PEL 15th Anniversary and Book Release (Citizen Edition)

0:00 Mark: Hey, welcome. It is our 15th anniversary celebration for the Partially Examined Life. Can you believe it's been 15 years? Can you even believe it?

0:10 Seth: No.

0:10 Dylan: We'll start driving next year.

0:13 Mark: Then we'll really cook. I want to make some metaphors here. Then we'll really take off.

0:20 Wes: We're recording video for this. Sorry, we're not. Okay.

0:24 Dylan: All right. We're 15 years older. That's not appropriate.

0:27 Wes: Yeah, that's a good point.

0:29 Mark: I mean, I guess we're at the point where, I don't know. Does having video make it less likely that these are AI simulacra of us, or are we still 20th anniversary? That'll be a. That'll be something to actually worry about.

0:40 Chris: I think it's here already. I remember a science fiction book I really used to enjoy, which was the Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein. And one of the main themes was the robot being able to simulate video. I think it's here now. I've seen at least short videos. Very convincing.

0:58 Mark: Hey, who's that funny voice that you may not recognize? Please introduce yourself, guest.

1:03 Chris: So, I'm Chris Sunami. I'm a philosopher from Columbus, Ohio, and I have been working for the last several years, actually, on putting a book together for the Partially Examined Life, releasing

1:14 Mark: on April 25th, which you should order on exactly that day, April 25th, because we want to drive it up the bestseller charts. Pre orders. Usually people want you to put pre orders or just think about it.

1:26 Wes: No, that day, and it came out great. I was surprised how well and readable. Just taking some of these discussions and taking a transcript and polishing it a bit. It's very readable, and it's kind of cool when you think about it, because it's a dialogue format, but it's not just some artificial dialogue. These are real dialogues. Where else can you find that?

1:49 Mark: Yes, tell us, Chris, a little about how you put this together. I know just for a little background, we have been talking for years and years and years about doing a book. We put a proposal together maybe 10 years ago.

2:02 Wes: We had a literary agent contact us at one point and then. Or at two points, really, two different literary agents. And that's sort of how it all got going.

2:11 Mark: Right. But then moving forward on it, there was always some kind of. I don't know. At one point, I think, Wes, you were the like, oh, I don't want to write that kind of stuff with you guys. Or, I don't know, whatever we had agreed to, we couldn't all agree to do anything besides have conversations. And so we determined at some point that we should just use the transcripts from the conversations, because that's what a lot of podcasts do when they put out a book. And many of them have many books, because you can make a lot of transcripts, but they're not the raw transcripts. Yes. So, Chris, here. Here's where you came in.

2:40 Chris: Yeah. So I started with the Partially Examined Life several years ago. Cause Wes actually recruited me. I was a content writer for the blog. And at some point, I asked Wes, why don't you guys have a book? And he was like, well, we tried. Then when I met all of you guys, I was like, oh, this is why there's no book. It's because they're philosophers and there's no

3:01 Seth: agreement because we're like the view.

3:05 Chris: Well, it's not you lack of view. Too many views, which I think is always the issue for philosophers. But I have to say, it was a dream project because you. You guys were the least micromanaging clients possible to imagine. I think the more I did without you guys even knowing about it, the happier you were. That was fun for me, at least. But I feel really happy with the book. I think it came together really well. So it's not just raw transcripts. So I do want to say that. So we did start from the transcripts, but I did do a lot of editing, and that's just to make it flow on paper, because paper is a very different medium. One of the great things, though, is there was a lot of material for each podcast, so I was able to kind of really boil it down to, like, the highlights of each episode, which I think makes it really entertaining on the page.

3:50 Dylan: You did a great job with it.

3:51 Wes: Yeah, you really did. It came out really well, Mr.

3:54 Mark: Segue, that you created all these little. And now let's talk about this. That we could never do in the audio format. There's lots of things I wouldn't mind editing out of the audio, or at least in the early days when I cared more, like, wow, that whole digression. But unless it's, like, seamless, like, even when we have technical fouls, somebody will comment on the technical foul, and that will turn into part of a joke. Oh, so I guess I have to leave the technical foul in there. It's very hard to remove a lot of content from what we do. But on the paper, yeah, you can do whatever you want. You can be magical.

4:26 Chris: Yeah, it really is like magic. No, it's kind of fun for people when they see it. I did kind of insert myself as a ghostly fifth presence into some of these podcasts. But the reason for that was sometimes when material got cut out, it would be hard to follow. You know, maybe the topic would change or something. Just it seemed like kind of the most entertaining way to bridge between the pieces. So I was really deeply inspired by rule number three from the early days of the podcast. So I don't think you guys do this three rules anymore at the beginning of each podcast.

4:56 Mark: But, yes, let's try to remember them. Does anybody remember rule number one? So I'm having trouble right now is

5:03 Seth: that we won't assume you'll have read anything.

5:05 Dylan: We don't assume anybody's read anything.

5:07 Mark: Yeah. So we still do go with that.

5:09 Dylan: Which I just listened to a pod, listened to 99. I completely didn't think that that was the rule. When I listened to the recording at 99, it's like, well, of course we assume that people listen to the book or read the book.

5:22 Mark: Yes, I should say I. As preparation for this, in addition for us to having some questions for Chris about the book and talking about it from that point of view, the last time we did a Deep Navel Gaze in place of a regular episode like this, I guess we've done it occasionally since then, but our first time doing it, I should say, was episode 99. It was the night before we did our first live show. That was episode 100. And we had, like, Chris here, we had a guest moderator. Daniel Horne was on there with us and kind of reflected, oh, we're such grizzled veterans. Five years into this podcast of how things have changed. And I just wanted to make sure we weren't going to say all the same stuff now. And I also was wondering if our answers would change. Anyway, that was just some background. Where were we?

6:06 Chris: Rule number two. I think we got through rule number one.

6:09 Wes: And rule number two, don't get off

6:11 Chris: track in the book.

6:11 Dylan: Rule number two is no name dropping.

6:13 Chris: That's right.

6:14 Dylan: Which we've gotten much worse at. We violate rule number two a lot more than we used to.

6:19 Mark: The spirit. I think we changed it at some point because the spirit of it is explain your point. Don't name drop. In lieu of making a point, you would understand. You'd understand what I mean. And I would do the comic book voice guy. If you'd only read Schnauzers for. For Lovers by PF Stuckey. You know, something along those lines.

6:40 Dylan: And we're definitely very good at that. I think we've always Been good at not naming, dropping in that way.

6:46 Seth: I think a better way to phrase it is should be no appeal to authority.

6:51 Wes: Yes.

6:52 Seth: And I think we're pretty good at that. But I do think we also agreed that after like nine years or something, we were like, it's impossible for us not to refer to. We hit a certain critical point in our corpus where it was just impossible that we could not refer to anything we had talked about before or nothing that we had talked about before.

7:09 Dylan: Yeah.

7:10 Chris: I do think the General Spirit of 1 and 2 is just that this should be really accessible to a layperson, that you don't have to have a philosophy degree or background to enjoy the podcast and get something out of them. And I do feel that really shown through in the podcast we featured in the book, they're definitely all things where somebody can come into them without having read any of the material and they'll leave knowing something a little bit more about it. I do think that's a tough thing to pull off, and I do think that's kind of the best thing about Partially Examined Life is that a lot of these are really interesting, important ideas, and they get locked up in these books, and the books get locked up in universities and nobody accesses them except a very small subset of the population. So I do feel like this is kind of freeing, these ideas so they can reach a wider audience.

7:57 Dylan: Oh, that's like the best compliment I've gotten about the person who's been in my life in a long time. Thank you, Chris. That's awesome.

8:03 Chris: I am a little biased at this point.

8:06 Mark: All right, then you mentioned Rule three. I don't think you said what it is, Chris.

8:09 Chris: Yeah, Rule three. So we shall be rigorous and exact in all that we say. Exactly. Except in cases where not doing so seems like it would be more entertaining.

8:17 Mark: It's aspirational.

8:20 Chris: So that was really my guide when editing was. Most of the time, I tried to be very exact to what was said, but if I felt like being too precisely exact to the exact words was going to make it hard to understand or follow, I did cut stuff. Occasionally I'd move a couple words around. It wasn't any big changes. It was always definitely meant to be true to what people said in the room. But rule three was definitely my guide

8:47 Mark: throughout the whole book, except for three key places where Chris put something really offensive in each of our mouths. And yeah, you'll have to get the

8:56 Wes: most little Easter eggs you can look forward to.

9:00 Mark: None of the rest of us have actually read the whole just to make

9:02 Wes: sure you read the whole thing.

9:05 Mark: There could well be something like that in there. I know you gave it, you gave us optional editing pass and in fact, I think I had it like a very small number of suggestions, one of which you just entirely ignored in that we should.

9:19 Chris: I did.

9:19 Mark: We should say.

9:20 Chris: Yeah, so.

9:21 Mark: So in addition to the transcripts, there are some essays and mostly, Chris, you just said just send me stuff. And I was more thinking things that we've already written in the course of doing the podcast. So I've written blog posts for all these things. And so you pulled something for Avicenna in particular. I don't remember that as being a particularly exceptional essay that I'd written, but I, I always am writing an essay on this to, to just accompany the blog post so people can feast on those. But, but Wes, you had a real meal of an essay. What did you had. That's right near the beginning of the book because it was about Socrates and the apology. What was the circumstance of you writing that? Was that actually for the blog or that just something you had around?

10:00 Wes: No, that was something I wrote and more than 20 years ago. And I don't remember what the circumstances were. Ah, so yes, Free speech and Socratic ignorance. So relating free speech to the concept of zetetic skepticism, focused on inquiry and maintaining doubt and maintaining a kind of agnostic stance.

10:20 Chris: There are several essays, there's two by Wes. So the first one is the Free speech and Socratic Ignorance. And then the second one is really, it's a little juicier in as much as you guys had a prominent guest on the show. Wes told him to his face that he was wrong about everything and then wrote a follow up essay that basically contradicted him.

10:43 Wes: So 10,000 word essay that took me forever to write. And I only completed it because I kept getting harassed by fans about it and I spent probably more than a year on it. And then, yeah, so. And then I thought, I'm never doing this again. Why do I do this? But now it's in the book, so that's great.

11:02 Chris: Well, if the fans want a philosophical dogfight, this is the place to find it. It was fun for me because I was able to find some stuff from the previous episode that kind of led really into it. The guest was Michael Sandel. He's a well known philosopher and he had written a couple books. One of which was discussed in the podcast that's in the book. And the other one was the one that Wes really, really hated. And so there's just a Little clip of Wes and Michael going back and forth about the book. It's not his book. So we did give Wes full chance to say all the things that he did not like about it. So that's a bonus for people. Mark, there's a couple things from you. So Mark did a brand new introduction to the book that's all new writing. It's a really good kind of summary. And he also sent me a speech. I think it was a graduation speech.

11:52 Mark: It was not a. It was. It was an inspirational speech that we were just making jokes at the time.

11:57 Wes: Was it by Chicky or what's the.

11:59 Mark: No, no, it was not. It was not by Chicky. It was the. Just the. The partially Examined life manifesto. I think that week I had watched like, the Biggest Loser, where they were giving inspirational speeches to each other about their weight loss. And this inspired me to write inspirational speeches for each of you, I believe. So we read them on whatever episode that was.

12:19 Chris: I'm disappointed. I had envisioned you going to some college somewhere and addressing amassed graduates with the speech.

12:26 Mark: I'm available for invitations, but no, have never. I think, Seth, you're the only one who's done anything like that in public. Right. At a graduation. Is that right?

12:35 Seth: Not at graduations, just to audiences. Student audiences. But not as part of a graduation ceremony.

12:41 Chris: Mark, if you're auditioning for it, people can see what it would be like if you did give a graduation speech. And then, as you mentioned, so you had given brief introductions to most of the episodes, and those are contained before each episode. But the introduction to Avicenna was just. It was much longer and more substantial. So that's why I kind of spun it off into a separate essay. I think probably your introductions got longer kind of later in the.

13:08 Mark: Well, I write them now. At some point I started writing them while I'm doing the editing. So, like, I'm stopping while I'm editing and writing a sentence. Whereas I used to edit the whole thing and then like, wait, what are the points I'm supposed to put in an introduction? And so, like, yeah, that's much harder. Whereas I could spend fully as long as time as it takes to do the edit writing one of these things at the same time. Multitasking.

13:31 Dylan: What? Mark also just has a unreasonable connection between his brain and his fingers in his ability to write.

13:41 Seth: Huh?

13:42 Mark: Yeah, I don't do a lot of rewriting.

13:44 Seth: It just.

13:44 Mark: It's sort of there.

13:45 Chris: That's good.

13:45 Mark: So it's difficult for me to see anything like. Yeah, I think that was part of the reason with us trying to write a book together is that Wes is like, got to build these giant edifices or whatever, you know, these personal essays, and was giving us examples of that. And like, I don't know, I could just pin something out overnight, but I'm not sure it's going to be the same level.

14:06 Dylan: I think in the end, we went back and forth a lot about ways of doing the book. And you're right, Mark, we just couldn't come together on a way to work on it together. But in the end, the decision that we have something we're working on together every other week for the past now 15 years that we are actually pretty darn good at. And though recognizing that just the transcripts by themselves are unreadable in the way that an unedited version of our conversation is unlistenable. So it's just been a real, really fortunate to have Chris have the fortitude to turn them into something readable the way they have been made. It's just great.

14:51 Chris: Well, you guys really do have an incredible back catalog. I was actually about a month ago, I was at a wedding and the bride was a philosophy major, I think actually has a doctorate in philosophy now. And the groom's college roommate was a philosophy major. I think he also has his doctorate now. And so there were a bunch of philosophers at the wedding, and I was seated at their table and I had mentioned that I was working on this project and they were all like, oh, yeah, we looked that up. If there's a philosopher that we haven't read and we just want to get a quick, quick introduction.

15:23 Dylan: That's awesome.

15:24 Chris: So it's apparently in use out there among professional working philosophers.

15:29 Wes: I had a friend who I just randomly ended up having drinks with her and two academics that I hadn't met before. And these are very well published academics with big books and tenure track positions. And they didn't know who I was. And so at drinks, what do you do? And I said, I think I said, I'm a therapist. I kind of don't talk about the podcast these days. But Emily's like, he's got this podcast. And they're like, oh, yeah? Which podcast? Partially Examined Life. And one of them goes, the Partially Examined Life. Really excited. Knew all about it. So I think it also academics in different fields. Philosophy isn't necessarily their field, but they're in a field adjacent like economics. I think these guys were economics people will listen to Pel as well. Per quick remedial lesson on a philosopher,

16:15 Chris: something that Was kind of fun for me going through the transcripts. You guys had a couple big name celebrities on at various points, and they were actually more excited to meet you guys than the other way around, which is kind of cool in a certain way.

16:31 Seth: Like who?

16:32 Chris: Well, there's Dr. Drew and Lucy Lawless. Lucy's a particular favorite of mine because I had a year where I was a die hard Xena Xenophan. So that was part of the reason I fought to get her episode in the book.

16:46 Mark: Xenophan or Xenophobe. This is just a translation to transition.

16:51 Seth: Xenophile. You're supposed to say xenophile.

16:53 Mark: Xenophile. Oh, there you go. This is just a transition of. You also leaned heavily, right. On certain topics of certain political topics that might be of interest.

17:04 Chris: Yes. So in addition to kind of, I did include kind of the big names, both sort of from pop culture and also the big name philosophers. I think that's just kind of naturally more of interest to people, rightly or wrongly. But I also really tried to make sure that we got a lot of the underrepresented philosophers, so philosophers of color, philosophers who are non Western. And really a couple reasons for that. I mean, one is I think that you guys do a really good job kind of expanding outside of kind of that classic European canon. But also it's something where I think it's an underserved niche. I think there's a lot of people who are interested in kind of philosophy outside of just the same big name European figures that are always studied. And this is a chance for this book to kind of fill that niche, at least for a little while, until other books come out.

17:53 Mark: This is AI Wes. You must remove my name from the book because I am not interested in underrepresented philosophers. No, AI Wes, no real. Wes is fine with it.

18:05 Wes: AI his voices have gotten a lot better than that. Mark, it would sound just like I

18:10 Mark: didn't want to try to do an impersonation of you.

18:12 Wes: Plausible deniability on anything, I sense.

18:16 Dylan: It just occurred to me, in addition to the book coming out, we should figure out how to package all of the podcasts together in one group that are in the book and the listening

18:29 Mark: version of it to make a Spotify playlist or something.

18:33 Dylan: Yeah, something like that.

18:34 Mark: If you can do that with podcast episodes, I assume. I don't know, I've never tried.

18:38 Chris: You're trying to get me hate mail when people listen to the transcripts and they're like, you skipped this whole bunch of stuff.

18:45 Dylan: No, no, I Figured that they can go for more.

18:50 Chris: No, I do think that's a great idea, because obviously we're only able to get a small fraction of each podcast into the book, so hopefully it will really whet people's appetites and make it not.

19:01 Mark: Even if you've listened to all the episodes, you're still going to enjoy the book. It's not the same thing.

19:07 Wes: It's not at all. Yeah, that's what really surprised me. It reads like it's something done for the page.

19:14 Mark: I guess you were at least aided by the fact that automated transcriptions are so fast and relatively accurate now, right, Chris? Or were they still super inaccurate, but it didn't matter because you were already editing. Editing the bejesus out of it anyway.

19:27 Chris: No, actually, the automatic transcripts were very good, and it would have been hard to do this without that. I mean, I can transcribe stuff myself, but it's a much, much slower process. I definitely did have to go through. Most of. Kind of the regular stuff was fine, but a lot of the philosophical terms were the names of philosophers. Those got butchered, especially for some reason. Hegel. Every time he. Hegelianism was mentioned, it was something different. I think my favorite was something like some kind of alien. They thought you were talking about aliens rather than Hegelians.

20:02 Seth: Ooh, I kind of like that. The hag aliens.

20:05 Chris: Yeah, the hag aliens.

20:06 Seth: I mean, that's a band name just waiting to happen. Or a horror movie. Hegelian.

20:12 Mark: The transcript project was like, as fraught a thing as the book that we. For a while, we're set on doing transcripts for all our old episodes and. But we just found it too time consuming and too much human interaction necessary. And we even, like, had a special intern that did several for us. But then just the energy of putting them on the site was too much. Well, now Apple is generating auto transcripts. Whether they've rolled this out already or it's just coming up very soon, I'm not sure. But I think that was that we said, maybe let's not put resources into this because technology will solve it pretty soon.

Except, I guess, if it doesn't fix the actual things that you would want clarified, right? The. The technical terminology. I remember we had somebody saying, why does Dylan keep talking about the relata? What's a relata? And it was like, you know, the members of a relation. relata. But like, if you didn't know that and you didn't see it spelled and probably the transcription program would not get it Right.

21:16 Chris: Yeah, I did have a couple moments where I was like, I hope that I am correcting the transcript correctly. I really do think like it took somebody with a philosophy background to do this project because otherwise a lot of stuff would have been really hard. Yeah, I should mention the other Easter egg that actually Easter egg in the books. I did sneak four of my own original essays into the book so those are in there for better or for worse. That will definitely be writing that people will not be familiar with unless they're among the five people have been to my blog.

21:51 Dylan: The way in which people get the book is going to Amazon.

21:54 Chris: So that's the primary way and we definitely want as many people as possible to buy from Amazon on April 25th. Although I do feel certain way ethically about Amazon. But the hope is actually that we'll get on some of the Amazon bestseller list. Different niches are easier to get climb up the list. But it's also a thing where once you get onto the top of say the philosophy list or history philosophy list, it becomes more prominent so then more people can discover it. I definitely, since this is going out to the fans, this book is primarily for the fans. But if you guys like it, please tell other people about it because that will be what will get into more people's hands.

22:38 Dylan: We'll send out multiple emails which have a link for getting the book and make sure that it goes out on April 24th and 25th for sure.

22:49 Seth: What is the exact title of the book?

22:52 Chris: The title of the book. This is going to be really original. It took a lot of thinking to come up with this. The the title of the book is the partially Examined Life. So very, very creative title. The subtitle is 15 years with your favorite philosophy podcasters.

23:06 Dylan: It was a good title.

23:07 Chris: Yeah, great title, right? Dylan, I did not fully answer your question. So Amazon is the primary way that people can get the book, but it will also be available through bookstores and libraries if people request it. So bookstores and libraries will probably not carry it by default. But. But it's set up so that they can order it. It's going to be distributed to Ingram, which is one of the major distributors, and it will be just like any other book that bookstores and libraries can order. So all they have to do is know that it exists. And actually some of your fans have apparently already been talking it up because I've already had one bookstore reach out to me to ask about when it was coming out.

23:42 Dylan: Woohoo.

23:43 Wes: Great.

23:44 Dylan: That's awesome.

23:44 Mark: I've seen some Unexpected things in Barnes and Noble philosophy sections. They certainly don't have a good selection if you actually were going there to buy a philosophy book. But they'll have sort of whatever is being marketed right now. And so there will be something like from another podcast, the Philosophy Bites book or whatever.

24:03 Chris: Yeah. So definitely, if we get some traction on Amazon, then the bookstores will take notice. They definitely follow what's on the Amazon list. So if it climbs up the Amazon charts, then bookstores may start to order it on their own. But again, the biggest way that we'll get into bookstores, if fans go and request it.

24:19 Mark: So if I remember correctly, I mean, on the cover it says 10 years, and then the 10 is crossed out and says 15, because it took us that long to actually bring the book together that we are talking to you about it at the 10 year anniversary. Time just keeps moving at an exponentially faster rate for us aging folks, I think. Then you included one episode from the last five years, is that right? The Kierkegaard.

24:42 Chris: Kierkegaard is one of them. And then the Laozi episode, and I think the Avicenna episode came after the 15 year mark. So some good ones from the last five years. I'm trying to think what five years ago was. That was a 2019.

24:56 Mark: Well, and that might have been before the turn. The turn. If we are Heidegger. We're not Heidegger. You know, it's very hard for us to do anything that is only one episode now because we want. I've noticed that we're hungry for more ser. So, in fact, the Kierkegaard you picked was the second of four or five podcasts in that series.

25:16 Dylan: Four or five. Aren't there like a dozen of those things?

25:19 Mark: Oh, no, no. I mean, if. Hours. Yeah. A dozen hours or somewhere close to that. If you include Marcel. Yeah. As a. As the footnote at the end. I guess that was isolatable enough. The one that you did.

25:34 Chris: There's always a selection of stuff. In any case, there's always some gold that you're going to miss in the second or third hour. But a lot of times I found that the beginning of the conversation had its own kind of completion to it. Even though things could get deeper after that point, there was usually like a good place of resolution that I could find or at least something that kind of left the conversation on an interesting note.

25:55 Mark: Often when we're trying to summarize, and theoretically that's supposed to take the first 15 minutes and is often the whole first hour. And then we're like, okay, now let's start actually reading through the text.

26:04 Chris: Something I should mention that people will get in this book that I have not seen in any other philosophy book out there on the market, which is illustrations. This is a fully illustrated book. And that's actually because of the illustrations that you guys commissioned for the website. But you guys have some really talented illustrators. And I don't know that everybody will have seen these illustrations because these are ones that people actually have to go into the depths of the website to find. If I'm correct.

26:29 Wes: We used to have a calendar for several years.

26:31 Mark: Yeah. We would capture those for the year, and it would generally be one artist we were working with for that year with the express purpose of filling out the calendar.

26:40 Chris: Yeah. So there's some great images, and part of it is. It's like, that's kind of a rarity. I mean, you don't really have philosopher trading cards, although that's a concept. We should do that.

26:50 Dylan: Yeah. With the art from the podcast, I

26:53 Seth: think that would be a terrific, terrific product. Do we have 52? Is that how many cards are in a deck?

26:59 Dylan: Yes, there are 52 cards in a deck, unless you put in two jokers.

27:03 Mark: I mean, are trading cards usually playable?

27:06 Seth: Like, no. I mean, I think a deck card. And then we should also have some kind of Pokemon, like, collection of philosopher cards that we can also Geocache, create an app and make billions of dollars

27:19 Dylan: off of, do foil versions of them.

27:21 Mark: At one point, we talked to. Because Tommy Maranges, AKA Philosophy Bro, designs board games. And I think we were talking with him at the time, or we were talking amongst ourselves of like, can we design a partially examined life board game? But I think this is a Magic the Gathering style collectible card philosophy game where, like, what's Kant's special powers that he, you know, you have to move your other guy back one square. What I don't know. I don't know about matching the gap.

27:51 Dylan: There's probably some copyright. Be awesome is to just use philosophers as that. You could integrate it into a Magic the Gathering deck, but there's probably copyrights that we can't. But it'd be fun to do that.

28:03 Seth: The estate of Malebranche is going to come after that 3 cents of royalties.

28:11 Chris: I do feel like if you guys put this on a Kickstarter that you would make your goal almost immediately, then

28:16 Dylan: we'd have to do it. That's.

28:18 Chris: That's the downside.

28:19 Mark: All right, Chris, here's your next assignment.

28:22 Seth: If.

28:22 Mark: If we don't right. This could be a series of books. If this one is successful. You seemed interested, Chris, in helping us continue this indefinitely.

28:31 Wes: How many advanced copies did we give away?

28:34 Chris: I think 15 print copies went out and about 20 e copies, ebook copies. So about 35 copies altogether.

28:43 Seth: Okay, what's the format? Is it hardcover, paperback?

28:47 Chris: So it'll be available in both formats.

28:49 Mark: Hmm. I just thought by default anything that you print through Amazon had the sort of mushy paperback. In fact, I have one right in front of me that is sort of a very amateurishly printed. You're saying no an actual hardback is available?

29:05 Chris: Yeah. I mean, please don't make people think these are gonna be low quality books.

29:09 Dylan: These are.

29:11 Chris: These are. No, these are really good books.

29:14 Mark: I'll believe it when it's in my hands.

29:16 Wes: Well, you have a proof copy.

29:18 Mark: I don't have a paper copy.

29:20 Wes: You never got a paper copy?

29:21 Mark: Maybe I didn't ask for one. I was waiting.

29:24 Wes: Seth and Dylan. You didn't get paper copies?

29:26 Dylan: I thought I asked for one, but I haven't received it yet.

29:29 Wes: Yeah, wait till you see the paper copy. It's more exciting than you think it would be without that. So. Looks great.

29:36 Seth: I'm not going to get a free one preview. I'm going to put down my hard earned pel. Cash for one and. And add to the rush to get us moving up the list on Amazon.

29:45 Chris: I am hoping to get one into the hands of everybody who contributed. I think that's just a good thing to do. You guys got me some addresses.

29:52 Mark: By which we do not mean everyone that's ever contributed to us financially. We don't mean that. We mean.

29:59 Dylan: We mean everybody who's featured in the book.

30:02 Chris: Everybody whose actual words or pictures are in the book.

30:06 Mark: Did you get any pushback from anybody? Of what? You're going to include my interview and you're not going to pay me? You're not going to.

30:12 Seth: That's why you signed the waiver.

30:14 Mark: We had the waiver once. Lucy Lawless signed a waiver. No one else ever signed a waiver.

30:19 Seth: Shut up, Mark.

30:21 Chris: Okay, yeah, edit this part out when you send this out. Mark, so far you've implied that the

30:28 Seth: book will be low quality and we're stealing intellectual property.

30:33 Dylan: Mark's knee jerk reaction is to cut things down, but these are times.

30:39 Mark: Well, I. I'm not cutting you down, Chris. You are a boon to the organization. And we. We are so happy that it happened.

30:46 Dylan: Yeah, thanks so much for the fortitude on it, Chris. I. You know, the backstory on this is our additional backstory is that Chris had, you know, after we had basically given up on doing it, Chris came and said, I think there's a book in you guys. And he spent a couple years shopping it around, putting together a book proposal, and we got some nibbles, but, you know, getting people to bite on books is tough. And Chris said, you know, after all, you know what? I still believe in this.

31:14 Chris: Let's.

31:14 Dylan: Let's do it. And he pushed it all the way through. So it wouldn't happen, Chris, without you.

31:20 Seth: Absolutely not.

31:21 Wes: You know, you mentioned how nice it was to not have us micromanage you, but you basically received no assistance from

31:27 Dylan: us except for the podcast.

31:31 Wes: We've just run out of energy for the book, and it's, you know, traumatic memories of trying to cooperate on it, not have it go anywhere. And then.

31:42 Mark: Yeah. So if you're wondering why Charge was

31:44 Wes: a big, big deal, why there are

31:45 Mark: no, you know, Dylan or Seth essays, it's just because you didn't send any to him. That's. That's. That's all there was to it. It was not Chris making editorial decisions and saying the. The ones that are in there are superior. It just. He worked with what he had available. Yes.

32:00 Seth: I can honestly say that I was in no position to be a valued contributing member to this project over the last year or so, so maybe the next one.

32:09 Chris: Well, again, like Dylan said, I mean, the core of it is the podcast, and that's the stuff that you guys built over a really long period of time. It was actually. It was a really enjoyable project for me, and I appreciate the trust that you guys placed in me. Again, you guys were so hands off that I really. I could have put anything out.

32:27 Wes: In all honesty, we had worked with you on the blog, and there are very few people I think we would have felt as trusting of. And, you know, if it hadn't been you, we might have been much more anxious and involved.

32:40 Chris: Well, I appreciate that. I really do.

32:42 Seth: That is true.

32:43 Mark: Moving away from the book slightly, what do you guys think about this turn or just anything else about the way things have progressed? In looking back at some of these old episodes, did you feel like we're not even doing that show anymore or what?

32:57 Chris: Actually, I felt like there was a. There was a certain consistency even from the start. The tone didn't change all that much. I mean, it's a little bit more serious as it goes along. I definitely didn't feel like, oh, these are two completely different shows.

33:10 Wes: I often wonder if, like, the early, early episodes are much more listenable than the most recent ones. But I haven't gone back. I haven't ever tried to analyze that.

33:20 Seth: And the earlier episodes are the more earnest work of younger minds. It was a newer endeavor. We were much more, I think, reverential to some extent with the texts.

33:32 Wes: Yeah, I got some huge complaints about the episode on the apology. Or maybe that was a comment. Do you remember this, Mark? Someone was upset that we were making fun of Socrates. I think that's the very first episode.

33:44 Seth: Yeah, I'm not saying that we weren't making jokes, because we certainly were, but I think there was an earnestness about our endeavor, you know, that came from it being something that hadn't been done before. Us being still in our 30s, thinking of it like, from the perspective of ex academics or quasi academics or, you know, amateur thinkers. And now I think of myself, at least from my perspective, you know, I think of myself as a. A relatively developed human being. And I don't feel like I'm doing some kind of academic exercise for somebody else's behalf now. And I'm sure that comes across in my tone a little bit.

34:26 Chris: But that actually reminds me of another bonus in the book. This is probably really more for the fans than anybody else, but they're never before seen behind the scenes pictures of all the main cast members for a. I don't know if cast members, contributors, what are you guys, co hosts? There we go. Thank you. There's behind the scenes pictures of the hosts for the podcast, including some really good childhood pictures from some of you guys, although not Seth. Seth did not send me any pictures.

34:58 Wes: Seth. I just. I want a picture of this angle that I'm seeing on your. I know listeners aren't seeing it, but

35:04 Mark: this is what I'm saying. Seth cannot be photographed. That's the secret of Seth. He just makes lenses flare his brilliance.

35:12 Wes: The sun is descending. Yeah, it's a bottom up view and the sun is coming down and making you look like you're anointed by God or something.

35:22 Seth: Well, that's because I am.

35:25 Chris: This would be a really good picture to get in the book for those of you who can't see it. Seth is in front of a window and the full sunlight is just shining behind him, so he's silhouetted against it. It's too bad. The book is finalized.

35:38 Wes: Well, you're getting rid of the effect now.

35:39 Seth: Yeah, I'm trying to. Whether you want it like that or like this?

35:43 Chris: Well, ooh, those are both amazing.

35:46 Wes: It's all amazing.

35:47 Chris: But I do have childhood pictures of Dylan, Wes and Mark. So for fans who wondered what they looked like before they became the mature individuals, you know. Now, Wes, you sent me a college picture of you doing your best kind of Sartre, I think.

36:06 Wes: Why? Because I'm holding the cigarette.

36:07 Chris: That's right.

36:09 Wes: I mean, I'm trying to look tough in that picture and I'm holding a cigarette and in my mind looking defiant and tough. I don't know how the picture looks to other people.

36:16 Mark: Did you go through a smoking period, Wes?

36:19 Wes: No, I think I smoked occasionally when I was drinking, but I don't think I knew how to inhale because a year or two after I graduated from college and I met my father and some younger new half siblings, I had like an 11 year old new younger sister that I had just met and I think I was having some drinks with other siblings at some point and she's like. And I was smoking a cigarette and she's like, you're not inhaling like what? She's like, the smoke's actually supposed to go into your lungs. I'm like, oh. So anyway, no real smoking phase in college. I never got the appeal in the end.

36:54 Chris: Well, if you want to see young Wes looking tough, this is the only place to do it.

36:59 Wes: Or at least thinking he looks tough. I don't know.

37:03 Mark: I guess. Right. There are no regrets about. Because you can always just do it next book if there's something. I suppose it's too early to have regrets about the book. It's not out yet.

37:12 Wes: Now you're on another negative jag. Regrets?

37:14 Chris: It's too early.

37:16 Mark: I've had a few.

37:18 Wes: Has it been published yet? I'm trying to schedule my regrets.

37:25 Chris: That tracks, I would say. I did read your inspirational speech and there were a surprising number of regrets in it.

37:33 Mark: For inspirational speech, I just regret that there hasn't been as much singing as I would have liked on the history of the podcast. I feel like there should be a musical episode every six years or so. That's just how it works on tv.

37:48 Wes: Do you want to do a musical pl. The musical?

37:52 Mark: I think that would be. Lucy would be great at it. Erica. We have some definite singers in the back catalog, let's say. Are there things looking at the history, ambitions that we want to share for the future? Not just like, you know, I want to do a little more metaphysics, but that kind of stuff that we talk about in Nightcap all the times, but grander things.

38:15 Chris: Well, in terms of follow up, I would definitely like to do the partially Examined Plato next. If this book is a success, I think that would be a great next one.

38:24 Wes: Great.

38:25 Chris: Both personally because I love Plato and because you guys have done so many episodes on him, I think it would be very easy to fill up a book.

38:32 Wes: Dialogues about dialogues.

38:34 Seth: I want to create a chatbot.

38:37 Chris: Oh, wow. Okay.

38:38 Seth: So I was talking to a friend of mine who understands this stuff actually uses generative AI to like write code for him and some other things. And we were talking about it and I said, you know, it'd be interesting to have a Kant bot that you could train to reply to you or engage with you as Kant. And he went out and said he found like nine of them already. So he showed me a response that he got from asking a question like what's your moral philosophy? Or something. And it was as right as far as it goes for an undergraduate audience kind of a thing.

But I wondered if there isn't some magic we could do. So as I understand the way chatbots work, or generative AI works, whatever, it's already consumed everything and you can constrain what it's allowed to take into account. Or you can train a bot just on certain things, but you might not want to limit it, but instead put conditions on it. Like how could we train a chatbot so that it would be useful like at a graduate level? Because basically. Right. This three paragraph response that the bot gave mentions the categorical imperative. Right. Which is we all know is like entry point.

Like if we were talking about it, we wouldn't refer to it the way that the bot did. So know, is there a way that you can train the bot to analyze Kant's writings with respect also to the secondary literature on Kant and create a revised. Like if Kant had lived for 400 years and engaged with his critics, that Kant.

40:16 Chris: Right.

40:16 Seth: You know, something like that. So that's one aspiration I have.

40:19 Wes: Yeah, that's coming soon.

40:21 Seth: Yeah, but what don't we want to be on the front?

40:25 Chris: I actually.

40:25 Wes: If you do, than I do. But without doing any of the work,

40:31 Chris: I actually trained a chatbot on my own kind of personal philosophies. And it was both astonishingly easy and eerily plausible. I mean like it did parrot back things that I could see myself saying, which was. Which was a little scary.

40:49 Seth: You trained your own replacement. You better make sure they don't have a clone in a lab somewhere.

40:53 Chris: Oh, I know.

40:54 Seth: Well that they can just upload your consciousness into.

40:57 Chris: My day job is as a programmer and we actually work with AI now, which is astonishing to Me, because all this stuff was such science fiction until very recently. And some of the other programmers, they're all excited, they come in, they're like, oh, I just asked the chatbot one question and it spit out this whole page of code. I'm like, oh, that's not really a good thing for us as professional programmers.

41:21 Seth: No.

41:21 Chris: I do wonder if any of the people who are on the forefront of this technology have ever read a science fiction book in their life.

41:29 Wes: It's over. The end is coming soon.

41:33 Chris: Have you guys done an episode on Generative AI?

41:37 Wes: No, I think that's a good idea because there's a lot of interesting philosophical implications. For instance, it may be the case that something can be rational without being conscious.

41:49 Chris: There's also the ethical issues, like all the creatives whose work is being harvested so that these bots can spit something out.

41:56 Wes: Right?

41:57 Mark: Yeah, that's more the kind of thing at this point, unless there's an actual text by somebody that we respect that we want to read, then I just channel that stuff into the Philosophy vs. Improv show. Because that show we can just have something flimsy like that. You know, we've heard in the news about creatives having their work learned from slash stolen. What are we going to say intelligent about that? I mean I could talk for three or four minutes about that probably without a lot of research. So that's what that other show is for, is for just going off on stuff.

42:30 Chris: What we should do is we should have the chatbot create the text, then we can discuss it.

42:35 Seth: Perfect. I think we've, you know, in addition to print, we've also talked long time about a video format. I've always thought that we could create some really nice short form videos if we just had some kind of an animator, some way to create visuals. Like you remember, three minute philosophy. I don't know if it's still creating new content out on YouTube, but something to that effect. And I always thought that a course turning our stuff into like a course that you could take on Udemy or something like that or whatever. I don't know what the platforms are at this point.

We have certainly enough content. It's just none of us are educators and you know, it would just take me sitting down and taking the time to like create the videos, the lesson and with the animations and the slideware and the quizzes and all that kind of stuff. But I mean basically we could put together an entire, more than an entire four year college curriculum that people could take themselves and since they're Eliminating philosophy departments all over the country. We might soon be the only non accredited. We might be the only place where you could actually learn.

If we created a, you know, some kind of a channel or a educational outlet. And I'm not talking about like 2530 minute lectures, but you know, more of that interactive. And that's where probably generative AI would come in handy to help build some of that stuff too. But then again we would make our billion and we could ride off into the sunset.

44:07 Mark: Yeah. When I ask and I'm thinking about, you know, what are the sort of areas we want to expand in, what are the sort of projects so many things are just since we've been doing this for so long and we've been dreaming for so long are just about ideas that we considered at some point, ideas that died, ideas that we couldn't agree on, ideas that nobody had the energy to follow through, things like that. I know for educational stuff you've long been talking Seth, about we don't want to have to do any more work. We just want to create something that you know, as you say, can be a udemy course. We want to repurpose. I mean that's essentially what this.

44:39 Seth: I want to direct somebody else's creative work and building something like that because that's not my area of expertise.

44:46 Mark: You know, the not school thing for a while that and we made a deal with the Great Courses which seemed like a good partner for us for not school in terms of like we're going to have like seminars through us. And now just in the last year that I've settled on not no additional labor use, but I'm just going to do additional labor. And so I've been teaching this class for a couple semesters. In the fall I'm going to create a new class. Wes, I know you messed around with this a little with the seminars that you were going to have after every single class that just there wasn't enough interest to keep doing that or seminars

45:20 Wes: I was going to have after episodes, you mean?

45:23 Mark: Do you not even remember this now?

45:25 Wes: I don't remember how far I went

45:26 Mark: or I thought you did like two of them anyway. It was like an official thing that you were like this is going to be a thing. And then it tapered off. But I've had good experiences with it. So I hope you. That's still a niche of somebody to do basically after shows after, you know, when something comes out. But letting people get involved with that and I don't know, I don't want to make any general pronouncements to listeners, to supporters, to, hey, come be on our team. Because we found that just supervising someone takes more effort than we kind of had that.

We've had interns over the years and things, and just coming up with stuff for them to do has been beyond our powers of effort. So basically, we put so much effort into reading these texts and doing the actual show that thinking more broadly is more difficult. And I don't know, for a long time I had grand designs of the couple celebrities that we've had on. That's only the beginning. It's only going to get bigger from there. And I don't feel like there was an explosion of other celebrities, bigger and better celebrities, if such a thing could even be possible compared to the ones that we had.

But, you know, more. More household names. James Franco does, you know, a philosophy channel, or did at some point before he was disgraced. Maybe. Maybe now that he's disgraced, he would do it. But anyway. But I feel like I've. I don't know, I don't put a lot of effort into that at this point to try to.

46:46 Chris: Once the book comes out, you guys are going to be mobbed.

46:48 Seth: You know, Another project for the future is maybe as we instantiate themes and topics from philosophy in our actual lives, we could revisit those. So we could be, you know, like those life hackers, you know, who go on and like, oh, I'm taking vitamin D and, you know, beta carotene or whatever. Be like, ah, I'm really going to be an existentialist and like, film ourselves out in the world. Like, actually being existential, like, that doesn't matter. Nothing matters. No, the only meaning that's out there is the meaning you create. And I'll tell you what, I'll start because on April 24, I am getting bilateral lens replacement surgery on my eyes. So Wes can only appreciate this unless you guys are wearing contacts. But if I take these off, I basically can't really see. My vision's been going downhill for 20 years. So these are progressives with astigmatism, correction and all this.

47:42 Wes: So this is like laser surgery or.

47:45 Seth: No, it's lens replacement. So it's not a laser surgery. They literally physically cut the eye, take out your lens and put in an artificial lens.

47:56 Wes: Why do that?

47:57 Seth: Well, because you get your vision restored back to basically what it was when you were like 30 with the naked eye. And it stays that way for the rest of your life because your lenses don't change, don't get cataracts, all that sort of thing. So I will be part bionic, I will be part artificial.

48:16 Mark: Can you ask for it either to be permanently or adjustably? So you could add yellow. So you could be like the philosopher's example of somebody with jaundice that sees yellow.

48:26 Wes: We should be an app with it that allows you to.

48:29 Seth: Yeah, well, I was going to ask for one that would allow me to simultaneously see zoom in, you know, like have like a zoom function and would also go like the Six Million Dollar Man when it did it, you know, so maybe a little speaker embedded in it. I don't know. You want to hear something crazy? They have a version of it that they can put in. You can let it wear for a bit, figure out, and then they can use the laser to adjust it. They can actually tune it with the laser before they lock it in. So you can fine tune it after it's already in your eye.

49:05 Wes: What does a procedure like this cost? Why doesn't everyone do it?

49:09 Seth: Because it's elective and it's not covered by insurance. So in my case, it's going to be seven grand.

49:15 Chris: We really are living in science fiction times.

49:19 Seth: It's a frickin miracle. I mean, it's like magic. It truly is. My wife had one of her eyes done because she only needed to have one. And it was like the next day she woke up and she could see. And I've been asking my optometrist for years, like, am I a candidate for this? And they're like, no, no, no. Then I realized they're selling me lenses and frames. So of course they don't want to suggest that I could get my eyes fixed where I wouldn't have to buy $700 progressive lenses.

49:46 Wes: So no problems with dryness and things like that.

49:48 Seth: I mean, post surgery it takes, they say it takes about a month to get settled in it. And then, you know, you want to wait and see what it looks like after three months, but otherwise no. No ramifications.

50:00 Mark: Well, thanks for everybody for joining us for this 15 year celebration of the podcast. Now, discussing medical.

50:08 Wes: Well, this is, this is just the natural result of aging. And as we do new anniversaries, it's just going to get worse and worse. It's going to be all hip replacements and plastic surgery.

50:20 Seth: And I will say this, 15 years is like. It is a massive milestone accomplishment for any creative endeavor, which I consider this to be. There are precious few television shows that last this long. There's hardly any podcasts that have been around as long as we have. Especially when you consider the ones that have are typically either done by professional organizations like NPR or whoever, but also. Or they're individuals themselves. So the fact that. And give credit where credit's due. Mark conceived of the project to begin with. I have to say we were probably the first people that tried to do anything like this.

And we were moderately acquainted when we began, I would say it wasn't like we were all friends or anything like that. We were just graduate school acquaintances living in different cities. The technology wasn't there for even video calls at the time, and we had plenty of adventures with equipment and latency and various other sorts of things. So the fact that we've persevered, I mean, I think is phenomenal and I would say unique. And we're a shining beacon unto others about what you can accomplish if you just set your mind to it.

51:39 Mark: If you just set 15 years of your life to it.

51:41 Seth: Set 15 years of your life to it.

51:43 Chris: You know, it's funny, I didn't think of it until somebody made the joke about the podcast being old enough to drive almost, but my oldest child was born just about a month after your first podcast. So I've spent 15 years raising a child, and you guys have spent 15 years raising up this podcast.

52:01 Seth: Do any of you think of it as a child?

52:03 Mark: Not at all.

52:05 Seth: Nah, me neither. My. My baby. My baby.

52:10 Wes: All right.

52:11 Mark: Yeah.

52:12 Wes: It's time to go.

52:13 Mark: Sure. The police are coming. The party's got out of control.

52:18 Wes: Seth gave an inspir speech and the emotions are running too high now.

52:23 Mark: All right, well, thanks again. Thanks again, Chris, for joining us and for doing the book, and everybody should read it.

52:30 Wes: Thank you, man.

52:31 Chris: Well, thank you. It's been a real pleasure, and I really appreciate you guys.

52:35 Mark: Good night, everybody.

52:36 Seth: Thanks. Good night.

52:37 Dylan: So long.