Episode 99: Looking Back on 100 Discussions and 5+ Years

0:08 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a philosophy podcast by some guys who at one point set out doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our topic for episode 99 is what have we learned in 98 episodes of doing this? For more information, check out partiallyexaminementlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer sitting in Dylan's living room in Middleton, Wisconsin.

0:28 Seth: This is Seth Paskin, also sitting in Dylan's living room in Middleton, Wisconsin.

0:33 Wes: This is Wes Alwan, also in Dylan's living room in Middleton, Wisconsin.

0:38 Dylan: This is Dylan in Dylan's living room in Middleton, Wisconsin.

0:42 Daniel: And this is Daniel Horne, also in Dylan's living room.

0:46 Mark: This is an exciting time. We are all facing each other. We've never even seen Daniel before.

0:53 Seth: I have. I visited Daniel in San Francisco.

0:56 Mark: So ah, we're all excited for the big in front of an audience Episode 100 tomorrow. And Daniel was so excited that he flew down here and then we thought we should include him in this thing.

1:07 Daniel: I'm officially your first groupie, right? This is part of your whole Phish concert cavalcade coming around.

1:11 Mark: Well, this was. You're listed on the about the podcast site as the fifth Beatle. So if you mess around with our Twitter feed, at least half the time that will be Daniel that is responding to you and Seth the other half.

1:25 Seth: What does it mean to be the fifth Beatle that you contribute materially but

1:29 Wes: you do a lot of work and

1:30 Seth: you don't get any benefit, you gain nothing. Financial output. Okay, that's then that's about right.

1:37 Mark: It means you die early. That's right.

1:39 Daniel: I was thinking. Yeah, it depends on which fifth Beatle we're talking about, right? Sometimes it depends.

1:42 Wes: But pretty much we're all fifth Beatles in this organization.

1:46 Dylan: Daniel is one of the most notable people coming in. But there are a number of people coming in tomorrow from aways. I got a call from a guy who showed up at the venue to make sure he could pay his $5 to get in. He's going fishing up at Kickapoo river tonight. He's going to come back for the event tomorrow.

2:03 Daniel: Very cool.

2:04 Wes: That's right. So did we announce this already? We're recording the 99th episode tonight and then we're having a live show for the hundredth episode tomorrow.

2:12 Mark: Yes, and you can catch that as if I'm going to give the webcast information. This is not going to go up.

2:17 Wes: You'll be listening to this show at the 99th. After the hundreds maybe.

2:23 Mark: Alright. So we decided it would be too Stressful to pick an actual book for tonight. So let's go.

2:30 Dylan: Well, Mark, you had some ideas about ways to talk about where we're at and maybe have Dan give us some semi third party insight into some focus grouping.

2:40 Seth: Well, before we get into that, I'd like to say this. The person who made. Who kicked this whole thing off was definitely Mark.

2:46 Dylan: Yes.

2:47 Seth: And when people ask me, like, how you get into this, the origin story that I tell is that the state

2:54 Wes: of nature before Mark came along.

2:56 Seth: I'm thinking more of like the comic book action hero. This is like the third Wolverine movie is that you found me on the Internet somehow. I don't remember you. You submitted somewhere my name was on a form like for contact or something, and you found me and you sent a note and said, hey, I want to talk to you about a proposition. And at the time I was doing some consulting and I thought, oh, a business proposition. Okay, well, see what this is about. And then you said, let's do a podcast on philosophy. And I said, yeah, that sounds great. Just call me when you've got everything worked out.

This is because I didn't know you that well. If I had, I might have been a lot more cautious. But literally, like three weeks after the time we first spoke on the phone, we were recording the first podcast. I don't think we ever thought that it was going to get to five years and 100 episodes. I certainly didn't. But the energy to keep this going definitely comes from Mark because he's persistent about making sure that we have topics and making sure that we have guests. And so the first thing I think that's important to acknowledge now that we're reflecting on the last five years is that it all started with your idea and you bringing us in and continuing to pull us through.

4:06 Mark: Well, I should say this wasn't even designed when I started it, to necessarily be a philosophy podcast or exclusively a philosophy podcast. I wanted to do a podcast. I was a fan of some podcasts and like the idea of four people, in fact. So Dylan was destined. Someone was destined to be added, even though we had three people for a while. And I had a couple friends from high school that I had contacted, one of whom was a writer, and I thought we could make it a literature slash philosophy podcast. Another guy that's just. Just an overall smart guy, linguistics major, funny guy. But both of those guys didn't want to do it. But I for sure had Wes in mind, right to start, because he was my roommate and the one that I hung out Most with in grad school. And then once I was looking for more people once these other people fell through.

4:50 Dylan: Oh, the origin story changes technically.

4:54 Seth: Wait, I just did my encomia de Mark. Now he's turning around and giving me the anti encomia.

5:03 Mark: So Seth was the first one though, I thought of in terms of just a guy who was very funny and very gregarious during grad school and thought so it was just extremely good luck. There were a couple other guys from our class that I checked with after you as a possible fourth before we decided just to go ahead. But I have here that our first episode was recorded on April 19, 2009. So we did a little test recording a couple weeks before that and then we were ready, bam. With the apology.

5:33 Dylan: Oh, so it's fitting 100 episodes later, back to Plato.

5:37 Mark: Yes, we can see if we're a little more mature in our treatment.

5:40 Wes: Plato people love that first episode.

5:42 Mark: Well, so that's one of the things I wanted to talk about with is how our attitudes have changed toward this thing since we started. And for sure when I started, I had a chip on my shoulder about why did I spend so much time on this? Why did I do grad school at all? It seemed kind of a self flagellating, something that I had mixed memories about. Obviously I was open to going back and doing this, to doing the podcast at all, but it's so disconnected. A lot of this historical stuff from our current experience. You feel, at least I felt when I was doing a lot of these old folks, if not Plato, certainly Aristotle, that I was engaging in just some kind of weird historical exercise.

That philosophy, as, say, David Brin described it, is looking toward the past and in terms of a source of authority and just wanted to reflect on the weirdness of that. And I think that that chip has long since blown off my shoulder. Now I'm just sucked back into it. And I won't say that I uniformly enjoy everything that we read, but I regained the compulsion. I fell back into the fly bottle like within a year certainly of doing this. And it didn't feel like such a tremendous effort to read these guys or put myself back in that mind space. In fact, it was tremendously fun.

6:56 Dylan: Well, that explains why you're the prime mover.

6:59 Mark: Have your attitudes changed? Seth and Wes, start off since you guys were here from the very beginning, in unison. Well, I like the Greek chorus, two part harmony.

7:08 Seth: Oh, that's gonna.

7:13 Wes: You'd make a good chorus.

7:15 Seth: Well, I honestly thinking back, I'm not even sure I can recall what the original motivation was. I think I just thought it would be fun. Fun because the way you pitched it to me, I don't know if you remember, was that we were going to try to recreate the atmosphere of what it was like after class to go to the pub or the bar and then spend. We spent three hours listening to the professor tell us what we were supposed to think. And then we were going to go to spend three hours in the bar drinking and talking about what we really thought. And I thought that would be interesting.

And I think it hit me at a time when I had lost touch with that kind of exploratory, inquisitive part of myself. You know, I had been working in technology for a long time and I hadn't been reading philosophy, I hadn't been reading literature, I just hadn't been reading as much. You know, I was all caught up in whatever my life was at the time. And so I thought, you know, this will be fun, it'll be a way to engage, it'll get my brain working again. Because I've been surrounded by an environment where I wasn't using my brain anymore. And so that's kind of what sucked me in.

And I didn't have a chip on my shoulder about it. I was always enthusiastic about reading either the things we had already read, you know, when we did the Meditations and I hadn't read the meditations in like 20 years or 15 years. I mean that never gets old. Whatever you think. There are certain texts in philosophy that you go back to time and again and they just, there's always something, even if they're totally wrong or ridiculous or whatever. There's just something about going back to them. And so I just thought it was going to be fun. And I had no.

8:44 Mark: So you're going to go back to that context.

8:46 Seth: That's a different story. He said some, I said some texts. And you know, the truth of the matter is I thought it would be fun. I had no hang ups about. I don't have any qualms about my decision to leave. Like, I had no. There's nothing in me about like, oh, I wish I'd stayed the course. And I don't have any kind of issues around the academia, the profession. The profession with a capital P. But when we started, you know, we looked at and I just thought we were going to be reading a lot of the stuff we'd already read. And I'll talk about later about what it's like to read stuff that I should have read, but I hadn't. But I was happy. It was going to be fun to go back and reread all these things.

9:28 Dylan: Do you feel like the podcast has maintained that sense of being at the bar afterwards? That kind of combination of irreverence but also really wanting to understand what's going on? The kind of earnest irreverence?

9:44 Seth: I believe it has maintained the earnest irreverence. I do believe that. I do think that the recordings in the past were much more an event. And where I was five years ago, I had a lot more time to prepare and it became, you know, everything built up and that that evening was a thing. And now with just life changes and a variety of other things, the episodes are not necessarily. It's not like there's a huge buildup and then we have that thing. So it's, it's a little less intense. I don't know the right word. The attitude's the same, but it's not quite the same experience as it was when we first got started. I think, you know, the newness and like I said, some of the other.

10:21 Daniel: You're in the groove of it now, I would think. Right. There's a certain.

10:24 Mark: Well, in the example of what two episodes ago where Seth contacts us on the day, like I forgot it was today. Read the stuff yet? Can you just push it off for a couple days?

10:35 Seth: It really comes down to the fact that scheduling wise and commitment wise, my life is a lot more hectic.

10:40 Daniel: Sure.

10:41 Seth: So even though I earnestly prepare and I spend a lot of time and it used to be that the PAL thing was like a destination, I didn't have a lot of stuff going on where that one Sunday was going to be like. And it was a build up. Now on a weekend I might have multiple meetings already and multiple things going on. And so it's now one other thing in my schedule, which doesn't mean that I care any less, but it changes. It's just natural to change the way you kind of approach it. So I won't lie, that's been kind of a little bit of a struggle just because I'm so over committed.

11:11 Mark: Wes, what's up?

11:13 Wes: Well, unlike Seth, I don't have full weekends. I have a lot of extra time on my hands. No. Well, I think of everyone here, I'm probably the most conflicted about not going down the academic track. And I think I never stopped actually. And I still think about finishing up a PhD and blah, blah, blah. And I wasn't conflicted about the value of philosophy ever. I was conflicted about the value of academia and whether or not I wanted to do that. When Mark asked me to do it, I thought. I mean, like you, Seth, I wasn't doing a lot of spontaneous reading and philosophy, and I thought it'd be a good way to get back into that.

11:52 Mark: You've kept up with a lot of other stuff, like with psych, and you were reading stuff about evolutionary biology and science and. Seems like your intellectual life.

12:00 Wes: Yeah, I was. You know, I had actually thought about getting a PhD in literature, and then I was briefly in Boston. I ended up taking a few courses in psychoanalysis, and then I took a job in D.C. as a communications consultant, which lasted three years. And then, Mark, you. You not only offered me the podcast thing, but you also offered me a job. So that may have been. Maybe I thought that was.

12:24 Daniel: Yeah, exactly.

12:26 Wes: But the job allowed me to move back to Boston and start taking more classes in psychoanalysis. So I've always toyed around with the idea of becoming a therapist, but I've never taken the plunge and gotten to the point of doing field work and seeing patients, which could happen.

12:40 Mark: The job, of course, is paid assassin, or should we not say that?

12:44 Wes: Right.

12:46 Mark: So how has your attitude changed? Are you finding that this is a sufficient substitute for the academic life?

12:54 Wes: Well, I think, you know, in all honesty, it's made me want to try and get back to teaching in some way, but I just don't know how to do that.

13:03 Mark: Short of you want to deal with real dumbass undergrads instead of.

13:07 Wes: Well, you know, more about this. I mean, you. You've been teaching adjunct courses here and there, right?

13:12 Mark: Well, so that was kind of what got me a little bit back into it, that I had a job after grad school in software documentation and things like that, and then woke my brain up by teaching this ethics course at the local community college. And I taught it about four times in a row, five times, I forget. And it was the same course more or less every time. And the people you know, it was computer science and accounting and business students, I believe, were the three areas. So this was a required course, and there were a few kids that were interested, but it was a three and a half hour, once a week meeting.

And it was just not really constructed for the benefit of anyone, I felt like. But it was still fun, at least the first time, prepping for the courses and reading, you know, actually a lot of the stuff like the Hobbes selection and the Kant selection and a number of the things that we picked for early episodes were straight from that course. And that, to some extent explains why we've spent so much more time on ethics maybe, than other areas. Because that's just something that I got.

14:11 Seth: Because it's reinvigorating.

14:13 Mark: Well, I guess, yes. A consensus judgment often pushes that forward. Why we're doing more politics and that kind of stuff. So Dylan got involved in episode 14 13, I believe 13 as a guest. Did a great job. Immediately after you did it, Wes was like, let's add him permanently. And Seth actually put the kibosh on that.

14:36 Seth: I did, yes.

14:38 Mark: He said, no, three people is enough. It would be too crowded.

14:41 Seth: We want to have flexibility. So even then. Even then, I had my issues about asserting myself in the conversation and being able to.

14:50 Wes: Even though you're trying to bring it

14:51 Seth: back to basics, I didn't realize. No, no, I don't remember that.

14:55 Wes: I don't remember.

14:55 Seth: Sorry. Dylan, you could have been at the time for no Money earlier, right?

15:02 Mark: At the time, Dylan was teaching at St. John's and so you were already doing quite a lot of that. And anyway. And really, you didn't join up with us permanently until it became clear that you were not going to be doing that full time anymore.

15:13 Dylan: Yeah, when we moved to Madison.

15:15 Mark: So tell us about sort of your experience, you know, starting as. You seem to get the project even better than we did when I talked

15:23 Seth: to you about it.

15:23 Mark: And partly that was the St. John's experience talking, but just when we would stray from the mission statement or something, you would kind of call us back. I call a couple times in discussions with you.

15:35 Dylan: The thing I love about the project of Partially Examined Life is similar to the things that I loved about being at St John's which was engaging as a group in a conversation about a text that was rich enough to go back to over and over and over again and have the attitude and the disposition that that experience, that text and that conversation was a communal activity for ourselves individually and that it wasn't limited to trying to become an expert on it. It wasn't limited to trying to figure out who was the biggest authority or any of those things, but that we would engage in an authentic conversation about.

About it, starting from wherever we started at it. And I thought that the books that you guys picked and that there were going to be lots of other possibilities that would admit of that. We have mainly read philosophy books, but we've also read some literature. We've read more modern stuff. And I think that that activity, that Partially Examined Life activity, admits of a lot of that. And that's what I think is just great about it. In some ways, it captures that spirit of inquiry better than anything. I think that's why it's been successful. People see it and hear about it and they listened to it.

16:56 Mark: Do you have comforting words to say to Wes that this is better than

16:59 Seth: teaching at St. John's well, it's a

17:01 Dylan: different kind of activity. I will admit that there are things that I miss a great deal about being at St. John's but one of the sweet spots of being there are the kinds of conversations that we are able to do together. And for one thing, I didn't know how it would go doing it online and doing it in Skype and stuff like that. And certainly a different experience sitting in the room with you guys. And in some ways I can see, yeah, it would be more fun to do it in the same room all the time. But it is amazing how absorbed I can get doing it on Skype and just concentrating and listening to you guys. And in fact, when we did the recording with Eva, and I was in the same room with her when I went to record it, but she was completely flabbergasted at how well that went. I took that as a. A sign that we were doing something right.

17:52 Seth: So that's actually a good segue to ask Daniel. I mean, you know, the one thing I hear consistently is what's attractive about Pel versus other podcasts or academic lectures or whatever, is that people feel like they're sitting in on a conversation and they either feel like they're a part of it or they feel like they want to be a part of it. And it's something about the conversational aspect of what we do that makes it attractive, I think, more than anything. And I was going to ask Daniel, is that what drew you into it? Or is that. Or was there something else?

18:26 Daniel: I would say that was. That's very much it. I get the sense that there's a certain type of person, and clearly that type of person is not necessarily American. Given your global audience, there's a certain type of person that wants to engage in, for lack of a better word, intellectual discourse. And at least speaking as a native born and raised American, we live in a deeply anti intellectual society in a deeply anti intellectual culture. And you will be mocked and ridiculed if you even try to engage on the lightest level of some of the kinds of concepts that have been discussed on the show, or if you carry

19:00 Mark: the gay science around.

19:02 Daniel: If you carry it around, Absolutely, that's right. But on Any level, it seems to me. And now look, I welcome rebuttal on this. It could be that you folks actually having gone first of all to grad school, as opposed to me, who went to a professional school, and perhaps it's just the social circles I was in, but it seems to me no matter which circles I float in, most people want to keep conversation on the level of chit chat, sports, politics, you know, within bounds, safe topics, and anything beyond that people seem to get uncomfortable with. And not uncomfortable in the way that, you know, politics or religion is meant to be uncomfortable, but there seems to be this pervasive sense, at least in American society that certain topics, you're just supposed to kind of like let go with the sophomore dorm room and move on beyond that.

And most people are, you know, again, because of the culture we live in, I get the sense, and maybe that's just the human condition. This could be true of all cultures. And I'm just, I can only speak for my own limited frame of reference as an American. So, you know, our global listeners, feel free to email in and tell us your experiences. But my sense is that there, because there are certain people that need to engage in this for whatever personal reasons that they're carrying, they're sort of deprived, they're isolated, obviously they live their lives and you know, look, this is these quiet desperation, but it's not the same kind of thing.

I mean, you could put it that way. I mean, I know you're making, I know you're making a joke, but on a certain level, I would say that it's a sort of a need that isn't satisfied in the culture. And I've seen so many anecdotes of those kinds of things being shot down. And I compare it to a culture, as best I can tell, like Great Britain's culture. Well, they will. And maybe that has to do with the elitist nature of their society. There's certain, you know, there's certain kind of like, you know, microstrata of society, they're able to get to call the shots as to what gets produced in the media out there.

But it seems to me that there are so many different podcasts, television programs, elements of common discourse within at least Great Britain, that these kinds of topics are indulged. And I'll therefore just assume that that's true within Europe for, for certain types of Americans at least, there are people who want to engage in that discourse. They can't. And so this is a long walk. But what I'm trying to build up to here is that the real value of the partially examined life in this project is that it provides at least some way to satisfy that need to engage in these sorts of topics.

Because of course, people who are interested in this can just go ahead and read on their own. That's what I was doing for years on my own. You just read these books, but these books are abstruse often, particularly if you haven't already been given some sort of a preliminary academic grounding in the intellectual history. And so you need a discursive element, in my opinion, to be able to round out your understanding of these texts. Otherwise they really don't satisfy. It's a sort of unseasoned meal if you don't have an opportunity to engage in discourse with folk.

And much like someone said, even just the opportunity to be able to listen in on a conversation on. On these topics has value. Because frankly, you can't just walk outside or go to the local Starbucks and hear these conversations. Certainly not with any type of acuity or depth out in the common culture.

22:03 Seth: Well, one of the things that I hear often from fans is I want to be able to explore this with other people. But there's nobody around where I live that I can talk to. There's no group or. I already went through my professional career and I'm retired. I didn't get a chance to study philosophy. I wanted to study philosophy in college, but I couldn't. There's. This keeps coming back to this idea that at least in our culture, the only place you're allowed to do this is in academia. And just like you're saying, you know, I think about when I was living in Germany and France, I mean, those countries, there are primetime shows where there are panelists of people having very. I mean, especially in France.

22:38 Wes: Right, sure, right.

22:40 Seth: You know, people talk seriously about serious topics on television in time slots that are now filled up by Hollywood, game show and, you know, the Voice and things like that. And it's kind of a shame that everything has started to revolve around this idea that academia is the only place you can have this kind of conversation. I think in the 70s it wasn't like that. You know, we had Dick Cavett and Charlie Rose and there were public intellectuals that were out there speaking.

23:05 Daniel: William Buckley, sure, yeah, Buckley. And in regards to the politics, you could at least. You can't really challenge the depth of the conversation.

23:10 Seth: And there isn't. There isn't quite that same level of discourse today, although it's opening a Pandora's box to Even talk about new media and all that kind of stuff. The point is, is that there's something about what we do that connects with people and the kind of experience they want to have that's commonly associated with an academic environment. And people have trouble creating that kind of environment outside of the formal structures of academia. You know, people do book clubs, salons, that kind of thing. But somehow they can't find a way to bring it together around the topics that we talk about or they struggle with it.

23:45 Dylan: Some of it though, is I think that even taking a book club is that one thing we do is we the conversations we have because we're learning earnestly, often along the way. I mean, I regularly have the experience where I changed my mind or I learned something new or thought about something different just because we had the conversation on the podcast. And just like Daniel was saying, it is something that becomes indispensable to the learning and the thinking through that I couldn't just simply do on my own. And that's one of the things I think people respond to even just listening to it is it's not a lecture, it's not an activity of straightforward learning the way, you know, going to iTunes U is intended to be.

Not that those things aren't valuable. It's that this is a different activity both for us and also for somebody listening to it. And I think that is what a lot of people respond to because they respond to the intellectual earnestness about it. And for me, the most gratifying kinds of feedback we've gotten are from people who by their own self acknowledgement, maybe they took philosophy, maybe they didn't, but they come to listen to the podcast and it's not any particular book we read or any particular topic or any particular thing that they've learned.

Who But a void gets filled in for them in just hearing other people talk about something in depth and seriously and not necessarily coming to any firm conclusions. And they get enlivened by that. We've gotten letters from housewives in Missouri and guy flipping burgers, guy flipping burger

25:26 Daniel: soldiers, guy mining coal in Latin America.

25:29 Wes: Right?

25:29 Dylan: Guy mining coal in Latin America, soldiers in Afghanistan who listen to the podcast not because they fell out of love with philosophy or because they are pining for something they used to do, but this is something they didn't even expect to be doing. And it ends up mattering to them in a way that I never expected it to matter to them. But I understand it. When I read those letters, I get why it matters to them. And it's more successful in that respect than I ever expected it to be. Were you surprised by those, Mark, those kinds of reactions? People say that because of you. Now I understand and I can deal with my disappointment in my life. There's a guy who's dying of cancer who listens to our podcast, who, for him, it is something that makes a difference in him being able to handle his cancer treatments.

26:22 Mark: That makes me a little less likely to. Should it make me a little less likely to just throw in dick jokes

26:28 Dylan: and stuff like that?

26:31 Mark: The kind of dismissiveness. You know, there's a lot more pressure now doing this, luckily until tomorrow, where we don't actually have to sit in front of people. You can still kind of make believe that you're just screwing around and we can edit out the foul thing that I just said or whatever anyway, or take as long as we want to cogitate and just say it in the most messy, horrible possible way, because that's the way you talk when you're thinking live, not the way our guests who have just been on a book tour and have described these ideas every single time. So I. Yeah, there's a lot more pressure there, hopefully, you know, that's all. So what I'm saying is that the edited version is perhaps not quite the experience that we have when we're doing it, but still, I hope that our own foolishness makes people a little more comfortable and gives them something to identify with.

27:23 Wes: That.

27:23 Mark: It's. It's that we are reading these books fresh. You know, maybe we took. Spent a little time glancing on the Internet at the Stanford Encyclopedia entry or whatever, the other thing, but it's all stuff that is basically available to them. And yes, the first bunch of episodes we may have started with, like war stories of. Yeah, we did that seminar when we were in grad school and now we're kind of revisiting it with that and kind of channeling those experiences, but we ran out of those, for the most part, a long freaking time ago. Like anything. Any great insights from a grad school?

27:55 Seth: It feels like it's been a year since we've read anything that I ever read before. That's what it feels like to me. Definitely.

28:00 Mark: Yes. Yes. Filling in a lot of historical details is fun, but do you feel like

28:06 Dylan: you've said that before? It's historic? Do you feel like it's merely historical in the way you did earlier?

28:12 Wes: Or.

28:13 Dylan: Or do you feel like that more often than not, the stuff we read maintains a kind of living quality to it? Or not?

28:21 Wes: Right.

28:22 Mark: I Should say, maybe I make the metaphor to history, that when I took my first European history course or US History course in early college or late high school, then I got this feeling of completeness, like, ooh, now I know all the kings, English kings in order. Even if I'm not going to remember this stuff, at least I got a glimpse of, like, what was going on in each century. And you feel this sense of wholeness. And so comparably, like, oh, everybody talks about this, you know, the Heideggerians. And so once we dive into one of those areas, I feel like, yeah, okay, I can check off that box. But I don't. It's a richer experience, certainly, than that. It's like you're getting to look into a whole house and learn about what's going on inside. It's not just purely, like, box checking.

29:12 Seth: But you had two questions there, Dylan. One was, did you ever think, you know, you would have this kind of impact on people's lives? And the other is, is this a historical exercise or is it living? And in the first case, there's. It would be disingenuous for any of us to say that we expected this to have the kind of impact, the fact that five years down the road, we'd be sitting in the living room with somebody, you know, who would listen to the podcast. Absolutely not. What do we say?

29:35 Wes: Like, it was a long time doing it with just a few hundred listeners.

29:40 Daniel: Yeah.

29:40 Seth: Nine months in, I think we. 300 listeners that I remember. And we found that even after two

29:45 Mark: years, I had that in perspective, like, how many people come to one of my gigs? Like, if we got 50 people at one of my gigs, that's awesome. So having 200 people listen to this thing, that's pretty great.

29:55 Wes: Well, now we're like, man, we only got a quarter of a million downloads this time.

29:58 Seth: No, I know. And that's the thing, is that the scale has far exceeded. But as much as the scale is far exceeded, which to me just speaks to the fact that there's a desire out there of people to participate. The individual anecdotal stuff that has come across has been really touching to me because there's a lot of people who contact us in times of grief and loss, and there's a lot of people who contact us outside of that. But, I mean, it's clear that we're providing. People are searching for something and they're looking to grasp whether it's dealing with death or if it's trying to find meaning in their existence.

And they're look, they're. I am imagining people on itunes, like, going to all of the Meaning of Life podcast, like, typing in, meaning Carnap and. But the reality was, a lot of those early episodes, I think we did touch on some of it, was they were a lot more existent, a lot more existential to point to it. So, no, there's no way we could have predicted. There's no way we could have predicted that we would have had this kind of effect. But as far as the. The historical versus the living, I think it's an episode by episode case. So, you know, when we were like, oh, yeah, Anarchy State and Utopia, that's one of those ones that's on the bookshelf.

We got to read that. Right. And that, to me, was a check the box. Like, after I was done with it, I was like, okay, I checked that box.

31:21 Mark: But you're rubbing that in the face of all the listeners who didn't get to hear that because it got erased. We will be.

31:26 Wes: Yeah.

31:26 Daniel: I gotta tell you, I was really looking forward to that.

31:28 Seth: Sorry. So sorry. Sorry. Let me rephrase that.

31:31 Mark: We'll check the box again because it was so good.

31:35 Seth: That theory of justice that Rawls, that was one of the ones that was on the shelf. But there are definitely ones that are still living.

31:42 Wes: Although I have to say, the more living ones are the dead ones. I mean, it's the newer stuff that

31:48 Daniel: it doesn't resonate with. And that seems to be because the discipline has decided not to tackle the quote, unquote, core questions. And it seems to me that they're

31:58 Wes: kind of spiraling off, more personalized and more professionalized and.

32:02 Daniel: But certain topics seem to be now off base. Right? I mean, again, no one's gonna come up with another book trying to, quote, unquote, answer their riddle of life. I think Schopenhauer.

32:11 Mark: I think we find 500 books written in the last year that try to do that.

32:15 Daniel: Now, whether they're by serious academics.

32:17 Mark: Well, okay, so that's maybe the thing. I'm not sure.

32:20 Wes: Well, Terry Eagleton, for instance.

32:22 Daniel: But that's my point. No one is going to get tenure tackling those topics. That's right.

32:24 Wes: Well, no, I mean, Terry Eagleton, tenured literature professor, I think, wrote a Meaning of Life book. And of course, I mean, in Continental Philosophy, I think people are. Although, you know, we often. Or at least I often bulk at the fuzziness and some of the willful obscurity of it. You know, the good part of it is they're willing to take on deeper questions, whereas Analytic philosophers where, you know, the clarity and the precision is nice. And I like that there's a definite avoidance of substance because substance is too hard and substance doesn't lend itself to writing a nice little monograph that gets you tenure.

33:05 Mark: I just don't even know how to even evaluate that claim. One of the recent books that we read, the David Chalmers. The David Chalmers and then recently the Michael Sandel, both of those kind of threw you to various degrees into current debates and particularly there's just so much of recent history and things that were going into the technical aspects of Chalmers book. And they were getting at what passes now for fundamental metaphysical questions. Now we need more episodes, I think, on those modern thinkers to even make sense of how those, that viewpoint, that particular cult, how that connects to the classical Plato asked the question about virtue and meaning of life and things like that.

33:51 Wes: I mean, I say this, I say this also. I mean, I know there are contemporary analytic metaphysicians, and when I say. When I talk about a lack of substance, I have to think more about that and say what that means. But for instance, I remember at ut, we were in this Leibniz class where basically we did a. Because I was dumb enough to actually do all the assigned secondary readings, these huge stacks of secondary literature on Leibniz, and I came to the conclusion, I mean, after. I mean, a lot of my initial response to grad school was confusion because I had been in St.

John's and also because I was probably more geared to a continental style at that point. And that's kind of what I had been expecting. But I. And UT was a mixed program. But I was getting exposed to stuff I just hadn't been exposed to. But after reading all of this very intelligent and reasoned debate about Leibniz on the ideality of relations and all this other metaphysical stuff, I just thought it was ultimately empty. It really was like a caricature of empty academic discourse. So. But I think you're right, you know, it's too broad a generalization.

Analytic philosophers doing serious substantive work. Although I think there's a book coming out, actually. I wish I remember the name of it, but someone who's trying to very carefully make this argument about sort of the evasion of substance on the part of analytic philosophers. So I think there are exceptions, but in general there is a lot of empty precision.

35:31 Mark: So with the Nick Bostrom article, that's a recent analytic philosophy article we read, it's trying to tackle real world problems, you know, potential medical advances. But yet when we were talking about the substance of that and it seemed like driven just by the academic standards. It's not that there was anything wrong with him in particular, but that it was very unsatisfying.

35:51 Seth: Yeah, but that's almost in this context, that's almost a straw man. Let's just take a theory of justice versus something like some Platonic dialogue, maybe even the Republic or something like that is the theory of justice. It's rich, it has a lot of ideas. What is that a text that you would keep coming back to again and again?

36:11 Daniel: Is it canonical? That was kind of.

36:13 Seth: Would you keep coming back to it again and again because it's rich and keeps yielding things and is interesting and delightful to read? Or would you keep coming to it again again because you were spinning off articles or trying to clarify points? And I think that's what the difference is. To me it's not about analytic and continental because it's about. Is this a work that has richness to it in the sense that it's touching on big themes? It is readable in a good or a bad way. Like there's Hegel complicated. Right. And then there's. There's different kind, different types of levels of engagement like that. And is it something that you, you feel like when I come back to it, it gives me something as opposed to. It's something I have to work on. That's to me is that we definitely text.

36:59 Wes: Some of this is, you know, just a matter of personal preference. So for instance, the. Whether it's Sandel or Rawls or. Or Nozick, part of the problem is there it becomes like a game of telephone where it's not someone doing a careful commentary or interpretation on Kant or Plato or this or that. It's someone who's responding to secondary literature about secondary literature, about secondary literature about that. And it becomes obvious to anyone who, because they joined a crazy podcast, has actually read the original text recently. There's an obvious disengagement with that and that's part of the problem.

But for me it's just a matter of. So reading the symposium is something which brings me back to why I wanted to become a philosopher. And part of that is I'm sort of. I gravitate towards texts where there's a possibility of interpretation. And so, you know, maybe I should have gone into literature or something like that. Maybe it's just a. It's a matter of wanting a certain open endedness to the text as opposed to the kind of mammoth hyper rational treatments. I mean, when I'm reading someone like Some of these, you know, Rawls and the rest of them, it's just like I.

I feel like there's a loss of. There's an emotional disconnection and it makes me crazy sometimes. But what.

38:23 Dylan: What about people like Descartes or Hume or Locke? I mean, it's part of it, I think has to do with different topics sometimes. You know, political topics versus metaphysics or epistemology and stuff like that.

38:38 Wes: I love all that early modern stuff. I mean, it's.

38:40 Mark: You're gonna keep going back to Hobbes again and again because of the richness. Yeah, really.

38:45 Wes: And that could be, you know, so that just might be an artifact of the fact that I. I like old books and the alien ness of the language. And there's something about that which is.

38:57 Seth: They're better refreshing.

38:58 Wes: And so that could be, you know, style is dead.

39:01 Daniel: You know, who, since Quine, has really been a master stylist.

39:04 Wes: Yeah, I mean, I was trying to avoid that.

39:06 Mark: You know, you.

39:06 Wes: I mean, what. It may be just that they're better, they're better stylistically or they're better substantively, but it may just be something about, you know, a few hundred years of distance between us and that kind of text is more conducive to a more open engagement with it because it's alien. And you have to cross that boundary. It's not something that is sort of as spoon fed as, say, a Rawls.

39:34 Seth: Yeah, but there are a lot of people, I mean, there are a lot of people who feel that way about, you know, Heidegger who's not that far removed from us, or Husserl, I mean, God forbid.

39:43 Wes: Yeah. Because they're trying to maintain that alienness. I don't know about Husserl, but at least Heidegger.

39:49 Daniel: Perhaps the flip side of what I was trying to advocate was perhaps a return of style is. I guess Heidegger is a good example of if you adopt a stylistic stance, you're gonna win fans, but you're also gonna make enemies.

39:59 Seth: Yeah.

40:00 Daniel: And I don't mean for all the other kind of banal reasons that everybody rails on Heidegger, but really just the style alone, frankly, he lost me at that. And I just decided, I, man, I gave that guy months of my time trying to figure him out. I'm done with it.

40:12 Seth: Yeah.

40:12 Daniel: And it's really, you know, I'm just not a fan of the style. In the same way that there are certain types of music that I will recognize that they have a fan base and it has technical qualities that would be appreciated, but it's just not for me. And maybe that's the flip side of

40:24 Wes: so what trying to do.

40:26 Mark: So do you like. So my experience with Heidegger is I actually really. I really enjoyed Hubert Dreyfus style. So if I listen to his lectures, if I read his book about Heidegger.

40:37 Daniel: Right.

40:37 Mark: His Heidegger makes me happy. And I know a lot of people

40:41 Daniel: feel that way about Fink and DeLanda on.

40:45 Mark: Even though other people are like.

40:47 Daniel: Or Fink and Lacan.

40:47 Mark: Delanda is creating his own simplified version of Deleuze that. But still, who cares? I mean, the scholars care. And you could always go back and read more of the original, but if so, I appreciate someone who's lucid and modern. It's almost inevitable. Of course, there are older writers like Montaigne, Voltaire, that read very lucidly, but because they're not in the same social environment that we are, they don't have the same standards of explanation. So I'm not talking about somebody who's trying to be hyper academic and respond to all of the secondary literature.

I'm just, you know, somebody who's trying to write clearly, you know, whatever they're talking about and bring together disparate themes. You know, I. So I appreciate a. Well written. I'm not saying I'm going to go back to it again and again. I think that these books, and they're all 300 pages, you know, they're not meant to go back to again and again. I'm thinking of like the Chalmers book or the McIntyre book or.

41:45 Seth: Yeah, my point is they're not well written. I mean, I get what you're saying. I get the appreciation of lucidity. And I would say that, for example, there are platonic dialogues that are extremely lucid. If you get to the point where you have a certain familiarity with the conventions of the genre and the way in which he puts things out. Then when I was talking about Rawls and that stuff is. I just don't think they're very. They weren't great writers. That's not particularly lucid stuff. Like, you don't need 600 pages to say as much as those guys,

42:17 Dylan: Hegel. I mean, Hegel is just a crazy crappy writer.

42:20 Mark: So that's what I'm saying. I really appreciate the secondary, like Robert Solomon's book on Hegel or the guy that wrote the book on Frege that I read a lot of while we were reading Frege.

42:30 Wes: Like, I think there's.

42:30 Mark: Some of those guys are really good and they really understand the subjects, the primary writers that they're maybe writing about. And so I appreciate that perhaps more. Of course, it's parasitic upon the original, but I still appreciate it. I know, Daniel, you had argued early on that, you know, I don't have time to read the primary text for a lot of this crap.

42:50 Daniel: I just, you know, well, when I say I don't have time, I don't have time to try to divine what the meaning was, Particularly if you remove centuries in time and from a different language and it's in translation. Right. At the end of the day, this is ultimately sort of an intellectual hobby. I just can't devote the time necessary to crack down on it. And oftentimes you can, as I did with Heidegger, really try to engage the primary text, spend a great deal of time doing it, and then really start to ask yourself, am I really going to mine the gold vein that supposedly is laying within this slag heap?

And I'm not so sure that it's there. And so the beauty. I'm going to come back to this, though. I was actually going to second Mark's appreciation of Hubert Dreyfus, which is that I'm a huge fan of secondary literature. That's done well for folks like Dreyfus because he helps give you an insight as to whether or not there might really be something there. It's an introduction to the topic that lets you know, is it therefore worth my time to delve deeper?

43:42 Seth: Listen. So just. Just for the record, I'm the world's greatest fan of popularization. That's my. Of all the people in this room, I am the least scholarly. I'm the least. This is the thing is, I like. I'm democratic to the bone. I love the fact that we're popular and we're getting people engaged who have no experience with philosophy, whatever. That's what I want. I love explaining complex things to. In its simple ways and all that. That being said, the question is, what's the point of the activity? You're saying, I want to mine for the gold, as if the mining itself is not the activity.

You're looking for the gold. We've had this conversation numerous times, and there's a big debate about what's the point of philosophy. Well, part of it is the mining. Part of it's the exploration itself. And that wrestling with the text is, in itself intrinsically valuable. And I get that you can get frustrated and, you know, Hegel is somebody. Hegel's like wrestling an octopus. Right? I mean, but I Swear to God, every page of that book, when we did the Phenomenology of Spirit, felt like it exploded with meaning. I was just in shock. It blew me out of the water.

Whereas Husserl. Husserl is like wrestling with eight octopuses and getting nothing out of it.

44:55 Wes: Here's the thing. I think difficult texts do this, and whether they're difficult because they're badly written or whether they're difficult because they're deep. And sometimes it's hard to tell the difference. For me, the jury is out on Hegel. I don't know if that's. That's. As some people say, he was engaging in the worst sort of academic bullshit of his time.

45:15 Daniel: In other words, that was. The unreadability may have been a cynical

45:18 Wes: exercise on his part, because that's what you had to.

45:20 Daniel: Yeah, that was the game. That was the academic game at the time.

45:23 Wes: As a philosopher in Germany at that time. Or if it's just a artifact that someone's sort of thinking at the edge, which tends to produce not the most lucid sort of prose. And they can both be true. Kant, for instance, I see someone who is just completely earnest. I don't think anyone could argue that Kant isn't just. He's like a kid who. And the complexity of his prose is just the fact that he's in it so deep, he's not coming far enough back out of the cave to explain it to the rest of us. But it's still tremendously rewarding to meet him.

45:58 Daniel: Plus, he was pioneering concepts more than.

46:00 Wes: More than halfway.

46:00 Daniel: When you're the pioneer to some degree, you can't always blaze the smoothest trail, right?

46:05 Wes: Yeah. And the thing about, you know, whether it's a Leibniz or Kant or any of these guys, there's always this element of scientific discovery where they're taking a very difficult problem, and even if it means monads, they're coming up with some model. There's that, you know, even though it's not science, there's sort of that quasi scientific satisfaction of someone who has taken something that seems really impossibly difficult or paradoxical and come up with some satisfying explanation of it. And that I think part of what's going on in more contemporary texts, you know, that's going on less, I think. So even in a Rawls. And I think Rawls, the ideas are really interesting. I think it's really interesting to try and found justice in the way he does. And the original position. All of it is tremendously brilliant and original and.

47:00 Daniel: And it's a sincere project. It's not just being done in order to.

47:04 Wes: But it's. It's still less satisfying. And maybe I can't explain very well why it's less satisfying, but it's.

47:10 Dylan: I think that in general, even with. Well, maybe what is the value of reading the original text? I'm a big advocate of reading it. Reading the original text. But, you know, my main academic training is in a discipline that could care less about reading a liberational text. You know, in physics, reading Newton is the last thing you would do in studying physics.

47:39 Wes: You're mining for the gold.

47:40 Daniel: Even Newtonian physics.

47:41 Dylan: Even Newtonian physics. And there's a couple of reasons for One is that bad stylist. Well, so there are a couple reasons for it. One is that is that you want to cover as much ground as possible in your education because you want to get current, right? You want to do new science. And so the activity of reading Newton is understood completely as a historical exercise and is a history of science. And that's its own discipline. Right. But it's not doing physics. It's inefficient. That's one of the main reasons why you wouldn't read Newton. And another is to the extent to which he's been superseded.

And then the third is just that there is a complete comfort with the notion that when you write that first paper or that first book pedagogically, it's probably crap and that there's somebody else that's going to be able to distill that down and come up with a way of presenting it that will be both more efficient and more enlightening, both forward into what you might do, but also in the topic itself. A perfect example is Maxwell. No one nowadays reads, you know, no physicist, unless they're just interested in the history, reads Maxwell's papers that introduce the theory of electricity and magnetism.

And one reason is that there was a whole new notation that was developed that if you've ever seen Maxwell's equations written down, they are in a form that Maxwell never wrote them down in. And one of the things that people find utterly confusing is that they don't even exist in Maxwell's papers. That said, when I read Maxwell's papers, there were things that he was paying attention to that struck me as very both interesting and important for understanding what his theory was about that are never talked about or very rarely talked about when you learn Maxwell's account.

The most important being the importance of vector potential.

49:42 Mark: So why do we care in philosophy

49:43 Dylan: so much about Original synopsis, for instance. Why are we reading the symposium? Why do we read it and why are we going to talk about it? And why do we strive to talk mainly about that text itself rather than about. Than Rosen's book about the symposium? There's 300, 350 page book sitting right next to West.

50:07 Wes: Better than its interpretations.

50:10 Dylan: Well, actually, so let's make this argument. Why is it. Even if you've. You know what I.

50:15 Wes: Because it's pregnant. To use a reason taken from the scripture, it makes you pregnant.

50:20 Mark: You know what the ideal is, Is to read something like Eva Brann's book about Heraclitus, where you get the entirety of Heraclitus in the book, but yet you still get this rich secondary literature because the original.

50:31 Wes: Yeah, but she's doing a certain thing that's not.

50:34 Seth: That's a unique. I have to say that's a unique case.

50:36 Dylan: And Heraclitus is a little unique in that. What do we have, 120 lines?

50:40 Daniel: Yeah, like 120 lines of code.

50:42 Mark: I mean, so all we need is a few cataclysms and then we could use Descartes and we could use.

50:48 Daniel: Over the first. So just a quick rebuttal. It shouldn't take long to get this rebuttal out. To Wes's point though, which is, aren't you inherently stuck with an interpretation one way or the other? Because if you go to the primary text, you yourself are trying to interpret it. It through the eons and through the. Yeah, but I mean, how would you trust yourself? It just seems to me that the alternate interpretation. I agree.

51:08 Seth: The second.

51:09 Daniel: Well, fair enough. I don't. Is the problem.

51:11 Dylan: I think that's one of the reasons for doing it in conversation.

51:15 Daniel: Right, right, right.

51:17 Dylan: Is that it's not just, you know, you rubbing up against the book.

51:20 Daniel: Right, exactly.

51:21 Wes: And I, and also I just. When I, you know, for the. Preparing for the symposium, I didn't look at any secondary literature. I mean, I found stuff and I downloaded it, but I knew I wanted to thoroughly grok the text first before I touched anything else.

51:35 Mark: I like to use the secondary literature to help me remember.

51:38 Wes: Yeah, but I think the thing here is this. I just, you know, as I heard the experience at St. John's I just wanted to make discoveries for myself before someone else made them for me. Sure. I wanted to make connections before anyone could sort of channel my connections in certain directions and maybe preclude me from seeing things I might have seen otherwise.

52:00 Daniel: Right.

52:00 Wes: There's always time for secondary literature. And I don't you know, I actually, I delve into it for these podcasts, but there's just nothing like the, like the pure. I mean, for me, it's just a joy to take one of these texts, like the symposium, and to start read it, summarize it, and then go through my notes and just think about it. And that experience, for me is what it's all about.

52:24 Seth: Yeah, I agree with that. And I'm totally unapologetic about focusing on original text because, look, for all the time and energy we put into this, we have to get some degree of satisfaction out of it. And I would get much less satisfaction if I was. It would be like being in school, like I was a student, if I was reading secondary literature. I mean, I want to read the. That being said, I do occasionally question the project and I think about, like, we oftentimes almost every episode, somebody who has spent a lot of time thinking about what we talked about or reading all the secondary stuff will say, oh my God, I can't believe you guys didn't pick up on this theme, or you didn't put it in this context, or you didn't address this thing.

And, you know, on and on and on. Part of me sometimes thinks, gosh, you know, I really should learn more about what we're talking about. I should read the historical context of this person and read some secondary interpretations on it. And yet. But what it is that we do, it somehow is what differentiates us from the academic crowd on one end. Right. And the totally set up a Socrates cafe table on the square crowd on the other end. I think the people who like to listen to us engage in these things are people like us where they want to get that same experience of engaging with it.

It's not about the scholarly pursuit. Secondary literature means scholarship. When you're directly engaging the text, it's a different kind of activity. It's not scholarship in that sense. And it's much more exciting and invigorating, I think.

53:52 Mark: Depends on what the secondary literature is. Secondary literature, like this Stanley Rosen book on symposium is going deep, deep, deep into the scholarship. If you're just reading stuff on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy or a popularizing thing, you know, one of Bob Solomon's book about anything, then it's a way to make the text accessible. It's not necessarily a way to get deep into the scholarship and do all kinds of literature.

54:17 Seth: Totally agree. You're right. I misspoke. I'm thinking in terms of like, the academic papers, that whole genre. So let's talk about different ways in which secondary literature is actually can be good fink on Lacan. We read Lacan, we read Fink. Fink is way better at talking about Lacan than Lacan is Eva. Eva's book is not an exposition. It's not a 350 page exposition of a 40 page text. What it is, is a 200 page framework for understanding these fragments. She actually created a way to make this accessible and a framework for interpreting, which was not an exposition in any way. It was bridging these disparate things in a way that you never would have picked up the threat. What she was able to do is completely different.

54:59 Daniel: So it's an annotation, basically. It's like the annotated.

55:03 Wes: Yeah, the word there is interpretation because to the extent that things are interpretations, I really like them. But to the extent that it becomes historical. And you're talking about what, Hippias, what were you telling me about?

55:16 Mark: Oh, so in the Stanley Rosen book that I borrowed briefly from Dylan to read the chunk of the symposium that I was most responsible for, you know, so I'm doing just the. Phaedrus is the first speaker in the symposium and I'm kind of supposed to give the one minute introduction to that. And so there's what, a 20 page chapter on that which talks about the character of Phaedrus and how he appears in the other dialogues, how his teacher was Hippeis and all. Everything we know about Hippeis from ancient Greek scholarship. And just going really deep in these themes to then give an interpretation of what he was saying that goes way beyond the six paragraphs or whatever that his speech actually is in the dialogue. And there was something kind of appealing and interesting about that, but there was also. It also really turned my stomach.

56:08 Wes: Yeah, to me, I mean, this is why. This is the part of academia that I didn't want. And also I'm not sure to what extent it's necessary and sometimes it becomes a way of evading the ideas. A lot of literature on ancient philosophy or on literature is very historicist in orientation because interpretation is hard. Doing an actual interpretation of the text and focusing on the ideas is far more difficult than talking about historical context and using that to make some more modest.

56:43 Mark: Wittgenstein wrote this because he was having a sad year.

56:46 Wes: Right, Exactly. Especially, yeah, the psychoanalysis of authors.

56:52 Dylan: Well, there's a special skill to doing an honest exegesis where you're trying to clarify what's being said, add, make some connections that are outside the text. But again, Being honest about what those connections are and then also interpreting. Those are my favorite kinds of summaries and interpretations. Where you have something revealed to you about the text and you then have a kind of commentary or interpretation of it, where that interpretation lies alongside the text. And you can see how that works. But the author has made a clear enough distinction between what the text that they're reading and analyzing and interpreting is saying, and then how they're getting to their own interpretation of it. And those exist and there are academics that do them, but they just aren't that common.

57:43 Wes: Yeah, their academics are great writers and interpreters and popularizers.

57:49 Daniel: And maybe that's the problem, right, is we, you know, we expect academics, something that we would never expect from writers at large. Right. All of us sort of know that there are good writers and bad writers out in the field of literature. And yet somehow we expect every academic talking about a particular subject to knock one out of the park. And, you know, that's just not realistic. The reality is most people just cannot. They're just, they're not adept at using language.

58:10 Wes: The difference is, I think though, that, you know, most people, even if they're bad writers, well, you know, if they're making a living at it, they're appealing to something with people and they're trying, and to some extent they're attempting a certain craft. And that craft is designed to communicate with people, whereas it's very obvious with some humanities, you know, academic, secondary literature. It's not really about communicating, it's about signifying one's sophistication.

58:41 Daniel: Right.

58:41 Wes: It's power plays. What's interesting is you see this in all walks of life. It's like everyone, despite the sort of anti philosophical general climate, everyone wants to be a philosopher. I want to write an article about this. And you know, you see this in the business world. Everything is sort of pumped up to be meaningful. And there was an article that came out recently about how the key to success is to use more abstract language.

59:06 Daniel: And so like that Microsoft memo that just came out laying off, what was it, 15,000 people that they buried it in like the 11th paragraph.

59:15 Wes: And I've been in meetings like this where I'm sitting here thinking these people sound like philosophers. This sounds like philosophers are people attempting to be. Yeah, but attempting to be thinkers. Like gorgeous. Amazing. To me, they're not, you know, they have luxury of doing this because they're at a high enough level in the business or the company or the organization where they're not responsible for getting anything done. And so they just sort of luxuriate in this kind of high level, pseudo philosophical talk that is meant to make commerce this highly meaningful activity.

59:51 Mark: Well, so here I think this is a good transition. We've done a lot of sort of ripping on academia here, but what we do and the quality of what we do and the quality of most of the outreaching kind of secondary literature that we're talking about is very much parasitic on the academic world, that if there weren't these people that just did this for a living, and we didn't have a long tradition of that, then we wouldn't have the canon, we wouldn't have all these interpretations. It was a pretty important decision in the formation of this podcast that we were actually going to stick with the text, that we were actually going to do preparation, we're going to read.

There are a lot of philosophy podcasts out there that just, they want to get at that meaningful, having deep conversations, but they just want to kind of reflect on what they've already thought about things in the past. And so it ends up being some kind of free form, you know, does God give us meaning or do we come up with meaning? Or it's very easy, even when done by very intelligent people, for it just to become kind of a pointless mess. And so the text and ultimately academia have been something that have hopefully saved us from that.

1:01:04 Dylan: But that's why the model is talking in the bar over beers after the seminar that you had a book that you were focused on and yeah, maybe you descended to some cursing and maybe there's a little more drinking than necessary, but that's the model. It's not. The model is not in your undergraduate dorm room sitting around smoking a joint and saying, man, what is the meaning of life? Which is what those are like, right? It gets grounded by having had a joint activity and then having something to reflect upon, an agenda. Yeah. That focuses that discussion.

Because you're absolutely right, Mark. You can ask an earnest question, but if it's too far flung or doesn't have any lens to focus it through, even if ultimately you decide, you know what, Descartes full of shit, or you know what, I can't stand Husserl, you get so much more out of that lens in working that through. But at the beginning of the podcast, we always summarize, we say, well, the question for the podcast is something like blah, right? But inevitably, if you had asked that question straight up, the podcast would be so much less interesting than it is.

Because that question lies behind the lens

1:02:23 Wes: that we're focusing the text is like the.

1:02:25 Seth: It's an anchor. It's an anchor that binds you, connects you to the audience and connects you to each other. So you establish some kind of common language or a common framework for at least approaching the problem.

1:02:35 Wes: Or I was gonna, I was gonna use the word evidence. It's like, you know, rules of evidence in a courtroom. Even if it's all hearsay, which is what the text is, it's something, right? We can't consult the oracle to check ourselves, but at least here's a text. And also it's a thing in common, which is also what's necessary to go back to an ancient Greek theme to friendship and conversation. There's got to be some concrete, substantive, meaty, common thing that's shared like a meal.

1:03:09 Mark: And if the reading that week has been not a very satisfying meal, then we sort of come into it like, I'm kind of angry that I just spent two weeks on that. What are we gonna.

1:03:22 Seth: Ah. By the way, I want to point out that I'm not unaware of the fact that it's ironic that we would rip on secondary literature when in fact we kind of are secondary literature. It's a commentary on the text for sure.

1:03:35 Wes: And we all consult secondary literature and we all benefit. Benefited from it.

1:03:38 Seth: It's not a blank. The other thing about having a text as an anchor is that most of the stuff we read is by smart people who have interesting things to say for the most part. And I certainly don't think that I would be capable in a free flowing, non anchored conversation to have the breadth of opinion about all of the things that we study and talk about without having the text in front. Like, it isn't like we're doing a Socratic kind of exercise here where every week we're like, so you're a lawyer. What is justice? Right? And then, you know, you're a writer. What is, you know, what is this? That's not the structure of what we do. And we're not, we're just. That wouldn't work. So it helps me to see what smart people have to say about things first before, you know, it creates a context to have the conversation.

1:04:30 Mark: We've gone through this podcast. We've got to meet so many people that are each engaged in their own, their own intellectual journey, their faith journey, whatever you want to call it. And some of those are scary. And it's been a very interesting experience as this has grown, learning to be. I was talking before, maybe being a little more careful in not being so Offensive in certain ways. Just having very clearly in mind that there's somebody, whatever text we pick, they're probably, unless it's carnap, there's probably somebody that this means a great deal to them. So that when we did as mean as we were about Ayn Rand, we came into it knowing that there is going to be a substantial portion of the listeners that like, this was a really meaningful, affecting thing for them and we couldn't just simply come in and spit at it or something.

1:05:27 Wes: We made a good faith effort to make sense.

1:05:29 Daniel: Well, I thought it was actually a very. You took her seriously in the way that you took her down. It wasn't the typical type of Internet comments takedown of like Ayn Rand, you know, espouses a virtue of selfishness and therefore she's evil and therefore I hate her and therefore people shouldn't appreciate it. I mean, it was very, a very methodical way in which you said, look, a lot of the statements that she's making are based upon false presuppositions and here's the way in which, you know, they are false. And that's breaking her down. Not much differently than you had done with many of the other writers that you've discussed on the show.

I actually thought it was a very rewarding program because you start to talk not just about Ayn Rand, but also her antagonists. Right. And you start to explain she sort of gets her antagonists wrong and you start to understand more about what her antagonists were saying as you take down how you disagreed with her take down of her antagonist, if that makes sense. I thought that was a very respectful way to do it. It's perfectly acceptable to rip apart someone's work as long as you do it in a serious and non frivolous fashion. You know, I read Walter Kaufman is a, is a secondary scholar.

I think we talk a lot. You know, really much of his fame is based upon interpreting more canonical writers. Nietzsche in particular. Translating Nietzsche, translating Nietzsche. But he's also an interpreter of Nietzsche. He's also a commentator on Heidegger and he wrote a chapter of one of his books on really just taking apart Heidegger. And Seth, I would be interested to take your take on his takedown of Heidegger, but it was a very sincere attempt to explain why he didn't appreciate Heidegger's approach, why he thought it was dishonest. We don't need to get into it now.

The point is that it was an earnest attempt to explain what his problem was with Heidegger. And there's value in that as well, even if you wind up disagreeing with it.

1:07:05 Seth: Yeah, no, no, I think that's what I feel like Mark was trying to say was exactly that. But we are earnest and very few things that people say make me upset. But one, one type of comment that we get that I really, really get upset about is when somebody says something to the effect of, you totally didn't get it and you missed the Mark and you didn't, you know, you didn't take it seriously. You didn't get this, you didn't get that. And I think, you know, but they

1:07:34 Wes: give you no specifics about.

1:07:36 Seth: Usually no specifics. Right. But I think, listen, I went to war with that text. You know, I'm like, it's like Jacob and the angel, right? I mean, we wrestled and I did my best and what I got out of it was what I found there. So if I didn't find it, I might be deficient, in which case you can say, hey, let me show you all the things you missed on this, or it's frickin not there. Those are the options. But don't, don't tell me that I somehow disingenuously didn't. That's the only thing that makes me upset is when people act like we are dismissive or disingenuous about something. Because I make a good faith effort to try to understand everything that we read. That's five years. Five years of. Well, more than 100.

1:08:20 Wes: I take it as a badge of honor that almost none of those comments go into any detail about some specific error. Unless it's, you know, no, you didn't

1:08:34 Daniel: die on a motorcycle crash.

1:08:36 Seth: That's.

1:08:37 Wes: Except for stuff like that. But I take it as a badge of honor because let them bring it on if. And then we'll. We can respond in the comments. I'm more terrified of like a very specific thing. Like.

1:08:46 Seth: Yeah, Well, I take it the badge of honor for me is that most of the times fans come to our defense and we never have to respond because other people listening are like, did you even listen to the same thing that we listen to? Because here's that, blah, blah, blah, right?

1:08:58 Mark: If there was a serious angle that we missed, like, it's possible that there's another text that would elucidate that. And that doesn't mean that we're going to do another Ayn Rand episode where we do Atlas Shrugged. That's not going to happen. But, you know, we'll do another Merleau-Ponty episode that Investigates some other part of his corpus. I'm sure we'll eventually get to that. Or there are many other people. If somebody, you know, we had a scholar listen to our original Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics episode and just thought it was crap. But it was kind of clear from his comment that he was maybe.

1:09:30 Wes: What did. What did he say with any specific.

1:09:33 Mark: Too many dick jokes of religion. Like, he seemed like he was maybe a Catholic interpretation on the show, a Catholic interpreter of Aristotle. So, okay, we'll do some of the medieval, you know, guys who are giving Catholic versions of Aristotle. Like, there's. They're objecting to what we chose to read specifically and the aspects that we focused on that there's a whole other idea that they just want us to do another episode on. So, like, well, maybe we'll get to that.

1:09:59 Wes: That's fine.

1:10:00 Dylan: Well, part of it, though, is that some people listen to it thinking that it's like an editorial. They're sort of missing the point of the podcast that we often disagree. The conclusions we come to might be tentative, or sometimes we have very thought out opinions about it. And it depends upon the podcast.

1:10:19 Wes: It depends upon someone is flipping. Usually there's someone, you know, coming back with a more. With a serious counterbalance to that. So it's not like it's just pure flippancy and dismissiveness, like we're dismissing religion. And I don't. I don't think that's an accurate way to characterize them.

1:10:36 Dylan: And in fact, one of the things that I think makes the podcast stand apart is its earnestness in trying to address ideas and think them through. And I think that's one of the things, I don't know that sets it apart. And I don't know if that's peculiarly modern. I think that when I read older texts, the Symposium or Plato's dialogues are good examples where an earnest attempt to try to engage in an intellectually alive life is something that people are suspicious of. That life of philosophy, very broadly speaking, is something that there's a lot of suspicion of, as opposed to a life

1:11:16 Mark: of politics or people wouldn't listen to us in the first place. That's not.

1:11:20 Daniel: I think what you guys are having is Comic Book Guy syndrome, really. Right. It's just worst episode ever. Rest assured. I was on the Internet immediately registering my guest. Right.

1:11:31 Mark: Very regularly.

1:11:32 Daniel: That's. I mean, that's right. I mean, the more serious point I was gonna make before I back off with that is that if you're not getting trolled, you're doing it wrong. It just seems to me that if you've got enough people listening to you, that there's some subset of jerks that are just going to explain to you how you should have done it. I assume that's roughly 10%. The people you're hearing from are the 10% that everyone. There's 10 people behind them that appreciated exactly what you guys are doing, even if they disagreed with it.

1:11:58 Seth: Right.

1:11:59 Daniel: I mean, I think you guys appreciate that people will disagree on any given point one way or the other. That's not the problem. But, you know, that's. Those people, by and large, are not taking the time to log in and register their praise. Their praise is effectively. They're one of the metrics on your download numbers every month.

1:12:15 Seth: Yeah, no, that's probably a good point. And it also ties back into what Mark is saying, is that they're coming from a specific place. They want us to talk because this is their guy or their gal. We have lots and lots of fans who are totally untrained and uneducated in philosophy, but they came across Kierkegaard. They know everything there is to know about Kierkegaard, but every Kierkegaard thing there is to do, and. But they'd have no. You know. And so you do your one Kierkegaard episode, and it's like, what about. Why didn't you read either? Or why didn't you do this? Why didn't you do that? And what about this? And what about that? And it's like, okay, I get it. Like, I get it. We have. We have besmirched or touched on. We've entered into the same.

1:12:56 Daniel: We failed to pander to your taste.

1:12:58 Seth: Yeah, well, it's like going to see

1:12:59 Dylan: a band play and they don't play. Play the song that's your most favorite song from there. There's, you know, they have 35 albums out, and there's this one cut that you always. And they don't play it.

1:13:10 Seth: So, wait, wasn't this supposed to be about what we learned over five years?

1:13:13 Wes: So, yeah. Is there any criticism of a podcast that we do well?

1:13:17 Daniel: So that's a good question. What criticisms did you take that you really appreciated and you learned from and grew from?

1:13:24 Mark: Well, a lot of it was just about being a little more professional in our organization. So when people just listen and they're confused, that's bad. Like, we. You shouldn't even have to listen to all the episodes from episode one to get most of what we're talking about in any given episode. And so when somebody is like, I didn't understand that at all, which is a very common comment that we get from well intentioned, smart people who are just maybe not that into philosophy, then we start questioning things. So we introduce the precogs and we tried to get a little more organized in our introductory statements in, you know, we keep these rules even pressing now, like, can we just save the sharp criticisms until the second half of the podcast? Can we do so? There's these things that we're constantly pushing out to make better in that respect.

1:14:14 Dylan: Part of it is there's a tension though, with the expectation that people who are listening to the podcast have read the text versus they have not. And the conceit at the beginning was, and we maintain this, that you read the text. The idea is we're going to talk about a text and we basically expect that you've read it.

1:14:35 Mark: No.

1:14:36 Wes: Even though one of the ground rules is.

1:14:38 Mark: Well, I don't think that at all. I don't, I've never now do that.

1:14:42 Wes: No, I think though it is better. Well, I mean, I've talked to listeners who say it is a night and day experience if they've read the text.

1:14:51 Daniel: And I've actually come to learn the hard way. I mean, just as an early adopter, I came to realize pretty soon in that if I had no basic familiarity with the earlier text, I was lost through much of, well, I think that's fine.

1:15:01 Wes: I talked to this, which is not a critique.

1:15:03 Daniel: It turned me, it taught me, hey, look, if you want to, if you want to get more out of the podcast, why don't you, at least on a secondary level look up the Internet, you know, the Stanford Encyclopedia on it.

1:15:13 Dylan: Yeah, I met a fan here in Madison who, he refuses to listen to the podcast unless he's read it. Unless he's read. And he. So he just makes sure he's read the text.

1:15:23 Daniel: A principled approach.

1:15:25 Dylan: I don't think you have to be that puritanical about it, but I do think that it's one of the virtues of the podcast that we try to be somewhat pedagogical and give some introductions to things and stuff like that. But it's absolutely true that you will certainly get more out of the conversation. And if you've read the text or tried to make yourself familiar with in some way, and I think that that is a good thing. I don't think that.

1:15:50 Seth: Why for three years plus have we had a ground rule that says you don't have to read the text or actually know anything.

1:15:56 Wes: I mean, because I think the. Ideally, you're trying to grow your audience.

1:15:59 Seth: Yeah, yeah.

1:16:00 Wes: But ideally we would teach the text as much as possible. I'm all for that. It's just a matter of. It's hard to be that prepared. It takes a lot more preparation to teach the text. And it's an ideal that we aspire to. But I just don't. I don't think it's practical simply to explain everything they need to know about the text, absent, you know, them having read it.

1:16:23 Seth: Yeah. I mean, it's been an evolution that. That and that particular part. I mean, originally we would just get on and it would be like, so does somebody want to give a summary of the argument here? And then it was. We assigned responsibility for doing that. And then there was a period of time where it just got lost and we weren't doing it at all, really. And then we started the pre. Cog thing. So it's definitely been. That's one of the learnings is. And that goes back to that concept of having a text to anchor it to begin with.

1:16:49 Daniel: Right.

1:16:49 Seth: Is that there has to be something around which people can gravitate and get a hold of, even if it's just a summary of the argument. I mean, I think the Precogs have been universally excellent, and they in themselves have tremendous value. I find myself, even before we do our episodes, I listen to the Precogs before I go in just to make

1:17:07 Dylan: sure if they get done.

1:17:09 Seth: If they get done in time. Dylan,

1:17:13 Mark: One of the other points of evolution has been just being a little more modest in what I actually expect to add to my overall philosophical world picture. Or, you know, just like we were saying, we asked these questions at the beginning, and the question, you know, this was even evident early on where I was trying to think of a question for Taoism, and I came up with, like, well, what is wisdom? Because Daoism just seems to be saying, this is what the wise man does, and this is what the wise man. So, okay, so here's one answer. But it would be ridiculous to think that we would have enough time after discussing Daoism sufficiently, after discussing the text, to then go in any detail in what we think wisdom really is.

Well, you know, what I think is launching off to actually try to answer the question even after we've done the text is usually not doable. So it's, you know, it's enough to present the author's view, say, whether we thought it was convincing. Maybe we have a little bit of insight that comes up in the closing or somewhere in it maybe. Usually it's some ongoing philosophical preoccupation that I have to pull out freaking new work or whatever. You have to pull out anti scientism Wesser. So you get these pictures of what our views are over a long period.

So yeah, just being more modest in what we expect to get out of these. I don't know, do you find that as well or.

1:18:33 Seth: I had no such pretensions. I don't have the same kind of steel trap memory that you appear to have. So listen, I could start the cycle all over again and it would probably be all new to me. I mean, I'm always amazed at especially you and Wes, Mark and Wes, that you've got threads and connections to things because there's so much stuff that's present in your mind. Whereas I live very, very much in the specific text as we're reading it. And I just don't remember a lot of the. A lot of the details of a lot of other things to make those connections all the time.

Sometimes stuff resonates for me. What I think I found is that I've had a pretty severe change of heart over the last five years, which has I think been part of an ongoing evolution for me in terms of what I find interesting. And I started off my undergraduate thesis was on logic. And then in grad school I wrote my master's on Heidegger, but I was still very interested in ontology and metaphysics. Now if we aren't talking about ethics or political philosophy, I have a hard time like getting up any. I think about all those debates about universals in particulars, you know, a part of every curriculum and as an undergrad or.

1:19:44 Wes: It's mind numbing.

1:19:45 Seth: And I used to get really worked up about like primary and secondary qualities and whether I honestly could not. I just, I couldn't get excited. I could barely bring myself to read anything about that stuff now. And that's definitely a big change.

1:20:00 Dylan: Well, that's not a big change in the past five years. Right? That's. That's a change from when that's a change in your life.

1:20:05 Seth: No, it's. I think it's a change from the last five years. Oh, I think, I think I've gotten.

1:20:10 Dylan: You expected. You expected to be more into that and you've.

1:20:14 Seth: I think in the early beginning I could have had a really passionate conversation about Quine or Hume or Locke and I think I would have a really hard time doing that now.

1:20:24 Mark: Well, a number of the things that we've said here, you know, my being less ambitious, trying less hard to say original, wide ranging things, your not being as emotionally raw anymore, us overall getting more professional and trying to explain things a little more soberly. I think even adding Dylan, I would say something incredibly stupid and dismissive and Dylan would call me on it in a way that you guys previously would not. And so over the. Over 20.

1:20:52 Daniel: What the fuck are you talking about?

1:20:54 Mark: It got me, you know, just a little less flippant about a few, quite a few things about the reading. And these all add up to what I think in many listeners, though a lot of listeners appreciate the development and the increased professionalism and the fact that we're still doing this at all. Almost every episode, or at least every other episode, somebody says that was the best episode you've had in a long time. Yeah. In other words, I really fell in love with stuff that went on in the really early episodes. And wow, I listened to that Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance one that changed my life.

Somebody said that. Or really got into the Taoism one. Or just when we were more raw and angry and had chips on our shoulders and, you know, we're trying stuff and now it's, oh, this is just another thing that's happening in Seth's schedule, you know, that I can see how people might be a little less overwhelmed now, but, you know, hopefully we make up for it by the fact that we do take it more seriously now and put more work. And adding Dylan means there's 25% more work going into every episode,

1:22:04 Dylan: always directed towards physics.

1:22:06 Daniel: Well, actually, I think that's. There's a lot of value in that. I think, I think, Dylan, I think a certain hard headed. I don't want to say analytic, because that is the wrong connotation, but I think you come from a certain intellectual background, having come from the hard sciences. Not that the other three don't have basic competence, but let's get real, you don't have a basic PhD in particle physics.

1:22:25 Dylan: Right.

1:22:27 Seth: Don't equivocate, Just say Dylan's better than us. I.

1:22:30 Daniel: But I do think any group needs to have an interplay of different elements. And I wanted to shower a certain amount of praise upon you, Dylan, for bringing that to the table. And I didn't even realize it was lacking until I heard you starting to participate in some of the perspective you come from, even if it's just the intellectual history of talking about people like Mach or Newton or Maxwell.

1:22:52 Seth: So let me ask you this as somebody who has probably listened to most or been, you know, all the episodes. Did we have a sophomore slump? Did we the.

1:23:00 Daniel: No, I think there was one that you were on. Maybe they could have been that one. That could have been that one. I always go into paroxysms of self hatred every time I do one of these things. I would say it's not so much that there was a slump. I do think that there are strategic gambles you make anytime you bring a guest on, whether it be me or whether it be David Brown or whether it be folks talking about, you know, I mean, frankly, I was not a fan of the Owen Flanagan episode, I'll be honest, you know, and I'm sure he's a good scholar and a fine man and loves his family. But I didn't gain much from that episode. And I think the proof in the pudding was you guys did sort of a post Flanagan episode on the same.

1:23:38 Dylan: Oh, we bitched about that episode from

1:23:41 Daniel: which I got far more value and far more entertainment than I did from Flanagan. And I don't want to dismiss the idea of having guests. I thought the episode Patricia Churchland, that was a gem of an episode. So I don't want to say that

1:23:54 Mark: we got slammed on that one for really giving her softball questions that are.

1:23:58 Wes: I really have to listen to that.

1:23:59 Daniel: I just found her interesting enough that she was carrying. Yeah, part of it. She's just a raconteur. Right. So it just carried well. So I don't want to say don't bring on academic guests, but it seems to me that you're taking a real gamble when you bring guests on of any stripe, because sometimes they click and sometimes not so much.

1:24:14 Dylan: Part of it is it's hard to have a discussion with someone who's you're talking specifically about their book. One of the reasons why I think the Churchland episode was partly successful is that we purposefully put on our list not just her book, but we put some Hume on that list to talk about it. And so we had that extra thing that was in front of us. And it's perfectly natural that a guest whose book we're reading would have that experience of thinking, well, they're asking me questions about my book that I read. And that ends up being more like an interview than a conversation. And Eva's book was think good in this respect. She had written this book about Heraclitus, but we.

1:24:54 Wes: We still had the Heraclitus, but we talked about Heraclitus.

1:24:56 Dylan: Heraclitus was the thing that we had read together. And like when Petrie was on as a guest, we were reading and talked about Cormac McCarthy's book. But he had, you know, spent a lot of time thinking about it. He wrote a lecture about it and we read that. But he was on there as part of a conversation that we had about something else. I think in general, it's probably easier to have a guest on that. There's some extra thing we were talking about.

1:25:22 Wes: Yeah, I think that's a great idea. I think. So we can let them plug their latest book and we can even spend 20 minutes of the. Or 30 minutes, the podcast, interviewing them about their latest book. But then we launch into some lightning.

1:25:35 Daniel: Well, that's what.

1:25:36 Mark: That's what I liked about some of what we did with Flanagan and Chalmers is that we asked them about their professional status and sort of what it's like to be this kind of philosopher. You know, both those guys, I admire them in that they chase after different areas of interest to them, that they're not just being the same horse like Rawls did through his whole life. You know, that's what makes those guys, I think, more exciting to talk to in some ways. I don't know. I mean, Sandel, even though he's talking about kind of the same topic, he has this whole different, like, public outreach part of it, that he's actually trying to contribute to a national conversation and get things done in a real way that.

I don't know. I think both Flanagan and Chalmers had that to some degree as well. They're both very gregarious. Anybody that will interview with us is pretty free about interviewing with them.

1:26:23 Seth: Totally agree with that. Totally agree with that. What I was taking away from this was that we went through a period where we. We were evolving. We had guests before that, and they were typically dilettantes like us. And then we started. We got to a certain level of notoriety, and suddenly we could ask the Patricia Churchlands, and we got asked for

1:26:43 Daniel: her publisher,

1:26:46 Dylan: and that was like our first, like, big.

1:26:48 Seth: It's the same. It's the same concept. We hit a threshold where suddenly. That's right, people were coming to us saying, you're a media outlet. Well, you want to introduce somebody and

1:26:57 Daniel: sorry, Wes, I've been meaning to talk to you about Alec Baldwin.

1:26:59 Seth: So we had to. We had to navigate those waters and figure out how to have those conversations. But it seems to me that it's totally a case by case basis. We want to have a conversation. We have to find some way to set that stage with guests and make them Understand that that's what we want and that's what our fans want.

1:27:15 Dylan: You know, I don't listen to a lot of podcasts. I mean, Mark listens to tons and tons of podcasts. But I feel like the kind of thing that we do still is so unique in the podcast world and the media world, mainly because while it's educational in some funny way, it's not the primary purpose. I don't feel like. I don't. We're not trying to enlighten. It's the activity itself that is the value.

1:27:40 Wes: It's all about the money. That's what I.

1:27:42 Dylan: That's why we got into this, for the money.

1:27:46 Seth: I certainly don't.

1:27:47 Wes: That's the anchor that I need.

1:27:49 Seth: Yeah. I certainly don't approach it as if I'm trying to educate people.

1:27:53 Mark: I mean, there are always things that you think are negative in the culture. Some of your tirades against scientism. Both you and Wes Daniel was saying that the US Is anti intellectual. Well, it might be anti philosophical. That, you know, philosophy is useless. It's just, you know, I remember telling my. My drama teacher from high school when I went back, like, oh, yeah, I got a philosophy degree. And he's like, this is something in drama.

1:28:18 Wes: Who's a drama teacher?

1:28:19 Mark: It's like, oh, let me wipe my butt with my degree.

1:28:21 Wes: Like, he. What are you going to do with that?

1:28:25 Mark: As, yes, exactly.

1:28:26 Wes: Teach drama.

1:28:28 Mark: But there is a lot of respect for science and like, if you are alive intellectually as an American, then you will learn. So Seth's eyes just rolled just about to the back of his head as I said that. And we don't have to go. We've done that in many an episode. But that is the kind of thing that sort of, as a long term concern, I would say that we all have our own little beefs that we want to convince the world about in some small way.

1:28:57 Dylan: Yeah, Less.

1:28:59 Mark: More than others.

1:28:59 Wes: There are a lot of these.

1:29:02 Daniel: I would grant you the point that somehow it's more anti philosophical as most anti intellectual. If I saw a great number of documentaries or television broadcasts or podcasts of great popularity devoted toward hard science topics. But to my mind, when I do get sort of popularizing documentaries on hard sciences, whether it be mathematics or whether it be physics, they're invariably BBC produced. Yeah, invariably.

1:29:26 Wes: I think they're two.

1:29:27 Daniel: And I think. And I think the Neil DeGrasse Tyson Cosmos reboot was just. It was an embarrassment.

1:29:32 Wes: It is. Thank you.

1:29:34 Daniel: And I got to tell you, I don't want to sound too. I don't want to hit this Anglophilic note too hard here, but I think it's worth noting that it was a BBC producer, I think Adrian Malone was his name, who worked with Sagan. Part of the reason I'm willing to maybe give Tyson a bit of a pass is that I've seen his lectures for the Great Courses. I think anyone who's kind of fancies themselves as having intellectual proclivities can gain a lot by downloading some of these classes from the Great Courses website. And Neil DeGrasse Tyson has a kind of a Quick History of Astronomy series which is, I find a lot more rewarding.

1:30:09 Seth: I'm not convinced that American culture is anti intellectual or anti philosophical. And I think the fact that we have a following is evidence to some degree of that. What I do think is that we have a certain kind of media culture now that the type of conversation that takes place in the mainstream media and around topics today is hardly earnest and generous. And all the things that we try to be. And we have become a media outlet to some extent, even though we talk about philosophy and we're kind of like that pebble in the stream, I think there's not just a core audience that's interested in what we talk about, but also people who are interested in the way we do things. There's an opportunity to encourage the type of thing that we do in a much broader sphere.

1:30:57 Mark: So that seems like a good final topic to think about is what do we want to see out of the next. Out of the future of this thing? Daniel, what do you want to see?

1:31:05 Daniel: I'm wondering if you guys could ever experiment with something like a debate format. I mean, obviously sometimes, you know, I think on the better episodes there's been a certain amount of debate argument, however you want to describe it. And I think that livens things up, obviously, as long as they're done within bounds.

1:31:17 Wes: Listen to this.

1:31:20 Daniel: But I'm. And I don't know if debate is necessarily the quite. But I wonder particularly if it might mesh well with, you know, Seth's interest in maybe trying to. Trying to discuss more political theory issues, if I hear you right, maybe that lends itself better to a debate format. I certainly suspect that those kinds of. Any sparks that might fly from that would make for good listening.

1:31:39 Dylan: I mean, one thing I hear you saying is just having more lively opinionatedness, right?

1:31:46 Daniel: Take a stance and attack the other guy who doesn't agree with it.

1:31:50 Mark: The way we've generally thought of that as a possibility is in terms of what guests we're going to get that we knew that if on the Ayn Rand episode we actually got a Randian, that it was going to be a very different kind of thing and thought, you know, just from observing other formats, Crossfire, etcetera, Where that takes place, that that was probably not going to be the most rewarding experience for anyone involved.

1:32:15 Daniel: No, Crossfire should not be your model. I agree.

1:32:17 Seth: Yeah, that's a tough one for me. I'd have to think very long and very seriously about how I could make that a reality, because it's not what I want to be involved in.

1:32:26 Daniel: It may not be workable because I would have thought perhaps that might have been something that would have appealed. And you're saying you seems like you're. You're absolutely disinterested in that.

1:32:34 Seth: Part of what we have going on here is we don't debate in that sense very often that even when we disagree about something, there's a way in which we engage it where we're kind of working together to try to. Even if we're. We're holding our distances. That would be.

1:32:50 Daniel: Well, I don't want an episode with winners and losers or. Yeah, email in your votes as to who had the better argument score.

1:32:56 Mark: Live episode. I think we should have little pleasure meters, you know. You know, like in the debate of people. That thing that Daniel said was really stupid. I have no.

1:33:06 Wes: It should be really. It should be like American Idol and, you know, people in Hopkins Idol.

1:33:11 Seth: Well, I'm thinking of.

1:33:11 Wes: Someone is eliminated from the podcast with each.

1:33:14 Seth: I'm thinking of that. The episode we did on theist arguments

1:33:18 Mark: for the existence of God.

1:33:19 Seth: I mean, yeah, those were two different sides. There's on his side, he was theist and on our side we weren't. I don't know, maybe.

1:33:26 Mark: But we all agreed that those arguments were.

1:33:28 Seth: But that was. He agreed too. That was. The thing was we were actually all on the same page. It was an interesting intellectual exercise to some extent. Right. That would have been the kind of situation where it would have been like a debate.

1:33:40 Daniel: Yeah, I was thinking more along the political realm or perhaps social. Or maybe, you know, social criticism. Something along those lines.

1:33:46 Seth: Yeah, well, this is.

1:33:48 Daniel: Do a Horkheimer episode or doing Adorno

1:33:50 Seth: or, you know, there's. I think there's a lot of opportunity. There's a whole rich field there to have conversations about conservative versus liberal approaches to certain kinds of social theory and those sorts of things.

1:34:01 Daniel: Right.

1:34:02 Seth: I still think you start from the issue and you work your way Out. I don't think you start with a point of view and.

1:34:09 Daniel: Right.

1:34:09 Seth: Work towards it.

1:34:10 Wes: Right.

1:34:11 Seth: For our format.

1:34:12 Daniel: Well, and that's what I was trying to get at. Again, I probably contaminated the idea by saying debate, and I think it's probably closer to what Dylan was saying, which is what can be done perhaps to just punch up some of the discourse with taking stances and defending. But on the other hand, if you start doing it cynically just for the sake of generating sparks for the show, that's probably going to be seen through.

1:34:31 Seth: I think the way to solve the problem that you're mentioning is just have more famous people on and let Wes

1:34:36 Daniel: talk, just rip into them.

1:34:41 Seth: Is that you were very gentle.

1:34:43 Wes: Yeah. It makes me very nervous to attack a famous person.

1:34:48 Mark: Well, true.

1:34:49 Dylan: Professor Leiter, I thought you did a great job, actually. And I thought that I was with Sandel and I was very gratified that he responded to you and took you seriously. And I. I thought that was a.

1:35:00 Seth: In fact, he had a good example. In fact, he had a very animated response.

1:35:04 Wes: Yeah.

1:35:04 Seth: It took him out of the comfort zone.

1:35:06 Wes: I didn't get a. I didn't get a chance to respond to him. I'm gonna write, go on the blog, and then we give him a chance to respond. So. And I'm sure he's seen all these criticisms before. It's probably not new, but he probably hasn't responded in this type of forum. So where he can be maybe. Maybe he will somewhat academic and still get a large readership. But anyway.

1:35:25 Mark: Well, I know one of the things we're. We're looking to do is perhaps step up the frequency of episodes and have more types of episodes. So we already, you know, we do the Precogs. We've had introduced the not school highlights episodes. One thing that I think we're going to do very soon is a blog highlights episode where we get some of the people that wrote blog posts to simply read their blogs and string five of those together. And so people that don't look at the blog now get an animated series of monologues that hopefully will be entertaining. So we're going to try some stuff like that. There's more and more people that want us to review their books. So rather than have all four of us bother to read that, that's the kind of thing that we are more open to even. I know I offered Daniel like that.

1:36:15 Dylan: You were.

1:36:15 Mark: Weren't you going to interview somebody separately? And we were gonna just post that as a half hour or hour.

1:36:22 Daniel: I made an Attempt I was ignominiously

1:36:24 Mark: ignored, but especially if it supports a given episode. So, you know, if we read some Spinoza on our own, like, well, let's get a Spinoza scholar in and we don't even have to read his book, but just one of us interview the Spinoza scholar as a follow up to that, you know, hopefully even get the Spinoza scholar to listen to the Spinoza, what we had to say about Spinoza. But even if not, getting another take on the topic would be interesting. So we're looking for lots of ideas and ways to enrich. It's just really a matter of having the time to do it.

You know, maybe eventually we'll get enough subscribers and things that we can work less at our jobs or something. I don't even know that's possible for me. But to work less, to work less in my job than I already do, That is at least the hope to be able to, to feel comfortable. So that is why we keep hitting you guys up for money all the time. It's embarrassing. It makes me feel kind of gross.

1:37:20 Wes: I'm not embarrassed.

1:37:22 Seth: Yeah, me neither. I think what we need is for people who are listening to this, who feel like they either want to or can meaningfully contribute to get in touch with us and for us to expand the net. Because there's only a finite amount of things that four guys who have full time jobs and families and lives can do. But there's an infinite amount of things. If we could marshal the resources of the 40,000 people that download every episode, you know, and the 100,000 people that visit our website every month, that we could do things to mutually create all kinds of new and interesting things that everybody can enjoy. And so I think we should be thinking about that too.

1:38:01 Dylan: Yeah. There are two things that I now

1:38:02 Seth: get to work, Daniel.

1:38:04 Dylan: There are two things I'd like to see five years from now. I'd like to have look back on at least two things having had happened. One is that we've grown as a kind of intellectual media outlet along the lines of what Seth is talking about, where we continue to have earnest, thoughtful contributions in a variety of different modes, be them reading books or interviews or whatever, and have more contributors to that. We have that. We have some guest bloggers and stuff like that, but grow that part of the activity. The other thing is I would like us to have had at least one kind of partially examined life conference or event or weekend or something.

And maybe what we do tomorrow will be, you know, the beginning of something like that. Where listeners or people who are interested can come in and have some seminars during a weekend and interact with each other and do sort of what we get to do themselves. And I think that there's a lot of desire for that. I think it could be both fun and I would like to at least try it one time and see if it's successful. And it's also something we could, you know, that could be taken on the road in all kinds of different ways.

1:39:23 Mark: I'd certainly like to see not school explode in that way. So maybe having more people that are kind of on semi staff with us that are, you know, especially I want to give out a call. I know there are a lot of like eager amateurs that are just listeners and there are probably always ways that you can participate and help. But I especially want to give out a call to frustrated grad students, to ex grad students, to people that, you know, have some professional chops in here and want a way to maybe figure out a way that teach this like we have that is more rewarding than what you might be doing now with it or your prospects might admit.

We love to co opt and connect with a lot of these existing discussion groups of other things like that, other podcasters, other, you know, we've made a connection with an audience and we'd love to share that with other people who want to similarly get out their their work.

1:40:22 Dylan: What do you want to see, Wes?

1:40:25 Wes: I think you guys said it all.

1:40:28 Mark: We're going to do the Wesley Pel audience member dating service.

1:40:36 Daniel: That's right. P Date.

1:40:38 Wes: Let's call it West Aid dating site. There's just one male profile with an endorsement by Lucy Lawless. That's right.

1:40:48 Daniel: West or not.

1:40:54 Mark: All right, well, I want to thank everybody who got through this. I, I do for people that think that this was just a weird self congratulatory circle jerk, I kind of share your apprehension, but

1:41:08 Wes: it's an apprehension for them. It's a reality.

1:41:12 Mark: Putting that aside, yeah. I want to thank the folks that help us edit, that have have participated in not school, that have donated any money to us at any time or buy Amazon stuff through us or just listening to us and recommending us to other people. And we really, really appreciate that. I'm sure that if it was still 100 people listening, we would not still be doing this. So we feed off of your energy now.

1:41:40 Seth: We fear what would happen if we stopped. And also shout out to the artists, people who write blog posts. Social media director.

1:41:51 Mark: Yeah, he's pointing at Daniel.

1:41:52 Seth: Yes, I'm pointing at Daniel. So thank you to everybody who both is a fan and a participant or both. Yes.

1:41:59 Dylan: Thank you very much.

1:42:00 Wes: Yes.

1:42:01 Dylan: Good night, everybody.

1:42:03 Mark: Good night.

1:42:04 Wes: Good night.

1:42:05 Daniel: Good night, guys.

1:42:23 Mark: I want to go back with you Back to where it makes sense with you don't potentially dance with you be a little less tense with you I don't want to go back I want to go I want to back I

1:42:38 Dylan: want to go

1:42:40 Mark: Dangerously calm up in our self inflicted ties Some display the tendency to intellectualize Some understand why this feeling's got to end the more I sleep the more I know that I'm not one of them I want to go back with you Back to where it made sense with you Won't bitterly dance with you'll be a little less tense with you I want to go back I wanna go I wanna go back I wanna go Fever is to loneliness I listen back again almost within inches of a self revolving pen steam within reach yes another call away But I watch it fade to silence as I tell you I'm okay I don't wanna go back with you better wherever it stays you walk into the leak dense you'll be a little less tense if you all want to stay on with you spend a bit of a yawn you could be totally gone with you gotta want to move on you I wanna go back you back to what it says you won't be totally less if you be a little less dance you won't want to go fight I wanna go I wanna go I wanna.

Innocent the witness never going to lose distance is impressive but it's not the thing to choose I want to go back with you Back to where it sits with you. Sa.

1:46:31 Wes: It.