Thomas Chatterton Williams on Reading, Practical Philosophy, and Embracing Contradiction | Approach Your Troubles Like Doctor

Ryan reads today’s meditation and talks to author Thomas Chatterton Williams about how his father helped him cultivate his love for reading, why the point of philosophy should be practical application rather than theorizing, the importance of embracing contradicting ideas, and more. Thomas Chatterton Williams is an American culture critic and is the author of two memoirs: “Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race” and “Losing My Cool: How a Father’s Love and 15,000 Books Beat Hip-Hop Culture.” In 2020, Thomas helped write and organize “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate.” This open letter, published in Harper’s Magazine and reprinted in newspapers around the world, defended free speech at a time of growing censorship and was signed by 153 leading public figures. Thomas is also a dedicated father, and much of his work is inspired by the relationship he shares with his father, and the relationship he has with his own children. Try Surfshark risk-free with a 30-day money-back guarantee. Get Surfshark VPN at surfshark.deals/STOIC. Enter promo code STOIC for 83 % off and three extra months free. Right now, when you purchase a 3-month Babbel subscription, you’ll get an additional 3 months for FREE. That’s 6 months, for the price of 3! Just go to Babbel.com and use promo code DAILYSTOIC. LinkedIn Jobs helps you find the candidates you want to talk to, faster. Every week, nearly 40 million job seekers visit LinkedIn? Post your job for free at LinkedIn.com/STOIC. Terms and conditions apply. Stamps.com makes it easy to mail and ship right from your computer. Use our promo code STOIC to get a special offer that includes a 4-week trial PLUS free postage and a digital scale. Go to Stamps.com, click on the microphone at the TOP of the homepage and type in STOIC. As a member of Daily Stoic Life, you get all our current and future courses, 100+ additional Daily Stoic email meditations, 4 live Q&As with bestselling author Ryan Holiday (and guests), and 10% off your next purchase from the Daily Stoic Store. Sign up at https://dailystoic.com/life/ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemailCheck out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more. Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookFollow Thomas Chatterton Williams: Homepage, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

• 0:03Speaker 00

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are, and also to find peace and wisdom in their actual lives. But first, we've got a quick message from one of our sponsors.

• 0:42Speaker 00

  Approach your troubles like a doctor. It's famously said that you should learn from the mistakes of others, because you can't live long enough to make them all yourself. In that way, the books we read and the information we digest gives us an advantage to those who choose to go through and make all the mistakes themselves. In studying the Stoics, we are able to adopt a mentality battle-tested by some of history's most successful warriors, artists, businessmen, and politicians. We can use the same operating system that helps centuries of people solve the complex problems of daily life. Ward Farnsworth is the dean of the University of Texas Law School. He's also a lifetime student of the Stoics and

• 1:25Speaker 00

  author of The Practicing Stoic: A Philosophical User's Manual, an amazing new book on Stoicism that you should check out. He expanded on the idea we were just mentioning in a recent interview with The Daily Stoic. "Stoicism tries to get its students to approach the troubles of other people like a good doctor would," he said. "Veteran doctors are very compassionate, and they give their all to their patients, but they don't get emotional about it. They might have done so when they were first getting started, but experience tends to turn them into natural Stoics in their professional lives." That's one way to think about Stoicism. It's an effort to gain by the study of philosophy, some of the traits and immunities that would otherwise be the natural results.

• 2:10Speaker 00

  Result of long experience. The study of Stoicism is a kind of surrogate for the passage of time. That's why you put in this work, listening to this podcast or reading these emails, because that's what your goal is, to bring yourself to the state that others would take a lifetime to achieve. When you read these emails, try not to just read them, but adopt their lessons into your everyday life. Try to speed up the passage of time that way. Try to get experience. In that way, you're inheriting the wisdom of generations past, and you're stronger and wiser for it. For more, read our full interview with Ward on DailyStoic.com and check out his newest book, The Practicing Stoic: A Philosophical User's Manual.

• 2:55Speaker 00

  There's a link on our website, or you can just pull it up on Amazon or your independent bookstore. This book distills the main ideas of the Stoics in 12 easy-to-reference headings, and I think you'll like it.

• 3:09Speaker 00

  Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. It's a shame the way that certain phrases have come to mean almost the opposite of what they actually mean, and thus derive, and thus deprive us of a term that might be useful, or a thing that we actually should be concerned about. For instance, do your own research. Of course, one should do your own research. This is a deeply important thing. If you're not doing your own research, you're probably not thinking very critically and just sort of accepting unthinkingly everything that's thrown at you.

• 3:50Speaker 00

  The tragedy is that people who are, quote, "doing their own research" these days are not doing research, they're watching stupid YouTube videos and actually ending up far away from anything resembling research. And this is the sort of anti-intellectual vein of today's culture. The other is term "cancel culture," right? Which, it does exist. We can be overly sensitive, we can be politically correct, we can throw the baby out with the bathwater because someone said something dumb, someone said something offensive, someone said something that's incorrect, or they did it a long time ago. And then you have Vladimir Putin describing the West's reaction to his criminal invasion of Ukraine as "cancel culture." Or you have people facing very real consequences for terrible things they've done and saying,

• 4:35Speaker 00

  "Oh, this is just cancel culture." Um, all of that is so frustratingly dumb. It's like, we can't even, this is why we don't have nice things. Because you people can't use words without turning them into these sort of culture war weapons. That's why we can't have adult conversations. And anyways, all of which is to say, maybe you saw this in 2020, there was this letter published by Harper Magazine called "A Letter on Justice and Open Debate." It was reprinted in newspapers all around the world. It was the idea of, the authors who put it together were trying to defend free speech at a time of censorship.

• 5:15Speaker 00

  It was signed by more than 150 leading figures of all different kinds of intellectual bent and backgrounds and political viewpoints, which was kind of the point, right? It was supposed to be a bunch of people who disagree on most things, agreeing on the one thing that does matter, which is civil, open discourse about important topics. Of course, this thing got misconstrued to be this anti-trans thing, to be this anti-this thing, to be this anti-woke thing. It was a disaster. But one of the leading figures behind writing it is someone whose work I've followed for a long time and have enjoyed many of his articles over the years. His name is Thomas Chatterton Williams.

• 6:00Speaker 00

  He's a, basically, an American cultural critic. He's the author of two memoirs, Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race and Losing My Cool: How a Father's Love and 15,000 Books Beat Hip-Hop Culture. And he's just a fascinating thinker. He's an American who lives in France. He's an intellectual who talks about popular culture. He's sort of crossing bridges and divides. I think that's really what that letter was about. He's a dedicated father and, and much of his own work is inspired by the relationship he shares with his father and the relationship he has with his children and the values and principles and ideas that he wants to pass along to them. And so I was really excited to chat with him.

• 6:44Speaker 00

  I believe he was speaking to me from a hotel room in New York. New York or New Orleans. It was a fun little conversation that we had. I'm really glad that I got to chat. Here's my conversation with Thomas Chatterton Williams. You can go to his website at ThomasChattertonWilliams.com. You can follow him on Twitter, which we talk about in the conversation, the perils, but also the wonderfulness of the platform. You can follow him @ChattertonWilliams, actually, on Twitter and on Instagram. And do check out his book Self Portrait in Black and White and Losing My Cool. This was a wonderful little conversation. I hope you enjoy.

• 7:23Speaker 00

  Where are you in the world right now?

• 7:24Speaker 01

  I'm in New York.

• 7:26Speaker 00

  Nice.

• 7:26Speaker 01

  Just got in yesterday.

• 7:29Speaker 00

  And then back to Paris or?

• 7:31Speaker 01

  And then, no, I'm all over the place. I'm going to New Orleans on Friday, then Atlanta, then Minneapolis, then finally upstate to see my brother, back to New York, and then back to Paris. That's on here for a while.

• 7:44Speaker 00

  That is so much travel. What are you doing?

• 7:47Speaker 01

  Lots of different stuff. I'm going to the New Orleans Book Festival this weekend, and then I'm doing some reporting for my next book in those Americans in Atlanta and Minneapolis.

• 7:58Speaker 00

  Fun.

• 8:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I think it's gonna be cool. It's been a while since I've been to the American South, so I'm looking forward to that.

• 8:07Speaker 00

  I was just in New Orleans a couple of months ago. I live outside Austin.

• 8:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know. I wanted to go by your bookshop with Jane, but it wasn't, it just wasn't possible.

• 8:17Speaker 00

  No, no, next go around, that would be fun.

• 8:20Speaker 01

  That'd be awesome.

• 8:21Speaker 00

  So I wanted to start with your introduction to books. It sounds like your father's the one that made you a reader.

• 8:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, he deserves the credit for that. I didn't grow up in an environment where everybody around me was obsessed with literature. So that was very much something that he instilled in me in the home. We grew up in a very, my brother and I grew up in a very small house in New Jersey, but it was packed from floor to ceiling in every room with thousands and thousands of books that my father had amassed over the course of his life and had hauled around the country with him as he moved.

• 9:01Speaker 00

  How did he, so was it just showing you a love of reading by example? Was it just surrounding you with books that inculcates that love of reading? Or what else did he do?

• 9:12Speaker 01

  No, he certainly surrounded and tried to inculcate. But then, in addition to that, he made us read. And he was very, he wasn't just a strict authoritarian though. He really tried to make us want to read. And the way that he saw to do that, at least at first, was to bribe us and to tell us that reading was work and it was something that we should be compensated for. And so he took money that in retrospect, I realized he didn't always have. And he paid us handsomely for our age to sit and study and to read Aesop's fables when

• 9:53Speaker 01

  we were really young and then to get on to more sophisticated things later. And then at some point, you know, I realized that it was something that I wanted to do on my own and it became a part of me. And I don't really know when, you know, the line from him kind of forcing it or encouraging it and me starting to be self motivated, I don't know where that line was or what age that happened.

• 10:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think the weird thing about reading is like, for people who read a lot, why they do it is very clear, not just because it's enjoyable, but they get a lot out of it. There's like an incredible ROI to reading, like my life has been so profoundly changed by the books that I've read. And when that's happened to you, suddenly books seem like the greatest investment in the world. You pay $15 for something and the entire course of your future can be changed. The hard thing is like, how do you convince someone of that power? Because it seems, it seems so incomprehensible if you haven't had it. And then the irony is, the books that we make children read are so often not even remotely up to the task of producing that ROI.

• 11:05Speaker 00

  And then we wonder why they don't buy the argument.

• 11:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's tough to get people, it's a really good way of putting it how you did. It's tough to get people to see the value of something that they haven't experienced yet and can't necessarily intuit without experiencing it itself. And it's a complicated pleasure. It's not something that's immediately apparent. It's, you know, when you immerse yourself in War and Peace or something like that, it requires hours and hours of investment before you start to feel this world that Tolstoy conjured up around you out of sheer language.

• 11:37Speaker 00

  Yes. And that, you know, War and Peace when you're 11 versus War and Peace when you're 22 could be profoundly different reading experiences. And so I feel like we also have this kind of one fits all, like everyone should read Great Gatsby in high school. And, you know, we sort of go through this list because generally those books are quite good. But it's, I feel like everyone I know who's like a big reader, it was like the right book at the right time that changes everything.

• 12:08Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 12:09Speaker 00

  And, yeah, getting the, I think, it really does have to come from the house because the parent is going to know you well enough and the parent is going to be, their interests are going to be closer to yours enough that I just, I just don't know if it's something that school is even equipped to do.

• 12:25Speaker 01

  Well, the type of school that I went to, I mean, yeah, The Great Gatsby I fell in love with in high school. That was one of the books that they assigned us that I think we could immediately see. It was exciting to us as 16-year-olds. But by and large, we were not being assigned really challenging or important works of literature where I went to high school. And it's very difficult for me to see, even as somebody who was coming from a house full of books, it was difficult for me to see why at that age I was reading Wuthering Heights, for example.

• 12:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:57Speaker 01

  But, yeah, but my father was very adept at kind of finding things that, you know, we talked a lot too. That's the thing. It wasn't just like, here's a stack of books. It was... These are ideas that we've been discussing and here's a book that can kind of complicate or extend this conversation we've been having. I know you're interested in how does a person live a good life or what is the good? And then here are some things that you can like take into your room and spend some time with and then we'll continue this conversation. So my dad always told me that books were actually conversation partners and that he always felt that he was surrounded by friends, even if he was by himself, because he could talk to people who really understood his inner self, just by pulling it off the shelf.

• 13:41Speaker 00

  Yes. Yeah, there's a line in the history of Stoicism. Zeno goes to the oracle of Delphi as a young man and he's told that he'll become wise when he begins to have conversations with the dead, right? And it's only many years later that he realizes that the oracle, speaking of reading, that books are how we talk to the dead, right? That it's this sort of portal into the past. But, yes, so many of the books we get assigned, we have no real conception of why we're reading them. We have no conception, we're not really told what we're supposed to do with them. They're just this like homework that we're given and then-

• 14:21Speaker 01

  You're just told that this is important and this is good. Yeah, but you're not told, you're not told why. I think that, you know, but you know, the other thing is that not everybody, even if they were to be told why, is going to, is going to love reading.

• 14:41Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 14:42Speaker 01

  It's, you know, some of the best pleasures in life are difficult pleasures. They're not, they're not easy to have. You know, some of the most gratifying flavors are things that you reject viscerally as a child because you have to go through many steps to develop the palate. I think reading is that way too.

• 15:03Speaker 00

  Although one of the things I've found that's made me a little bit less like I'm like a physical book snob, like I only like physical books. That's what changed. So it's so intensely about the hardcover book for me, right? Or whatever, the physical book. But one of the things that's been interesting is watching the rise of audiobooks and the number of people that I hear from that did not read before the popularity of Audible. And then when you talk to them, what you realize is they thought they hated books. What they really didn't like was reading, right? And realizing that people consume information in radically different ways. And that from a literary perspective, we've been sort

• 15:46Speaker 00

  of not including a huge portion of the population that and then I found that, you know, they got sucked into audiobooks and now actually they do read physical books also. But but just realizing like the sitting down by a fire with a physical book, although has become a very normal ritual for me, they just didn't have a place or an attraction to that in their life and that there's other ways to get this information into your system. What really matters is the information, not not so much the specific means, I feel like.

• 16:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, on an intellectual level, I tend to agree with you. And I've read that actually the brain processes audio the same as reading with narrative, especially, I think. But I'm like a words on the page guy and a sentence guy where when I see a sentence that really is well crafted, I go back over it multiple times before I move on. And I just kind of linger in the in the texture of what's been accomplished by the juxtaposition of words in a way that I'm very partial to. I've never listened to an audiobook. I've had people write to me as an author. I've had people write to me and say that, that, you know,

• 17:05Speaker 01

  They were really happy to have my audiobook and that the fact that it was read by the author made it even more of a rich audio experience and I can understand that, but I've never consumed it that way. But you know, then I'm a podcast guy and I guess the line is getting thinner and thinner between that type of pleasure and an audiobook, right?

• 17:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, totally. I can do podcasts. I can't really do audiobooks. Like, to me, I need to be engaged with the material. I can't, I shouldn't be doing two things at one time? Like, I shouldn't be working out and listening to the book?

• 17:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's the risk. Is that when you're reading, that the beautiful thing is that you can't do anything else and read.

• 17:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:45Speaker 01

  And that's why the phone is so dangerous now, next to the book, because you're constantly, like, leaving this immersive experience. But when done right, reading actually makes the world recede around you.

• 17:57Speaker 00

  Which is, I think, a thing you actually need, especially in this crazy world that we're in. So, yeah, you can read an ebook on your phone, and that's certainly better than not reading an ebook on your phone. But I think anything you can do without the screen, you should probably try to do without the screen.

• 18:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm becoming more and more aware that I have to make those, I have to erect those barriers. Otherwise, it's, you know, even as somebody who, you know, I make my bread, and my whole life is about reading and writing, and it's getting hard. It's harder. I've been, I published my first book in 2010, so it's been 12 years for me. And, you know, the difference between writing the first book and reading and writing for this third book I'm on now, I mean, the phone has destroyed so much of what I took for granted about my own self-discipline.

• 18:50Speaker 00

  Well, I wanted to talk to you about a bunch of stuff pertaining to this, but jumping ahead, because I think it's related to what you were just saying. I feel like so many of the sort of class of people that we know, the sort of knowledge worker, public intellectual, writer, journalist crowd, I feel like so many of their brains have been scrambled.

• 19:12Speaker 00

  By the amount of time they spend online, specifically the amount of time they spend on Twitter. When you see the amount of tweets that some of these people send, you're like, there's no way you're reading anything long form, because it's, there's not enough hours in the day. You, you are, you have been, your brain has been hijacked by this short form, hot take, uh, respond as soon as you see it mentality of, of social media that, that you're, there's no way you're doing the work to, to generate the certainty that you are projecting with the things that you are writing.

• 19:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, it's, it's really bad. And, and you know, I'm, I'm guilty of this. And I was not, um, somebody who was early on interested in Twitter. I, I really kind of, it's 2017, 2018 that I became more active. And then 2020 that I actually started to have, you know, a number of followers. And then that changes your engagement with the platform because after a certain threshold, you're constantly engaged if you want to be. So it's, it's more like you have to force yourself not to be engaged because people are always talking to you.

• 20:19Speaker 00

  There's always an audience if you want it. And as a writer, you're, you, there, the thing that attracted us to this line of work in part was, was the audience. It feels weird to not engage with it.

• 20:30Speaker 01

  Very much so. And this is really, really dangerous. And you know, it's also very dangerous to be able to get, um, no matter what you say, to get a certain level of approval, uh, because it doesn't necessarily bring out the best or the most reflects reflective, uh, instincts in you. Um, and you know, I, I'm willing to like, offer myself up as a prime example of, of, of how this is, you know, something that, uh, is problematic in public thinking, but you know, I think we're all more or less kind of in this new context. And I don't know how as an individual, you're strong enough to just on your own resist it. I mean, I've heard you in other podcasts say that you kind of have a level of discipline

• 21:14Speaker 01

  that I find admirable. It's very, very difficult though. Um, actually like Zadie Smith.

• 21:22Speaker 01

  Told me once that, you know, I just have to absolutely get off of social media. And I told her, you know, if I were as famous as you are, I think that would be a lot easier. But there's, and maybe I'm just completely wrong about this, but there's a sense that you have to be there, otherwise you face the prospect of disappearing. But of course, that's objectively not true.

• 21:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, it's easy, it's easy for certain parts of the literary culture, the people who are sort of in before social media came up, who are sort of anointed, who just happen to operate in a rarefied world where the old system still works for them, right? It's, I think, easier for them to say it. But then it's also easy for our egos to convince ourselves that what we're doing is work, even though by definition, it's not paid, and it's taking away time from doing the thing that you are paid to do, which is think about big things and write about them in long form.

• 22:26Speaker 01

  But then I do also lay some of the blame on the industry for this too, because you get really mixed messages in this workplace that's been in flux for the past decade, where when you're writing books, your publisher really wants and expects you to come with some form of a platform. Now, that's, that's, that's just a part of what you're, informally.

• 22:53Speaker 00

  They're not selling the books, you have to do it, so.

• 22:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so, how are you doing that? You're doing that on social media. Then if you're a journalist, or you write for magazines, essayist or whatever, columnist, there's an informal expectation that you engage and that you, you know, publicize your work and have an audience, and then also that you're not supposed to trip over these invisible and moving lines of something that will get you, you know, in trouble for saying something that's beyond the pale, that maybe wasn't beyond the pale a few weeks ago, or a year ago. And so, you're constantly navigating this kind of, you need to be there, but also like, don't mess up, and if you mess up, it's on you. It's really difficult, and I do sometimes look back at how writers used to just take for granted that they had institutional platforms that were sufficient, and they didn't need

• 23:40Speaker 01

  to do that stuff on their own.

• 23:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, and it also feels like when sometimes when I dip into the conversation, it's like, man, this is like a thousand people all talking to each other. You know, like they're acting like they're broadcasting to millions of people. But it's like the same group of people who are just chattering amongst each other and judging each other and criticizing each other and subtweeting about each other. It's like this weird high school mentality that for whatever reason, the rest of our culture is downstream from. There's a sad patheticness to it also, you know what I mean?

• 24:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, people liken it to high school all the time for a real reason. There's a kind of, you know, there's a variety of tables that you can choose from at the Twitter lunchroom and they're the kind of, they're the people that sit at the heads of these tables and they direct the conversation and then there are, then there are millions and millions of people just kind of listening in to any number of these conversations, but they're not really participating or part of the table.

• 24:40Speaker 00

  Yeah. So going back to your dad, what did he, what were the big books that shaped you or what were the big books that shaped him that then shaped you?

• 24:51Speaker 01

  So my dad, when one of the, I mean, this is probably a little bit cliche or it's maybe obvious to some of your listeners, but when I was 15, 16 and my best friend and I were studying all the time with my dad and we were navigating our social context and trying to figure out how to manage and maneuver around peer pressure, my dad gave us Shirley Jackson's The Lottery, this short story about this public stoning, you know, that the whole town participates in. And, you know, that was a profoundly impactful and moving reading experience for both my

• 25:32Speaker 01

  friend and I and it made an enormous impact on, on me and how I thought of, you know, what it takes to, to go like to, to be strong enough to not participate in whatever direction the group is influencing you to move in.

• 25:52Speaker 01

  So that was, the lottery is like something that I can still see myself sitting at the kitchen table and him handing to me on a Xerox printout to think through and underline and then talk about later when we were done. For my dad, like enormously impactful books for him were like Maimonides' Guide for the Perplexed, which I have to admit, I used to talk to him about Maimonides and stuff, but I never did actually read The Books That Really, Really, Really Made an Impact on Me, that changed me, started from like 18 years old, once I arrived at college. And so for me, like, I think the book that destroyed my faith,

• 26:34Speaker 01

  I had always been in Catholic school and my parents, my mom's a Protestant and my father's an atheist, but they just let faith be a private matter that my brother and I could decide for ourselves. And I kind of just loosely identified as a Christian and then I read The Brothers Karamazov and it was just an astonishing reading experience for me and it kind of shattered my faith. And, you know, I was just deeply impressed that Dostoevsky being a proselytizing kind of believer in his own life could nonetheless, as an artist, be so powerfully moved by the vocation of art, that he put the strongest and most compelling arguments in the voice of Ivan Karamazov, who's the atheist. And

• 27:14Speaker 01

  so it just made me think about life and art and the fact that this guy, who was kind of racist and anti-Semitic and lived in another century in Russia and thought that Russia was distinct from Europe, nonetheless seemed to understand who I was on the inside more than many of the people I grew up around. And so The Brothers Karamazov was like this link to the world for me. And then I studied philosophy and so some of the most important books in my father's life were like Plato's Dialogues and things like this. And so, once I got to college and I properly studied, you know, Greek philosophy. That was also very important for me as well, and then I understood my father better.

• 27:57Speaker 00

  How did your father come to be this literary figure? Was he self-taught? Had someone done this for him? What makes him this lover of books that then shapes you into being one?

• 28:10Speaker 01

  Self-taught. My father was born in 1937 in Galveston, Longview, Texas, and then raised in Galveston, Texas, under segregation. And no one in his family had an education beyond high school. And he didn't have a father and was raised mostly by an aunt and uncle.

• 28:30Speaker 01

  And they kind of discouraged him from being bookish because they thought that actually, you know, a black kid being overly bookish could get himself in trouble in the South. And so he basically was, under the age of 10, and the story that we've always understood from him was that he, in a neighbor's house, he came across a copy of Will Durant's The Story of Philosophy. And the neighbor had bought the house from, there were, it was an immigrant family in the house before his neighbor currently residing there. And the neighbor didn't know how the book was there. But my father, just like paging through that book, there was an illustration of Socrates.

• 29:12Speaker 01

  And my father was wondering who this guy was that lived so long ago that was important enough that there was an image of him in a book. And, you know, that led him to wanting to know what philosophy was. And he just accumulated from that age as many books as he could and just read on his own. And just told himself, I guess, that if he were to transcend his circumstances, the only way that that was going to realistically come about was if he were to develop his mind. And I always wonder, like, you know, I was pushed by my father. I'm amazed by the people that, in some sense, you know, they liberate themselves from the matrix.

• 29:56Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 29:57Speaker 01

  They don't have anybody coming to tell them that they're in the matrix. They, but they somehow figure out that this isn't, that this world is stifling and that... There's a way out. And he had that inner kind of voice telling him that there was more. And this connection to philosophy, it allowed him to realize that whatever he was being told about his worth as a second-class citizen in this segregated South in the United States of America, there was a universal humanity that he was discovering in this book that linked him to ancient Greece and to thinkers that, you know, told him about something that was more than that.

• 30:39Speaker 01

  And I don't know why that struck him and it didn't strike other people that he was related to.

• 30:46Speaker 00

  Well, it's interesting that there's kind of like, there's the two paths to philosophy. There's this sort of like, blue-collar, autodidact path to philosophy, the self-liberation, like, anyone can access these books, anyone can apply these ideas, no matter who they are and what they're doing. And how radically different that is than the sort of academic introduction to philosophy that people get in school, which is very high-minded, which is very theoretical, which is very abstract, which they think needs all sorts of pre-qualifications and, you know, hand-holding. And yet, they really should get you to the same place, which is, you know, the ability

• 31:26Speaker 00

  to apply these ideas to everyday life, apply philosophy to who you are as a person.

• 31:33Speaker 01

  Well, that's what I was always attracted to with philosophy. I went to Georgetown, which is one of the few college programs which is essentially continental philosophy and not analytic. And, yeah, I was attracted to metaphysics and, you know, ethics. What are we doing in this life? You know, why are we, what is the good life? How do we go about flourishing? And the other questions kind of were not, moved me to the discipline. And I think that, you know, I still, you know, I still find myself out of step with, you know, language questions and games like that. I think that they can be intellectually fascinating, but that's not what stirs me.

• 32:18Speaker 01

  You know, I still have that kind of... Antiquated notion of having your soul stirred, you know? And I'm sure that is the way you approach it too. I mean, if you're, if you're thinking about Stoicism and, you know, thinking about how to cope with life's hardships and not allow them to derail you.

• 32:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's like, what am I supposed to do with this information? Not like, how can we have a very exclusive, you know, difficult to follow, but intellectually provocative conversation? Like, how do we know if there's such a thing as right or wrong? Or how do we know we're not living in a computer simulation? Or whatever? Like, what if reality is a hallucination? All these things, I guess, are intellectually interesting, but like, what am I supposed to do with it, you know, the next time I'm stuck in traffic and I get frustrated, or somebody calls me a horrible name, or somebody I love dies, right?

• 33:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, like real.

• 33:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, the real shit.

• 33:18Speaker 01

  Yeah. The real shit. That's what I think the, the books that last, they address themselves to the real shit. The books that, you know, that we're talking about thousands of years later.

• 33:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, Socrates is mostly not talking to other philosophers. Socrates is like talking to dudes on the street, you know, and asking them questions and forcing them to evaluate their assumptions and question the things that they've taken for granted, you know, not, not sitting cloistered in a, in a classroom.

• 33:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, he was the antithesis of that, actually. Yeah, exactly.

• 33:59Speaker 00

  So, did you find that your study of philosophy, did it clash with your dad's? Or did you find one to be superior than the other? I'm just curious, like...

• 34:10Speaker 01

  No, his is very much the same. He was, he was interested in the Socratic dialogue. He was interested in asking questions to get a slightly more refined sense through, through a back and forth of what might be closer to the truth. He was interested in the questions that you're talking about. How, how does a man die with dignity? How does a man live with dignity? You know? How does a man live with dignity and or a woman live with dignity in situations that are impossibly undignified? And so this is what he thinks of his philosophy. And my and a step further, like Socrates, my dad would say, it's not credentials that make you a philosopher. It's not that you majored in philosophy. It's how you're thinking.

• 34:53Speaker 01

  Do you define yourself as a philosopher? Are you addressing yourself to these questions? And then you are, and no one else can certify you.

• 34:58Speaker 00

  No, I wondered if if that sort of, to me, earthy understanding of what philosophy actually is, if that clashed with what your, you know, Ivy League professors were then, you know what I mean? Like, I wondered, I wondered how, as you went on and studied things in a less autodidactic way, more in a sort of academic way, I'm just curious how that how your relationship changed.

• 35:21Speaker 01

  Basically, I only studied at undergrad, so I stayed with those kinds of questions mostly. I mean, I started to study Hegel and Heidegger and things like that, and it got really complicated. But I was still really interested in it and still continental in the sense that they're they're not playing language games.

• 35:37Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 35:38Speaker 01

  So, no, it didn't really clash so much. But then, when it came time to decide whether I would pursue a doctorate in philosophy or not, I really was, by that point, aware that I wanted to, you know, ask certain questions, and I wanted to be a writer, but that I wanted to address myself to more than a very, very restricted readership, you know, and it's necessarily restricted if you go the academic route.

• 36:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, right. What is the, sometimes you read these books, and you're like, how many copies could this have possibly sold? And how many copies did you think it was going to sell when you spent seven years of your life, you know, writing this this thing? Like, of course, it's not that it was a waste of time, but it just seems so indulgent. Do you know what I mean?

• 36:30Speaker 01

  Professor, I mean, that was really what influenced my thinking. A very kind and accomplished professor told me exactly that. He said, if you are thinking about going to grad school for philosophy, you need to think very hard about whether you would feel satisfied with 12 people purchasing your book, eight of whom are colleagues.

• 36:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 36:54Speaker 01

  And, you know, he said, you have to really, really, really answer that question for yourself, whether that would satisfy you. And I think, you know, that very quickly, I knew that wouldn't satisfy me. I didn't know that you're not guaranteed to get a readership if you go the other route, but at least you have more of a shot.

• 37:12Speaker 00

  Well, there's a meritocracy to it where it's like, you have to go earn it. You have to go build the audience as opposed to almost being patted on the back for not having the audience. Like, I always, I always love when they criticize, you know, like a Malcolm Gladwell or something for like, popularizing something, as if that's not like, the job of a thinker is to take ideas and make them accessible or usable for people.

• 37:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, and there is an argument and something to be said for people that are talking to other experts so that that kind of, you know, that develops knowledge and then, you know, those books will be consulted and referenced. And I'm all for the production of knowledge, but, you know, I think that's why it's great to have a division of labor. You know, some people got it right, like Malcolm Gladwell and spread ideas and we're, you know, the larger discussion is richer for it.

• 38:03Speaker 00

  So, how have you thought about this with your own kids and reading? I'm assuming your house has plenty of books in it, probably not floor to ceiling, but how have you thought about inculcating the same curiosity and thirst for knowledge in your own kids?

• 38:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, the house is full of books. The, my children see their parents reading and working with books and take it for granted in a way that I'm, you know, I'm very happy about. They think it's normal. But, you know, I read to them, my wife reads to them. And I always am very hesitant. There's this line between constantly encouraging, my son's too young right now, but my daughter is eight and a half, and constantly encouraging her to read and wanting her to be a voracious reader, and also not wanting it to ever seem like work, or I want her to still have that sense of pleasure in play, where it doesn't seem like a chore or like a punishment. And it's tough because when I see her wanting

• 39:04Speaker 01

  to do other things, I get stressed out that maybe I'm not being tough enough. And then, of course, there's the modern, the contemporary problem of...

• 39:14Speaker 01

  She also sees you staring at your phone quite a lot and that becomes something that she thinks is to be emulated. And so there's this discrepancy between do as I say and do as I and don't do as I do, you know. So I'm just, I'm trying my best to just to have books be like air around her, you know. And even with my dad really pushing me to be a reader, I think that's actually what really sealed the deal is just that books were, I don't think a house without books feels right. It feels off to me.

• 39:53Speaker 00

  It's not a home.

• 39:54Speaker 01

  It doesn't feel like a home to me.

• 39:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 39:56Speaker 01

  And so, living with books is something that he kind of gave me through example. And I think that's what I'm really trying to do with my kids. They have tons of books in their rooms. They live with their own books and not just ours.

• 40:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I think that thing you were talking about, that I'm very inspired by that exchange. You were going through a specific thing, you were at a specific point in your life, and your dad was like, this is the thing you should read right now. And then you see that very clear, like, oh, the books are a solution to a problem, right? And, and maybe eight is a little, my oldest is five, so also a little young, but like, I think it's really there. It's learning that books are something you turn to when you're struggling with something, when you're unsure about something, when you wanna understand something. That's really where the deal gets sealed, I feel like.

• 40:51Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And I'm still trying to figure, I have, my children are growing up in France, in Paris, and so they are increasingly bilingual, but I also have the, I'm not completely bilingual, and so I'm navigating trying to, you know, turn them on to books, but in the language that speaks to them. And sometimes I don't have exactly the, the same expertise in the language that they wanna be reading in. And so, you know, there's an extra degree of difficulty with that as well, but I think it ultimately sorts itself out. I think that children, they understand what you value and take seriously. They intuit that. So I'm having faith in that process, but I'm gonna start freaking out in a few years

• 41:35Speaker 01

  if my daughter's in high school and she's not.

• 41:40Speaker 01

  And she's not a self motivated reader by then.

• 41:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, I agree. What is it like in France these days? I imagine it gives you, just as studying the past helps one understand the present a little bit better, I imagine seeing the place that you're from with an ocean and another culture between you helps you see things a bit more dispassionately or clearly.

• 42:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that I've one of the writers that's always meant the most to me as an adult is James Baldwin, and he always made the point that leaving

• 42:17Speaker 00

  From France.

• 42:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, leaving the United States allowed him to look back at it from outside of it and have a perspective that he wouldn't have had if he stayed in Harlem. I like to think that when I'm working well, that's something that I can do, too. I mean, it's certainly something that I think allowed me to, you said dispassionate, and I think that's a very good word for what I think has happened to me. It's allowed me to step outside of the American racial discourse and the black white binary. And sometimes that pisses people off that I don't actually always, as a man of mixed race ancestry, of a man of partial African descent, I don't always respond to all these

• 43:00Speaker 01

  questions with what I think some people expect should be the proper emotional response. I think I have a perspective that I think sometimes really does help me think through some of these questions because I'm not in it the same way. Living my life in Paris, my primary identity isn't being black American, it's being American or it's being foreign. The national difference becomes emphasized and then.

• 43:31Speaker 01

  That's a long way of saying that I think that stepping out of the emotional urgency of some of the debates is healthy, even if some people think it's a way. I think that there is, and I'm sensitive to it, I understand it, some people can mistake that distance for a lack of concern or even a kind of disloyalty. But I don't think it's the same thing at all.

• 44:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think, I think, living somewhere other than where you're from, you know, for me being from California, moving to the south, you just, it forces you, one, I think, to see a different perspective, and then also, you're just not surrounded by people who think exactly the same way you do. And it forces you to understand, I think people think it would make you understand, be more understanding, which it does, but I think it also helps you understand just how wrong those people might be about certain things. Do you know what I mean?

• 44:34Speaker 01

  That's exactly what happened to me. I grew up very much under the American logic of the one-drop rule. A drop of black blood makes a person black because they're not white. This is, this is what, this is the custom of the plantation. This is slavery. I never questioned that. You know, I had a white mom, black dad, black kids I grew up around with, excepted my brother and me as black, the white kids I grew up around with didn't think we were white. So it was a kind of closed case for me in America. But in Europe, in these nations that they have their colonial history of enormous crimes against humanity, but they didn't have slavery within their national borders, and so they

• 45:16Speaker 01

  didn't have the kind of, the real obsession with blood purity. And so they don't actually have, they don't assume the logic of the one-drop rule. So you have to explain it to them. And you hear yourself explaining this logic, and you say, "Wait a minute." I don't even fully, that's not even fully convincing me anymore, you know? And so that actually, I don't know if I would have arrived at some of the conclusions I've arrived at about the absurdity and the harm imposed by, the absurdity of and the harm imposed by the racial categories that we take for granted in America. I don't know if I would have arrived at a rejection of that without having stepped outside of the American racial paradigm.

• 46:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's interesting. It does seem that the discussion in America has become so consumed with race that we almost lose sight of the fact that the whole thing is made up.

• 46:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, we very much do. We end up reinforcing the very categories that we say are made up and are harmful.

• 46:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 46:23Speaker 01

  By reapplying the very same logic and then doubling down on the identities as a way of, you know, as a way of manifesting solidarity, which I certainly understand, but I don't think that you can, you know, cliche, but it's true, you're not gonna, you know, tear apart the, you're not gonna deconstruct the master's house with his tools. You're gonna have to need new language, new methods of thinking, new paradigms. If you want to transcend racial thinking that results in racism, you can't do that by, you're not gonna rehabilitate categories of black and white, which come with a ready-made hierarchy within them. They presuppose a hierarchy. You're not gonna, you're not gonna scrub those categories of that hierarchy.

• 47:06Speaker 01

  You're gonna have to actually do what Franz Fanon and many others called for, which is conceive of a new man. And, you know, that sounds unrealistic and naive and impossible to people, but so long as we keep reproducing the same thought that comes out of the plantation, we're gonna have, we're gonna have this kind of... Unending, very frustrating racial conversation.

• 47:30Speaker 00

  Well, it's like that thing about Keats where Keats said, you know, to to hold contradictory ideas in your head at the same time is like what wisdom really is. It's like this idea that race has historically been incredibly important and shaped almost everything that's ever happened, particularly in America, and at the same time is a bullshit made up thing. And and and so by focusing too much on the former, you end up actually undermining the latter, right? So it's like you have to be aware of everything that happened without reinforcing it and propagating the very thing that you're trying to get rid of.

• 48:10Speaker 01

  But you just did it perfectly. You just you just summed up what I was trying to say in way too many words, much clearer. That's exactly it. And that's actually really one of the main arguments in my in my second book, Self-Portent in Black and White. You have to hold two ideas in your head. You have to have two goals. You have to deal with and oppose the very real racism that exists in the society we are thrust into. And you have to keep this longer term goal of transcending these categories and doing away with them in the future. And people seem to think that if you if you if you are intent on transcending race, you're not paying sufficient attention to racism.

• 48:53Speaker 01

  But it's exactly what you said, you have to have both at the same time.

• 48:57Speaker 00

  Well, you actually know, I'm thinking of another thing. You know, Nietzsche had that line about how those who fight monsters have to be careful that you don't become one. And it's like, clearly, a person who is a racist, like you think about the three men who killed Ahmaud Arbery, right? Clearly, those were men whose entire existence and day to day frame of reference was consumed with thinking about people and the color of their skin, from the Confederate flags in the back of their truck to the racist texts they were sending back to each other. One is angry that his daughter is dating a black person, right? So so clearly, they're like consumed with race. So those people exist. And they have been this terrible driver of misdeeds and injustices throughout history.

• 49:40Speaker 00

  And sadly, they continue to exist. So that's that's this reality. But in fighting those people and arguing with those people and trying to limit their ability to infect and change, you know, our laws, you can end up becoming obsessed with race, which is what I feel like some of the the leading sort of intellectuals on the left have done. They've become that those two people think about race, those two extremes think about race far more than is possibly healthy or conducive to an integrated society.

• 50:13Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Because one of the things they both do, and it's not morally equivalent, but it ends up being effectively the same thing, is they think of individuals in terms of categories, color categories, and the thing that's most important and that can't be transcended is the category. So whether you're coming at that from a racist or an anti-racist angle, it's counterproductive to the integrated, multi-ethnic society we're trying to achieve.

• 50:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, and it doesn't seem like it's good for like, it was interesting you talking about you going to France and this sort of changing how you think about things and James Baldwin. You know, Ta-Nehisi Coates also goes to France, but it doesn't seem like it manages to, I don't know, when I read his writing, especially over the last couple of years, it just doesn't sound like a guy who's, I don't want to say having a good time, because that seems dismissive. But it doesn't sound like a guy whose worldview is able to make any room for progress or improvement or optimism or really any change at all. It almost becomes the same sort of nihilism as the people that he's criticized.

• 51:24Speaker 01

  It's interesting, because he seems to really have a real love of France, and he seemed to have really thrown himself into the study of the language. From what I can tell, he liked living there. But there's an astonishing kind of passage in Between the World and Me where he basically sees a kind of caricature of an upper-class or wealthy Frenchman in a beautiful car, smoking a cigarette, and he imagines him going on to have some type of amazing night and kind of living this kind of privilege that he imagines is equivalent with his identity as a white Frenchman, but it ignores the reality of the extraordinary inequality

• 52:07Speaker 01

  in France and suffering that like the Gilets Jaunes manifested a few years later by showing that just like a huge number of white French people who you couldn't describe by any means as privileged. But I always thought that it was unfortunate that his success with that book became so great that it cut short his stay in France, I believe. So he didn't get a chance to actually spend as much time as maybe would have been what he had intended to and would have allowed him to, you know, reflect in ways that would have seemed more, I guess, like James Baldwin's or Richard Wright's or someone who's...

• 52:48Speaker 01

  he didn't get a chance is what I understood because America really called him back with a huge, with a huge commercial success, and that was undeniable.

• 52:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, you know, talking about some of these like Twitter people that we're talking about, it feels like the sort of... obviously, social justice is incredibly important, and it would make sense to be a warrior for said thing if that were to make a difference. But you sort of read what these people write and you see the things they talk about, and it almost has... it seems like it has consumed who they are and in many ways just sort of sucked the joy out of life. And then you read, you read the sort of cruelty and animus and snark and sarcasm and cynicism in what they write, and I don't know, it just, there's a darkness to it that I've...

• 53:39Speaker 00

  I think that's partly why it doesn't sell itself very well, because it doesn't, it's in nobody's vision of what humanity should be, if that makes sense.

• 53:49Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, it's not persuasive to those who don't already agree, because, I mean, and especially like on Twitter, you see there's a kind of perverse joy in...

• 54:02Speaker 01

  In attacking from a perceived position of righteousness.

• 54:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 54:07Speaker 01

  So for someone who doesn't already start with the presupposition that you are yourself righteous, it looks a lot like bullying and it looks rather unjust, ungenerous. And so, you know, that dynamic is really unfortunate. And I think that one of the real changes that's happened over the past decade with the rise of social media and also the kind of disillusionment that I think happened after the financial crisis and after, you know, the kind of horrific spate of videotaped killings that went viral and Black Lives Matter and all that. I think that one of the things that happened is that all aspects of our lives are now

• 54:51Speaker 01

  heavily politicized and, you know, the election of Trump really exacerbated this tendency that, you know, you can't actually, you know, from a social justice perspective, you can't actually have Thanksgiving with a relative who votes differently than you because that's being like quiet in the face of evil or that's being, you know, that's not being sufficiently an activist. And I think that's really unfortunate because, you know, there are many realms of human life that should actually be off limits to the kind of cantankerous political debate that we're mired in now.

• 55:35Speaker 01

  But one of the problems with the moment we live in now is that everything has become so intensely politicized, all aspects of life, even areas that had been, you know, understood as non-political, become a matter of your identity as a political person. And, you know, in a highly polarized society like ours, that means that there's a limitless opportunity for a kind of really ungenerous interaction with our fellow Americans.

• 56:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I'm reading, I've been reading lately, I read David Halberstam's book, The Children, on the sit-in movement. I've been reading a lot about John Lewis. I just keep coming back to how important and primary the idea of hope was in everything that they did. And that, to me, seems what's most missing. And the change in the civil rights movement from the early civil rights movement, and then as it switches to Black Power, this is where you see the hope sort of leave, and any kind of positive message leave. It becomes more militant and more angry, not that it wasn't very much deserved, but how

• 56:54Speaker 00

  a movement without hope is such a joyless one, and such an uninspiring one, and how it eats at the people at the core of it.

• 57:05Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, and I think that that's actually, that's not just racial politics, that's, that's, that's, there's kind of-

• 57:13Speaker 00

  That's everything.

• 57:13Speaker 01

  ... and anger and cynicism and everything, even food politics, you know, I mean, there's an anger. There's an edge to, to a kind of non-meat-eating activism that-

• 57:26Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 57:26Speaker 01

  ... isn't hopeful for a better world, but is kind of angry at people that still want to eat meat. And I don't think that that's something that is very inspiring.

• 57:33Speaker 00

  Or sustainable. Like, how long can you be angry without becoming a bitter cynical person?

• 57:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, you know, I don't know. I mean, I think that that's gonna have to wear itself out. But it can go on for quite some time, apparently.

• 57:48Speaker 00

  Well, because I was thinking about the Harper's letter that you were a part of. There was a certain amount of hope and sincerity and good faith in it. And then, and then the overwhelming, even though there's almost nothing in it that a person, a reasonable person, would actually disagree with or be angry about, somehow the spin or the presentation of it is that it's like- You know, the most evil thing that's ever written, right? Like, I'm constantly amazed at the ways, the creative ways that people manage to find

• 58:24Speaker 00

  some core negative thread in a very anodyne or positive message.

• 58:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, we were really surprised by that, too, because none of us expected that people would comb through the list of signatories and say, "Well, the text actually does say this, and none of that is objectionable, but if you look at who signed it, this is actually an anti-trans document." And then that was like, that was at first, then it's like, "No, actually, if you look at who signed it, this is actually a Zionist document." Then it was like, "No, if you look at who signed it, this is actually an anti-black document." But it's like, on its face, of course, everything that they say, we agree with. And that was just astonishing to us, because it's like, wait a minute. And, you know, Malcolm Gladwell had one of, he was one of the signatories, and he said, "People are saying that it's problematic that certain people who, you know, whose views

• 59:16Speaker 01

  on other matters I might object to have signed this, but for me, that's like, one of the reasons why I did sign it, is like, here are some principles that we can all..."

• 59:24Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 59:25Speaker 01

  "...uphold."

• 59:28Speaker 00

  And it's weird, too, because it's like, there are anti-trans people out there, and there are, like, there are bad people who believe bad things. But instead of focusing on those people and attacking them where they are, they try to, like, insert that animus into things where it's really not there. It's a weird...

• 59:51Speaker 01

  It really took us by surprise. I mean, I don't think any of us anticipated that, which may have itself been naive, but we just simply thought, "There's multiple people here crafting together a document that multiple people from a variety of perspectives can sign on to, trying to be persuasive and concise, that just says that, you know, from both the left and the right, you know, there's a kind of creeping climate of censoriousness, and that a liberal society is a maximally tolerant one, and that, like, the urge to publicly shame and punish is not healthy."

• 1:00:31Speaker 01

  We didn't see that as necessarily being something that people would comb through. But then also, we didn't, we didn't really fully understand that people would say that there's nothing objectionable in the points that are being made, but actually, the mistake is the timing, as though there's a better and a worse time to say that societies should be maximally tolerant. It was just a very strange reaction.

• 1:00:51Speaker 00

  I think if you look at what, like, you know, the idea, Neil Postman talks about this, that like, sort of whatever the dominant medium of culture is, shapes what people make, how people perform, how they think. And it's like, if we live in a society or through a technological medium that demands, like, interesting takes on things, right, the take of like, this is pretty good, is not an interesting take.

• 1:01:21Speaker 01

  It's not like you've got a ton of, yeah, of dopamine rushing in your head for saying, this is basically anodyne and good.

• 1:01:28Speaker 00

  You have to, you have to work, it's rewarding the person who can most creatively misinterpret or discover the secret evil or, you know, subtext in, in the thing. And, and then that, that of course is what gets amplified, because whether that take is legitimate or profoundly stupid, it's going to provoke the biggest reaction, the sort of even keelness, there's no market for that.

• 1:01:58Speaker 01

  That's exactly right. Yeah, I mean, it's, I mean, it's unfortunate that the the medium of social media and Twitter specifically is so dominant for, for public thinking, because it does incentivize, incentivize certain modes of behavior that I don't think are necessarily in the best interest of public thought. You're absolutely right. And, you know, I don't know how to really escape it, because it's not going anywhere. We're not gonna, we're not gonna put that toothpaste back in the container.

• 1:02:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, but you know, you were talking about this with with Dostoevsky earlier that you you you were struck by this book that presented an idea from a person who almost certainly wouldn't have liked or accepted you, right? Like that that that he managed to do like that through space and time you managed to connect, even though, you know, in another circumstance, wouldn't have managed to connect. And I think that's that's like the tragedy of it is that like it deprives us of the ability of finding common ground, that that rare common ground with people or ideas, like just the amount of like, yeah, you read you read some old southern writer, whether

• 1:03:13Speaker 00

  it's Walker Percy or or Faulkner, and you're like, this person almost certainly was a vehement racist, had all sorts of regressive, ridiculous views on things, but the the work is beautiful, and you're connecting through the work, and that the work is better than they are, right? Like, to me, that's what I take from Jefferson. Jefferson's writing is better than who he is. But if you lose the ability to do that, you you deprive your you deprive yourself of a lot of good work or good ideas.

• 1:03:46Speaker 01

  Oh, you absolutely do. And you also, I think, make life a little bit boring.

• 1:03:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, sure.

• 1:03:54Speaker 01

  You know, it is boring. It's intellectually boring, but it's also just bland to basically reduce questions of interesting, uninteresting, insightful or not insightful, profound or not profound, to good or bad in a kind of, you know, preordained frame of, you know, window that like is very simplistic in its rendering of what is good and bad and lacks a lot of shading. I think that that's just it's detrimental to the kind, you know, there. Life isn't that way.

• 1:04:33Speaker 01

  You know, Jefferson is a perfect example because whether we like it or not, he authored our country. That has to matter in some way. And part of what our country is, is a place that did really horrific things, but it also had mechanisms inside of its structure that continuously sought to correct for things it did wrong. And that has to count for something. We have to be able to hold these contradictory ideas in our head at once and appreciate the entirety of the man and their creation. And I just find this urge to go back and edit and sanitize what came before to be rather childish. That's not adult life.

• 1:05:16Speaker 00

  Well, it's also disempowering, right? It's like you have to accept this person all or nothing.

• 1:05:23Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:05:23Speaker 00

  Right? And it's like, they're dead. Who the fuck cares what they think or what they want? I am going to pick and choose the stuff that I like from here and there and cobble together something that makes sense here in the 21st century. There's a Seneca line that I love. What I love about Seneca is Seneca is the Stoic, but he quotes more, the philosopher he quotes more than any other philosopher in his writings is Epicurus, his rival. And he has this line, he says, "I'll quote a bad author if the line is good."

• 1:05:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:55Speaker 00

  Right? And I like the idea of like, they're dead, they don't get, they don't get to enforce some fundamentalist interpretation of their work. I can take, I can choose to see them however they want, however I want, and take whatever I want from them and wrench it out of context if I want because I'm empowered as the reader and thinker. It's almost infantilizing that we say people can't do that because they're not, they're too fragile.

• 1:06:25Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly. It's thinking of them as being incapable of handling the complexity and difficulty of the person in full. Yeah.

• 1:06:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, and right, it's like, and it's dogmatic, right? The idea that that that they were that you have to take all of it, that the whole thing is is that there's a fundamentalism to that that makes no sense to me either. It's like pick and choose, like cobble, put your own thing together. That's that's what an intellectual journey is, is a cobbling of influences together.

• 1:07:00Speaker 01

  That's exactly it. Yeah, that's exactly it. And that's what's to say one more thing about social media. That's what's so kind of disturbing is that there is the kind of algorithmic incentive for the bubble and for the echoing of what one already agrees with. That doesn't allow you to cobble together these disparate threads because you're not even exposed to them if that's how you're primarily receiving information.

• 1:07:25Speaker 00

  That's totally right. And then and then more alarmingly, on both sides of the spectrum, you have people going like, children shouldn't be allowed to access this, this should be banned, this should be taken away from them.

• 1:07:36Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:07:37Speaker 00

  Which, you know, has has not solved many problems over over human history, you know, like, it's not, it's never worked out that banning things.

• 1:07:47Speaker 01

  Exactly. That's why myself and three other authors this summer wrote an op ed in New York Times against these proposed CRT bans, because that's not, that's not the way that persuasion and disagreement work. You cannot ban out of existence ideas that you deem inappropriate without having really adverse consequences for that.

• 1:08:08Speaker 00

  Well, what I liked about that op ed is that I imagine there was a good amount of political disagreement between the three of you generally.

• 1:08:17Speaker 01

  There was, yeah.

• 1:08:18Speaker 00

  But you were able to come together on this one thing that you agreed with, which is like what we need more of.

• 1:08:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think so. I mean, it definitely did lose some, you know, it lost some of us, some, if not friends, some allies, but I think that, you know, that's an attempt to put your money where your mouth is and to not be strictly tribal.

• 1:08:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, right. No, the more you are locked into an identity or a frame, a worldview, the less optionality you have and the less potential allies you have because you see things in such a binary way.

• 1:09:00Speaker 01

  That's right. Yeah, absolutely.

• 1:09:03Speaker 00

  Well, this was amazing, man. I love your stuff. I love the letter and I forgot about that op ed, but I remember reading it. I'm a big David French fan. I've had him on my podcast before, too. He's such a nice guy. Again, someone totally different worldview than mine, totally different, but you can't help but appreciate someone who is at least thinking seriously about the things that they think.

• 1:09:29Speaker 01

  Exactly, and willing to refine his thinking and change his mind, which I think is actually, that's something you can get penalized for, because people will pull out the receipts and show that you're contradicting yourself. But I think that we should all hope that we can evolve our thinking on questions that are complicated as new information emerges, as we see new arguments. I mean, that's what I want out of an intellectual that I look to as an example, and that's what I want as a model for my own kind of behavior, too.

• 1:10:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's a line in one of Cicero's dialogues where someone quotes something that he said before and says, "You're contradicting himself." And he goes, "Yeah, I'm a free agent." And you should be able to change your mind, and you should be able to look at each individual issue anew. And there's a certain, what did Emerson say about consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. Like, you should be able to change. It's a bad sign if you can't.

• 1:10:34Speaker 01

  Yep. Yeah, that's a line. Is it Emerson? My mother used to always tell that to me, and it always made me feel better.

• 1:10:42Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:10:43Speaker 01

  And then I used it to get out of being reprimanded, you know?

• 1:10:48Speaker 00

  There you go. Well, I really appreciate it, man, and keep up the great work.

• 1:10:53Speaker 01

  Thank you so much, Ryan. You, too. Keep it up. I really enjoy your podcast. Thanks for having me on.

• 1:10:59Speaker 00

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• 1:11:43Speaker 00

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