Q&A with the Partially Examined Life, Pittsburgh 9-25-15

0:07 Unknown speaker: For those of you who don't know, the Partially Examined Life are a wonderful philosophy podcast. A podcast that focuses on being accessible, something that most philosophy podcasts noticeably lack. I have been a fan for many years and am just so excited to have them joining us tomorrow night. They are going to be recording a live podcast on Hannah Arendt here as part of the conferen, but we wanted to also include them today. And so what we're going to be doing right now is we're going to be having a Q and A session, the theme of which is philosophy in the public sphere. The idea is that it doesn't get a whole lot more public than broadcasting your philosophy on the Internet every single month. I mean, it's up to pretty much every single week. Now, Erica is going to help moderate this. So please join me in a round of applause for the Partially Examined Life.

1:04 Seth: Hello. Hi, folks. My name is Seth Paskin, and I have been asked to give a very quick overview of kind of who we are and what we do, so to kind of give us some context, because I'm sure not everybody in the room is a devoted fan the way Justin is. So at the far end, you have Dylan Casey, Mark Linsenmayer, Wes Alwan, and me, Seth Paskin. The three of us here at this end, we were all philosophy graduate students at the University of Texas at Austin in the 90s. We call it the Clinton era. And so we. We went to school there at the same time. We all got our master's degrees, and then we left and we dropped out of the program. At least I dropped out.

1:42 Unknown speaker: You may have not, like, respectively, get your master's degree two years and then leave, but, like, pretend like we're getting the PhD and stick around for as

1:49 Seth: long as possible and then. Yes, and then bail. And that's a whole nother conversation, but

1:54 Unknown speaker: part of this conversation.

1:56 Seth: So we were not of the same year, but we were very, very close. And about six years ago, Mark and Wes are working together and they found me, and Mark said, contacted me and said, hey, we'd like to do a philosophy podcast. And I said, great. What's a philosophy? I know what philosophy is, but what's a podcast? And he said, it's kind of like radio on the Internet. And I said, sounds great, thinking that nothing would come of it, not knowing Mark's ADD tendencies three weeks later, when we were recording our first episode on the Apology. And it's been six years of more or less constant philosophy ever since.

And the sort of premise of the podcast was that we used to go to seminars that were three hours long with our graduate professors. Then we would go to a bar afterwards and we would have three hours of real discussion about what the thing was really about. And we were trying to replicate that experience because after 15 years in the real world, we were not being intellectually stimulated. I guess the way we felt like we wanted to be. So that's always been the guiding light, is that we read things that we are interested in or that we think we should read.

We read them independently and then we come together to have the discussion completely fresh. It's unscripted and it's intended to kind of create that atmosphere of intellectual vibrancy that we experienced when we were with the peer group doing that. Some quick logistical things. Just so you understand. Wes lives in Boston. Dylan and Mark. Oh, sorry, I forgot to mention Dylan. Dylan is Mark's brother in law and joined us about a year and a half or two years into it. Roughly.

3:33 Unknown speaker: Yeah. I didn't realize he could do this at the time I started it. I would have asked him, but did not, as people connect in that way.

We had an episode on Quantum Mechanics.

3:42 Seth: Yes, we had an episode. Yeah.

3:43 Unknown speaker: Dylan has a PhD in physics and

3:47 Seth: one of them on even though we call ourselves the Partially Examined Life because we got master's degrees and then we left. So we're not fully examined. Not unexamined, but not fully examined. Dylan, technically speaking, does not fit that criteria. He's fully examined, but he was a tutor at St John's College, which has a great books program. So he's very well versed in tutor, meaning professor.

4:09 Unknown speaker: Oh, that's what they call professors at St. John's is they called them tutors.

4:13 Seth: Oh, okay. Anyway, so he fits right into our vibe. Dylan and Mark both live in Wisconsin. Wes lives in Boston, I live in Austin, Texas. We do this usually on Sunday nights. We get on Skype and we talk for about three hours. And then we have this dedicated and amazing team of editors that edit that down to about an hour and a half, to two hours worth of actual.

4:35 Unknown speaker: Including Aaron.

4:36 Seth: Yes, including Aaron over here. Which is listenable content, which it's not if you just heard the raw conversations that we. That we typically have, just to give you some sense of scale, because I think that's appropriate. About a year and a half in, we had 300 subscribers on iTunes and we thought that was unbelievable that there were 300 people that wanted to listen to us talk about philosophy. Nowadays we get about 30,000 downloads for each episode within the first week. Or so. And we crossed the 10 million threshold last month, I think, or the month before. For total we have 120 episodes, full fledged episodes in the last.

5:12 Unknown speaker: And in general with the back catalog, we get more than we get 300 to 400,000 downloads a month.

5:17 Seth: Yeah. So there's an audience out there of people who are very interested in a. The topic, but also in hearing it be addressed and dealt with the way that we do it.

5:28 Unknown speaker: So as an opening question to build on some of what has already been said, I wondered if you could expand a little bit more on the difference between doing philosophy in an academic setting and doing it in public or on the air. What have you noticed about that and what do you make of it?

5:42 Seth: It's a lot more fun to do it in public than to do it as an academic.

5:47 Unknown speaker: Just the lack of professionalism.

Well, the guide was sort of the discussions we'd have at the bar after the seminar was the model because we

wanted to hold ourselves to that standard.

You know, as time has gone on and we realize people were paying attention, then it gets us to kick up our game a little bit and be a little less irresponsible about. If we don't like a philosopher that much, just spend the whole time ripping on them. You know, most of it is our professional, professional conscience. Is that a thing?

Didn't that happened by the third episode though that you were coming prepared with?

6:24 Seth: Yeah, I don't know.

6:26 Unknown speaker: Pages of secondary readings.

6:27 Seth: And we've always been respectful. I think we take it seriously and we want to treat the thinkers that we look at respectfully. But we have had three ground rules that we claim to stick to but violate.

6:39 Unknown speaker: Keep them in mind.

6:40 Seth: We keep them in mind, you know, don't assume that the audience has read what we're going to talk about. So don't talk about it in such a way that we assume, you know, what we're talking about. Don't name drop or just throw in references and be as precise and, and articulate and clear as possible. Except where it would be more fun to do otherwise. And if you use those as guidelines, I think that kind of outlines a difference in doing philosophy, so to speak, for the public or for a broader audience, certainly a non philosophical audience, than what you would get if you were listening to the four of us talk about an article about what it's like to be a bat that was written in response to this guy's article, to this woman's article, to this, this guy's article.

7:23 Unknown speaker: Yeah, I think we have more Freedom to be openly ignorant. But that's one of the things that makes the show entertaining is us wrestling with the text. So that's not something I think you would see as commonly in academia where you're being presented with finished products by people who need to do that for their career. And we don't need to do that. So that's another way I think it really matters.

7:43 Seth: And I think we try to use our own experience in our own lives, actual lives, as a yardstick. So we treat these ideas not as academic exercises, but as living things. Like when somebody says, for example, we just recently did an episode on stoicism, we said, okay, this claims to be a guide for how you live your life. What would it be like if you said, my wife died doesn't mean anything, I can't control it. Like practically speaking, how is that as a useful guide to life? Right. And that's not my wife died, it's a wife died, it's a wife died. So I think that's another way in which it's a little different.

8:22 Unknown speaker: I like the word conversation. We use it a lot. But it gets across the idea of the activity that we're doing that it's open ended. And like Wes said, we. I don't know if we're willfully ignorant. That's not true.

But did I say that willfully?

No, you didn't. But we are willfully non expert and so that we can go and approach it and say, well, this is sort of actively try to figure it out. And so there's a combination of seriousness of trying to sort through what it said and then think about what it means at the same time.

So the ambiguity in the question, if you compare what we do to what you do in academia is, well, what stage of academia as an actual professional, somebody my age who has become an actual professor? No, we would not be doing this. You have to have your paper written and you show up and you have something to add to the conversation and you keep pushing the boundaries of whatever little tiny specialty you've gotten yourself into, that's one thing. But what we're doing is not that different than what we did at various levels of our academic training.

It's more just continuing that thinking. That was fun. You know, the thing that I liked least about graduate level seminars was the fact that I had to do three of them at the same time. Like, no, I just want to read just this book right now. I don't want to read two other books at the same time that are distraction from this book I want to do. So this gives us the freedom to just focus really heavily on one thing and then after three weeks say, I don't even care about this anymore and move on to something else.

You can also be just completely. Infidelitus isn't the right word.

10:02 Seth: What's the word?

10:03 Unknown speaker: Promiscuous. You can be intellectually promiscuous. That's a better one. Meaning that we can read whatever we want and we don't have to worry about, like, we are doing the podcast on Hannah Arendt tomorrow. So I never read Hannah Arendt until we picked it for this podcast. And that's perfectly fine for the way we do things. It would not work as a professional philosopher to go give a paper on Hannah Arendt when you just read her book for the first time. That's not how that works. And that's okay too.

Yeah, I remember one of the topic announcements that I put up. I'm like, we're trying to involve the listeners more and like have them give us questions beforehand. So like, okay, we're going to go talk about.

We used to do that, didn't we?

We're going to talk about Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance. We're just reading it right now. Does anybody have any questions for us that they want us to consider? And somebody responded like, well, I've been studying Pirsig for 40 years, so no, I don't think I have any questions for you.

Speaking of Zen, how do you guys view, say the non academic talk that goes on? That's, you know, a lot of times the more enjoyable part. Do you think about that? And I guess this is a question for the editor too. How do you make decisions? I mean, when you guys get off and you're talking about your life or something like that, and you know, sometimes I'll say, come on guys, get back to Freud. Is that part of your. I would say, is there decision making involved in that? Are you allowing yourself to go certain places in terms of the talk in the bar?

Hopefully. I mean, there have been things that, you know, we used to have a lot more chat at the beginning of episodes before we get down to topic.

And.

And we got enough people really not liking that and like, why don't you just talk about. This is what I want to talk about. Freud. This is why I clicked on this. So we try to maybe get all the information out there about the reading, at least some of it right up front before we go off in a lot of directions. Often the reading is heavy enough that we feel A sense of responsibility to it. And we do spend most of the time just really drilling on that and sometimes purposefully schedule things like, let's just do a part two to this episode so we can have a chance to talk about Star wars or whatever stupid extra things we want to add on.

But there's not a lot of planning that goes into what we end up disclosing. And some of it, yeah, we do cut that out, make sure that's cut

out

so it can be a safe space.

We lose about a third of the entire conversation in editing, but that's not

because we were saying boring, irrelevant things. That's because we were talking like this.

12:45 Seth: Yeah.

12:47 Unknown speaker: So one of the things that would make it unlistenable. It's unlistenable when I've edited it, is the fact that we're actually thinking the whole time. And so there's all those pauses that normally happen in a conversation, which, if you're actually engaged in that conversation, you're in the bar and somebody takes a long pause, you don't notice it as much. But if you're actually listening to somebody talk like that, it's utterly unlistenable. It's just. You can't. You want to shoot yourself.

13:12 Seth: I would highly encourage all of you to record a conversation that you just have on a daily basis, a regular conversation with somebody else, and then go back and listen to it. And the ums, the ahs, the pauses, the grammar that falls out, you just don't realize when you're speaking. And it's a testament when we have guests or when you see somebody who gives a very polished speech, like we heard earlier today. I mean, that's really hard to do in conversation. So a lot of the editing is us trying to take that 10 minutes that it took me to articulate and cut it down into the two minutes where I actually say what I was trying to say, but it took me 10 minutes to get there.

And we're fortunate in that our technology is still not up to snuff, where Skype has a lag. So we've gotten in the habit of being patient with each other because you have to wait and see if something's going to happen for about six seconds after you finish speaking before you can jump in and start talking.

14:04 Unknown speaker: We're not on the moon.

It's not.

14:07 Seth: Sorry. But we do often come in, at least with a list of the topics that. That we think we should talk about. And then maybe we get to them all, maybe we don't.

14:16 Unknown speaker: So first of all, thank you so much for everything that you do. I'd love to partially examine life, and you've gotten me through a lot of readings that I could not have gone through by myself. But I have a question, not just about your practice, but about the way you speak during your podcast. And specifically, do you have a specific audience in mind when you do these podcasts and when you do have these conversations? And if you don't, why don't you think that that's a relevant question to when you do your podcasts?

I would say this is the thing we have the most conversations about outside of the podcast itself, about what kinds of assumptions we make and should we have a long introduction to set things up or should we not have one? How much is the right amount? When should we be really conscious of our audience and making sure it's clear enough for someone else listening to.

To what extent we're going to be prepared? You know, are we gonna be prepared enough to teach the text as we would in a. Yeah.

And should we be trying classroom? Should we be trying to teach that alongside or not? We talk about that all the time. Myself, I think that we have a kind of a moving target of being conscious that other people are listening more or less, without trying to be too conscious about aiming towards it. Maybe, except for the very beginning.

But it's basically what creates the false sense of intimacy, is that it's aimed at each other. We're talking to each other. So I can feel much more comfortable doing that than I would be if I was doing this in front of people. We were much more prepared. We did our first live show last summer, and it was, I think, quite a different thing. And maybe we've gotten so many habits from doing these, you know, that we can be casual now in front of people, but I think it would have been pretty strange to do that right off the bat. So it's only just because why we might reveal things that even if we say we want them cut out, that's actually very rarely happens. Like, usually any personal details?

16:10 Seth: Just who cares at this point?

16:12 Unknown speaker: Just say it.

16:14 Seth: I have a slightly different response. I intentionally, I think, bring things down to a lower denominator than the other guys. It's been a theme for the six years that we've been in here. And that's part of what I'm about personally. But it's also been my experience just in my professional life, that I've spent a lot of time explaining very complex things in very simple ways to a variety of different audiences. And So I never take for granted that even somebody who claims they understand something or is well versed in it actually understands it. So I try to say, let's get the basics, the fundamentals of the argument on the table and make sure everybody's. So we're not talking about something where we don't think we understand. So that's how I read it, and that's what I try to do. And sometimes that's a virtue, and sometimes it's not.

17:01 Unknown speaker: Well, I just think even among people that know what they're talking about, unless it's two Kant scholars talking about Kant, even people in grad school, their research is not overlapped that much. Unless you read the thing I exactly read last night. Even if you're trying to explain it to yourself. I mean, that's one of the things about analytic philosophy and about doing this is until you can externalize your thoughts in a way that then you can read them back and they make sense, you don't actually know what you're talking about. And that's our intolerance with a lot of contemporary continental philosophy sometimes is that we find it hard to believe that people could be talking like that and actually understand each other and themselves so that we feel the need to translate as much as possible into everyday English.

So even if we're just aiming at each other's. We still have to dumb things down pretty a lot, I think, to be understandable.

I don't think of it as dumbing down, but that's okay.

17:48 Seth: Yeah, I don't agree with that term either. I will say one other thing. We know our audience pretty well because they talk to us and they have for a long time. So we have people that live in rural Oklahoma who don't have anybody to talk to about this stuff and are searching for meaning. Right. We have the people that come to us through the religious atheist who then get disappointed because we're not talking about religion all the time. Somebody might listen to the Kierkegaard episode, and they're the Kierkegaard guy, right? That's all they do is read Kierkegaard, and they don't read anything else but Kierkegaard. Like, you can't serve all those audiences at once. So we can only be have a fidelity to what we do well. And I think part of that is that level of conversation, that tone that we set and that level that we bring in, and then relating it to the things that are important to us.

18:34 Unknown speaker: Well, and what you bring up is different audiences have different Expectations of us too. So when you bring up the idea of being conscious of our audience. So I think we are in the ways we talked about. But one thing we aren't is we aren't very conscious of making sure that we placate certain audiences because some of the books that we read are very popular or desire or they have devotees.

Ayn Rand.

Ayn Rand is a good example,

but

the first big example.

Utilitarians.

Well, I thought, well, maybe Utilitarians. I was thinking, Zen, that when we did that podcast, the whole thing blew

up the cult of people that just search the Internet and search for things about comments about Pirsig that they could respond to and say why you didn't know what you were talking about.

We had a large number of people on the comments on our blog that were there only because of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and were livid, many of them, about what we had done and what we hadn't done. And that happens with a lot of things when we do. When we did Rand, we did any author that somebody's a devotee of. This happens with Heidegger sometimes.

Oh yeah.

Where people are, well, how could you not have said this? How could you have said this? In fact, we were talking at dinner and who said that their roommate or friend of theirs disowned us because of what we said about Lacan. So we had done an episode on Lacan and then after that they had been a devotee and they swore off of us forever.

Which Lacan episode? Because I was defending Lacan.

Oddly, doesn't matter.

It's not enough.

Your life is not devoted to Lacan. It's not enough.

20:21 Seth: You have no idea how hard we worked for that fucking episode.

20:30 Unknown speaker: All right.

I wanted to say it's a shame that a good looking bunch like you gets to exist in the popular consciousness as disembodied voices. But my question was, I see the instructional value of this and actually there was a reference to it just a little bit earlier. But also there's something validating as to these particular sort of looser intellectual conversations, right? And your friendship is not unique. We all retain friendships from high school and on, basically where the high school ones are usually persistent on having to do with sports and other things in life. But the philosophical conversation is a common thing and it sort of self perpetuates, right?

So.

So there's something validating about having you out there in those sort of. In the public realm. But philosophy specifically as a discipline is notorious for policing its own boundaries, right? So Institutionally and also in terms of different schools. So I'm really curious about the blowback. I can imagine people being very angry, and I'm referring to professional philosophers out there.

They basically don't pay attention to us.

Yeah, I think mainly were ignored by academics unless they want to come on the show to plug their book. But I.

But we haven't gotten any, like, top flight academics come asking to be on our show, have we?

21:46 Seth: Nobody's asked.

21:48 Unknown speaker: We've had them on there. But we wouldn't ask them.

They're on a press junket.

We have the same attitude towards TED talks or, you know, there's a whole culture of things that are sort of intellectual, but from the point of view of a philosopher is like not rigorous enough that we kind of wish that it wasn't quite that. And so, you know, you have. Well, it's nice that it's getting more people in the world to think about stuff, but yet can they just not do it that way? I imagine that is what professional philosophers, many of them, insofar as they would pay attention to this, would feel about us. But we have gotten good comments from a lot of people who say, I shared this with my class.

Often it's academics in other fields who will praise us, write us letters thanking us. I don't think we've very often gotten a philosophy academic saying, we love the show, but we haven't gotten philosophy academics writing to us, telling us it's terrible. I just, I suspect that they don't have a high opinion of this sort of thing. And like Brian Leiter, for instance, who I went to. Yeah, no, I actually, like, studied under him at ut. And so he's kind of a scary guy. But he will. If someone he knows comes on the show, he'll sort of begrudgingly link to it on his blog.

But it would be like David Chalmers.

Yeah, that's it. Or David Chalmers or Jessica Berry or one of the guys. So there's just no commentary. So I think it's more silence, not overt condemnation.

23:12 Seth: I'll speak even more specifically to it because I think there's more detail that's worth giving. So I think if you're talking about what you would consider to be, say, the top 25 or 30 philosophy departments that have. That are institutionalized, MIT, Harvard, UCLA, Yale, whatever, they're in their own world and we don't exist for them. We flat out don't exist. But there's a huge substrate of teachers and professors and adjunct professors who maybe are working at universities where there is no philosophy department and they're part of a humanities department or they're the only philosophy professor.

It's a small department and they're struggling to engage their students. They're struggling to give their students secondary materials or whatever. They're struggling to find ways to connect with a generation that consumes information this way. They're used to standing up and lecturing, but people are getting information different way and we get a lot of positive feedback from them. And we also reached out directly to undergrad and graduate programs everywhere and early on and we reached out to students and we said, here's who we are, please listen and tell us what you think.

So we get a lot of positive feedback from students that are say, I was struggling with this text and I listened to you guys and it really gave me a lot of insight. It's just like reading a secondary source, right? It's just much more accessible. And we try not to. We don't pretend. Right. It's. We're a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living and thought better of it. It's a little bit of a jab, right? But in general, we don't think about it too much. But I will say this. I was very aware of when the number of our subscribers surpassed the annual subscription to the APA magazine.

And we are now much more than tenfold of their distribution as far as that's concerned.

24:57 Unknown speaker: And one thing I want to say is I don't think we are in the same category as other popularizers. The type of stuff you see on TED Talks or Dawkins or the. I don't think we're subject to the same sorts of critiques. So when Dawkins talks about philosophy, I think it's sloppy and irresponsible and as amateurish as we are, we're at least engaged, I think, in a more rigorous way. I do, I do actually know one chair of a philosophy department who is a big fan, really. And regularly.

25:27 Seth: You got a name drop.

25:30 Unknown speaker: I just thought this whole thing was begging among our listeners for them to stand up and identify themselves.

What?

It just seemed a self serving pity party of call. Come on, professionals, don't you like us? Can you send us an email and tell us that?

25:47 Seth: I don't worry about that because of the emails and the contact we get from the people who actually get some. I mean, this is self serving, but it's also real. I mean, we've had people write to us and said I was recovering from cancer and I was laying in bed for six months or nine months, and all I had to keep me company was I couldn't open my eyes, I couldn't focus. All I could do was listen. And so I listen to you guys, right? I mean, that's the kind of stuff we hear that's making real change in the world, that's having a meaningful impact in people's lives. And if that's what I get out of this, that's plenty for me.

26:17 Unknown speaker: So, speaking of making real change in the world, my question is actually diverting away from the podcast itself and more back to the original question of what it is to do philosophy in public space. So when you're not on the show, how does philosophy affect your life as you live it? Or how do you do philosophy or apply philosophy in your lives? So there's kind of just a way of living that is living philosophically. And I was just wondering if you guys had any insights on how you do it personally, what it is to do that.

Well, since I read something and then forget it three weeks later, whatever it is we read most recently, I just apply that rigorously. So if somebody were to die in the next couple weeks, it would be nothing to me. But other than that, after I read, it'll be something else. It's obviously a big question that we get asked a lot. Somebody else can take it.

27:10 Seth: This is a sad question.

27:11 Unknown speaker: What?

Dylan, take it.

27:14 Seth: Yes.

27:15 Unknown speaker: So for me, being philosophical or applying philosophy to my life is much less about a particular brand or kind of philosophy, and it's more about being thoughtful in general or thinking about what's going on or observing or whatever. The closest thing to actually applying philosophy is just the amount of time I spend talking about habit and virtue with my kids. I sound like a very, very hardcore Aristotelian when I talk to my kids.

And I have this kind of eudaimonic man,

and I have this sort of, you know, I have these sections of the Nicomachean Ethics, like, going through my mind right in front of my eyes as I'm talking to them. That's the closest thing. The other thing is really, to me, the way in which the podcast or what we do in the podcast embodies something that matters to me most about philosophy, which is this sort of conversational aspect of trying to sort something out without necessarily having a thesis involved. And there's a directedness to it. You're trying to figure something out, but you don't necessarily know exactly where you're going to end up. And that's the part that if there's a philosophical disposition, that's the part that I bring along with me.

28:38 Seth: This is a big thing for me. To me, living a philosophical life, if you want to call it that means that ideas are alive for you. So we wouldn't do it. I mean, six years and we, we didn't get paid, we didn't make any money for the first three years. And we started getting people just wanting to spontaneously give us money to do this. You can't sustain that kind of activity if you're not passionate about it, if it was just turning the crank. So what I love about this is that these ideas are alive for me and they're alive in a way that everything that I'm reading, I find a way to relate to what's going on in my life, or I find a way, I say, let's turn the lens on my experience of society or what's happening in politics or whatever the case may be.

And maybe that lens shows something a little bigger, maybe it makes things a little smaller, maybe it obscures things, I don't know. But it's a real thing for me. And it's also about being willing. This came through in the Gadamer episode we did a little while back. The idea that you have to be willing to risk your beliefs, you have to be willing to entertain a new idea and be willing to change what you believe because of that idea. That's what living a philosophical life is to me. And I think I'm probably predisposed to be that kind of person anyway.

Much more so than many people I know. But this activity of doing the partially examined life has exposed me to many more ideas and put a lot more of my beliefs at risk. And I've been humbled numerous times reading things that I say. God, I wish I'd read this 20 years ago, right? Or even if I had read it 20 years ago, I wouldn't have understood it the way I do now because I'm more mature, I've had more experience or whatever. That's what a philosophical life is to me.

30:21 Unknown speaker: One of the things being a para academic kind of organization like we are, that we think a lot about is the relationship between the academy and non academic people. And increasingly in your podcast, you've been including experts. I think, you know, if you were to chart it out, you'd see this is becoming a much more. More regular thing. So what I'm curious about is how you see the dynamic when you bring an expert on what is the dynamic between you and that expert and between the expert and the material. And how does that sort of dynamic change when you bring somebody who's a quote unquote expert into play?

It depends a lot on the expert. From our perspective, it matters a lot more about the particular person than it does about the fact that they're an expert or not. And it has to do with whether they're able to have a conversation about it. And some of the people that we've had as guests on have been able to be conversational and talk about stuff, and others just have not.

They have their routine, they have their spiel.

So we've had episodes where we had somebody on, and basically it ended up being an interview and we heard what they had to say, and sometimes it was really good and sometimes it was okay. And we've. Then we've decided at the end of that we're gonna have another podcast so that we can actually have a conversation. Sometimes that happens, and then people are

like, why didn't you say it to their face? Because we're not that obnoxious. That's all.

Hey, I said it to Sandel's face.

Yeah, but he engaged you on that. That's one of his virtues. He was a good guest in that respect, is that he was willing to

engage in good guess with a bad book.

32:04 Seth: The other thing is we sort of loosely define what constitutes an expert. I mean, we have basically said, if you know more about this thing than us and you want to come on and talk and we think you can have a good conversation, you're welcome. And that's how a lot of our early guests came on. I mean, I think one of the better episodes we ever did was on the proofs for the existence of God. We read a great book that outlined the arguments very clearly. We had a really reasonable conversation. And the guy that came on was just a blogger. He's just the deist blogger who was articulate and interested and was willing to participate and get in the spirit of things. And I thought that was a great example.

32:39 Unknown speaker: So you could say we had one deist on our God existence.

32:42 Seth: Yeah, we've done a couple of episodes on religion, and then, you know, we've had professional academics on. And sometimes they're pimping a book and sometimes they're game to go down with what we do. And. And it just depends on the person. We'll dish offline if you want to.

33:01 Unknown speaker: It's two different things that we're now trying to do. Guest. No. Guest. Do an alternative, because there's a chemistry thing here that in terms of adding somebody new to the equation is good to spice things up, but it's good to return to that. And listeners have told us that they like that. And with a guest it's just too unpredictable. That sometimes they could talk five times more than we do, and sometimes they could be almost absent and you wonder why they even bothered to show up. Or many things in between. So we like doing all different levels of sort of expertise.

I think we like people who have actually studied this stuff. Just the fact that we have this approach, that we just read it last night, doesn't mean that's the only thing we appreciate. So we'd like to do both. And one of the things we were just playing around with recently is we have this after show, so. So we have our discussion and then we get some of the listeners to come on and we have the after show. Well, we just started. Well, why don't we get an actual scholar of that thing on the after show and make them listen to what we just talked about and tell us what we said wrong.

So that's a thing. We're a way potentially to bring the academic establishments together with what we do without us having to sit there and like just listen to them talk about Augustine because they've studied for 20 years. And we read it last night.

So I ran a reading group for about two years. And I remember you all said you could pick whatever you want to read, right? So I remember always reading all of this stuff and having to like, it was exhausting, you know, like, what will be worth talking about? And then we ended up changing towards like thematic types of things, you know, so like, we'll do like a whole kind of thing on the body or something or on horror, you know, and that was like, easier. So we would like pre plan the readings. So I'm wondering how. How you pick the readings and how you don't get exhausted in picking the readings, you know, if you're doing it every. Every week or something.

34:41 Seth: You know, we have a giant list

34:43 Unknown speaker: really, of backlog stuff. I mean, sometimes it's just a whimsical, like somebody offers to talk about.

We take a lot of recommendations, we add them to the list.

Yeah, it's more of somebody. People recommend stuff to us all the time and a lot of times it's just names I've never heard of.

And so I just.

Whatever. And then if five more people recommend that, then I'll have heard of them and then it will probably make it in the lineup before too long. But we are trying to reflect. It's not necessarily. Occasionally it's like this is somebody that I think is underrated and deserves this attention. But usually it's just who are people talking about? So whether they could be people we ultimately decide are really great or not so great, but what's out there in the culture, in the academic culture, but also increasingly and in little bits, the academic adjacent cultures. Why we got around to doing Ayn Rand eventually because enough people requested her, even though that was not something that we would in a classroom setting, ever get around.

35:34 Seth: That's true now, but it wasn't true six years ago. I mean, I think we started off thinking we had to hit the highlights. So if you look at the first 30 episodes or whatever, it's Descartes and Leibniz and Spinoza, I mean, we're hitting all that. And to a certain extent Mark is responsible for this. That he was like, we need to cover certain ground because we're not going to talk about 20th century critical theory until we've got Hegel and Nietzsche and all these other people lined up. You know, we were not going to jump into Irigaray without having done. We may never jump into a. Irigaray. Luce Irigaray.

36:15 Unknown speaker: That'll be another one that I read for the first time.

36:17 Seth: All right, so we definitely had in mind that there were things we had to cover. But when we got to a certain point of 50, 60 episodes, you were like, okay, you know, we had the opportunity to talk to Lucy Lawless. Of course we're going to take it. Right. We have the. Somebody says, hey, you want to do no country for Old Men? Yeah. I mean, because it's not frying our brain. I mean, it's hard to do this every three weeks. I just went back and I listened to the Phenomenology of Spirit episode and I can't remember how we managed that. I mean, I can't remember how I personally managed it.

It was so hard. So hard. Right. So nowadays we have some more flexibility because we don't have people yelling at us that we haven't covered the biggies. Except for Augustine. He was kind of the last big check mark. Maybe Aquinas we need to still get to or something, but. And then we don't. We've checked the box on Zen, Ayn Rand, you know, some of the other ones that we had to get around to, and now we have some flexibility and we can kind of do something fun and do something that's more. But we are Trying to get to the Frankfurt School, for example.

That's a big one. We would love to get on the list, but where do you start with that, right? And I mean, it just goes. Another thing to keep in mind is our format. We're doing this every three to four weeks. We have to pick a reading that we can read, digest, have a meaningful conversation about is significant. But isn't so much that we don't have time because everybody has jobs and other things that they're doing. So it's really hard to do that, really hard to pick the right readings.

37:41 Unknown speaker: So one thing about the readings, and this is another topic of conversation amongst all of us and a little bit of attention, is I'm a big fan of having something that's really digestible and short or a section of something. And I would rather talk about something that had at least a minimum amount of integrity without worrying about being a completist. I have no inclination to completism, and I think that that ends up being a virtue in the kinds of conversations we have, because I feel like we can jump into it and work through it, and that's good enough. The other thing is that we generally pick. Well, I guess the catalog is full of a lot of hard books, which usually, if you're not a completist, they are rich in their own way, so you can constantly go back to them. And so they end up being a foundation for a whole conversation.

So after having talked about a little bit about what you do, I kind of want to ask you a more theoretical question. And since you've been both in the academy and outside of the academy, I think you're the perfect kind of group to ask this. And do you think that public philosophy or publicly engaged philosophy is possible within the academy? Especially because a lot of the kind of criticism that comes with it is like, well, no, like great. It's not legitimate labor. The university doesn't pay for that to happen. Other philosophers will kind of like, tell us that we're wrong or that we're not actually doing philosophy.

And so it seems like you were saying, right, you have jobs outside of this, but yet you're still doing this publicly engaged philosophy. So can you talk a little bit about these kinds of criticisms that academic philosophers have of public philosophy? And if you think that it is possible to do it within the academy,

39:22 Seth: it's cowardice and horseshit. How's that?

39:26 Unknown speaker: My mentor at Texas was Bob Solomon, and he was sort of well known for producing a lot of very publicly accessible intro books explaining continental philosophy. Explaining Nietzsche, explaining really hard stuff. And when I was applying to schools, like, well, this other person is a much deeper thinker. You'll be better off going there. And he was also. He became a dean in the business school. He taught business ethics. Definitely had a lot of outreach and professional push. And I think I was a little mystified by it at the time. But I don't see why you wouldn't want to make the most of your position of power as an academic and actually try to reach people like that.

That seems like an obvious thing. And I don't know why the two would be mutually exclusive. That you could write to the cutting edge of your particular little specialty, but then also produce things that people would actually want to read.

40:17 Seth: Yeah. And if you're. There's two things. If you are a teacher, if your job is to educate, why would that be limited to the 12 students to come to your graduate seminar or the 300 students? First of all, Secondly, I don't know any university that doesn't have a public mission that says, our mission is we were founded to keep everything within these four walls and not to share knowledge with anybody. And not. That's. As a member of an academic institution, you're part of a community. And that community is not just where you're geographically situated and not just the students that are there then, but your legacy of all of the alumni that are part of that university. University. And you should be constantly engaged and reaching out to all of those constituencies.

40:58 Unknown speaker: But I think it's not. It's not. I mean, there's a talent to writing well and engagingly and being rigorous, and it's not something that everyone is suited to. So there are those rare people who can do that. But I don't think it's for all academics.

Well, I think that's. I mean, I think that's true. I mean, look at. You could look at the sciences. I mean, there are people who are scientists who are very good and successful at talking about their work in a public way, and other ones who aren't. There's room for both around. I think a harder question is what are the professional requirements in this respect? And whether or not that kind of outreach activity or public activity is valued as part of being at the university in a professional manner. That would be brass tacks. Is it going to help you get tenure, interrupt you getting tenure, or be neutral with respect to it?

And I think that it depends upon the university you're at. I think at a lot of universities, it's decidedly negative I think that at some of them it's neutral. I don't know very many that where it's a outright positive until you've gotten tenure. And then the university loves the fact that you are doing TED talks and you're out promoting the university effectively by being somebody that's talking about stuff publicly. That I think is a kind of problem for the academy itself. That's not unique to philosophy.

Back to what you're saying about the curriculum, of how you choose what you're going to read. I know at least two of you went through the Great Books program, which has been criticized as being mostly dead white men. And a lot of, well, obviously you're more white men.

We're not dead.

Do you get a lot of. But do you get a lot or little or like to talk about. There is a push certainly in academia for more diversity. There's more women philosophers, there's more philosophers of color. Do you think about this? Do you talk about it? Do you get a lot of criticism? Do you get a lot of feedback? Or you should include this. You should include that it is something

that people raise regularly. And usually I say, you know, we're trying to cover the whole historical period, more or less. Yes, we could spend more time in Asia. There's lots of non white philosophers there. So there's a whole very established ancient tradition. And that's just a matter of we just haven't gotten around to it yet. We're going to do Confucius before the end of the year and stuff. But in terms of we just didn't cover that much from the 20th century. It was that thing again that we're not going to read Kristeva until we've done Hegel or whatever the 12 steps to actually be able to. 12 steps to Kristeva.

43:38 Seth: Kristeva, like an Advent calendar. You gotta.

43:42 Unknown speaker: Now we've finally gotten to the point where I think we're doing more of that, where we're finally getting to Hannah Arendt here. We're going to do Simone de Beauvoir before the end of the year. And it's the same thing with philosophers of color that we did Amartya Sen just recently from India. And it's just because more of those people are in the 20th century.

43:58 Seth: It's a live issue for us. I mean, it's not like we spend a ton of time. We don't get so much pressure from our audience that we spend a ton of time hand wringing about it. But like we knew when we did an episode on race, we Couldn't the four of us sit here and talk about race? That just doesn't make sense. So we got somebody. We at least had one person who was.

44:18 Unknown speaker: He had taught a class. Don't just say, we found a black guy. Found a guy who had taught a class about.

44:24 Seth: About philosophy. No, he's a professor. He's written, he's teaching classes. That's not the point. We got the right person to do that conversation. But I think we think about it.

44:35 Unknown speaker: I've had this.

44:36 Seth: I've said, like, okay, well, if we're gonna do something on feminism, first off, we would like to have women as guests on the podcast to just talk about philosophy. It doesn't have to be. We don't want to say, like, well, just because you're a woman, you come on, you have to talk about feminism. So we've had Jessica Berry talking about Nietzsche. We've had people come on Katie McIntyre, Katie on. And talked about Kant.

44:54 Unknown speaker: We had Eva.

44:55 Seth: We've had Eva a couple of times. We had Pat Churchland on. So we try to be aware and that sort of thing. But we know that, like, if we do an episode on feminism or some really, really serious gender studies or something like that, it's problematic.

45:10 Unknown speaker: Well, and it's in the schedule that Matt Teichman, our repeated guest who does our analytic philosophy stuff with us, just taught a class on gender and so he wants to gender with us. So we're gonna, we're gonna be five white guys talking about that.

45:22 Seth: Yeah, I don't know, we might be. Sorry, we might be four white guys talking about that, you know, but we have the same conversations about that topic as we do. We've talked recently quite a bit about Judith Butler. Like, we pretty sure we could get Judith Butler on to do a show and we're pretty sure that we would not understand anything that she was saying because she has a way of speaking that's very in depth, the language of that field. And it's just like she probably isn't going to be a good guest, you know, in terms of. That fits our style. And that doesn't mean she's not good or we don't want or she's not the right person to have on. We got to find that right person who's going to fit and have that conversation with us. And maybe it's more than that. I don't, I don't know, but I try it.

46:01 Unknown speaker: Come on, Judith.

46:02 Seth: I'm sure she's watching the live feed.

46:03 Unknown speaker: Yeah, she's watching the feed as a Final question. I want to ask what you think the future of philosophy, if you had to predict, would be. And if there's something that is a beyond public philosophy, maybe that's one way, just eschatology.

That's what.

That's the future, by definition, the end of the world.

Clever.

So the future, it's all going to be podcasts within 20 years. That's our plan.

46:26 Seth: The future of philosophy is the past. One of the things that distinguishes philosophy from science, right, is that philosophy is an intentional, consistent, and repeated dialogue with itself and its past. You know, one of the things, if you take the long view, you know, we see a lot of stuff happening right now, and there's been a lot of change in the last 50 years or 40 years, and technological change, and we see all these movements to essentially attack and destroy the liberal arts and the humanities and institutions and what have you. But the reality is that we're still talking about the same ideas that we've been talking about for 2,000 years.

And the concerns that human beings have that can be treated and discussed philosophically are the same concerns that they've had. They care about love, they care about right action, they care about the good, they care about what we can know. These questions don't change. So I think I need to learn a lot more myself about political philosophy and think about that quite a bit more. And I think maybe we'll see an evolution in that sphere of things quite a bit more, But I don't think philosophy will change.

47:36 Unknown speaker: So the answer is, we don't know. But we know the future in Japan, right, which is that all liberal arts departments were eliminated. Is that true or is that right?

47:49 Seth: I don't know if that's true or not. I mean, I just know this. Justin says, yes, the pendulum. Look, the pendulum swings both ways. So when we're suddenly let's. Is there a soapbox? All right, so when we're told that the purpose of education is to prepare skilled workers, and skilled workers are exportable to other countries, and the things that make an education, that give people the ability to think critically and think in new and innovative ways, AKA innovation, disappear, right, at some point, people are going to look back at a lost generation of people who were told to take accounting instead of read literature, and they're going to look at a wasteland as innovation moves to some other part of the globe or what have you, and they're going to say, wow, we made a huge mistake.

We really should have kept to the tradition and kept to the values that made Our educational system, great. But also that mold good citizens and good human beings. Now, maybe they might do that in some Mad Max Fury Road kind of situation where it won't make much difference. Or maybe they'll do it in this kind of a setting only there'll be people in the room that actually have the power to make change and we can go out and do something to reverse course. But I don't think philosophy is going to change.

49:12 Unknown speaker: I think the other aspect of the question was just given changes in communication, what do we think about philosophy's role in the culture? And so it's funny, I just, I was watching with my family Clueless, the 1995 movie, and the main character, they're watching Ren and Stimpy, and she's like, oh, that's so existential. And Paul Rudd says, do you actually know what you're talking about? Like, no, but do I sound like I do? And just the fact that that joke makes almost no sense now you just look up, type in existentialism into your browser. Like, it's so the amount of people.

People have a philosophic urge. It's a normal. At least every fifth person has a philosophic urge and they want to talk about this stuff. But if they're disconnected from other people, then they might just sit around with their friends and kind of, wow, man, that's deep. And it never gets beyond that. But it's so easy now to find out about stuff. And so if you're thinking about if God really exists, and you can't freaking do a search and listen to a podcast on whether God really, you know, there's so many, of course, that, you know, you'd be deluged by all the religious podcasts that maybe you would never get to the actual philosophy.

But at least if you're wondering, hey, what about the difference between sense and reference? You could look that you could do

that, Serge, because that's what every fifth person wonders. That's right.

That's a popular stoner topic. So I hope, I'm positive, I think that we will see more merging of the academic and the non academic. And maybe the gutting of academia will lead to more of that. And the fact that academics themselves, you know, what they have to. Just the academic publishing thing, I'm sure you guys know more about that than we do. But just how hard you have to work and then maybe get your article in one of these. Very hard to get in journals or. Well, compared to somebody that can. That's maybe why the Brian Leiters of the world are so protective of.

Oh no, all these non philosophers are encroaching, putting their philosophy out. It's supposed to just be in the five journals or something, but I don't see how that's sustainable. And certainly young people and students, they don't care if it's from the five journals. As an undergrad, I was not reading those journals. As a grad student, when they were in the library that I was in every day, I still didn't read those journals.

It's

all right. So on. On the note of not reading journals, can we give a huge round of applause to the Partially Examined Life?