Going Deep with Chad and JT - EP 203 - Agnes Callard Joins

Episode Date: September 8, 2021

What up stokers! This week we have professor, Agnes Callard, on the pod. She takes us on a heady journey through all the stuff happening below the surface in our day to day lives. Enjoy!    Sign up for new merch here: http://www.shopcgd.com​​​​​​​​​​ Sponsored by     Talkspace: Match with a licensed therapist when you go to talkspace.com get $100 off your first month with the promo code GODEEP. That’s $100 off when you use code GODEEP at talkspace.comSHOW LESS

Oh, we are also brought to you by the legends at Manscaped. Manscaped, thank you so much for keeping our trims pewed, for looking after our hogs, for making sure their dinks are looking fresh and clean, because these are the leaders in below the waist grooming. It's time, it's back to school time. We want to make sure that you pack the essentials just to have the best year yet. The Manscaped fourth generation performance Performance Package is just that. Things are opening up. Be ready for whatever is in the daily sketch for you. And it's the perfect package for your perfect package.

And it includes the brand new Lawn Mower 4.0. Fellas, go for the valedictorian wordplay of ball trimming and join the two million men worldwide who trust Manscaped by going to manscaped.com with the promo code GO DEEP. Alright, let's start the show. Sizzle up the pan and serve me a burger. What's up Stokers of stoke nation this is chad kroger coming in with the going deep a chance at podcast i got my compadre

sean thomas what up boom clap stokers and today we have with us our guest she is a philosopher at the university of chicago and author of the book Aspiration, Agnes Callard. Welcome. So pumped to have you on. Thank you. Did I get that pronunciation correct, Callard? Awesome. Nice. Nice. How's your day going? Pretty good. Nice. What do you do typically in a day? Today, I've been just reading and rereading this one platonic dialogue that i know super well and i'm so frustrated by the fact that i still have to reread it um at this point um but it's i'm writing about it and the things that i'm saying about it don't exactly fit what it says so i've had to like reread it to right pull myself into line what's the rub i don't understand what's uh what's different like what where's

the discrepancy in what you're saying and what the uh yeah so it's a it's a dialogue about this guy this young sort of like heartthrob named alcibiades and he's like he's an he's an up-and-coming um successful person right so he's like the young elite and uh this guy socrates um the philosopher's like old guy has been hovering around him like for years um and this this this kid alcibiades like you know i mean maybe maybe 1920 has just throngs of admirers. So Socrates has been hanging out in the outskirts of the admirers and watching as this kid turns everyone away and be like, I don't care about you. I don't care about you. And Socrates would be like among the lower, like lesser admirers, right? So he didn't dare approach Alcibiades, but this dialogue is about when he finally approaches him and walks up to him and like has the guts to like say hello to

him and try to interest Alcibiades in what he has to, in what he has to offer, which is philosophy. So it's very dramatic in the whole beginning is Alcibiades being like, yeah, I have been wondering like why you hang around me and like what are you doing why do you expect me to notice you you know and by the end of it Alcibiades is like I'm going to throw myself at your feet and I'm going to be your student and you're going to be my teacher so it's this sort of transformative thing where you watch Socrates do his magic oh wow how does how does he do that what just through the Socratic method or how does he convince him that he's worthy enough to be a teacher yeah so like the first move that's really crucial

is Socrates says to him I know what you want secretly Alcibiades I'm the one who knows he's like I know the official story the official story is that pretty soon you're going to present yourself to the Athenians as somebody who can give them advice which in a democracy that's sort of what power is is like to be the guy that people will listen to for advice right and he's like you really want like political power but the thing I know about you is suppose that you could rule over the Athenians suppose that you really got sway over Athens but you you couldn't rule over the Spartans so you couldn't rule over like all the Greeks just the Athenians you would rather die than be limited to only the Athenians and suppose you got the Athenians and

the Spartans but not the Persians because the Persians weren't listening to you you couldn't rule over them you would rather die the thing you want Alcibiades is to rule over the whole world and unless you can get that you will think your life is not worth living. And he's like, I'm going to tell you that because I'm the one who understands that about you. And it's totally true. And Alcibiades is like, not that I'm going to say that that's true, but suppose it were true. Why would I be interested in you? So that's like Socrates' first move is to intuit something deep about alcibiades's motivations

that nobody has really understood before about him and something that alcibiades views as like something you kind of can't say so what's socrates's motivation for doing that just to have kind of power over this other person who has power or is it because he really admires the kid and he wants him to kind of reach his full potential or both i think i think it's soccer what socrates says is that it's because you have this ambition that i'm interested in talking to you that is i want to talk to people who can rule who want to rule over the world because the people who only want to rule over athens that's like nothing to me like those people like they they don't have um one way to put it would be there's a point in the later in the dialogue when so alcibiade is having a lot of trouble

answering socrates questions and alcibiade's like it's a bit petulant he's like yeah but i don't think anyone else can answer these questions either it's not like my fault and socrates is able to say i'm ashamed of you for comparing yourself to those other people, the people who don't even care about ruling over the world. And Alcibiades is like, you're right. So he's able to leverage off of Alcibiades' massive kind of world-destroying ambition to insist that Alcibiades has to become the sort of person who would be worthy of ruling over the world. And that's the sort of person who really has to grab for the kind of knowledge that Socrates thinks people should want to have. Right. How would you how would you recommend for the novice, for the philosophical novice? How would you recommend they approach these texts? Because, for example, and I majored in philosophy. these texts because for example and i majored in philosophy so i i should but you know like last year i i read meditations and and some in plato and stuff and and it's so dense and i think i think part of me was like i want part of me was sort of like this thing of like i want to finish the book just to say i finished the book you know but then i was the way i was reading it i was like

i feel like i'm not reading this in the correct way. Cause I feel like I'm reading it more as a novel than a philosophical text. I guess. How would you recommend people approach these books? Does that make sense? First of all? Yeah. I think wanting to finish the book to say that you finished is a great motivation and people need to listen to motivations like that. Because anytime you're trying to do something where part of what you're doing in doing the thing is learning how to appreciate and enjoy the thing. You're not going to appreciate it or enjoy it that much at the beginning. Right. So something has to keep you going. So the idea

of like having a benchmark like this is an achievement to have read Descartes meditations which it is um and I think so I think Descartes meditations especially the like first two have this really nice narrative element to them um that does help pull you through and I don't think there's anything wrong and the Socratic dialogues are even more of a narrative element. Most philosophy doesn't have that. Yeah. But I think, so I don't think there's anything wrong in allowing yourself to be pulled along by the narrative and, or even to selecting Socratic dialogues that have more of a narrative element to them. But I think, you know, you were saying you felt like maybe you didn't get everything out of it that you could have. I'm sure that's true. As I was just saying, I was rereading the Alcibiades for the thousandth time today, right? Right.

possible out of it and I think and like how can you be doing more than just saying to yourself I will have finished this that is I think it's not a bad start to say I want to have be able to say that I read this um but you want to try to do a little more than that um my experience and this isn't like you know probably not true of everyone. But that is that reading books with other people is the key. So having, like, people often ask me, like, which, what should I read? What dialogue, whatever, and I say, whatever, you can get another group of people to agree to. So if it's a particular platonic dialogue that the others want to read, read that one. You know, if it's a novel, read the novel together and talk about it philosophically. I think you'll often get more philosophy done talking about a novel with other people than reading a book of philosophy

by yourself. I think that one thing that happens is that we all have like major blind spots when it comes to philosophical thinking. That is, there's just assumptions we make that we don't notice that we're making and we don't know how to question them right and but other people are great at questioning them so someone will ask you a question and you'll be like oh yeah i never even how did i not ever think of that so that that's that's generally it's what i do it's what i still do with reading platonic dialogues i was talking about the alcibiades with someone like 10 minutes ago um uh and um i think yeah i think that one thing that a philosophical text reveals to pretty much everyone who reads it is their own lack of intellectual self-sufficiency oh right that's a that's so true i think what also you just did right there though but talking about

alcibiades and socrates you put it into like a very relatable human narrative that like i was like oh now i get it so it was it i was interested in it less for even like what they were saying but like the game between them so i think if i had more of a context for that well and what ended up happening to alcibiades did he did he end up ruling the world yeah no he ended up ruining the world? Yeah. No, he ended up ruining the world, basically. He ended up, like, so he basically, like, did rise to power among the Athenians. But then there was a scandal, and he was disgraced, and he went over to the Spartans, and then he betrayed the Spartans and went to the Persians, and then he betrayed the Persians and went back to the Spartans and then he betrayed the Spartans and went to the Persians and then he betrayed the Persians um and went back to the Spartans I I I'm really bad at remembering the details of history so like there are moments when I can remember this whole narrative and now is not one of them um but he's basically kind of exhibit a for the case against Socrates that is you know um um

Socrates the end of the story of Socrates is that the Athenians put him on trial for corrupting the youth and for impiety. And who are they thinking of? Alcibiades. Right. Yeah. So that really was an intellectual corruption. It didn't have anything. There was no other components to it. It was just you put bad ideas in young people and they went off and created evil out of it or something like that yeah basically so one thing that's super interesting is that you know played so we socrates didn't write anything down but his student plato um wrote these dialogues and he played was not the only one socrates was a major inspirational figure in his time so lots of people wrote socratic dialogues

they didn't all survive so what what survived was Plato's dialogues and then Xenophon, who also wrote Socratic dialogues. But it's, that is, he wrote Socratic dialogues, dialogues that feature Socrates. But the point is, that was like a thing to do at the time, because Socrates was such a phenomenon, right? Was to write up these dialogues with Socrates talking to some guy, because Socrates didn't write anything down himself. Okay, so when Plato is writing, so he's Socratic dialogues, he's also thinking about sort of the rehabilitation of Socrates, right. And the defense of Socrates in a culture that has decided to put him to death. So of course, he wants to change the narrative a little bit. Exactly. Right. So Plato is going

to have Alcibiades show up in dialogues, right. And have you watch what Socrates is doing to Alcibiades so you can judge for yourself. Do you think this is corrupting or not? And one of the really interesting things that Plato has Alcibiades do in a different dialogue called the Symposium, Alcibiades shows up. He basically crashes the dinner parties. They're all having this dinner party, drinking, but they're not drinking much. Normally they drink a lot, but Socrates has said, let's not drink so much so we can like talk philosophy. They're talking about like love and and sex and alcibiades comes in after they've all given a bunch of speeches and alcibiades like i'm going to give a speech about socrates i'm going to tell you the truth about socrates and among the other truths that he wants to tell this is a super poignant

story about basically how alcibiades ended up trying to seduce socrates so this is a culture in which older men are regularly seducing younger men like pederasty that's like a cultural institution all those admirers of alcibiades these were like older men who were into him right and that's what alcibiades thought socrates was too right and once alcibiades comes to admire socrates he's like trying to seduce socrates and and socrates is like is like resistant. And in fact, it keeps escalating. Right. There's like a point where Alcibiades is like, he's like, I invited him to dinner as though I were the older man and he were the younger one, you know? And the first, he didn't even come. And

then he came, but then he left right away after dinner. And then the second time I got him to stick around for a little while. And the third time I got him to stay really late so that he had to sleep over and, you know, and, and so he laid down on the couch and like I try to lay down next to him and uh and I said and I say Socrates you know with other men I would be ashamed to be their lover but with you I'd be more ashamed not to be your lover because you're so wise and Socrates responds if I'm really as wise as you think I am then you know trading me sex for that is a bad deal like knowledge is worth way more than sex oh powerful basically rejects him right and but Socrates is like you know and he tries to make moves on

Socrates and Socrates yeah like he just lies there and and then of course Alcibiades becomes even more uh you know kind of enamored of Socrates right of course incredible self-restraint that's not what you can't possess yeah exactly and Socrates is like look let's always do philosophy together let's always like you know proceed by agreement the two of us um let's be friends and i think exactly um so you know the idea of platonic right right um and i think that um you know what like like one question of course there is like why is plato telling this story right why is plato having alphabites show up in his dialogue until it's about socrates well plato wants to tell his reader socrates wasn't walking around seducing these guys he was just doing philosophy.

That's a good way to do that. It's character testimony. Yeah. Exactly. Oh, that's so interesting. So when Alcibiades went out there and was betraying these different states or nations, did Socrates feel a responsibility for those kind of not moral acts or was he able, did he detach a lot from whatever his students did? We don't have much insight into how he felt.

I don't know. Like, I think that, you know, I think that some of what is going on in the symposium is Plato saying it wasn't Socrates' fault. That is, Plato saying Socrates did everything he could to try to Alcibiades away from the pursuit of honor and political power and Alcibiades kind of kept resisting it and that's the narrative in effect that Alcibiades himself tells at the end of the symposium so I feel like we have a kind of we have a platonic line on this question it sort of but we don't have anything more direct about um uh what you know you know there's a there's there's another passage that could be relevant so in another dialogue called the theotitis you have socrates talking in very abstract terms about how the people that he talks to often leave him too soon. Like, so that would be a sort of complaint of like, no, I would have gotten them to, you know,

I would have gotten them to an uncorrupted state, but they had to stick with me longer. It's almost like if you shake the foundations of someone's basic beliefs, right? And then they go away from you at that stage before they've acquired newly stable beliefs. That would be one sort of thought about the effect of Socrates on people who are sort of half formed by him. All right. Do you have another question about no no no it's going a different direction yeah i just like so i on the ezra clients podcast you

talked about how the process of self-creation involved a lot of self-violence towards ourselves and i like i'm incredibly hard on myself um and I was sort of wondering when do you think that crosses the line from very beneficial to harmful do you have an idea of where that would be yeah i i do think that um one thing um maybe a background thing to keep in mind is like we're um i think we we secretly or something think it's perfectly fine to be mean and horrible ambitious and cruel to someone as long as that person is yourself right so we treat ourselves in ways that we would see as morally unacceptable were we to treat another person that way right and we don't even and we might say to somebody who was doing that

we might be like don't be so hard on yourself but we wouldn't like censure them in the really serious way that we would if that person were treating another person that way. Right. And you might think it's just as morally serious. So I think that there's a real danger here, like that in some sense, our alert system or something like you're doing something evil doesn't go off when the target is yourself. So and now I think self-cre Yeah, so I think that, you know, as a, what happens is like as you're growing up like as a teenager or something, you have to learn to like fit into the world somehow right and you have to kind of of um modify and experiment and it's not true that the world is just going to accommodate you in every respect right and and it's sort of like it depends i think how much of that you have to do both depends on just how weird you start out being and also how intractable some of your weirdnesses are right um yeah uh so it's like uh uh it's like a process of trial and error like here's an example that i was talking about with

someone yesterday um so like when i was around 13 14 i noticed that like if i was in like group dinners especially ones that were not with my family but even to some degree also with my family I would often get like a really bad stomach ache um and like it was just really hard for me to eat with other people especially with like larger groups of other people like more than one other person right and uh it would just happen really frequently that I'd like get this terrible stomach ache while eating and I learned that there's a thing I could do that would immediately resolve the stomach ache which is lie down on the floor on my back in front of everyone or would you steal away to your room or something okay so so sometimes we'd be like at a restaurant or whatever now my initial thing was like i would just lie down on the floor wherever i was smart i learned

that this is not socially acceptable you just can't do it right it's a power move though it's a good status to be like i don't care um i mean I in you know initially it was like as soon as I figured it out like this is great I've solved this like terrible problem right but um uh you know I then learned like you just can't do it I would then like I would sometimes like we'd be in a restaurant I'd go on in the car and I could lie on you know on the floor in the car or something um but I was like ah that doesn't work like it you know it, you know, it's a solution and it's a solution. Like if I'm at home or whatever, my symptoms are turning that my kids don't care, whatever I can lie on the floor. If I am, I can sometimes like go and retreat to my room,

but there was like, I had a problem. I had a solution, but I couldn't apply the solution. So then over the years, this problem could persist to persist to this day. I have developed like all these other solutions. Right. So like another solution i've found is um leaving the dinner um so like i can tell that i'm starting to get a stomach ache and i'll just be like i have to go and it's the thing i've learned which i wouldn't have known going into this i would not have been able to predict this but people are less offended if you say i need to leave this dinner than if you lied down on the floor so leave the dinner is better option that for me that's just experimentation to learn that. But that, but they are a bit offended.

Like, it's not great to have to say I have to leave. Right. And so I spent a lot of time with just a lot of stomach aches, just sitting there having a horrible stomach ache in pain, like literally in physical pain. Right. Because I hadn't yet figured out the just walk away option. And then even when I had, even nowadays, I still have something like give a talk. There's a dinner after the talk. Right? It's a problem I still have. But I've

learned other things like the more I control the conversation, the less of a stomachache I get. Right. Now, is it always okay to control the conversation? No. Right. So that's a strategy I can't always completely employ. The more that I'm talking to someone who is sitting either to my right or to my left rather than directly in front of me. But I have like a hundred things, like a hundred little like little like tips and tricks, right. For dealing with, with group dinners, which is like just a standing problem for me. And at the early days, like there was just a lot of sitting in pain, right. Or people getting really annoyed at me and freaked out because I'm lying on the floor. Right. And like, I have to learn to accommodate to a world that you know find some of my initial

ways of dealing with this to be off-putting or weird and i was pretty much already labeled a weirdo but it's like like like you don't want to upset people you know you wanted everyone to have a good time you didn't want to like you want them to not be like totally thrown and like like i mean i'm just telling you if you haven't tried it if you literally try and lie down on the floor at a dinner people are this really thrown by that, like in a way that like, I wouldn't have predicted going into it, but they are just a psychological fact, we just can't do it. So, so the point is, it's like trial and error to learn for me to learn what's going to freak people out. I often don't find it that easy to predict. I often don't find it that easy to predict. And so I have to like go through, right. And, and experiment and try different things. And then in a given, in a given dinner, it's always also there's, it's just like a balancing act of experimentation. And then

at some point it fails and I say, I just have to leave this dinner and I leave. So it's like, how long can I hold out? But you go through a checklist and the bottom one is just bail. Yeah, exactly. I think what I like so much about your work too, is that you talk about all these things that are like, I think we kind of categorize as negative emotions or something like that, or negative impulses, but you do a good job of like creating kind of like looking at the positive benefits of these emotions. Or you said this other thing about like not actually being okay with who you are at a young age because you shouldn't accept yourself as like an unfinished product and I think so much of what we preach is like hey just accept yourself just accept yourself but I was fundamentally like

we're both pretty hard on ourselves I was fundamentally incapable of doing that but I also think it was coming from a kind of noble place where I was like I'm not where I want to be you know I'm still not but I was like and and I think it had someone framed it that way. So it didn't feel like I just hated myself. I'd be like, oh, okay. This is just like a stage in my development. Yeah. So I think that one, one big lie that we tell ourselves is like, don't base your self-worth on what other people think about you. There's nothing you can base your self-worth on other than what other people think about you, because you can't actually like decide how much you're worth. It's like, that doesn't make any sense. It's like making a promise to yourself. Can you make a promise to yourself? Like you can say the words I promised to you, but like, I can release myself from any

promise that I promised to myself. It's not really a promise. And so similarly, you can't evaluate yourself and the worth, like, what would you be selling yourself for? You know, it's like, you are yourself, it's your whole thing, right? And so, like, you can maybe not care that much, you can come, I think, at some point, like to care a little bit less about the question, how much am I worth, but insofar as you care about that, what you care about is other people's opinion of you. And it's really hugely important that human beings care about other people's opinion of them. If they didn really hugely important that human beings care about other people's opinion of them. If they didn't, we would just have no educational prospect at all, right?

Like, like people are not good as they start, right? That's why we have to educate them. So, so, and it's, and the, the, the mechanism of that is people caring about what other people think about them. And that's what self-worth is, is the sense of you have of your worth that's filtered through the judgments of other people, sometimes quite indirectly, right? It's sometimes like, I'm trying to impress, you know, I'm often trying to impress an image I have of a particular teacher

that I had as an undergrad. And she's always there in the classroom with me, watching me, and I'm like trying to impress her in my head right um but but you know as a younger person I was just trying to impress the actual her right I didn't yet have her as an image in my head um so I think that there there is really there might be some very unusual people but for most of us what it is to aspire to be better is like you is to kind of push off of the judgments of other people and sort of to pull ourselves up to a higher um place and how do you how do you do this in sort of a the correct way because you always hear about people like the kind of that don't give a fuck people who those are the ones who get the most acceptance those are the ones who sort of you know in the eyes of other people they're the ones who sort of rise because because

their indifference is so kind of attractive i think that sort of aspiration which is to say trying to be like a better person than the person that you are specifically in terms of coming to value new things is profoundly uncool so it means like you're not okay and you're not okay with who you are and uh you know you're defective and you recognize that you're defective and so those are never going to be the most like attractive people um because like they they do care what other people think about them because they can't rely on their about them because they can't rely on their own judgment because they don't even trust their own judgment so um you know so people i think often even when they are aspiring like to pretend that they're not um so like here's

the thing i've noticed about students students care a lot what i think about them they care a lot how well i think their paper was written and like whether I thought it was insightful and whether I think they're smart and whether they're making good comments. They care about all those things, but they pretend like they only care about their grade quite often, right? Because it's sort of easier to admit that you care in some instrumental way about a grade and its role in your success than to admit that like you are vulnerable to the judgment of another person as regards your worth um and so the people who like are indifferent and cool are the people who are signaling that they are not aspirants that they're not trying

to be anything other than what they are which is a way of trying to convey I'm already at the top. I'm already there. Unlike the rest of you suckers who are still trying. Yeah, that's interesting. That makes me think of like, the way I was growing up, I was the youngest of five. And I think my way of asserting my dominance over my siblings was by feigning this indifference or this coolness like you know oh you guys are ambitious but i party you know but i think that was just my that was just sort of how i you know my way of sort of asserting my status within them of being like well i don't care so this is how much i don't care so that's why that's why i'm more important or not more important, but like,

that's how I earned my spot at the table. Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah. And you have autonomy in that value system too, where you're like, Hey, that's what you guys value. But I have different values. And I actually think my values are better because I have more excitement, more fun. Like you guys are caught up in like a rat race and i'm fucking chilling and i'm not scared of dad even though i was terrified right right and the person you allocate status to i don't need yeah yeah and i also think it's like you know in a way it's very much of a power move to claim indifference to the forms of value that other people are pursuing right like that stuff doesn't even matter to me so i I'm not failing at your game.

I'm just playing a different game. Right, right. How useful and how accurate do you think like alpha and beta kind of categorizations are? So this is like sort of like alpha male, beta male where the alpha male is sort of more ambitious. And more dominant. More dominant I think that I guess I sort of if I if I now try to apply that framework to people in my life, I sort of can. my life, I sort of can. So, so I think it probably has some purchase, but it's one of these things where I suspect that if I tried to press hard on it and really get clear on it, it would then

dissolve. Like, I feel that way about introverts and extroverts, you know, like people like, like there's like, you can sort of, if you're doing it very quickly, you could be like, oh, I know these people are introverts, these people are extroverts, right? But then you actually kind of, I spent a while thinking about extrovert and introvert. Like I often want to run away from other people and like want to be alone, but I actually think I'm more of an extrovert in a lot of ways. I really like public speaking. And I, you know, so when I tried to like think hard about it, I kind of ended up tying myself in knots and being like, everyone is kind of both in different ways and with in the you know in different constellations of people and so I you know I sort of I sort of on a first blush I'm like yeah I can sort of categorize people in this way of being more dominant and being more submissive

um but I sort of wonder whether if I tried to push hard on it, it would collapse in the way that extroverts. It lacks a lot of nuance. Well, like, so here's an interesting case. I think a lot of the people that we think of as alphas are people who take on positions of leader, recognizable positions of leadership within organizations that are in their community in one way or another. within organizations that are in their community in one way or another, right? So, you know, they sort of rise to preeminence in this, whatever sphere is allotted. And I know people who are absolutely allergic to any of that and have no interest in it, but it's because like, that just seems too small to them. Like even running a university, you know, which would be like, that's pretty high, right? They might just be like, why do I want to run a university? Like, I want to like discover the next big thing, like about the whole world, you know? And so there's a kind of alcibiadeanism,

right? Where in effect, any form of power would be too small for you. And that's a form of alpha, but it's not going to manifest as like becoming the president of some board or some group or some whatever right and so there's a way in which um the question is almost like in what sphere do you want to dominate um and are you are you content to dominate sort of like in the contingent community that you're a part of or is that always going to not satisfy you somehow interesting yeah that's like in high school i played water polo i had no interest in the team's success i i honestly thought it was like uncool to want to play i was like you guys are all losers you did not buy it yeah yeah it wasn't that hard i'm like who gives a shit but now i'm starting to

think because because i think i just had i guess isn't a question more of an observation but i think it's just because i had different aspirations so that is interesting that that you know it's yeah it is very nuanced and it's like, um, Here's an example through my life. So I was on the debate team in high school. Okay. And I joined in my freshman year and I was super, super into it. I like read all this philosophy for the first time in order to use it in debate. Uh, I was very devoted, like member of the team by my senior year, I was captain of the team,

but I was not good at debate in the traditional sense of winning rounds of debate. Right. I kind of, I mean, maybe I won 50% of them, but maybe less than 50%. Okay. And I'm, I'm debating against people who are not nearly as invested as me. Right. So I'm like trying super, super hard. They're like, maybe this is their first tournament or ever. And I still managed to lose to them. And all the other people on my team who were super into it, I had a real, my high school, like it was a really good team. They were really strong. People who are really into it were people who are really successful. And like, I wanted to be successful and I wasn't, but I also just, like my place in my team really matters. Like being captain of the team, being in charge,

I was really good at teaching the new people, like the new recruits, how to do debate. Despite the fact that I wasn't myself that good at it, I was good at teaching others. And like, I was very invested in my role. And I wasn't that upset about my record as a like loser of debate. Right. And so I saw myself as having like being dominating in one sense of dominating, right, even though in another, very natural sense of dominating, I wasn't dominating at all. right? Even though in another very natural sense of dominating, I wasn't dominating at all. Right, right. And do you think like the quest for status is about control? Like about being able to dictate what the terms of the world around you are? Or do you think it's just about like, I don't know, some like biological reproductive need or something like that? Like what are the,

besides needing a system to self-evaluate our own worth, like what is the aspiration to status? What does it give us? So I really think that the thing about meeting the thing to evaluate our own worth is the main part. That is, I think a lot of the time you're going to understand the concept of status better if you use a different word, if you use the word honor. Oh, that's a better word for sure. And one thing that, so one thing that the word status does is it's alienating. So the word status tends to be used of a certain system of valuation and estimation by people who don't buy into it. Right. So it's like, if I'm talking about like the status relations among some group of humans, like, oh, they're such idiots that they think this is important, right? That's the point of view of status is that the external point of view. But if I'm like, here's an honor that I really want, where that's a recognition of others for who I am and what I've achieved, right?

it's just from the inside instead of from the outside. And I think you understand it much better if you think about it from the inside. So we all have forms of being recognized and being honored and being kind of credited that are feel very genuine to us and are genuinely important to us. And that's the place to understand status. And I think why that's important is like that you cannot evaluate yourself. So you rely on other people and it's also that it's really important to us I think to collaboratively and in a community way value things together so like some of what honoring is doing is saying like we as a community value this thing together and so not being honored in that way can feel very lonely and isolating. It's like, I, there's things I value, but I value them all by myself and no one's doing

it with me. So I think those are the fundamental roles of status is like getting a sort of evaluation of you that feels authentic and real and sharing the value of things with others. I think, I do think you're right that achieving a certain level of recognition and sort of power in your life allows you to control things much more. And that's not insignificant. You know, it's a lot easier for me to walk out of a dinner now than it was when I was 16. What, what motivated you to walk out was I perceived it as part of the fact that you, cause like, and you said one of the correctives to it was talking. I felt like the reason you wanted to walk out is because you're like, yo,

I should be in charge of this dinner and I'm not. So I just want to bounce now. Yeah. So, I mean, you know, it was like, it took me actually a really long time to learn that my speaking had any effect on it. Like that was years, right? This, this, this, this took me a very long time to figure out it was all just like because i didn't know anyone else who was like this and i i thought it was a medical problem first i went to so many doctors like i'm like oh there's something wrong with my stomach you know you're like i should drink milk or something yeah i know absolutely i stopped milk for a while that maybe it's gluten like it took me the longest time to realize that it was like

other people like that it was right yeah right that took forever to figure out um so and then the idea that like if i would commandeer the conversation that had a positive effect i mean i was definitely in you know it was a decade or something before i got to that point of understanding the thing i i definitely generally like to commandeer conversations it's not like i knew that myself yeah yeah i mean it's like what you know it's i i i'm puzzled by anyone who doesn't right um but i just didn't i didn't understand that that would have an actual effect in the social exchange um but i think it's more like it takes a certain kind of confidence to um to just say to people like i just have to go and it took me a long time to summon that like and you think

some horrible thing's gonna happen but nothing happens actually they're just like okay well what do you think about going back to the honor and sort of being recognized by society and stuff what do you think about people who reach like the heights of fame and wealth who are incredibly unhappy what what do you think is the cause of that unhappiness? If they have all the, you know, honor and sort of status that we sort of fundamentally crave? That's a fire question. Yeah, it's a great question. So first of all, I think notice that in the case of those people, it becomes very hard to exclusively use the word honor. And I don't think that they would use it.

I think that, you know, what they get is a kind of like attention, let's say, that even they would say is not underwritten by their virtues. Right. It's almost like there's an attention that feeds on itself. Right. And so that, so one thing is they can no longer actually really treat it as like a sign of their worth. Cause they know that it's like a kind of excessive, you know? And I think that's especially true of if you're a kind of celebrity who is not really a celebrity because of what you take to be your talents or something. And I mean, which celebrity really is even like in terms of to the extent of how much celebrity they have. Right. It's not proportional, even if they have talents.

they have, right? It's not proportional, even if they have talents. And so, so I think that in fact, fame, both great fame and great wealth tend to be destructive of people. They tend to be psychologically destructive. So in general, things that make you happy often make you unhappy when you get too much of them. And so most things in your life, you do not want to try to maximize, right? Like you want to have some kids maybe, do not want to try to maximize, right? Like you want to have some kids maybe, but not like as many as possible. Right. And I think the same thing is true of fame. And I think especially fame takes weird turns when it goes up a few orders of magnitude. You know, I mean, I can't imagine being the sort of person who can't like leave their

house without people like looking at you and taking pictures of you. And I was at a restaurant, like, I don't know, eight or nine years ago with Matt Damon was at a table like right next to me yeah and uh like like really pretty close to me and like I kind of like kept on trying to touch him I just really want to touch that day but my husband was like to not touch him I have to touch him I'm like how insane am I right like trying to touch this stranger man and now imagine being that demon you're walking around strangers trying to touch you right yeah so um uh I think that that's like I think people go a little bit nuts right and uh that's not a good way to live it's not a human way to live. It's not a human way to live. It's bad for your kids.

So I think that having certain like having the kind of recognition that you can properly classify as honor is definitely can be really good for a person. But once it escalates to fame and kind of mere status, then that very emptiness, I think, is corrupting for people. That very emptiness, I think, is corrupting for people. So was you trying to touch Matt Damon that sprung up for me some of your talks on jealousy and stuff like that? So your husband wasn't jealous in that instance? He wasn't jealous. He just didn't want you to violate like social. Yeah, he's like, and he's like, poor Matt Damon, like, leave him alone. He's just trying to eat his lunch right but you've said you said something so interesting about how polyamory and monogamy are both kind of constricted by the the same uh the same issue of jealousy and one is

like the explored version and one is like the unexplored version but they're both like kind of not equally powerful but they both take effect in both relationships could you kind of not equally powerful, but they both take effect in both relationships. Could you kind of explain that idea of polyamory and monogamy and how jealousy plays a factor in both? Yeah. I mean, here's one quick gloss that doesn't quite answer the last bit of the question, but we can go back to it is, you know, a lot of times people talk about monogamy. They really mean polyamory. They just mean serial polyamory right so what they mean is like you're only with one person at a time then you break up with that person then you find another person right right and like over like a series of like many years that's polyamory right you love

many people just over time not at one time and no overlap yeah right and no overlap right there's honor and no overlap like what like suppose that suppose that over five years you dated like one woman a year. Right. Versus you dated five women for five years. Like we have this this feeling like those are so hugely different. Like one is polyamory. Right. And the other is like, oh, you're monogamous. But it's like, you know, in a way they're not that different. Right. Right. So I think. right? Right. So I think, but it feels nice when you feel like you're abiding by the monogamous ideal, even if it is some kind of distorted version of polyamory. Absolutely. Like we look, we have conventions, right? And those conventions then feel really natural to us. And if we were living at another time, the conventions might say, you cannot just like date a woman for a year and then date another woman, right? That's like, so promiscuous. So, so, but the point is just, I, so I think one thing is that it's really important to us to constrain sexuality. Like sexuality is one of the things about ourselves where we don't understand it. It's super powerful.

We're terrified of it. We're not sure why we are into it. Like there's of course a pure pleasure element to it, but the pure pleasure element doesn't capture like the depth of course a pure pleasure element to it but the pure pleasure element doesn't capture like the depth of the psychology of it and like why are we just masturbating like why do we have sex with people right like there's clearly this this this this this deep psychodynamic element of sexuality that nobody really understands and we kind of just want to step back away from and be like at least i can confine it and constrain it somehow. And I think monogamy is a way of confining it and constraining it. So we feel more comfortable about it. Sleeping with a different woman every night, as opposed to sleeping with the same woman every night, the different woman every night feels more unconstrained. It feels more like you haven't

put any bounds on yourself. Right. And, and so that feels like dangerous. And I, I do think that the project of constraining sexuality is hugely important, is both hugely important to human beings and has created so much suffering, right? So like, you know, the project of constraining sexuality is like why there was a taboo against homosexuality for so long. Um, um, because we have this idea, like you can't just have like anything goes in sexuality, right, and so we're, I think we're still figuring that out. Now, in terms of the sort of deeper polyamory, like, what would the deeper polyamory be, and I think that, you know, one thing that seems to me to be a sort of not very deep polyamory is, like, suppose you just have these two relationships, and they're really just isolated from one another, right? And, you know, that really, to me, is a lot like serial monogamy, right? But what becomes,

like, what would become interesting, right, is if the, imagine if you had kids like that, right? So, like, I have two kids, imagine if I had them sort of separately, they live in separate houses, and I parented one some of the time, and I parented the other, another of the time, right? It's very different for them to be siblings, right? So I guess like, you know, the broader thought of polyamory would be that there would somehow be a kind of cultural component to it. Now, how, if both the like, like husbands and the wives have like multiple husbands and wives, like how you, how do you create a group? Right. I don't know the answer. And so I,

it's, it's not obvious that you can, like, maybe there is no way to make that a kind of cultural phenomenon. Right. And maybe, you know, maybe a big part of, of why we have monogamy norms is that I just learned this recently on Twitter is that like, you know, if you go back, you know, I don't know, 10,000 years or something, very few of the men were reproducing. Yeah, that is guys were getting all the women, right. And it was creating a lot of violence, because these guys who weren't getting laid were very upset about it. So monogamy was a way to like distribute equalize. Yeah, for lack of a better word, like the opportunity or the resources to the not as appealing uh prospects yeah right and those poor guys yeah exactly well they were

pissed off that's like so a bunch of wars were happening this is bullshit yeah it was like almost everybody was an incel basically yeah yeah i know that's so yeah incels don't even know we've created this whole system for them to be okay and then they're still complaining. Yeah. It's like So, so I think it's like that's a real worry like if we had multiple partners would be end up in that equilibrium. So, I guess I think like it's not at all clear to me how to construct a richer. all clear to me um how to construct a richer um and I and I think like it would be good like if you guys are interested in that you should invite someone up here you know who is into polyamory and is part of that like culture and has more experience because I don't somebody who has

like our I I it scares me hypothesizing you know I don't have like right right it's not your area of expertise I I lobbed a lot at you. Well, we're stand-up comics. So there's been, we've had a number of open mics where, you know, comic guys will come up and they'll be like, you know, my girlfriend wants to be in an open relationship and they're just so miserable, you know. They seem really sad, yeah.

They're just very sad. And it's just like, yeah in terms of the like yeah in terms of the polyamory yeah i just think emotionally i could deal with that well and i think dude that's that's so interesting about the emotions of it too because i think yeah instinctively when i think about it when i hear that a woman wants to be with other guys outside of her partner i think it's on a sexual level. You know what I mean? Cause I think there's just this primal kind of insecurity that, that is strong in me. But then like when you and Ezra Klein were talking about,

you talked about it like on a more emotionally intimate level where it's like that other partner could share a kind of language with your partner that you don't speak. And then that's where the real like jealousy and insecurity comes from. And I had that with a past partner, but this idea that they had this intimacy and this connection was really what kind of terrified me and i i really couldn't get past it that was interesting to me too just the uh that's what the root of jealousy can be is just like oh i don't i don't understand how they're talking but i can tell it's significant and that's driving me like crazy yeah i mean i think that um you know the um i guess my thought was that um there's something romantically significant about jealousy

such that um if you have excluded jealousy from a monogamous relationship by way of the monogamy and by way of an understanding that everybody is going to behave, you know, fully, like if you fully excluded it, then that's problematic because jealousy is kind of erotic fuel in a certain way. But if you've sort of overcome jealousy via the polyamorous relation, right, and you're like, I'm totally okay with the fact that you're also in a relationship with her. That's also problematic for the exact same reason because jealousy is the erotic fuel. And so that was just the thought,

just to get back to your sort of question of why are these things exactly as problematic? It's because jealousy, I think, has to be a problem in a relationship. Like, I think it's like the sort of project of in some way wanting to be everything for that person and the impossibility of that, you know. But I could imagine, like, that doesn't work in a monogamous relationship. I could sort of imagine it not working just as well in a polyamorous relationship is what I say.

So I don't have this thought like, oh, I could never imagine a polyamorous relationship because I would be so jealous, know it's like nah exact same problem with monogamy like it'd be a problem like for me it'd be a problem but um but it's not a different sort of problem from the problem that i'm already in right what's up guys i'm ready right in this podcast let you know once again that we were brought to you by uh us we will be at the ho Improv Main Room September 15th, Wednesday at 8 p.m. Get your tickets at hollywoodimprov.com. You do not want to miss the show. There's going to be some big, big names on the show. It's going to be epic.

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like i i don't like it when people say like successful people are only successful because they cheated to get there or because they did like that, that feels like a kind of overly reductive. But then I also don't like a system where people are like, oh, this person didn't, you know, achieve values that are society kind of rewards, but that's because they're like not good or because they didn't try. Yeah. Maybe, maybe one way to put it is that the idea of a non-punitive meritocracy is an idea that combines the right to praise for those who succeed with the right to complain for those who fail. Right. So it's like, it's like, you want to be able to say of the people

who succeed, like, congratulations, but you want to honor them at least like maybe not honor them beyond, you know, all reasonable amount the way that we do with actors or whatever, but at least a reasonable amount of honoring them, because I don't think that people can achieve, you know, much without actually trying and actually putting effort into it. So they deserve some honor. But on the other hand, I think like, look, everybody wants to achieve stuff. So the people who fail, it's like the idea that like, oh, well, they just didn't want it enough, or they didn't try hard enough. Like, no, there isn't a person who doesn't want the good, like, that's not a human possibility and so if they you know yes of course

it could be that they like in some ways didn't put enough effort in but that's going to itself be a function of the kind of environment that they were in and the kind of opportunities they had and the kind of responses people made to the efforts that they put in and I want those people to be able to in some sense be hook on to those features and be like why didn't this work out for me um partly in the mode of like um actually asking the question you know where like that question almost becomes forbidden if you're so prone to blame right it's like well it's your fault you brought it on yourself that's a way of shutting down a certain question. So I think the way a lot of people view it is that like in order to avoid blame as a failure person, I have to blame the successful person so that you purchase the right to complain

by blaming the other group. And each side feels that they purchased the right of the thing they want to either to get the praise or to complain by like denying that to the other side. And I think, no, we can just have a system that includes both praise for successes and complaint the right to complain people who fail right yeah so it is a little bit more acceptable within that kind of idea for the the group that's lacking to complain and that's why it's a little more off-putting when the group that is successful complains, because you're like, wait, shouldn't you have a little bit more like kind of grace about this because of your station? Yes. And I think what happens is that when you

are in, you're not in that non-punitive meritocracy that I described, but you're in a kind of punitive one. The people who succeed feel a need to dress up their success as a kind of failure in order to elicit sympathy right which is like a little bit like playing the leveling game you know like yes i had it so hard right um yeah like even paris hilton has a documentary now on netflix about how difficult her teen years were and i was i was on a date with someone i was like i don't know if i have the bandwidth to afford empathy towards Paris Hilton's upbringing, which seemed kind of cruel on my part. But at the same time, I was like, there's people way worse off.

So like, what does she expect? Well, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle too. Yo, they're perfect. Yeah. Yeah. During peak COVID, we're gonna go on Oprah and complain about our lives. Right. So I think this is super.

And another thing which is super interesting is like, I think in general, we are far too, we like police complaint more than we should. Right. So on the one hand, like if you end up if you have a kind of messed up meritocracy, you either it's either messed up because you are blaming the failures or because you're blaming the successes, then you're going to create bad incentives, right? And so in particular, in a situation where you're blaming the successes, you're creating incentives for the success people to describe themselves as failures so that they can get the thing that's valuable in that system, which is like sympathy. And then what that does is it generally, it generates a general suspicion of requests for sympathy right which i think is super corrosive at a human level that is i think what we want is

a world in which anytime anyone is expressing suffering of any kind we're ready and willing to like you know believe them and trust that they're suffering. And suffering takes a lot of different forms, right? And rich people can suffer too. But I think what, you know, and so the natural human response to suffering is to empathize and to, you know, in some sense, not require the sufferer to show their credentials like of being sufficiently right and i so i think it's really like almost like trickle-down effects from the toxic meritocracy that then creates a like uh empathy olympics right where in order to earn your empathy you have to put down someone else as like not really deserving it as much as you do. Like I deserve more empathy because look at Meghan Markle, she's married to a royal. So, you know,

I secure my place in your giving me empathy by putting down somebody else. So do you almost think that that sympathy game is a correct? So that's what you're saying, that the sympathy game is a corrective to the toxic meritocracy that we're in? Yeah. I mean, in a way, a simpler way to think about it is like, you know, the one version of the punitive meritocracy, which I do think is tends to be more the version that we're in, which is the successful people are evil version of it. That version of it, then, you know, creates this new currency in, in effect, failure, suffering. Like, you can't, like, you can't sort of show off that you succeeded, because that actually makes you bad, right? So what can you show off is like, well, that you are suffering, right? And so in effect, like, I think, striking the right right balance and it's difficult to get that

balance of like um you know it's impossible i think um yeah but we can work we can at least have it as a goal let's strive for it yeah in a mark of achieving it would be that we would be doing a lot less calculation in terms of like well does she really deserve the empathy because she suffered more you know what it's like it's like in a relationship when things are going well, you're not like counting how many things the other person did for you. Right. Like, like if someone does something nice for you, you're like, awesome. And you do nice things for them. And you're not like trying to make sure that they're like the even amount. Right. And when that is happening, when you're like calculating, something has gone wrong. I think similarly, when we're doing these sorts of calculations of like,

well, does so-and-so really deserve to complain since like she's married to a royal and right that that's a sign that's in a larger dynamic something has gone wrong right i yeah like i in the comedy world i have a hard time if we have like a you know if jt and i have like a career success or whatever i'm I don't want to tell anyone about it you know what what do you think that is like and I think a lot of it is I don't want them to dislike me and what what do you think in sort of our comedic meritocracy world what do you think is uh creates that within me does that make sense yeah i it makes perfect sense to me um i think that i mean first of all we have really um strict norms against showing off um right uh and um

so uh so you don't want to be seen as showing off is like a big thing. Right. Yeah. Cause I do want to tell them, but I, I don't want them to know. I want them to know not through me. Exactly. Right. Yeah. Yeah. JT will do it. That's why it's nice having a partner. Yeah. Yeah. So, right. So I think often it's like, it's not that we don't want them to know. We do want them to know, but we don't want to be the one to tell because the speech act of telling is easily read as showing off and showing off is read as like an attempt at

like dominance or aggression or whatever. Right. And so you want people to think that you're awesome, but you don't want people to feel like you're making a claim on their recognition of your awesomeness. Right. Yeah. That's so good. Wait, what was I going to say?

Shit. All right, well, I'll just pivot. You also talked about what like a left-leaning version of Jordan Peterson would look like because it doesn't seem like there's an equal figure in that, or maybe there is, but I might just be oblivious to it, but it doesn't seem to there's an equal figure in that or maybe there is but I might just be oblivious to him but it doesn't seem to be as culturally impactful in the circles that I run in one thing that one thing I think I said to Ezra is that Jordan Peterson mobilizes a lot of egalitarian sentiment to great effect right so

he is he is playing the leveling game way more than he's playing the status game. Oh, wow. Really? Absolutely. So he is speaking to people and addressing people who the part of people that where they feel a bit like failures. Right. He's not addressing the part where they feel like successes. And what he's saying is like, look, you can have a kind of self-respect. Right. And and it's not dependent on your being above other people um and i think that's what makes what makes jordan peterson so effective is precisely that he is though he's um on the right and you might have

associated the right more with the status game he's actually much more playing the leveling game um and he even is doing it himself right he's he's somehow i feel he's a very a person with whom people empathize um his travails like in the past few years with his you know he suffered a lot it's evident that he's really suffered um uh he um he is somehow um he doesn't have a tone of superiority at all, which is quite, I think, quite remarkable, actually. He's very relatable somehow. So I think that, you know, in a way, if you were constructing someone on the left, what you'd want is somebody actually who mobilizes status really well, despite having a lot of egalitarian principles, right? Yeah, that's what you'd want. And like, how does someone do that? I almost feel like, well, you have to watch someone do it before you can see how it could be done really effectively. But because I think, you know, one of the problems with being a kind of egalitarian is like, but everyone wants to be

special to and like being some way better than other other people and that's a very very deep thing in all of us right um so um uh yeah but i'm i'm not sure no but that's so interesting because like his the the the instruction that he gives that always i always think of when i think of him is that he says make your bed and that's something that like no one's gonna see you know what i? You're doing that for your own. And everyone can do it. And everyone can do it. And it's all for your own personal, like self-worth and it's not contingent on other people. And then, so what you're kind of saying is that the left-wing version of that would have to like kind of appropriate the values of the other side to make it as equally appealing. Yeah. Like maybe you can be way more anti-racist than other people or something right yeah that was i think that was

what you mentioned on ezra and i was like yeah i guess i was just kind of like oh but i don't want to do that because that feels a little inauthentic to me you know what i agree of course i strive to anti-racism you know i think uh you know that is in me but to to lead with that or to make a and to make a competition out of it right yeah i agree like i don't think it's a great like it's sort of like look i mean if somebody figured this out they'd be like a genius and it would be amazing and so i can't just like like the idea that i could produce it out of it right yeah I agree like I don't think it's a great like it's sort of like look I mean if somebody figured this out they'd be like a genius and it would be amazing and so I can't just like like the idea that I could produce it out of my own head right I'm producing a caricature version of it right um so you'd have to I'm sorry you'd have to actually oh no no it's totally fine as a question but I think it's like you'd have to really actually do this effectively

in the way that Jordan Pinch does it effectively where you actually have to make people feel like this is like a legitimate source of honor in a certain way. And I guess there's already so many people competing for the anti-racism title that it feels a bit oversaturated. And I feel very out of place throwing myself into that. There's people who do it better than me.

Yeah. The painting on your walls behind you says no room for racism. Yeah, my dad bought this for me in Mexico because he said it reminded him of me. And it says no room for racism on it. And I for me in mexico because he said reminded him of me and it says no room for racism on it and i thought that was why he said it reminded him of me but people since then have said it just looks like me and that's it actually does kind of look like you and that's probably more why he picked it yeah i have a offset eyes so i i think i was uh picking the part that i that i thought me, but now, and I just couldn't see my face.

Yeah. Yeah. Um, yeah, well, uh, we'd love to answer some questions with you right now, uh, from our listeners, but before we do that, I'd love to kind of get again, your, uh, perspective on advice and how that's kind of, uh, intrinsic in podcasting. in podcasting yeah so I mean I was really referring to something um uh I think my sort of objections to advice extend beyond podcasting but I I was referring to something specific that happens in podcasts which is um uh and um people are asked for advice to how to become like them you know like Margaret Atwood I talk about Margaret Atwood right and people are asked for advice to how to become like them, you know, like Margaret Atwood, I talk about Margaret Atwood, right? And people like, so if people want to become a writer, like, what should they do? And like, you know, should they spend a few years teaching grammar

the way you did? And should they go and live in another country for a few years? And like, oh, should they, and she's like, they should write every day. And then she's like, not that I do that, but, you know, and, and so there are like things that I do that but you know and and so they're like things that sound good like if you're asked like how to become a writer there are things that sort of sounds like the things that you say to other people asking you how to become a writer like write every day but those things are like they're not being said because there's any reason to believe they would turn someone into a writer they're being said because there's like a just a currency of like what we say in these contexts. And there's safe platitudes too. It won't get anyone in trouble

to do that. Like sometimes people ask me for advice and I'll give advice that's totally opposite of what I actually did. But I know that my road was so fraught with mistakes that negatively impacted me and other people that I'm like, I can't recommend that to other people. Like that's like gonna, I don't know what would happen if I did. So I just kind of take the, yeah. So I think that's a great point. And I think this gets to something deeper that was bugging me, but I never articulated in that piece, which is that if you, so one thing I do say is like, if you just look at the trajectory of someone like Margaret Atwood, it's like super, super weird. And, you know, she did this like teaching grammar to like

people in some military base or something for a while and like you know like the the people just do all kinds of random stuff right and when she did all that random stuff she wasn't like trying to like do something that someone else did first right she was kind of just living her life and she took you know in effect took a bunch of risks too that like paid off in her case and it's like you would never recommend any of that but if the if if people didn't take a bunch of risks where they weren't sure they were going to pay off they wouldn't become margaret atwood but you can never recommend those risks right and so somehow the the path that ends up getting recommended is like this kind of boilerplate that's like couldn't actually get

anyone to succeed and and i feel like promotes a kind of risk aversion that's in a way noxious yeah yeah it's like seinfeld said he wrote every day you mark off on your calendar like i wrote for an hour a day i wrote for an hour and i i used to follow that i like took that advice i was like i was like that's what i need to do you know and then but through trial and error you sort of learn your own system your own method of like being a comedian and and then looking back on it you know that's a good thing to do probably but you know in terms of becoming a good comedian there's so many other factors that are at play and it's like that you just have to learn for yourself of just like living life and learning how to you know

interpret what happens to you in that in a comedic way but you can't Seinfeld can't really say that I guess but yeah that's yeah yeah it feels like a lot of the most important stuff somehow can't be conveyed efficiently let's say let's answer some cues uh x moving back what up legends and babes just found fruit smash fruit smash is this uh seltzer that i drank a bunch of during this um that sponsors us at the grocery store today and i hit the spot while my current stoke tank the last few days has been down bad tremendous got t-bone last week and my dirt nasty subby subby is in uh is an op to add to the bad week i just found out that i just found out from a schmole uh a schmole is a we have like our own kind of vocabulary for this

stuff a schmole is someone in the friend group that no one likes but you can't get rid of because they're basically a good person but they just don't ever fit the vibe um so this guy found out from that person that his ex who moved away last august is now moving back to keep it short she told me she loved me first which is huge to me this took six months of dating but she has worked for me for the previous two years on and off i piped her down at work one day um sorry was a fantasy i was able to x off anyways i know she she is bad for me but i don't know how to keep her and her return off my mind our chemistry is unmatched but i don't think i'd ever change who she is at heart she loves to do full sends and would do lines all night from a six foot covid straw oh strong lung capacity do i ignore her return try to say what up

or just let shit flow i hate that i always think of her thanks for the insight and mega stoked if this hits the pod fuck puzio uh puzio's a guy fought freshman year of high school at a football game i liked your husband's perspective on fighting too that he said the guy who would go the the is it the furthest or the farthest would be the most damage yeah stick his fingers in someone else's eyes yeah but i do jujitsu and i don't know if that's always true on a certain level of a skill yeah i think this was a not a high level this was high school kids fighting each other without without training so um um uh i okay so basically this guy's ex is moving back into town and he knows he's going to be

attracted to her but he thinks they're going to fall into the same bad dynamic and he's not going to change her but he's going to get probably have the illusion that he can change her um and uh he might enjoy sleeping with her but that's not going to be no strings attached. It's going to, from his point of view, it's going to involve an emotional investment that, that can, that can turn into, that he sort of foresees turning into a net negative. Yes. That's how I hear what this guy's saying. Well put. So I almost feel like in these situations, sometimes you take a predictive stance towards yourself. You're just like, yeah, I know I'm going to get involved with her.

Oh, wow. Oh, you're telling us to go with it. No, I'm not telling him that. I'm saying like, it's not what you tell yourself in your mind. Yeah. Like what I'm saying is like, you can have all these things where you tell yourself, like, what am I going to do? But like on some deeper level, you also have this predictive stance where you're just like, what, what, what is actually going to

happen? Am I, am I like in control of this process? At least in my case, when I've been in something like this situation, it's, it's like, it's been a situation where at the deep level of my brain, what was happening was the predictive stance and not the choosing stance. So, and there's a way in which like when you're in the predictive stance, advice is irrelevant, right? Because you're not choosing. So I think often like in that situation, you can only make meta choices.

Like you can't like, you're not always gonna be able to decide how to manage a given interaction, but like maybe you can figure out ways to like prevent interactions right right um but on the on the deeper level like if your brain has taken the predictive stance and it wants those interactions like it's going to find a work he's definitely going to do this yeah i think that's what that's what i'm getting to but is there a way like you talked about in eric

weinstein's uh podcast which was super interesting I liked when you guys kind of towards the last 20 minutes, it almost, yeah, but it almost seemed performative on his part. I almost thought he was just like, you know, I'm going to perform anger as a way to spice up. Or did you, it was real anger. You guys remained so even keeled, but, and it's so articulate that it's, it's hard to discern. Was that, was that uncomfortable for you? Or are you, you're able to just kind of sit in that and stick to your guns? It was interesting. I would say like, I was like, you know, not every podcast happens with someone to thank you. So I think it was not, I was not indifferent to the emotional aspect of it at all like I was oh interesting um but um um but I thought like I don't know I sort of respected it in the sense that it felt real and he was like

giving me a real response to you know this feeling like he wanted me to be indignant about what happened to his brother and I was not being indignant and that like genuinely upset him and it's not um so I feel like there was something like it was almost like throughout that podcast we were having a bit of trouble relating to one another like even speaking the same it was an interesting podcast but we weren't quite speaking the same language and it was almost like we ended up in this emotional language that where we were communicating as like we found a you found common ground yeah in anger um so I I thought it I mean I just I think as a as a kind of

performative thing it was just interesting well I've been on dates where I'm not connecting with someone and then I've just towards like an hour and a half in on like the third date I'm like why don't I just get combative because maybe that'll provide some energy between us which is really what I'm pursuing yeah I so i totally do that with people like all the time um right uh like i in a sense picking fights in order to have an emotional connection i think people do it on twitter all the time it's a big part of what people are doing is like seeking emotional connection by picking fights yeah um uh but sorry you were you were gonna ask something but i i uh where was this oh right sorry um i guess um it's so at the beginning of your guys's podcast together

you talked about odysseus strapping himself to the uh the the mass of the sailor or whatever the the terminology is so that he so he could listen to the uh the songs of the sirens where everybody else if they hear it they go nuts and they just go straight into it and it ends up being their death but he he found a kind of way around it where he just had his homies tie him up so that he couldn't get loose but he could still hear it which i for some reason to me is like the best thing you can do like i just love that but is there a way that this guy can do that so that he doesn't fall into destructive temptation? Yeah. So I had a friend who used to like he was really trying not to overeat and he would like take like you buy all these cookies and then he would lock them in the trunk of his car.

But then like in the middle of the night, he would come down. Yeah. yeah um so i you know there's like um um i guess i think the most effective control mechanisms of that kind tend to involve other people right right um because if it's like a thing you can unlock you'll just unlock it later um yeah so um yes you can set other people against you i think you can tell your friends like don't if you see me go near her, you know, pull me in the direction, don't let me text her, et cetera. I think you can, you can say that, like, there's a question, is, is he actually going to do it? Like if somebody, you know, if he really wants to get back together with her, then he's not going to tell that to his friends. Right. I, you know, I think one thing that like, that's problematic about these scenarios of like weakness of will, where someone is saying, I don't think it's good for me to get back together with her but I like I'm strongly

inclined to is like I never feel totally sure which part of the person I should identify with like the person is telling me to identify with the the self that says I don't want to get back together with her and like they're sort of dictating that to me right and they're like that's the real me the real me is the self that doesn't want to get back together with her. And like, they're sort of dictating that to me, right? And they're like, that's the real me. The real me is the self that doesn't want to get back together with her. And then I have these desires for her, right? But I'm like, well, am I going to trust you?

Like, you know, what if the real you is the one that wants to get back together with her? Like, what if the real you is the one that wants the cookies? Like you say the real you is the one that doesn't want the cookies, but. Well, I guess it's just which real you. Who am I advising? Which of you am I advising is, but. Well, I guess it's just which real you. Who am I advising?

Which of you am I advising is the question. Well, I guess I just take the stance of like advise the real you that's not going to fuck your life up. You know what I mean? And it feels like the real you, even though that the realer him is probably the one that is going to do this. But I feel like that one is not the one I should be advising because that feels like it could have more negative consequences for his life. I mean, the question of what constitutes a negative consequence, though, is going to be answered differently by the different parts of himself, right? So like, you're really on one team here. You're on team prudence. Yeah. And, and like, you know, isn't that the better one, though?

I mean, is it like we don't know what you know, isn't that the better one though? I mean, is it like, we, we, we don't know what, you know, there's probably some reason why we don't always find ourselves on that team. And like, do you know people who are always, always, always on that team and they're super boring? Like, so no, I don't, I don't think we should always be on that team. I think that I, like, I do think that there's a, you know, there's a question of how destructive you should be with your life, but like the answer isn't

zero, I think. So in a way, the thing that's more worrisome is the thought, this is a cycle that I've been through and I'm going to go through it again and it's going to be exactly the same. And it's less on the destructiveness part than it's the repetitiveness of that. It's not going to provide new epiphany. The chances for growth are not there. Right. And so I think that that's the thing to tell yourself.

Like if you really want to persuade yourself, it's like, think about the ways in which this will all just be what already happened. And like, you'll be reliving the past. And is that who you want to be? And I think you can make that pretty unattractive to yourself. And then that can potentially be persuasive to the other you but i think you ultimately have to persuade that other part of yourself you can't just try to shut it down lock it in a trunk etc because you'll just unlock the trunk so so going back to team prudence like are you saying that we should explore those avenues sometimes to see just to see for ourselves

or like for example i'm trying to quit vaping but i asked my brother to hold me accountable just to like call me every day uh i don't even know where i was going with this but you were you wanted to ask about like team prudence and like you know should we like should we do bad things or not right am i suggesting that we should do bad things yeah should we explore that to make our lives a little more interesting or to learn more from experience like is there a road too cautious I think definitely yes there's definitely a too cautious road um and um you know like it depends like what part of your life you're in like I think there are many times of life where people gravitate more towards caution than anything else. Like people, I'm 45, people my age are,

I would say under self-destructive, like that I know. But, you know, I think that like, it depends. It's sort of like there's an exploratory approach to life that can pay some really big dividends, but it opens you to being in some way dominated by your impulses. And some of those impulses are really destructive. And so it's hard,

it's hard to be like, you know, like there's a certain kind of speech that we give to ourselves so often of like, don't be impulsive, be prudent, right? Where that's really often the right speech to give, but we give it to ourselves so many times that we associate that with who we really are, whereas really it's just a kind of authoritarian voice of over ourselves right and um so the question is like how to be exploratory and um uh kind of open about your life um without being sort of um prey to your impulses. And I don't know the answer to that. But I guess the thing is, like, I do know that, like, a certain framing of, well, here's an option that I know is bad for me. But I might give in to it.

And, like, you ask someone for advice, right? It's like, well, you already sound like you know what you think you should do. And you also sound like, you know, you're not going to do it. And like, what is this dynamic? What are we doing here with this advice? And what like, one thing one can do is like question this whole framing. Like, you've told me some things about this woman, right? You haven't told me everything, right? You've told me a particular story. And so like ask yourself why have you framed the story in this way where like there's the real me and like like you know the real me knows she's bad for me and then there's like the evil me and like should i listen to the evil me or not so like you're asking right and i'm like

i'm starting to like wonder about whether all this framing is like is itself kind of you're trying to work yourself up into something yeah it's almost like um for you to tell if the if we were to tell this guy like don't get back with your ex you're gonna regret it you know it's just gonna be the same the same thing that's happening before it's gonna come up you know but it's almost like and i think this is the case with like alcoholics too who want to go back out and drink sometimes people in aa will say well go go learn for yourself you need to you know you obviously maybe there are some instances where people just need to learn through experience that this is not beneficial for them so that or maybe they didn't need to but that's how it goes it's like right like that is it's really hard to know what needed to happen right right um it's

like that's a story we tell retrospectively like margaret atwood saying like oh yeah i taught grammar for these years and yeah you know did that need to happen like one only knows that it did happen and then they you know that that that taught them. And then they, you know, that, that, that taught them that, that was like, I, you know, I hit rock bottom and then I was able to transform myself. And like, you know, if, if that was a person I loved, like, and they were alcoholic, I probably would really, really do a lot to try to prevent them from drinking. but I'm not sure that any of that is the same as me giving them advice not to drink. Like advice sort of seems to float at a float free. Right. And sometimes at a superficial level where it's pretty, it's pretty basic. I guess for me, when I'm giving advice, I try to take into account, and it's hard with these emails because they're brief, but I'm just like, all right, is this person like, if there are a person who seems to controlled by their impulses, like they're kind of Pinocchio and someone else has the strings and that's their impulses.

I'm like, all right, well, let's push this person towards prudence. But if they feel like they're overly prudent, then I'm like, all right, well, like, fuck your life up a little bit. Cause it's just really about finding that, that sweet spot, which is basically impossible in life. I've discovered for myself at least, cause I'm just kind of extreme, but I'm like, all right, what direction does this person need to get nudged? And with this guy, I feel like, I, you know, just guessing, I don't think he needs any new information. I don't think he's

going to get new epiphanies from being with this person again. I think your better course of action is to see if you can resist it, and then see if you gain kind of new power and knowledge of yourself in that process. But that's also based off who i am which is typically the person who does the thing you're not supposed to and then tries to glean and then retroactively it's like oh but i learned a lot but i don't even know sometimes if i'm learning yeah yeah i mean one thing that just struck me about this letter is it seems so obvious that he thinks that's the correct advice right yeah he doesn't want to do are you asking for advice if you already know what the right advice is but you don't want to do it

like well you're not more likely to do it if you hear the thing that you already thought was the right thing to do right um so um so it's sort of like i think you're totally right that this is written in such a way as to produce the response, stay away from her. He wants to hear that. Yeah, exactly. So it's like, you know, and maybe it's useful, maybe it's useful for him to hear that that's clearly what he wants to hear. I love the kind of meta-analysis on it. All right, here's the next question.

Non-horny girlfriend, eternally grateful if you answered. Chad, JT, Aaron, and any lovely guest. I've been with my girlfriend for five lovely years we got together in college, then live solo distance for two ish, and are now capable of moving in together post pandemic, because of cheap apartment prices and lack of COVID sick. jerking off while living with a girlfriend in a previous pod which i appreciate but what is a dude supposed to do when a girlfriend is straight up not in the mood to actually bang i'd agree dudes are more horny than girls but like sometimes they feel insecure that she isn't as into me as i am to her i'm assuming this will happen when we move in based on our visiting experiences so far i'm too tired we can tomorrow or we can tomorrow that he's using those as like blanket uh uh yeah kicking the can down the roads that she gives him do i take this as an insult are girls just less horny or

am i just looking too much into it just want to make sure i'm not moving in with this with the girlfriend and potentially fiance and accepting the non-bone life and ps how can i get her to initiate please keep it on we're both pod fans okay good interesting i mean um there were there were like several ways that he posed the problem here like early on i thought it was going to be a question about like how do you masturbate when there's someone else around but then it sort of took this turn of like how do i like how do i deal with the fact that she wants less sex than I do? How do I get her to want more sex? It feels like the baseline is how do I get my girlfriend to desire me as much as I desire her?

Or, but there's another level of how do I get myself not to be upset by like, and to read into, etc. Right. Because it's like like okay they so they've been together but they haven't been living together right so he has and assuming they haven't been sleeping with other people he's not gonna have less sex right in this scenario than he had before but it's more like he might notice the having less sex more right um uh so it's it's like it's a question about it's it's coming to bother him right like because it's like it it should be a possibility since she's there um i think this is like a real and serious and profound issue in like most relationships to be like i think that's the one thing i would tell this guy is like this is most people have this

problem uh it's not the gender the gender dynamic does not always work that way. It's not always the man who wants more sex. But it's like I think it's actually like from people I know, it's kind of rare that both people in the couple want the same amount of sex. Yeah. So like this is like a real like it's like a real problem with marriage. a real problem with marriage. It people like, and it kind of, you know, there are all kinds of ways in which a couple might not be on the same page in terms of like, I'm way messier than like most people, including my husband, but really anyone. I'm, you know, like, one person in the couple might want to eat one kind of food. So all kinds of ways in which people's basic nature might not coordinate with another person. But the sexual one, I think,

is the one that really poses a problem. We read into sex, we symbolically idealize it, and we interpret it as a sign or as a mark of like, how much the person loves you how good the relationship is how much they're attracted to you how much they care about you how much they value about you all of that gets packed into sexuality in a way that it doesn't for like whether or not they clean or something so I guess the first thing I would say is like I I think it's uh um it makes a lot of sense to me that he has this worry um and, and one thing is like, he shouldn't, you know, it's like, it could just be that that's like, that's part of that's one of the worries that's baked into coming to live with someone is having to come to negotiate this. And maybe it's

not obvious to me that you can sort of know in advance how that's going to work or even that if you get it to work it will keep working and you won't have to like deal with the problem again like five years down the line right yeah it's well said it's good stuff i think i think you're right too i think we all read into that too much. You know what I mean? We don't, we don't understand that someone's just baseline or someone's kind of a, just relationship to sex is different than our own. We think that if it's different than our own, it's kind of a poor reflection of our sexual attraction. Yeah. Aptitude or, or ability to seduce and stuff like that, which, you know, hits hard. But I guess if I was giving him like a, a way to go about it to get to that place where you guys are on a similar

level, I would just be without being overly inquisitive and without being putting pressure on it, I would just try to find out what works for her so that, you know, explore all those options and see if there is a way to kind of, I don't know, just all those options and see if there is a way to kind of, I don't know, just better understand each other. Because even if it doesn't lead to more sex, if you can better understand her through her preferences and through her eroticism, maybe you'll also understand that maybe it's just not on the same level as your own. I think one thing to think about is why he hasn't

done that already in effect, right? Like just to think about it himself is he already knows about this discrepancy in their sexual appetites, right? And so like, it'd be interesting to know what stands in the way. Is it just that he sort of doesn't want to have a conversation or is it that he knows what it would be, but he doesn't want to do it? I just don't think he's asked. I think he's't want to do it um i just don't think he's

asked i think he's probably just really young and he's just horny and he's just like hey let's have sex all the time and she's like hey like that that route doesn't really work for me but that's my uh yeah i like that i think that's more insightful actually than the thing i said and i think maybe another thing to think of would be like, maybe to think in terms of like the, of sex as more extended and including something like seduction. Right. So it's like, there's a project of seduction that goes along with sex. Um, and maybe if you, if you see each other very infrequently, that seduction element,

the work of that is done by like the fact that you've been longing for each other very infrequently, that seduction element, the work of that is done by like the fact that you've been longing for each other all this time so that this, you know, but like in the context where you're around each other, you have to like recreate that distance somehow. Right. And so he may have to like think about seduction for the first time. You know, I've been on both sides. Like I've been in situations where I was the one who wanted more sex and I was being the situation where I was the one who wanted less sex. And like, they're both just really, really hard. They're both painful as fuck. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Like, I think it's like incredibly hard not to read into that, you know, like it, the, the, the telling yourself, whatever, like, my experience doesn't work at all. And so you actually have to deal with the problem, I think, rather than trying to like tell yourself that it actually isn't important because I think it just is super important. Nice. All right. Well, I think that's, that's it. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you so much for coming on. It was really fun. I've never talked so much about sex on a podcast.

Nobody ever asked me to talk about sex. You were, you were wonderfully insightful. And if you're ever in Los Angeles, we'd love to have you on the podcast in person yeah okay okay awesome yeah i'll keep that in mind all right thanks so much thank you okay bye have a good night Thank you. We'll be right back. Chad, what is your beef of the week? Aaron, who's your baby? Shryder, what is your legend of the week? Joe, what's your quote of the week? Chad, what is your beef of the week? Aaron, who's your baby? Shryder, what is your legend of the week?

Joe, what's your quote of the week? Shryder, what's your quote of the week? Thank you. Give me the screws. Thank you. Joe, what's your question? Chad, what is your name for the web? Aaron, who's your name? Strider, what is your question? Joe, what's your question? Give me the screen. Guys, guys. Guys, guys. Bye.