.

42:12 Mark: I'm.

42:12 Wes: I'm saying that that's not the typical. I'm saying we all have a relationship to celebrity that's not the most.

42:17 Mark: I'm just saying it would be very easy for Paine's argument if we could look at somebody with a mental illness of that sort as. As exhibiting the extremes of what is naturally in all of us.

42:27 Seth: Okay.

42:28 Mark: And Paine describes this in a very Freudian way, is that we have this aggression. It's not just wanting to have heroes to look up to. It's wanting to have heroes and to see them go down. I mean, what did you guys think of that part of his. Obviously, we can pick up a lot of individual occurrences of that and he has loads of little stories of that. But is that essential to celebrity itself? Or can't you just have Hometown hero is hometown hero and. And that's all just great?

42:56 Wes: No, I think it's essential in the sense that. And this is something we saw a little bit with the Freud episode Civilization and its discontents. Love and hate are intimately related. Idealization leads to demonization only if you have a reason.

43:11 Mark: If there's some turn, like you said, maybe this is saying something about your own relationships that all of your loves.

43:17 Wes: No, idealization leads to demonization because. Because the idealized object of your affections can't really live up to them. So a Kristen Stewart is bounded to be disappointing. She's bound to turn out to be human. She seems pure and innocent or whatever fantasies you want to have about her at first. She's bound to turn out to be disappointing. Granted, you have a media that's going to look for those flaws. Obviously people are motivated to be disappointed. They're trying to find.

43:50 Lucy: Yeah, because you've been made to look bigger, taller, shinier than you are. And let's face it, you're. There's six people who are doing your wigs and your makeup and sewing you into a corset and making you look a certain. And lighting you a certain way and putting words in your mouth. So you do seem like this elevated creature. But really you're just a composite of so many people's hard work and who

44:15 Mark: did your corset in preparation for today?

44:21 Lucy: I'm in a muumuu.

44:25 Wes: Let's turn on the video. Actually, we have video here.

44:28 Lucy: I love modern clothes, but. Yeah, so it's no surprise that they would be disappointed when you're not as funny. You know, it's hard to be a comedian, I think, because people want you to say something funny and you're bound to disappoint.

44:42 Mark: Yes. Steve Martin going on and talking about Art on a recent interview thing kind of like this. He just. He's with art now and so he went and did an interview and all these people were really pissed off. Like, come on, hasn't he done enough dramatic stuff and not.

44:56 Wes: He's written a novel or two now, right?

44:59 Mark: Yep.

44:59 Lucy: Yeah, we don't want them to change, do we? It's like we raised you up in a certain version of you and how dare you go and break the mold. It's not okay for you to grow outside the. Yeah, I think people feel betrayed maybe. Okay, so what do you reckon is going to happen to Lance Armstrong. Now here's a big star who, who has.

45:19 Wes: So what is, what is your view on that?

45:21 Lucy: Well, presumably everybody's doping in that sport. Yeah, right. Yeah, I don't really have a view one way or another. But if the American Doping agency is saying we're going to strip you of your honors or we're not going to recognize whatever, and the overseas one is making up their minds on the issue, what if there's an amnesty where absolutely every other guy comes out because they are having an amnesty, are they not? Where people can own up to the amount of doping they've been doing and they won't lose any of their titles or whatever, really. But I reckon for Lance Armstrong, I

45:54 Wes: think it's too late for him.

45:55 Lucy: Yeah, I do too. He's got a huge brand and, you know, he's aligned with Nike and this Livestrong thing. There's way too much to lose to.

46:03 Wes: Well, what's interesting is there's a book and I became fascinated with this and I don't even know why. I'm not like a cycling fan, but just his the level of denial versus the amount of evidence, including like 10 of his former cycling buddies. So there's an overwhelming amount of evidence against him, at least based on the testimony of these people. And you have to believe there's a conspiracy for them to be lying. But Armstrong sort of has this level of. He has an incredible amount of self righteous anger against all these people and he's defended himself relentlessly. So it creates the impression of, well, this guy really believes he's innocent. So it's an interesting phenomenon where I think it's almost like he believes his sort of hard earned celebrity. I think to him it doesn't matter whether or not he was actually doping.

46:56 Lucy: Yeah. Because that was the playing field he was on. Right. That was. Everybody was doing it.

47:01 Wes: Exactly. Everyone was doing it. And so his outrage is that it's unfair that his position should be taken away from him when that's what everyone was doing. Yeah.

47:10 Seth: I think living as I do in his hometown, or at least his residence, I can tell you that it's too big of a machine and it's too big of a brand to fail.

47:20 Lucy: Too big to fail.

47:22 Seth: Lance is too big to fail. They can't disappear.

47:25 Wes: We gotta bail them out.

47:26 Lucy: Yeah. Because it's like cancer will never be cured. If we, as we back up on the site.

47:33 Mark: Cancer's too big to fail in a

47:36 Lucy: kind of a way. I kind of do forgive. I go Oh, I kind of get that, to be honest with you. If everybody was doing it, I agree. You would have to have that massive amnesty to get your sport clean. And do people really want the sport clean? Anyway, I wonder where we would be if, you know, we've got Usain Bolt coming down here next week or something. So where would man sport records be if there was no doping? I wonder.

48:03 Wes: Right.

48:03 Seth: You wouldn't see Olympics records getting set at the Olympics, and there's probably no television ratings and seeing people perform the same thing over and over again. Right. We want to see them go faster and be stronger. There's no money in catching people for doping.

48:16 Lucy: Maybe that's why the Paralympics are now. They're so cool because it's at the forefront of human endeavor for real, whether it's technology and humans or whatever. But it seems to have a cachet that it never did before.

48:28 Wes: I saw that. Yeah, I've seen a few of those races online, and they're exciting.

48:33 Lucy: They really are.

48:34 Wes: Yeah.

48:34 Seth: That reminds me, when you were talking about celebrity and then you mentioned Lance, I was thinking of my boyhood hero, Cal Ripken, who's a baseball player for the Baltimore Orioles. And he's everything that you just described before about being this paragon of virtue. Hometown boy, beautiful family, great performer, you know, and I don't think people would want to see him fail or find out that he was an adulterer or whatever. That it would really, truly be crushing. Like it would certainly.

49:03 Lucy: Honestly, America. I wish she'd. I wish America would get over that one. Honestly. All that nonsense about somebody was an adulterer. Oh, my God.

49:13 Seth: Yeah, yeah.

49:13 Lucy: Grow up. Shit happens. Marriages, you don't know what's going on in a marriage. But yes, he is famous.

49:18 Wes: It is devastating, though. I cried for a week after Kristen Stewart cheated on her.

49:24 Lucy: Cheated on you.

49:27 Wes: It was like the worst, worst thing that ever happened to me.

49:33 Mark: I'm speechless.

49:35 Seth: Maybe if we. Maybe if we found out that he was running a dog fighting ring. How's that? Is that a better.

49:40 Lucy: That's much worse.

49:41 Seth: Yeah, I agree. I agree 100%.

49:43 Wes: I cried for 3 days after Michael Vick went to jail anyhow.

49:47 Seth: All right.

49:48 Mark: I have an alternative to the aggression thesis, which is just that our minds are limited. You know, maybe we evolved in small groups, and so we can only deal with a limited number of faces. You know, we've got all this mass media, we have all these people sort of we could be right into our pantheon of people that we call our friends. So the celebrities are the Ones that intrude the most are most successful in establishing that place in us. And since we have a limited amount of attention in that way, we guard it jealously. So if somebody does let us down or they start doing something like Steve Martin not doing comedy, that.

50:27 Lucy: That.

50:28 Mark: That's not why I let you in my mind in the first place. Screw you. And then it, like, produces this unwarranted aggressive reaction. But really, it's just this sort of simple that we want to have. Like, the government is just too big thinking about the government in general, so we have a face to put on the government, and we talk about the president in particular. And that's one of the reasons why you would maybe still have kings, say, in a parliamentary system and why we retain a president today. It's not just the efficiency of the form. It's having the figurehead. It's having these identifiable individuals that represent things. And that's just one of the ways we work psychologically.

51:04 Wes: I think one of the crucial things here is that you don't get the demonization without the idealization to begin with. You have to really idealize. You have to have that kind of delusion in order to get the concern about whether Kristen Stewart is cheating.

51:20 Dylan: I find myself a little bit pausing about this because it seems to me that the whole issue about fame in Paine's book is much broader than the question of the way we treat celebrities. That seems to be one piece of it, the demonization and stuff like that. But the flip side of it would be, again, I'm just brought back to the question of people wanting to gain notoriety themselves and not just attending to it, but in political organizations. If we just go back to forming gangs and wanting to be at the top, whether you're Julius Caesar or.

51:55 Wes: Or Achilles or whatever, is that typical? How many people are trying to gain notoriety?

52:00 Dylan: Well, I think there's two things that are happening there. One is that people are gaining notoriety of themselves. They want to be the top, the one in the group. And then there are people who associate themselves, want to associate themselves with that. You can't have a Julius Caesar.

52:15 Wes: The entourage.

52:16 Dylan: Yeah, the entourage. You can't have a Julius Caesar unless you have all of his centurions or Napoleon without his dedicated soldiers who are willing to throw themselves on a pike for Napoleon, whom they just know the idea of.

52:30 Lucy: Well, you're right. That's why you have to give them a little bit of something all the time. You have to nourish that bloody fan base a bit.

52:38 Dylan: That's how you act as being a person, taking care of and tending your fame. So then there's the aspect of wanting to be that person, because not everybody wants to be that person. Some people just want to be associated with it, but they don't want to be that.

52:54 Lucy: They're the ones who get really mad if they get rejected. The ones who want to be associated with that for the sheer sake of touching fame up close and personal, they get really mad if they are disallowed.

53:06 Mark: They should be satisfied with their relics. 8 by 10 glossy. They can purchase a deal and carry around in there.

53:12 Lucy: Yeah. This is a shard from the crucifix from episode 13.

53:20 Seth: So, Lucy, did you always want to be famous?

53:24 Lucy: Have you been reading, like, really old bios or something?

53:27 Seth: I have not.

53:28 Wes: I'm just going, what is it like to be famous? Was it surprising to become famous?

53:36 Lucy: Wes, I don't even want to talk to you anymore. Okay. But, Seth. Yes, my friend? When I was too young to remember this, my godfather was out picking up washing on the line. He says, what do you want to be when you grow up, Lucy Ryan? And I said, said, famous. I think I saw things on TV, but I remember being 8 and watching television and hearing an ad, and my brother said, oh, somebody, they get paid a lot of money to do those ads. And I went, oh, my God, that's a job. I could do that. You know, it was like a voiceover for an ad. I could do that. And then it was like, oh, yeah. That struck me as being a really cool and kind of easy job to do.

54:16 Mark: But I'm glad you took the easy.

54:22 Wes: The easy way always leads to greatness.

54:25 Lucy: Going to school is not so easy. It's a lot of hours of very boring stuff, and you might never get up. But that's what craft is about.

54:32 Wes: It's easy to take the hard way after you've already taken the easy way.

54:35 Lucy: Oh, I was eight, for Christ's sake. I didn't do it all. When I'm not talking to you, Steph, say something.

54:40 Seth: Well, you do hear that, though. You do hear. There definitely seems to be, in some people, like, a certain craving for fame, whether it's for the notoriety or the. What attends fame, you know, the wealth and all those sorts of. Of things. And maybe it's something that's, you know, Payne's point is that fame is a mechanism in our culture and always has been, right? That, like I said earlier, it's a relationship between an individual and the community, and that as the individual famous person ceases to fulfill a certain function. Then we replace them with. It's almost like we need to have this role played and that there seem to be people who desire to play that role from a very early age. You hear stories of people say, oh, I knew I wanted to be famous when I was younger.

55:23 Lucy: You can say famous, but you don't know. Know what that is. It just looks like something alluring when you're a kid. So you can say that that's not really the point. The point is that you're probably a bit of an exhibitionist. You're a bit of a show off as a kid. And that means you're going to get up and do the acting at school or be in the play or whatever it is. And that is going to, with any luck and with a lot of hard work and managing your neuroses, roll out into a kind of a career. So don't you have that in your line of work? Right, Mark?

55:52 Mark: No, I feel the sense of I want to be a causal agent in some way. It's another way of saying the. I want to be somebody that is. It's sort of irritating that so many things. It sounds like one of the bad guys from a Cormac McCarthy novel that there's so many things going on in the world that I did nothing to bring about.

56:11 Wes: Yeah.

56:13 Lucy: Are there not stars in your line of work? There really are, aren't there?

56:17 Mark: Philosophy stars are different.

56:18 Wes: There are stars, but I'm not one of them.

56:20 Mark: Them.

56:21 Lucy: And so I think you

56:25 Mark: just think in academics as a whole, you don't really get that it's, you know, the most.

56:30 Wes: You get academic stars, but you, you know.

56:33 Mark: Yeah, but the most prominent among them, very often I can email and they will respond just like as if I was their student asking them about office hours. The most famous philosophy people are still very, very unfamous. You know, maybe if you actually get somebody who is a media whore, whatever that means.

56:50 Lucy: Some lecturers are just so. It's so exciting.

56:53 Wes: Patricia Churchland is one thing. Lucy Lawless is entirely different category.

56:58 Lucy: Well, I don't know what that means, but certainly there are lecturers that are really exciting to be in their class,

57:03 Wes: you know, and, and I'm, I'm one of those lecturers except that I don't lecture.

57:08 Lucy: And I've got to say both conventions were just knockout this year year spending

57:14 Wes: time and Clinton was amazing.

57:16 Mark: Say something to relate that back to the book Getting a Sense of Vertigo.

57:21 Wes: We're trying to entertain Mark. The imperative is to entertain first and

57:25 Mark: Foremost, talking about how great Clinton was is probably not anything people have not already heard.

57:31 Wes: Clinton is a fucking grade A celebrity.

57:33 Lucy: Except was he not booed last time? Booed?

57:37 Mark: I didn't remember that, but I don't know that I was paying enough attention.

57:40 Wes: I think he must have dreamt that

57:42 Seth: the last Democratic National Convention.

57:44 Lucy: Yeah, he was booed. And Obama didn't talk to him for several months after that. And there were a lot of hurt feelings. That's why it was surprised that he came out of the states.

57:56 Wes: It's no secret that him and Obama don't get along and they've had their conflicts. But this time Clinton was amazing. Yeah, that's the role of charisma in establishing celebrity. I mean, for Clinton, I think his charisma means he actually communicates with people. He actually is interested in arguments. I mean, if you look at that speech, you see the whole thing is filled with numbers. It's filled with statistics. And given the conventional wisdom, you'd be flabbergasted why a speech like that would ever win people over. But it's the way he did that. His tone, his charisma, his use of

58:31 Mark: humor, because he said that about the booing. I looked up Clinton booed 2008 convention and the first result I got was Honey Boo Boo. Ratings match. Bill Clinton, DNC speech.

58:44 Wes: Yeah.

58:46 Mark: Tells you about this new culture.

58:48 Lucy: Honey Boo Boo, Honey Boo Boo child. Even I from New Zealand have heard of Honey Boo Boo child.

58:57 Mark: I almost didn't want to talk about the fame for fame's sake, which seems to be what reality TV is. But do we have anything intelligent to say about that? How does that relate to the overall pain thesis or anything important, like why

59:09 Dylan: would you want to be on Jersey Shore?

59:11 Mark: Well, I had made the point earlier that if we only have so much space in our brains for famous people, because really they're occupying the same space, I think that our friends and parents and things do. And so that's. It's an extension of that, then we actually expect it to be meritocratic, that we expect that it's. The excellent ones will be the ones who make it in there. And when somebody does it through a reality TV show, unless you're counting, like American Idol as a reality TV show, which you know, expressly has, these are standards. You may not agree with the standards, but if you watch it enough, you can see the logic of them.

And the people that then get most famous out of that actually meet these standards of excellence. That's certainly not the way almost any other Reality TV kind of setup works. So you just get. It's almost like they're created to infuriate us as well as just being something to kill an hour and make a show cheaply. But to be incensed that we're watching. It's this self loathing and people love

1:00:09 Lucy: to watch people that they can't stand. I must say, even the characters I've played are a little bit like that. You know, the character you love to hate. And the vote for the worst.com, that's in the Tom Paine book where people, was it on Big Brother or American Idol, would vote for the person with the least charisma, the least talented person, and they would want to keep them on because that gave them a perverse delight.

1:00:31 Mark: We brought up in our humor episode a while ago when we were talking about Sacha Baron Cohen and the whole like pranks on real people and how you know a lot of the jokes. If he did it with actors, maybe you'd. At least Dylan was arguing that that would be more palatable. But I feel like that part of the joy that we get out of seeing comedy, like if you add the realism element to it, like, oh, it's that more raw. So it's the same like I could see an action movie or I could see Jackass where they're actually doing these things and potentially hurting themselves. And so maybe it's the same thing that like, yeah, we might like to see some of your characters or Dabney Cole or whoever, these people we love to hate. But seeing people we that are really like that is even better to a certain mindset.

1:01:11 Lucy: But the authenticity of the straight man is what makes them so painfully funny. Right. When Sacha Baron Cohen is doing a poo or something in that Southern woman in a bag or something. Do you remember? And you know that this poor woman is in a panic on the inside. There's something so painfully authentically funny about that that we love that. Ooh, how naughty we are, huh? Witnessing somebody's pain.

1:01:41 Mark: Yeah, so. And then we could link the meritocracy thing back to politics. Like something that just irritated me all through Bush's presidency was just as somebody who's casually just glancing at the news, like I get to hear every minute like what this guy thinks. But this is sort of before I was into Twitter or these other things like that, or at least had those as an option. Now maybe it's an option to pick the most intellectual luminaries or somebody you actually think is your hero and kind of Hook into them so that you're getting on a daily basis what they think and not just who the media thinks you should care about.

Because it's easy to just get irritated about that, about the politicians that you don't think deserve to be in there because the system is fundamentally flawed and maybe anybody that's in that position is going to be subpar. And plus, of course, the regular celebrities. And you're saying, why do I have to hear about what Tony Dens.

1:02:31 Lucy: The things about, you know, just because he's a sage. Okay,

1:02:39 Mark: okay. That's a bad example to him.

1:02:42 Lucy: One summer. I. I serious. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I made the terrible mistake. There was a man fishing off the wharf and his little boy. They only spoke Spanish. And, and anyway, I made the mistake of going saying, hey, instead of your little boy and wife sitting there in the sun, you sit under my house here. And then I hear, Lucy, you got some explaining to do. Which I totally did not get that joke at the time. I didn't know what he was going on about. He was very cross with me for inviting strangers to relax on our beach because it's. Apparently it's Malibu and not anybody's allowed to be there. Oh.

1:03:21 Seth: Not just strangers, but civilians, as Elizabeth Hurley said. Didn't he mention that?

1:03:25 Mark: Right.

1:03:26 Wes: Civilians.

1:03:26 Seth: She calls non famous people civilians.

1:03:28 Wes: Is that how you refer to non celebrities, civilians?

1:03:31 Seth: Yes, that's what Elizabeth Hurley says, according to him. Wow.

1:03:35 Lucy: Anyway, yeah, Tony's amazing.

1:03:41 Mark: Okay. Name dropping is okay. I guess that's fine.

1:03:45 Lucy: I'm just trying to.

1:03:46 Wes: Celebrity name dropping show.

1:03:49 Seth: Okay.

1:03:50 Dylan: One thing I was thinking about when I was mentioning about philosophy and fame was the phenomena of philosopher philosophers wanting to develop schools where they consciously want to become famous and court students and put forth a particular point of view and tend to that by trying to make sure they get lots and lots of students or acolytes and maybe an entourage of some sort. And sometimes it happens with the individual philosopher and sometimes it happens with their own followers. Descartes, like this. Right. There was a whole Cartesian school for a long time.

1:04:26 Lucy: Time. But he wasn't there.

1:04:27 Wes: Right.

1:04:28 Lucy: He was long gone. So who's.

1:04:30 Dylan: I don't know enough about the history to know if that's true.

1:04:32 Wes: Yeah, he was long gone. There's no Descartes entourage.

1:04:35 Lucy: He didn't have any.

1:04:37 Mark: Ayn Rand had an entourage. If you're talking modern, cultish. Yeah.

1:04:41 Seth: What do you mean?

1:04:42 Mark: Head.

1:04:43 Seth: She still does. If our Facebook page is any indication.

1:04:46 Mark: She's dead, so she can't have an Entourage.

1:04:49 Wes: She's actually running for vice president right now. Know that.

1:04:54 Seth: I mean, if you ask yourself, like, who would you say is the most famous philosopher right now?

1:04:58 Wes: Ayn Rand.

1:04:59 Mark: Famous living philosopher.

1:05:01 Dylan: Steven Pinker.

1:05:02 Wes: Habermas. Habermas.

1:05:04 Dylan: Habermas is still alive.

1:05:06 Wes: Yeah.

1:05:06 Mark: He's really old.

1:05:08 Wes: Or Zizek, actually. Probably Zizek.

1:05:10 Seth: Yeah, probably Zizek.

1:05:12 Mark: And Lucy, do you know who either of those people is? So there you go.

1:05:16 Wes: So they're not really famous. They're definitely not famous. I know they're not famous. To the famous. Famous people definitely do not find them famous.

1:05:25 Lucy: They think you're famous.

1:05:29 Wes: Yes.

1:05:31 Mark: Anything else interesting from the book so far? I think my interpretation of the limited mental space is Winning over pains. We want to kill all of them, but is there anything to add to either of those?

1:05:43 Dylan: I'm sorry I keep harping on this, but I still don't get at least half of the book. Look, and here's me being irritable. Right, Lucy? So

1:05:54 Wes: vintage Dylan. That's what you're famous for.

1:05:59 Lucy: Go Dylan.

1:06:00 Dylan: Half the issue is people wanting to be wanting. It's not just being irritated about people who are famous and having them having things that you think are unworthy, getting into your cognitive space and stuff like that. Like that. It also has to do with wanting to be the people in that cognitive space or getting there and what you do about it. For instance, I have a hard time believing that people who write books don't want them to be successful. And I've never really believed in bands who go out and play music and say they don't want it to actually take off.

1:06:38 Mark: It might be among a select audience. Maybe they're not right. It's the same with philosophers aren't necessarily searching for mass acclaim, but they want to be famous and do something substantial in the field. They want a community of philosophers to respect them.

1:06:53 Dylan: So that brings me to the idea of the distinction, if there is, between sort of relative kinds of fame. So Habermas is famous in philosophy. I mean, Lance Armstrong as a cyclist with his fight against cancer and him becoming a brand, and he transcended that particular sport.

1:07:11 Lucy: He's going out with musicians, you know.

1:07:14 Wes: Yes, Danny.

1:07:15 Dylan: Sheryl Crowe was probably.

1:07:17 Wes: Yes, there you go.

1:07:18 Dylan: But there are plenty of other cyclists who are famous as cyclists, and there are all kinds of recreational and serious amateur cyclists who would just be going gaga over meeting them or thrilled to be in their presence.

1:07:33 Mark: It's funny, though, that you don't hear the term like you hear, oh, this person's an actor's actor. Maybe the person's not so famous, but all the other actors think that this actor is awesome. Or you could have a musician's musician, but you never have a cyclist's cyclist, even though that's exactly what you're describing. I've never heard that term.

1:07:51 Seth: Well, yeah, we haven't.

1:07:54 Wes: Those are the guys who refuse to dope and they stay at a different level. I read an article about this recently. There are lots of cyclists who say, you know, they get to the point where they. Yeah, I could do the Tour de France. I could go to that level, but I'm not willing to make the sacrifice and say, I'm going to be the national champion or whatever I'm going to do without dubbing.

1:08:14 Mark: You will not put your soul at risk. You will not enter into conflict with Shigur and.

1:08:19 Wes: Exactly. I do not want to be corrupted with my confrontation with absolute evil.

1:08:24 Lucy: I guess that explains why there is Runner magazine. Because I was always like, is that like one edition? How can you. How can you possibly say about walking really, really hard?

1:08:37 Mark: 10 tips to run Faster.

1:08:40 Lucy: But I suppose there's always a fresh runner's runner along every moment. Just like virgins. Just like. Just like acolytes.

1:08:49 Mark: And with runners, you can just stand there and they just run by. You don't have to do any.

1:08:52 Wes: When do you run except when you're afraid that you're going to be killed? You see a few lines, then you run.

1:09:02 Seth: Or you're going to be late. Maybe that might be another.

1:09:04 Wes: Or you're going to be late. Yeah, there you go.

1:09:07 Lucy: What about celebrity criminals?

1:09:10 Seth: Okay.

1:09:10 Mark: Like Bonnie and Clyde? Is that. Or you're talking like O.J. simpson?

1:09:14 Lucy: I don't know. There's a. There's devoted to it.

1:09:17 Wes: How many celebrity criminals are there? Are there enough?

1:09:20 Dylan: Are you thinking of ones who become

1:09:21 Mark: celebrities by being criminals or the ones who are celebrities first and then become criminals?

1:09:26 Lucy: Oh, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I mean serial murderers. You know, there's.

1:09:29 Dylan: Yeah. John Hinckley and what's the guy in Wisconsin who ate all the.

1:09:34 Wes: Oh, Jeffrey Dahmer.

1:09:35 Mark: Jeffrey Dahmer lived in Madison. Yeah. Somebody that my sister knew when she

1:09:40 Seth: went to school here.

1:09:41 Mark: Knew him. There you go.

1:09:44 Wes: Sweet gun.

1:09:46 Dylan: Or Manson. Charles Manson would be the biggest one, right?

1:09:49 Lucy: Yeah, yeah.

1:09:50 Wes: Well, he definitely used his celebrity to get other people to perform criminal acts.

1:09:55 Dylan: So what were you thinking, Lucy, about that?

1:09:57 Lucy: I know. I was just wondering what it is. But I suppose it's because of their extreme aberrant natures that we hold Them up as they're sort of a scarecrow, maybe.

1:10:06 Wes: Are you plotting something? Are you trying to use your celebrity to.

1:10:10 Mark: She doesn't need that as a career move, Wes.

1:10:12 Lucy: Okay, Wes, Wes, am I getting aggression from you? What's going on? What's going on, dude?

1:10:18 Wes: No, I have a.

1:10:20 Seth: Sorry, I have to ask. Would that be infamy as opposed to being famous? I mean, what is the difference between being famous and being infamous? You're being. You're infamous if you famous for doing something bad. Bad, Right.

1:10:32 Wes: Isn't that what is famousness?

1:10:34 Seth: I don't know. We don't have a fami. We just have infamy.

1:10:38 Mark: Famous.

1:10:40 Wes: I'm famished. When Britney Spears do something, I am famished.

1:10:47 Seth: Well, I think that's Somebody must be.

1:10:51 Wes: What is that?

1:10:52 Seth: Those are the dogs that are alerting me to the fact that, I don't know, there could be a deer in the neighborhood, that they're just gonna go apeshit. No, I, I. This kind of brings up Dylan. What? I thought you were on the different kinds of fame. Sorry, hold on just one second.

1:11:07 Mark: The dogs have spotted Tony Danza.

1:11:11 Seth: I just realized I was talking to Lucy Lawless.

1:11:13 Wes: Yeah, the dogs can sense Lucy Lawless. That's the obvious explanation.

1:11:17 Seth: Well, you can be famous for creating art, okay? So that's what Lucy does. That's what Cy Twombly did. That's what artists do. You can be famous for doing something. That's what Lance Armstrong is famous for. Right? Or the guy, you know, climbing a mountain or doing great feats. Michael Phelps and. And then Hercules. You could be famous for being famous for being.

1:11:40 Lucy: Or for being beautiful, which is a little different, isn't it?

1:11:43 Dylan: Hello, Troy.

1:11:44 Wes: It's really the only reason anyone should be famous is for being beautiful.

1:11:50 Seth: And then, you know, then there's people who are famous because they're put on reality TV shows, right? They're famous for just being famous. To me, those are different kinds of things. And I think that's where this structure that he puts together in the book kind of breaks down. Because I can imagine a situation where you treat the people on the reality TV shows. They're like the ritual animals of the slaughter, right? We sprinkle a little water on their head, they shake it and make it look like they're willing participants and what have you. And then we love to see them torn down.

It's a train wreck waiting to happen. That's what those shows are all about. It's about the pain. It's about the violence. But when you're talking about somebody who's got fame for creating something or for achieving something and then something bad happens to them, it forms a different kind of function. The people who use it in the same way that they use that other function, I think, are the deviants or the people that Lucy was talking about earlier about those kind of weirdos that do that, as opposed to the people who are genuinely empathetic and where the artist or the creator or the actor, they're somehow creating an empathetic bond.

1:12:50 Lucy: Except that the fame is really a product of the many. I certainly know in my case, it's very little to do with me because I am saying somebody else's words. I'm just the most public face of everybody else's hard work. And so everything that they take from that show about the meaning of the show and the interactions with the characters are nothing to do with me. So when, you know the fabulousness of. Certainly of Battlestar Galactica, which I was such a small part of, you kind of get all this reflected. I don't know. People are projecting onto you their vision. It really is no bearing on reality.

1:13:25 Mark: But you know that your comment about the reality TV stars. Maybe there's more similarity to the fame of select reality TV stars to the other kinds of fame that we might think that it's not that they're famous just for being famous. So there are a lot of people profiled on Toddlers and Tiaras, but there's only one freaking Honey Boo Boo and her crazy monster. And like, so it's like they're being.

1:13:46 Lucy: That's freak shows.

1:13:47 Mark: Beautiful. Or that's freak, isn't it?

1:13:49 Lucy: It's really that. That's the Bearded Lady. That's the. I mean, literally, you want to see the most horrifying exemplars of our society. And there you have it.

1:14:01 Dylan: That's an interesting thing. The distinction between. Do we want to call that fame? Exactly. The fame for Freak show, the Bearded Lady.

1:14:09 Mark: It's not infamy because they didn't do anything bad, but it is more similar to that.

1:14:13 Lucy: Yeah, yeah. They would not be famous if we weren't forcing our attention on them. You know, they might participate in it, but if we didn't show any interest in them, they would have gone back to their normal.

1:14:25 Wes: It's hard to look away, though.

1:14:29 Lucy: Do you really watch that? Seriously?

1:14:31 Mark: I googled it at one point and I watched one video of it. That's all.

1:14:34 Lucy: It's on YouTube.

1:14:35 Seth: Yeah.

1:14:35 Mark: And it was. Yeah, maybe that's all, you know, it's another meme, and it'll just go away. You know, it's interesting to compare the phenomenon of celebrities and how we're focusing on the person and how we want to, according to Paine, replace the person periodically because they serve this with just these other Internet memes. It's not that the piano playing Kitty is famous in the same way, but certainly it's serving a very similar social role, in which case, maybe it's not a matter of trying to focus on this pretend relationship that we have with the famous. Maybe it's just another aspect of it. But certainly there are a number of phenomena going on at the time. Same. Same time. And in the, you know, Kitty falling down Internet meme or whatever, you see one aspect of that that is not in the rest of them.

1:15:19 Wes: Yeah, I don't see the Kitty memes as having much to do with fame, though. Right.

1:15:24 Mark: How could you not? It's a direct.

1:15:25 Wes: They're viral.

1:15:26 Mark: They're not famous.

1:15:26 Wes: It's not like we look at. Look at the kitties and say, oh, I want to be like them. And oh, my God.

1:15:32 Mark: If we say Honey Boo Boo is relevant to this, to me, there is no difference at all. Partly because I'm not going to watch this.

1:15:37 Wes: I haven't seen Honey Boo Boo. I mean, that's more like a fascination with a train wreck.

1:15:42 Mark: It's just an Internet meme, as far as I'm concerned.

1:15:44 Wes: Is that about fame, though? Is the toddler famous or.

1:15:48 Mark: Yes, if Lucy knows who she is.

1:15:52 Wes: Yeah, but no, that's a different thing, though.

1:15:54 Mark: And she's going to be on the show next. That is true.

1:15:58 Wes: We do have her on the next show. I forgot about that. That's different than fame. We look up to Sir Richard Francis Burton and other famous actors and actresses for a different reason. It's kind of a different phenomenon than Toddler and Tiara's Star.

1:16:15 Mark: Well, I guess that's what I'm saying. That pain is shoving a lot of different things together. And maybe that's partly why it is so hard in parts to follow the logic and to sort of get an overall thesis out of it. Like, he has a point to his first essay, but then the point of the next essay is a little different. It's like he's just exploring all these different aspects of fame, and he brings up all these things, and there's still this theme of celebration, consecration, sacrifice that runs throughout. It may be that he's even trying to shove too much into that.

1:16:40 Wes: I agree.

1:16:41 Mark: One of his chapters are celebrities, anything like gods. And I immediately started thinking about just the way that me and my teenage friends would talk about music as if they were the Greek gods. And I even like putting them in trinities. It's Beatles, Stones and who was one? Trinity and the Cars, Police and the Talking Heads. Is the early 80s tril or Genesis. Yes. King Crimson or Weezer, Radiohead, Pavement or. You know, there are different trinities for different eras as far as I've concerned. And none of this, you know, even if I might think that some of those people are just so talented and I would be so stunned if I were around them.

There's no hostility in this. There's no. At least in my case, like, oh, the who sucked after this album, whatever. They should have just wrapped it up after Keith Moon died, whatever, you know, that you can see these other parts of celebrity that can inflect into them. But I got to think that they're just multiple independent phenomena here that we're not. Not really properly pulling apart. And that pain doesn't help us in that respect.

1:17:37 Seth: I agree with that. It seems like he's talking about a specific aspect or a kind celebrity, not so much fame, as a specific way that we deal with celebrities and particularly media celebrities, which is very different than,

1:17:51 Mark: again, like the high school hometown hero. Like, I think that is one of the. Especially if you're looking back in time, it's not just these people that we anoint to be gods or something. It's that in any group then we have. It's not just that some people rise to the top. It's that that's kind of the way we like it. Yeah, maybe it's a Hobbesian thing.

1:18:12 Wes: I think we should be careful to think about this as driven by our wish to become famous or to become recognized by the group. I think in general, the group needs an object of recognition. It needs to identify someone who has achieved that level of fame.

1:18:30 Mark: The popular kids in class, even in a very small group.

1:18:34 Lucy: And I wonder even in primitive cultures if ancestor worship is like. I mean, there's. Or there's. You know, there are still objectifying people without the Internet or, you know, it's just a human. The great do the lesser prattle.

1:18:49 Mark: Yeah.

1:18:49 Wes: Ancestor worship, I think is one of the prototypes for this. If you look at our Nietzsche episode on the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche at least sees this ancestor worship as the foundation for ultimately for religious experience. I don't think he's completely right about it, but I think it's important which is to say that we have this reverential feeling towards our ancestors because they make our lives possible. And ultimately we idealize them. And we generate our gods from our

1:19:20 Lucy: ancestors because they can represent our best hope.

1:19:23 Wes: We feel indebted towards them.

1:19:24 Lucy: Yes. And that makes sense, that we can be projecting our most positive hopes on these people. That's why we don't want to see Cal Ripken be brought low. And it's kind of nice. It doesn't have to be always with the eye of destroying somebody.

1:19:40 Seth: No. In fact, it can be restorative. Like it's an emblem of my faith that there's good in the world. Right. It's my. An outlet for my Anne Frank sentiment.

1:19:53 Wes: She wrote a diary before.

1:19:55 Lucy: Hey, what do you mean, your Anne Frank?

1:19:58 Seth: That I believe people are ultimately good.

1:20:01 Mark: That's something expressed in the book Anne Frank, despite the fact that she's.

1:20:05 Lucy: Yes, God bless her.

1:20:07 Dylan: Lucy, when you read this book, did anything occur to you that you thought that he utterly missed or a big theme in your own experience or observations about fame that he just missed?

1:20:20 Lucy: No, I did not have that feeling, though I didn't read the entire book. Somewhere in the middle is a big chunk. But no, I found that really revelatory. All that stuff about human sacrifice and the need to direct our aggression outwards, which was something that Wes said early on. That feels really real to me.

1:20:38 Dylan: Sure.

1:20:39 Mark: He also makes a point that this relationship that we have with celebrities has to be dynamic in some way. So if you die young, you kind of got to have it made because you have that image of you that. That's your image in the public consciousness and it might just be immortal. Maybe it'll just be forgotten, but it's perfectly possible that that could just stick there and it'll. It'll be iconic forever. But if you keep on living, people have expectations out of you and they want to. Either you have a comeback. So there's a thing about Britney Spears attempted comeback in there when she was at some awards show and she did a miserable job and it was not the perfection that people were expecting. And so it's kind of. If you have a second act, then people will be happy to cheer for you or happy to boo for you, but they can't just be indifferent.

1:21:25 Seth: Right.

1:21:26 Mark: It has to keep their affection, has to keep moving. It's a living relationship.

1:21:30 Lucy: Yeah.

1:21:31 Mark: As long as you're not dead.

1:21:32 Lucy: But that's a bizarro kind of fame, isn't it? That's. That's celebrity. That's not really about being a successful actor or musician or whatever. That's about that interface in the magazines. I would bet you 90% of so called celebrities really rate that pretty low on their list. List of things to do in a day. But you do it because it's part of the job.

1:21:55 Mark: But don't we have the same thing, even with Tony Danza, that if he doesn't match what he did in Taxi and how cool he was in Taxi, then I'm gonna be offended. I'm gonna.

1:22:05 Dylan: I don't know.

1:22:06 Lucy: Because then there was who's the Boss thing. I mean how do you explain Two and a Half Men and all those kind of shows like America just has. There's a lot of room at the top, top for a lot of people, clearly.

1:22:21 Wes: Yes. Two and a Half Men is an abomination. And why is Tony Danza Mark your like recurring?

1:22:27 Mark: Just cuz he's away with it the first time.

1:22:30 Wes: Tony Danza.

1:22:31 Mark: Some of the attitude that we have toward past celebrities has to do with shame about our own childhood interests or childhood experiences at all. Yeah. So watching who's the Boss and like it was kind of goofy at the time and now you just like recoil from the fact that you would sit in front of a TV and watch something like that. And presumably as an adult you're not watching the equivalent that's on Nickelodeon or whatever the hell channels that they're on now. The Sweet Life with Zack and Cody or whatever the latest thing is. We're always going to have that. And so the biggest sort of celebrity punchlines are like, oh, you know, if we got Screech on here. We've made jokes about people like that in the past and I'm sure that's just going to be relative to whatever culture you're from.

1:23:17 Lucy: I sort of feel like certainly I've been one of those punchlines. It's quite hard to dig yourself out of punchline ville. Do you know what I mean? It's like if you were. Oh, that's so last century. To reinvent yourself is a major bloody. It's a hell of a lot of work to overcome that.

1:23:37 Mark: Well, good job so far on your part. Seriously.

1:23:40 Lucy: Yeah, it's working all right, but it's over a lot of years is, you know, I don't know, maybe there's hope for Tony Danza, don't you reckon? He's just.

1:23:48 Mark: I'm sure he's a wonderful man. No offense, Tony.

1:23:53 Wes: What would you be a good vehicle for his. His.

1:23:56 Mark: You know, I thought it's not that I was so nervous talking to you on this, Lucy, because we've now been communicating for a while and had time to get used to the idea. It's the fact that by being on this, it's like you're introducing us to all your friends. And so I'm.

1:24:09 Lucy: I don't have any friends. I'm just. I'm just.

1:24:13 Mark: All the people that are listening to this episode, only because you're on, they now think that we are a bunch of just totally arrogant, boring assholes that.

1:24:23 Lucy: No, they're gonna think you're really cool. But. Okay. There's a lot of weird baggage that comes with. I'm just warning you. Warning you. Now I got some doozies. And they might be the kind that Wes would like to deal with on a clinical basis. Over to you, Wes.

1:24:42 Wes: To me, yes. $300 an hour. Well, we're talking about the phenomenon of being starstruck, right? Have we not all experienced that?

1:24:50 Dylan: Have any of you guys ever been fans of somebody and then you got a chance to meet them and had to work at it?

1:24:57 Lucy: Oh, my God. Yeah. It's so embarrassing. You're just bad. You're. What could. Who do you guys feel that way about?

1:25:04 Dylan: So for me, it was Lyle Lovett.

1:25:06 Lucy: Oh, me too. Oh, my God, I love him.

1:25:08 Dylan: It was like the fourth or fifth time I saw him at a small theater. There was, like, a thousand people there, and I thought, this is gonna be the only chance I ever get to possibly, like, shake hands with this guy. So I waited outside just to get a chance to meet him. And it was clear that he wasn't coming out or whatever. So I ended up leaving. And on the way out, he was there with just his cello player. And his cello player was sitting out, just greeting people as we walked out of the. I shook his hand and started chatting with him. And it turned out that he had a sister that lived in the town next door to ours.

And they started talking, and he said, yeah, come on down to the bar. We'll be hanging out later on afterwards. So I just guessed on which it was, and so I went back and forth, back and forth. And I ended up going down to this bar, and there he was sitting at a table. And I had to work up my courage. I just went up and I said, I really enjoyed your show and just wanted to say thanks for making great music. I just felt like such a fool.

1:26:09 Lucy: When it's genuine, he could read that.

1:26:11 Dylan: Then he was really polite and just awesome and shook my hand. Well, thank you Very much. And then I just left.

1:26:19 Lucy: Oh, yeah, he would have known. That was really genuine, though. It's like the pain of the woman in the Borat movies, you know, the pain of a straight man. He would have felt the authenticity of that. And being really. He's a very gracious man, isn't it? I think he's just a critical lyricist. He's a poet.

1:26:36 Wes: I think the feeling of being starstruck is something we can't avoid, no matter how reflective we are. So in this instance, I mean, discovering that you were a fan of the show, and it's not like I was a huge fan of the Warrior Princess, but I was enough of a fan or I knew enough about it that I felt extremely nervous about emailing with you and all of the interactions that went into it. It's definitely a feel of being starstruck that went into that.

1:27:05 Lucy: Or something. Or something. Yeah. Isn't that funny? Yeah. That was so long ago. It has not much relevance. But I think you guys, as you

1:27:13 Mark: know, you're starstruck as well.

1:27:15 Wes: Obviously.

1:27:16 Lucy: Starstruck. And I could not believe I was hearing you guys in an interactive way when I talked to Mark the other day. It just gave me the giggles because I'm used to hearing you all converse and not knowing we were listening.

1:27:31 Mark: Well, that's the big thing that the media is. It's like we want to have there be this objective thing the rest of the world, and then me and my friends can snipe about it.

1:27:42 Lucy: Yeah.

1:27:42 Mark: That we're not actually then interacting with that. It just is weird. It seems wrong.

1:27:47 Lucy: And here's the other funny thing. When people interact with you and you really aren't that impressive, they're disappointed. So you are expected to play a certain role. I find that I adopt different postures. Like, if I stay on Twitter too long, I start to get savage, and I just have to, like, not go on it for two days or whatever.

1:28:06 Wes: What do you mean by savage?

1:28:07 Lucy: I just want to say mean things about the people who tweet as individuals. Not about objective, you know, some politician or whatever. More about moronic shit that comes at you. And I realize that's not really appropriate. And it also shows too much of you. It's showing your dirty laundry. And you don't want to give out that power either. You don't. You don't want people to know who you actually are.

1:28:33 Mark: Yeah, we're in a transformational spot with the way the Internet works and with Twitter, because, like, I noticed, you know, Barack Obama has a Facebook page. And you think that if you were posting comments on his Facebook page or, say, responding to his posts, you might act like he might hear about it because it's his page and probably one of his employees reads it and will read stuff back to him or something. But people respond to that with no filter whatsoever. It's like they're on YouTube putting nasty comments under videos. It's just like, no, you are the big public sphere that I can say whatever I want about, and I can just only assume that they would not say this to his face. For instance.

1:29:14 Lucy: Yeah, I had some crazy stuff the other day. It was sort of repeated hatred about something I'd purportedly done, which I had no knowledge of, and then saying, you know, I'm gonna get you for what you did to my sister, blah, blah, blah, you gonna drop a house on me? You can only respond with humor because it makes them disappear magically. But if you in any way try to explain or apologize, you're finished. They got you. You know, so. And again, that's not natural, because I'm not a particularly combative person in real life. But you must adopt a certain sort of posture in dealing with that kind of stuff comes at you.

Hey, Mark, remember we talked the other day about, you know, when you talked about how in Tom Payne's book the Girl who Heard Two, there was two boos and a thousand people cheering, but two people booing is louder than a thousand people cheering. You know, how you'll get negative letters about something that you've done recently and how that really affects you? Certainly the first time. I think Twitter's making that a much more prevalent kind of way to attack adults out there.

1:30:20 Mark: So the Internet is just ruining the concept of celebrity, and it's ruining. Everybody is. Everybody gets stalked in the same ways that celebrities. Everybody's getting stalked gets treated as the objective media, when really they're just individual people that will read your thing and aren't just so deluged by their own press that they have learned to ignore that.

1:30:40 Lucy: Well, they might not be reading it. They might be mediated by somebody.

1:30:43 Wes: And if anyone is on the fence about stalking me and would like to stalk me, fine with me.

1:30:52 Mark: Such a sexist thing to say.

1:30:53 Seth: Such a.

1:30:54 Mark: Was that sexist because it's only funny

1:30:58 Wes: because you're playing complete stretch. That's sexist that you would even say

1:31:02 Mark: that, because you would not make a joke out of that.

1:31:05 Wes: If you, in your sexist imagination, you're

1:31:09 Mark: in touch with how. What a horrible.

1:31:11 Lucy: Kirsten Stewart. If you're listening.

1:31:13 Wes: I hope she's listening.

1:31:14 Lucy: Hey, Wes, if you were getting 300 bucks an hour for this, how would you diagnose Rousseau? Do you think some of these guys, they would totally have diagnoses slapped on them these days, right, Rousseau?

1:31:26 Wes: Yeah.

1:31:27 Lucy: What would you say about him today?

1:31:28 Wes: They would say he has narcissistic personality disorder or paranoid. He has a narcissistic pathology and he's. He was extremely paranoid. That's well known.

1:31:38 Lucy: That he was from the beginning or just at the end.

1:31:40 Wes: I don't know from his birth. But I know he ended up thinking Hume, I think was out to get him and other. I don't think he should be representative of philosophers in general. As weird as philosophers.

1:31:55 Dylan: So.

1:31:55 Mark: Okay, that hasn't come up yet, but, you know, the whole way we pick topics is based on how fucked up. Well, it's. No, it's partly what we think people are going to be interested in hearing about. Some of it's our own interests. But. So, like picking this pain book. If you weren't on here and we weren't looking for something that talked about fame, there's no way we would have picked this. So we're subverting, you know, we're making Pain a celebrity. And in fact, I was looking a little about Payne as a person. I mean, he just. He did classics undergrad. He now teaches at like a public. An all boys prep school.

1:32:26 Wes: This book is not a. It's not a great book. I was not happy with this book. It was fun and I was. I mean, I suggested this book, but I'm not happy with it.

1:32:37 Mark: You did the initial Amazon search that revealed it. That is funny.

1:32:40 Wes: No, I sent you a bunch of. Dude, I sent you Walter Burkert. I sent you all the technical.

1:32:46 Lucy: He's doing it, Dylan. He's doing it.

1:32:47 Mark: This is the one that I looked up from the library. And it seemed like we could do it because it talked about Homer and other things that were respectable and then. Then the Golden Bough connection. And I was just looking up about the Golden Bow.

1:33:01 Wes: We could have read Frazer and Burkert. We could have read Weber.

1:33:05 Mark: We could have read it.

1:33:06 Wes: Charismatic Power. We could have read the.

1:33:08 Mark: We could not have Lucy to read it because it would be very rude to do that.

1:33:12 Seth: You couldn't force Seth to read it. What are you talking about?

1:33:15 Lucy: Yeah. And impossible. And impossible.

1:33:16 Wes: We wanted to make things easy because we really had no confidence. We didn't believe that Lucy would actually. Come on. I mean, I'm still shocked.

1:33:26 Seth: That's not True. Once she committed, we knew it was going to happen. But it's not like I didn't believe

1:33:31 Wes: it until I actually heard her.

1:33:33 Lucy: Okay, we're Schopen—.

1:33:34 Wes: I'm still actually in disbelief that she.

1:33:38 Lucy: What about Schopenhauer? How would you diagnose him? He's such nutty guys.

1:33:44 Wes: Just depression, I think. He's a straightforward depression. Right.

1:33:50 Lucy: I don't know you. I'm totally to this.

1:33:52 Mark: But these guys, when you're actually depressed, then you have low energy. When you are so into, like, the pessimistic views of life that you do translations of the Upanishads for your own enjoyment, that's not something else.

1:34:10 Wes: Yeah. He wasn't depressed in the sense that he sat on the couch and ate Doritos and watched Ricki Lake all day. He produced something, actually.

1:34:18 Mark: We don't know, though, how much that time people spend creating these things that they're famous for. Is, of course, in most cases, unless they're like Voltaire, who is writing every day.

1:34:26 Wes: He didn't have to work for a living.

1:34:28 Mark: Like, he was a trust fund baby.

1:34:31 Wes: He had lots of time to be depressed. And he had his poodles and, you know, he was into poodles. Right. Now he's into poodles. And he. He was a trust fund kid and he could do what he wanted. Yeah, he was brilliant, too, and I'm glad he did a good job, but he was depressed.

1:34:48 Lucy: They're all such oddballs, aren't they? I really. I mean, it's so thrilling, really, about them. Heidegger, would you give him a diagnosis?

1:34:56 Wes: We'd have to leave it to Seth. I'm not. I don't know.

1:34:59 Seth: I don't know enough about clinical diagnosis. But.

1:35:02 Wes: But give us your intuition.

1:35:04 Lucy: What do you reckon?

1:35:05 Seth: He had some childhood issues that made him extremely nostalgic for some sort of idealized pastoral past that probably never existed. And he was in complete denial about the realities of the society and political situation that surrounded him. He was exceptionally naive, I think.

1:35:26 Wes: I don't fault him for being a Nazi.

1:35:27 Mark: And intimacy issues.

1:35:29 Lucy: What did you say? I don't fault him for being a Nazi. Was he really a Nazi Nazi or is he just.

1:35:34 Wes: Yes, he was officially a Nazi, Actually, he was. Officially. He wasn't just. He wasn't metaphorically Nazi. He was officially a Nazi.

1:35:42 Seth: Yeah, let's get sidetracked. He did some very terrible things to Husserl as well. Personally terrible. Who was his teacher.

1:35:53 Lucy: And that's getting him kicked out or something of the school, essentially.

1:35:57 Seth: Yeah, yeah.

1:35:58 Mark: No, library privileges.

1:35:59 Wes: I didn't know that.

1:36:00 Mark: Well, it was on the episode you were on. We talked about my favorite.

1:36:03 Wes: I forgot that that was mostly you.

1:36:06 Lucy: And did it live with Mark.

1:36:09 Mark: I was reading some Martin Buber in preparation for a potential future episode. And he actually wrote about Heidegger's view of sort of what the ideal is. And thought it very peculiar that his ideal did not involve other people. That it was about attaining this authenticity to yourself and breaking away from the they, the crowd. But that it did not ultimately rest as Buber thought the existential ideal should be. In an authentic relationship with another person where you're accepting them as they are and seeing them as full people and all this.

That he had a very weird, immature. And I'm sure that had something to do with his emotional capacities. So there you go. And we can even relate that back to our damn topic by. What is fucked up about our relationship with celebrities is because, of course, even though maybe they in some way occupy the same kind of brain space as the people we actually know, we're not having real relationships with them. Even if we carry around their pubic hairs in jars like in the movie Slacker where they have a Madonna.

1:37:12 Lucy: Oh, so tempting.

1:37:15 Wes: No, but what we do, I mean, we have these weird relationships to people who are teachers, parental figures. We have these relationships where we identify with people who we aspire to be in some way. We aspire to be better than we are. We aspire to be a great trumpet player, a great writer, or I think most people. This idea of greatness, or at least of being exceptional has a really important function in their psyche. And that's where fame comes in. Fame is often about. I mean, as much as we like to decry the fact that people are famous for being famous and they're not really that. That great and this and that. Really, when we think about fame, we're thinking about people who are exceptional at something. That's what we aspire to.

1:38:04 Mark: Does that work for you, Dylan?

1:38:06 Dylan: That's why fame exists, or that's our relationship with fame, is that we aspire.

1:38:10 Mark: That is our motivation. That was. You were focusing on that part of the puzzle. I'm trying to get at some summaries of our views so we can.

1:38:17 Lucy: That's all right. That's the right side of it. Right. That's why that fame exists from the famous persons. I think people like having that one way relationship where they have all the power. And that's just what you were saying about that whole Nietzsche bringing down the aristocracy. Yep.

1:38:32 Mark: The Resentment of the weak.

1:38:33 Lucy: We don't want to see them as real people because then we might have to feel something. We want to be able to objectify them, raise them high and bring them low. And I will.

1:38:41 Mark: And yet we want them to be our best friends in some sense. At least that's one of the things

1:38:45 Lucy: that pain on their terms, though only on your terms terms. You'd be friends with me when I want you. And when you say, well, sorry, I've got a life, I've got children, or I'm too busy, you broke the fourth wall. You ruined the fantasy.

1:39:00 Dylan: Fame would not be compatible with friendship in the sense that you would have to have a different relationship with that person. So, like, the only way in which I've ever experienced this from the standpoint of the little teeny, tiny bit of having people. Something like fame is relationships with students in that they will. Just because I was their teacher or because they had seen me give a lecture or something like that, they would have to work up the courage to come and talk to me. And I would say in class, well, you know, if you want to go out and get a cup of coffee and talk about something, come and get a hold of me.

And so they will. And then they won't have anything to say. I have to run the whole conversation. And so that relationship is completely different than the relationship that I have with my other colleagues or my wife or my family. And I'm imagining that's exactly the same thing that has to happen if you're, you know.

1:39:49 Lucy: Yeah, because friends don't want you to be a celebrity. My friends and I never watch each other's shows. We don't even know when they're on. Nobody cares.

1:39:58 Seth: So to recap, some of the big themes that I thought were interesting was, you know, the idea that fame is kind of a power relation between groups and individuals that has persisted in society, at least in Western society, for a long time, and just manifests itself in different ways. And it's an interesting power dynamic that's asymmetric because as Lucy just mentioned, the group or the community has power over the individual. And at the same time, the individual is the one who can give the community what they want. The only issue is that the individual is replaceable in a lot of ways and the community is not.

But I still feel like the book is kind of a gloss on the. I still stand by my thesis that there are different kinds of fame or you're being famous for different reasons. Being famous for different reasons changes the dynamic of Fame in some way, shape or form that we haven't fully articulated, but I think we touched on a little bit.

1:40:53 Dylan: I agree with that last point, Seth. And we didn't talk much about political fame. And I think that the reasons why you would pursue fame and the ways in which you would have to tend to it and also the ways in which it might turn on you or not probably depends a lot on what particular kinds of things you're famous for and what sort of your subgroup, who your fan base are, for lack of a better term.

1:41:17 Mark: I guess as my closing, I'd want to just say a little more about the book. I thought it was pretty fun and I'm almost sad to hear you. If I was in a very critical mood, I would agree with you, Wes. You know, it's obviously not written by a philosopher. There are philosophical issues here, but it's more like he read about the trial of Socrates and doesn't know. Know so much about the Platonic dialogues involved or any of that kind of stuff. It's a history and classics and literature approach to this topic, as opposed to a philosophical approach to this topic, which is a little problematic in that it's basically a philosophical thesis on par with the kind of thing that we saw in Freud's book of philosophy, Civilization and Its Discontents that we read.

But yet he doesn't really know how to systematically analyze it. And. And there are just a lot of interesting individual insights, but they're kind of scattered all over the place. And I sort of don't want to be mean to him because he's not famous. And I don't. I feel like the irreverence. The irreverence, like I can say Leibniz is a bastard or whatever because who cares if you know, Leibniz is secure in the canon. But like this guy who is basically one of us, that he is not a formal academic, but yet he's a smart guy. When to Cambridge and like went and got a book deal and did all this research and now he's being interviewed on NPR and other things about this, like, I just want to applaud the guy because I feel like I.

One of my remedies for maybe not treating like I was referring to how most other musicians and music fans attitudes towards artists I find appalling, you know, that they're so ready to dismiss, like, oh yeah, that's his sucky period and stuff. Whereas I'm just like, I want to follow whoever the artist is through all their ups and downs and even sort of the early 80s, Neil Young, or whatever the equivalent is for you that other people might discard. I will try to see more from their point of view. So maybe the way to think about it is I compare other people's accomplishments not to this high bar of what should be allowed to enter my consciousness and the culture.

Because, you know, there's a lot of great, great literature and great, great philosophy out there. And if you're really protective of your time and you're like, ah, why am I letting this shit cross my palate? I am so offended. It's easy to be snarky like that. But if I compare their accomplishments not with Leibniz, but with my own accomplishments, then like, well, I haven't gotten my shit together enough to write a book like this. I feel very proud of him.

1:43:36 Wes: Yeah, well, unfortunately, I don't have the same level generosity of spirit. This book. I annoyed the show.

1:43:45 Mark: You have a miserly, shriveled heart. Sorry, go on.

1:43:50 Wes: I just think this is a. It's a shitty book. It has a lot of the flaws that you see in the types of books published today, which primarily has to do with. He's interested in relating a lot of anecdotes because I'm sure his editor, whoever has said, yes, this is the way.

1:44:08 Lucy: Yeah. The fact that we're having such trouble collating the information sort of indicates that the ideas weren't explored in a really sensible fashion. It just seems like a litany. But there you go, he did it. We didn't.

1:44:23 Wes: Frankly, I don't see him as making a lot of very interesting substantive points. He mentions in the first chapter, Walter Burkert and Frazer's Golden Bough. And I think those are the really interesting substantive questions. What does it mean to be sacred? And by extension, what does it mean to be famous? I don't think he really tackled that question in this book. There's a lot of sort of free floating speculation. And he told a lot of stories, had a lot of anecdotes, because I think that's a popular thing to do today. But it's not what interests me. People who load up their books with anecdotes, whether it's from Homer's Odyssey, an Iliad, or whether it's. It doesn't matter. It doesn't make it better. Just because your anecdotes come from the classics.

1:45:08 Mark: You were expressing a similar opinion in some of your recent blogging about Jonah Lehrer, who's another guy that. So somebody gave me. I even mentioned it on the Patricia Churchland Podcast, because I just sort of thumbed through it. It was called How We Decide that. It was sort of a popular science book. And my general take on these kind of attempts to make the culture accessible is, oh, great. I'm all for people trying to think about things. This is so much better to be reading something like this and to be writing something like this than to be reading the latest trashy romance novel or whatever the alternative is.

But I know you've kind of come down as the opposite, that actually maybe these things are harming real scholarship, that they make you kind of feel like you're being. Oh, I'm being all cultural. But in fact, it's so surface level and bah. It's like watching Xena to learn about Greek history.

1:46:01 Wes: With Jonah Lehrer, though, there was that review that I referred to where he was being criticized for his social speculation based on science. And then it turned out that he had fabricated quotes from Bob Dylan. And then it turns out that scientists didn't even like his science journalism. So he fails through every level. But I think those things go together. I think someone's more serious. Science journalists, they're not going to be out there making these kinds of huge speculations about what does the big bang tell us about our love lives. They're not going to be trying to. To make these big speculations. You know, they're trying to be famous. They're trying to obtain a sort of unwarranted celebrity from these types of books. And I think that's where they go wrong.

1:46:45 Mark: So you don't think we're guilty of the same thing? We're not producing dynamite original work. We are.

1:46:51 Wes: I think we're trying to be precise. We're doing the best we can to be accurate and precise, and that's why we're not.

1:46:57 Mark: Tom was doing the same thing. He was doing the best he could.

1:47:00 Lucy: Yeah.

1:47:00 Wes: Yes. But I assure you he had many more people purchased his book than listen to our podcast, which is. Which is a sign of our authenticity.

1:47:11 Seth: I don't know that that's true. Lucy. This is a hot button topic for us right now because we're trying to pull a book together. So how we go about doing that and whether we whore ourselves out as Wes is, I'm all for us selling out.

1:47:25 Mark: There you go.

1:47:28 Wes: Wow. It's called the Philosophy of Xena. I don't know if you can help us.

1:47:34 Seth: You guys are.

1:47:35 Lucy: Yeah, you guys are the Dao of Xena.

1:47:37 Wes: Yeah, the Dao of Xena.

1:47:39 Dylan: I thumbed through the Philosophy of Batman. The other day.

1:47:42 Wes: Really?

1:47:42 Seth: I read a few of those books. Philosophy of Buffy, Philosophy of Philosophy of Star Trek.

1:47:47 Lucy: Really?

1:47:48 Seth: Yeah.

1:47:48 Dylan: Yeah.

1:47:50 Mark: Well, aren't they mostly just excuses to like, just talk about Kierkegaard and what Kierkegaard said to like. Oh, I can say Kierkegaard is kind of like Storm in the X-Men. So now I can write an essay about Kierkegaard.

1:48:00 Wes: And Kierkegaard at this point is the go to guy for all of this?

1:48:04 Seth: No, no, no. It's. They're usually more ways that lesser known academics can get articles published. They kind of just take pop philosophy and tie it to one idea. Kind of like no.

1:48:14 Wes: So, yeah, it's a big thing in cultural studies.

1:48:16 Seth: There's a lot of those books, by the way.

1:48:18 Wes: There's whole journals devoted to, say, Back to the Future. It's not. People make their scholarly careers based on this stuff.

1:48:25 Lucy: How would you structure a book being that you're also different?

1:48:29 Mark: Well, that's what we're trying to figure out. So let's just say that is we'll

1:48:33 Wes: be writing our own chapters. We won't be co writing.

1:48:36 Mark: No, we will be co writing. See, even that we can't create anything. I'm going to just do the punctuation

1:48:44 Wes: and that will be controversial, but I'm

1:48:46 Mark: going to do that first. And then you have to fit in the sentences. Any other substantive, final thoughts about the topic?

1:48:53 Lucy: Well, it's the first chapter or two. The two big ones that came out of it were that we need people to be famous so that we can objectify them and raise them up and smash them down at will. And that some people are begging for it. Right. And then everything after that just seemed like variations on those themes to me.

1:49:13 Dylan: I enjoyed little bits of history that you got out of it. I found myself skimming through parts I was less interested in. It was fun from that perspective. There's lots of Roman history that I didn't know.

1:49:23 Lucy: Mark, you said you wanted to cover the beauty chapter. What was it about that? Oh, are celebrities becoming less beautiful?

1:49:31 Mark: Well, I think we kind of have. We've covered it in general terms that we set up these standards that then nobody can possibly meet and we glorify the past. But then there are some specific things in there. And again, it's hard to make some of Pain's individual insights into something that you can coherently apply to his main point. But, you know, like he's talking about Elizabeth Hurley or somebody like that being criticized for touching up her vacation photos. She's like removing the red eye and stuff. And how we object to that sort of falsity.

But then he points out, like, well, but all images are false, so what's the big deal? The fact that you've stopped somebody at all. That struck me as a kind of a cool observation at the time. But I'm not really sure ultimately what to make of that or how to apply that to anything other than a lot of this dealing with famous people. We're not dealing with them as people. We're dealing with them as icons. So still images that all fits right in with that. That these are not things that are moving. They can be falsified and they are by nature false.

An icon is by nature not the person.

1:50:33 Lucy: You know what? It could go to that authenticity idea. Because we want to punish her for being a phony baloney. Because every image you ever see about her is these days really manicured and choreographed. And her and her Aussie cricketer boyfriend and their perfect family. Family and all their white shirts and all this stuff. So we want to punish her for being inauthentic. And he's right. It's all inauthentic anyway, so who cares? And you're a sucker. If you go looking for satisfaction there in any real degree, you know, in any real way, you're not going to find it there.

1:51:05 Mark: Yeah, no, I like that we could pursue that. I've also heard that whole discussion in terms of music criticism that a lot of what people get criticized for is why it's bad that they sold out or their later albums are all poppy or whatever, is because there was something authentic and gritty and real about them in their early days. And that's not always really the case. I mean, so if you look at Bob Dylan, say, and people. That's something commonly said of him, that he was. But he was. If you then actually watch documentaries about him, he was very sort of manufactured from the start.

And, well, even his accent. I mean, he's from Minnesota, but he was, like, trying to sing like Woody Guthrie, you know, and that's a lot where his early vocal tone came from. Like, it's a very weird, manufactured thing in the first place. Just that it was. And it didn't really change that much as it went on. It was always his own invention. It was always his own. This is just the style that I'm putting on as a performer. And of course, his real feelings come into it in both the earlier and the later stuff. And you just have to get that perspective in order to.

And just throw away this notion of authenticity. That. That is just not a useful way of getting at. At art. Art is by nature inauthentic, but that's

1:52:11 Lucy: what we respond to. Certainly in acting, you know that you are on some cellular level being made to feel emotions that you don't have. You know, but it's not authentic.

1:52:24 Mark: It's just well acted. Right. That's the point that you're not. I mean, I guess that can involve channeling your inner abused slave woman or whatever the thing you're trying to do, but it's. It's not like, oh, we got a real abuse, you know, so like in the Wire, some of the drug user types, like, they actually found people that had some background in that. I mean, there were still actors that

1:52:48 Lucy: came to the audition, but. I'm giving up. I'm giving up. I'm gonna go back to school

1:52:55 Wes: and

1:52:55 Lucy: learn to do something.

1:52:56 Mark: I'm not saying all your work is bullshit. I'm just saying that if you're gonna evaluate, evaluate what a great performance is.

1:53:01 Lucy: I'm serious.

1:53:02 Mark: You're right.

1:53:03 Lucy: It's okay. It's all just tricking. Just tricking.

1:53:10 Mark: That should be a great Oscar speech.

1:53:12 Lucy: I was just tricking.

1:53:13 Mark: Helen Mirren should go on in an Oscar speech and say, I successfully tricked you in playing the queen.

1:53:20 Lucy: She knows it. You better believe she knows it.

1:53:23 Mark: Well, thank you so much.

1:53:24 Lucy: My PhD. Thank you so much. Love it.

1:53:27 Mark: Tell you how much it. Thank you means that you not only put the time to sit here with us for many hours, but then read all this stuff and sit through our episodes. So that's a high bar for any future celebrities to meet. I don't. I don't think I can get. If I get. If we get Larry David to talk about a comedy, you know, read the Freud book, which would be the next comedy one. He would be great for that. But he's not going to listen to 50 of our episodes.

1:53:49 Wes: That reminds me, actually, I had a fan of our show wanted me to. To ask you what it was like to work with Larry David.

1:53:54 Lucy: So fabulous. I would love to hear him on the show. He's amazing. Bill David.

1:54:00 Mark: We'll take that as a commitment to reach out to him on our behalf.

1:54:04 Lucy: If I see him, I can't chase him down because that would be weird and inappropriate. But if I see him, I'm going to say, hey, you might want to do this. In fact, there was somebody else that I thought would be really good that you'd. Yeah, George Clinton. Can I just call. I actually don't know very many famous people at all. And the minute you meet them, they're not famous anymore. So they lose all their luster, which is why people don't want you to be real, because they want to have that luster. So they still maintain the phony relationship. But I'll think. I'll think on it. I'll try to make some connections for you. But gentlemen, thank you so much.

1:54:40 Wes: I have like, three screenplays that I'd like to send you.

1:54:45 Dylan: My lord.

1:54:48 Wes: If you could pass those around.

1:54:51 Mark: Hey, can I tell the people what we're doing next time?

1:54:53 Lucy: What are you doing next time?

1:54:55 Mark: Why, it's the Federalist Papers. Not all of them, but a number of them. Dylan is picking them out. You'll have to look on parcel examinedlife.com to find out which ones exactly. You know. By Alexander Hamilton and James Madison way back in the day. 1788.

1:55:08 Wes: Way back.

1:55:09 Lucy: So hot.

1:55:09 Mark: Yes.

1:55:11 Lucy: Well, congratulations, fellas, on everything.

1:55:15 Wes: Thank you, Lucy.

1:55:16 Mark: Yes.

1:55:16 Wes: Thanks for coming.

1:55:16 Seth: Thank you so much.

1:55:17 Wes: Thanks, Lucy.

1:55:18 Lucy: My pleasure.

1:55:18 Mark: Thank you.

1:55:19 Lucy: Bye, Dylan. Bye, Seth. Nice to meet you.

1:55:21 Dylan: Good luck at school.

1:55:21 Seth: Nice to meet you.

1:55:22 Lucy: Thank you. I love it.

1:55:24 Wes: Good night. Good night.

1:55:25 Seth: Good night.

1:55:25 Mark: Good night, Lucy. And good night to the world.

1:55:27 Lucy: Good night.

1:55:28 Mark: Hey, folks, thanks for listening. We invite you to join us on our blog, partiallyexaminedlife.com to discuss this episode or our Facebook group. Or you can follow us or Lucy on Twitter Save the Arctic. You can support the podcast@PartiallyExaminedLife.com we are also Amazon affiliates, which means if you click the Amazon link from our page and then buy anything at all, then a percent of the money you spend will go to us at no additional cost to you. Thank you very, very much. Hope you like the new song. I can't handle responsibility I should be a goddamn celebrity I want nothing but more clothing I feel nothing but self loathing I feel something destined me to be on a postcard I don't care to exert much energy I don't know what to spend on me I'm the only one out there keep kicking me off of a rain cloud I've gone off to a place that's beating me I don't seem to be want them feeding me I love everyone else that lives with me I should be a

1:56:46 Lucy: goddamn celebrity God damn, God damn celebrity

1:56:54 Mark: God damn, goddamn I worship me Goddamn celebrity God damn I worship.

1:57:25 Lucy: Sam.

1:57:59 Mark: Goddamn celebrity God damn, God damn, God damn I worship me Goddamn celebrity Goddamn Elvish.