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.

• 54:54Speaker 0

  The election of Trump really um exacerbated this tendency that you know you can't actually, you know, from a social justice perspective, you can't actually have Thanksgiving with um with a relative who votes differently than you because that's being like uh quiet in the face of evil.

• 8:20Speaker 1

  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 0

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

• 9:02Speaker 1

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

• 9:13Speaker 0

  No, I he there he certainly surrounded and tried to inculcate, but then um in addition to that, he uh made us read. And uh he was very um he was he wasn't just a strict authoritarian though. He um he really tried to make us want to read. And the way that he saw to do that uh at least at first was to to bribe us and to you know to 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, uh, and he paid us handsomely for our age to sit and and and study and to read Aesop's fables when we were really young, and then to get on to more sophisticated things later. Um, and then at some point um, you know, I realized that uh you know it was something that I wanted to do on my own, and it became a part of me.

• 10:07Speaker 0

  And I don't

• 10:07Speaker 1

  really know

• 10:08Speaker 0

  when that,

• 10:09Speaker 1

  you know, the line from him

• 10:10Speaker 0

  kind of forcing it or encouraging it and and and me starting to be self-motivated. I don't know where that line was or what age that happened.

• 10:21Speaker 1

  Yeah, I think the 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 and the entire course of your future can be changed. The hard thing is like, how do you 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, and then we wonder why they don't buy the argument.

• 11:08Speaker 0

  Yeah, it's it's it's tough to get people. It's a really good way of putting it how you did it. It's tough to get people to see the value of something that they haven't experienced yet and can't necessarily into it 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. But yes.

• 11:40Speaker 1

  And and that, you know, war in 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 the 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 2

  And

• 12:10Speaker 1

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

• 12:25Speaker 0

  Well, the type of school that I went to, um, 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 the it was exciting to us as 16-year-olds. But

• 12:40Speaker 1

  by and large, we were not

• 12:41Speaker 0

  being assigned um 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. Um but yeah, but my father was very uh 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 that we've been having. I know you're interested in how does a person live a good life or what does 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.

• 13:27Speaker 0

  So my dad always told me that books were actually conversation partners, and that um 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.

• 13:42Speaker 1

  Yes. Yeah, there's a there's a line in the history of stoicism. Uh Zeno goes to the oracle of Delphi as a young man, and he's told that um 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 the oracle was speaking of reading, that books are how we talk to the dead, right? That it's this sort of portal into the past. But uh, yeah, so so many of the books we we get assigned, we have no real conception of why we're reading them. We have no conception of 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 you're just told

• 14:22Speaker 0

  that this is important and this is good. Yeah, but you're not told, you're not told why. Um 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. It's it's it's a 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 uh gratifying flavors are are things that you uh reject um viscerally as a child because you have to go through many steps to develop the palate. I think reading is that way too.

• 14:25Speaker 1

  Back in the ancient world, philosophy wasn't abstract, it wasn't theoretical. It was designed to help you live the best life. In Stoicism 101, we have a two-week course that will introduce you into philosophy that will make you a better person. There's interviews with me, daily lessons that will challenge you to be better, give you new ways of thinking, tackling the problems of life, becoming your best self. Has Marx really says you could be good today, but instead you choose tomorrow, Epictetus, how much longer are you gonna wait to demand the best for yourself? Check out our new course, Stoicism 101 at Daily Stoke.com/slash 101. Although what one of the things I found that's made me a little bit less of like I'm I'm like a physical book snob.

• 15:11Speaker 1

  Like I only like physical books. That's what changed. So I it it's so intensely about the 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 the popularity of Audible. And then when you talk to them, what you realized is they thought they hated books. What they really didn't like was reading, right? And and realizing that people consume information in radically different ways, and that from a literary perspective, we've been sort of not including a huge portion of the population that, and then I found that you know they got sucked into audio books, and now actually they do read physical books also, but but just realizing like the 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.

• 16:16Speaker 1

  What really matters is the information, not not so much the specific means, I feel like.

• 16:22Speaker 0

  Yeah, on an intellectual level, I I I tend to agree with you, and I've read that actually the brain processes audio um the same as as reading with narrative, especially, I think. But I'm like uh words on the page guy and and a sentence guy where I see a sentence that really is well crafted, I I 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 audio book. I've had people write to me as an author. I've had people write to me and say that you know they were really happy to have my audio book and that the fact that it was read by the author made it even more uh of a of a rich audio experience.

• 17:11Speaker 0

  And I can understand that, but I've I've never consumed 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 audio book, right?

• 17:25Speaker 1

  Yeah, totally. I I I can do podcasts. I can't really do audio books. Like to me, I need to be engaged with the material. I can't, I I shouldn't be doing two things at one time. Like I shouldn't be working out and that's the risk. Yeah. Yeah.

• 17:39Speaker 0

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

• 17:44Speaker 1

  Yeah.

• 17:45Speaker 0

  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 1

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

• 18:15Speaker 0

  Yeah, I'm I'm becoming more and more aware that I have to make those uh those I have to erect those barriers. Otherwise, it's you know, even as somebody who, you know, I make my bread um and my whole life is about reading and writing, and it's it's getting it's getting hard. It's it's 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 1

  Well, I I wanted to talk to you about a bunch of stuff uh pertaining to this, but jumping ahead, because I think it's related to what you were just saying. I feel like so much many of the sort of class of people that we know, the sort of knowledge worker, uh public intellectual writer, journalist crowd. I feel like so many of their brains have been scrambled 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 social media that that you're there's no way you're doing the work to generate the certainty that you are projecting with the things that you are writing.

• 19:48Speaker 0

  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. There's always

• 20:20Speaker 1

  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 0

  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 reflex reflective uh instincts in you. Um, 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 that I find admirable.

• 21:15Speaker 0

  It's very, very difficult though. Um actually like uh Zadie Smith uh 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 as 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. Um otherwise you face the prospect of disappearing. But of course, that's objectively not true.

• 21:46Speaker 1

  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. Uh who to 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 0

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

• 22:53Speaker 1

  selling the books, you have to do it. So

• 22:56Speaker 0

  how are you doing that? You're doing that in social media. Then if you're a journalist or you write for magazines, uh essayist or whatever, you know, uh columnist, uh, 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. Uh and if you mess up, it's on you. Uh 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 to do that stuff on their own.

• 23:42Speaker 1

  Yeah, and it 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 it 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 sub-tweeting 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 there's a sad patheticness to it also, you know what I mean?

• 24:14Speaker 0

  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 at the Twitter lunchroom, and there are the kind of they're the people that sit at the heads of these tables and they direct the conversation and then they're 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.

• 24:41Speaker 1

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

• 24:51Speaker 0

  So um my dad, when the one of the I mean, this is probably a little bit cliche, or 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 um peer pressure. My dad gave us uh Shirley Jackson's The Lottery, this short story about uh this public stoning, you know, that the whole town participates in. Um, that was a profoundly impactful and moving reading experience for both uh my friend and I. And it made an enormous impact on me and how I thought of you know what it takes to go like to to be strong enough to not participate in whatever direction the group is um influencing you to move in.

• 25:41Speaker 0

  Um 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 uh Xeraxed printout to to think through and underline and and then talk about later when we were done. Um for my dad, like enormously impactful um books for him were like Maimonides' Guide for the Perplexed, which I have to admit, like I I've I used to talk to him about my monities and stuff, but I never did actually read um a guide to the complex. Um the 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 the book that it destroyed my faith. I had a I had always been in Catholic school and my parents, my mom's a Protestant and my my father's an atheist, but they just let faith be a private matter that my brother and I could decide for ourselves.

• 26:38Speaker 0

  And I kind of just loosely identified as a Christian, and then I read the Brothers Karamatsaff, and it was just an astonishing reading experience for me. And it kind of shattered my faith. Uh 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 um powerfully moved by the vocation of art that he put the strongest and most compelling arguments in the voice of Ivan Karamatsoff, who's the atheist. Uh and so it just made me think about life and art and uh Um and and the fact that this guy who was kind of racist and anti-Semitic uh and lived in another century in in Russia and thought that Russia was distinct from Europe, um, nonetheless seemed to understand who I was on the inside more than many of the people I grew up around.

• 27:31Speaker 0

  And so the brothers Karamatsov was like this link to the to the world for me. And then I studied philosophy, and so um some of the most important um books that in my father's life were like Plato's dialogues and 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 1

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

• 28:10Speaker 0

  Self-taught. Um my father was born in 1937 in Galveston in uh Longview, Texas, and then raised in Galveston, Texas, um, under segregation, and no one in his family had uh an education beyond high school, and he didn't have a father and was raised mostly by an aunt and uncle. Um and they kind of discouraged him from being bookish because they thought that actually, you know, um a black kid being overly bookish could get himself in in trouble um 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 uh he came across um a copy of Will Durant's The Story of Philosophy and the neighbor had bought the house um from there were um uh 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.

• 29:04Speaker 0

  But my father um just like paging through that book, there was an illustration of Socrates, 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

• 29:18Speaker 1

  a book, and

• 29:19Speaker 0

  you know, that led him to wanting to know what philosophy was, and he just accumulated from that age uh as many books as he could and just read on his own and um just told himself, I guess, that if he were to transcend his circumstances, uh the only way that that was going to realistically come about was if he were to um develop his mind. And I always wonder, like, you know, I was pushed by my father. I'm I'm amazed by the people that in some sense um, you know, they liberate themselves from the matrix. Sure. 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.

• 30:07Speaker 0

  Um and and he had that inner kind of voice telling him that there was more. And this this connection to philosophy, it allowed him to realize that whatever he was being told about his worth as a second-class citizen in the segregated South in the United States of America, um, 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. Um and I don't know why that struck him, and it didn't strike other people that uh he was related to.

• 30:46Speaker 1

  Well, it's it's interesting that there's kind of like there's the 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 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 to apply these ideas to everyday life, apply philosophy to who you are as a person.

• 31:33Speaker 0

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

• 32:24Speaker 0

  Uh and I I'm sure that is a way you approach it too. I mean, if you're if you're um thinking about stoicism and you know, thinking about how to to cope with life's hardships and not allow them to derail you.

• 32:38Speaker 1

  Yeah, it's like, what am I supposed to do with this information? Not like how can we have uh a very exclusive uh you know, uh difficult to follow, but 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 how do what if reality is a hallucination? All these things, I guess, are are intellectually interesting, but like what am I supposed to do with it? You know, the next time I'm stuck in traffic and uh I get frustrated, or somebody calls me a horrible name, or somebody I love dies, right? Like real Yeah, the real shit.

• 33:18Speaker 0

  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. Um

• 33:35Speaker 1

  Socrates is mostly not talking to other philosophers. Socrates is like talking to 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. Uh you know, not sitting cloistered in uh in a classroom.

• 33:56Speaker 0

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

• 33:58Speaker 1

  exactly. 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 No, his

• 34:10Speaker 0

  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 um sense through through a back and forth of of what might be closer to the truth. Um 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? Um how does a man live with dignity and or women live with dignity in situations that are um impossibly uh undignified. And so this is what he thinks of his philosophy. And my and a step further, like Socrates, my dad would say it it's not credentials that make you a philosopher. It's not that you majored in philosophy, it's um how you're thinking. It's it 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 1

  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 auto-didactic way, more in a sort of academic way. I I'm just curious how that how you relationship change.

• 35:22Speaker 0

  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, you know. So um no, I it didn't really clash so much. But then when it came time to decide whether I would pursue um 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 um uh restricted readership, you know, that's necessarily restrict restricted if you go the academic route.

• 36:10Speaker 1

  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 gonna sell when you spent seven years of your life, you know, writing this thing? Like uh of course it's not that it was a waste of time, but it just seems so indulgent. Do you know what I mean? Well,

• 36:30Speaker 0

  the 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 1

  Yeah, you know.

• 36:53Speaker 0

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

• 37:12Speaker 1

  When there's a 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 To almost being

• 37:21Speaker 0

  patted on the back for not having the audience. Like I always love when they

• 37:25Speaker 1

  criticize, you know, like

• 37:26Speaker 0

  a

• 37:26Speaker 1

  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 0

  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 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 the larger discussion is is richer for it.

• 38:03Speaker 1

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

• 38:21Speaker 0

  Yeah, I mean, the 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

• 38:33Speaker 1

  you know, uh

• 38:34Speaker 0

  I

• 38:34Speaker 1

  read to

• 38:35Speaker 0

  them, my wife reads to them. Um, 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, um, where it doesn't seem like a chore or like a punishment. Um and it's tough because when I see her wanting to do other things, I get stressed out that maybe I'm not being tough enough. Uh and then of course there's the the modern the contemporary problem of she also sees you staring at your phone quite a lot, and that becomes something that she thinks is to be emulated.

• 39:25Speaker 0

  Uh and and so there's this discrepancy between do as I say and do as I and don't do as I do, you know. Um I I'm just I'm trying my best to just have books be like air around her, you know. Um 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 um books were I don't think a house without books uh feels right. It feels off to me. It doesn't feel like a home to me.

• 39:55Speaker 1

  Yeah.

• 39:56Speaker 0

  Um and so living with books is something that uh 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 they live with their own books and not just ours.

• 40:11Speaker 1

  Yeah, and I think that thing you were talking about, like that I'm I'm very uh 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? Yeah, 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 want to understand something. That's really where the deal gets sealed, I feel like.

• 40:51Speaker 0

  Absolutely. Um, and I'm still trying to figure out I I have my my children are growing up in 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, um turn them on to books, but in the language that speaks to them, and sometimes I don't have exactly the same expertise in the language that they want to be reading in. Uh, 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 um they understand what you value and take seriously. They intuit that. Um so I'm having faith in that process, but I'm gonna start freaking out in a few years if if my daughter's in high school and she's not uh and she's not a self-motivated reader by then.

• 41:42Speaker 1

  Yeah, I agree. What is it like in in France these days? I imagine it gives you uh just as you know, studying the past helps uh 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 or clearly.

• 42:06Speaker 0

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

• 42:13Speaker 1

  um he always you know made the point that uh leaving France

• 42:19Speaker 0

  leaving the United States allowed him to look back at it uh 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 uh well, that's something that I can do too. I mean, it it's 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 uh 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 as a man of um of uh of mixed race ancestry of a man of uh of of partial African descent, I don't always respond to all these questions with what I think some people um expect should be the this the proper emotional response.

• 43:12Speaker 0

  I think I have a uh 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. I living my life in in Paris, my primary identity isn't being black American, it's uh it's being American or it's being foreign, uh the national difference becomes becomes emphasized, and then 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 I think that there is, and I'm sensitive to it. Um I understand it. Some people can mistake that distance for um uh lack of concern or or or even a kind of um disloyalty, but I don't think it's the same thing at all.

• 44:01Speaker 1

  Yeah, I think I think living somewhere other than where you're from, you know, for me being from California, moving to to the South, you you just it 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 uh just how wrong those people might be about certain things. Do you know what I mean?

• 44:34Speaker 0

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

• 45:21Speaker 0

  And so they don't actually have a um, 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 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 um the absurdity and the um the harm imposed by uh the absurdity of and the harmon post 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 1

  Yeah, that's interesting. It it does 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.

• 46:16Speaker 0

  Yeah, we very much do. We end up reinforcing the very categories that we say are made up and are harmful 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 l, you know, cliche, but it's true, you're not gonna, you know, tear apart the math, 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 uh thinking that results in racism, you can't do that by um you're not gonna rehabilitate the categories of black and white, which come with a uh ready-made hierarchy within them. They they they presuppose uh hierarchy.

• 47:02Speaker 0

  You're not gonna, you're not gonna scrub those categories of that hierarchy. You're gonna have to actually um do what France Manon uh and and many others called for, which is conceive of a new man. And you know, that sounds unrealistic and and naive and impossible to people, but so long as we keep reading. Reproducing the same thought that comes out of the plantation, we're gonna have uh we're gonna have this kind of unending, um, very frustrating uh racial conversation. Well, it's like

• 47:31Speaker 1

  that thing about Keats uh where Keith said, you know, to hold contradictory ideas in your head at the same time is like what 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 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 0

  But you just did it perfectly. You just you just summed up what I was trying to say in way too many words, uh, much clearer. That's exactly it. And that's actually really um one of the main arguments in my in my second book, self-porting in black and white. Um you have to hold two ideas in your head. You have to have two goals. You have to um deal with and oppose the very real racism that exists in a society we uh are thrust into, and you have to keep this longer uh term um goal of transcending these categories and and doing away with them uh 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. But it's exactly what you said. You have to have both at the same time.

• 48:57Speaker 1

  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 uh don't become one. And it's like clearly a person who is a racist. Like you think about the the three men who killed uh Armand Aubrey, right? Yeah. 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 uh uh texts they were sending back to each other that one is angry that his daughter is dating a black person, right? 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.

• 49:43Speaker 1

  And and sadly they they continue to exist. So that's that's this reality. But in fighting those people and arguing with those people and trying to uh 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 those two people think about race, the on those two extremes think about race far more than is possibly healthy or conducive to an integrated society.

• 50:14Speaker 0

  Absolutely, because one of the things they both do, and it's not morally equivalent, but it ends up being um effectively the same thing is they think of individuals in terms of categories, color categories, and and the 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 antiracist angle, it's counterproductive to the integrated multi-ethnic society we're trying to achieve.

• 50:42Speaker 1

  Yeah, and it's it doesn't seem like it's good for like it was interesting. You talking about you going to France and and and this sort of changing how you think about things and James Baldwin, you know, Tanahasy Coates also goes to France, but it doesn't seem like it manages to I don't know. When I read his writing, especially uh over the last couple 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 to her. But it it doesn't sound like a guy whose worldview is able to make uh any room for progress or uh improvement or optimism or or really any change at all. It almost becomes the same sort of nihilism as the people that he's uh criticizing.

• 51:25Speaker 0

  It's interesting because he seemed to really have a real love of France, and he seemed to have really thrown himself into the study of the language, and from what I can tell he liked living there. Um but there's an astonishing kind of passage in between the world and me where he basically sees um a kind of caricature of an upper class or wealthy um Frenchman in a 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 um equivalent with his identity as a white Frenchman, but it ignores the reality of the extraordinary inequality in France and suffering that like the Gilet Jaune manifested a few years later by showing that it's just like a huge number of white French people who you couldn't describe by any means as privileged.

• 52:19Speaker 0

  But I always thought that it was unfortunate that uh his success with that book became so great that it cut short his stay in France, I believe. Um so he didn't get a chance to actually spend as much time as maybe would have been um what he had intended to and would have allowed him to um you know uh reflect in ways that uh that would have seemed more um I guess uh like James Baldwin's or Richard Wright's or someone who's he didn't get a chance, is what I what I understood because America really called him back with a huge with a huge commercial success, and and that was undeniable.

• 52:59Speaker 1

  Yeah, you know, talking about some of these like Twitter people that we're talking about, it it feels like the the sort of obviously social justice is incredibly important, and it would make sense to be a warrior for said thing, uh if if that were to make a difference. Um, but you you you sort of read what these people write and you see the things they talk about, and it it almost has it it seems like it is 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 and it, I don't know, it just there's there's a darkness to it that I've uh I think that's partly why it doesn't uh sell itself very well, because it doesn't it it's it's in nobody's vision of what what humanity should be, if that makes sense.

• 53:49Speaker 0

  Well, yeah, it's it's not persuasive to to those who don't always already agree because I mean, and especially like on Twitter, you see there's a kind of perverse joy in um uh in in attacking from a perceived position of righteousness. So you for someone who doesn't already start with the presupposition that you are uh yourself righteous, it looks a lot like bullying and it looks rather unjust, ungenerous. Uh and so, you know, that that dynamic is really unfortunate. And I think that one of the real changes that's happened over the past decade uh with the rise of social media and also the kind of disillusionment that I think happened after the financial crisis and after um, you know the kind of horrific spate of uh videotaped killings that went viral and the Black Lives Matter and all that.

• 54:45Speaker 0

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

• 56:10Speaker 1

  Yeah, and I reading uh I've been reading lately, I've read David Halberstem'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 uh primary the idea of hope was in everything that they did. And that to me seems what's most missing uh and and the the change in the civil rights movement from the the early civil rights movement, and then as it switches to black power, this is where you see the 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 a movement without hope is such a joyless one and such an uninspiring one, and how it it eats at the people at the core of it.

• 57:05Speaker 0

  Well, yeah, and I think that that's actually that's not just uh racial politics. That's uh that's that's there's kind of an anger and cynicism in everything, even food politics, you know. I mean, there's an anger, um, there's an edge to a kind of um non-mediating activism that isn't hopeful for a better world, but is kind of angry at people that still want to eat meet. And I don't think that that's something that is very inspiring. Um or sustainable.

• 57:35Speaker 1

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

• 57:40Speaker 0

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

• 57:49Speaker 1

  Well, because I was thinking about the the Harper's letter that you were uh a part of. Um there was a certain amount. Hope and sincerity and uh 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 some core negative uh thread in a very anodyne or or or positive message.

• 58:34Speaker 0

  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. Or if 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 I was like, no, if you look at who signed it, this is actually an anti-black document. But it's like on his face, of course, everything that they say uh 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 the, he was one of the signatories, and he said, people are saying that it's problematic that certain people who you know whose views on other matters I uh might object to have signed this. But for me, that's like one of the reasons why I did sign it.

• 59:21Speaker 0

  Is like, here are some principles that we can all

• 59:25Speaker 1

  uphold. Well, 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. Right. But instead of focusing on those people and attacking them where they are, they try to like uh insert that animus into things where it's it's really not there. It's a it's a

• 59:50Speaker 0

  weird it really took us by surprise. I I mean I I don't think any of us anticipated that uh, which may have itself been naive, but we 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. Um that just says that you know, uh from both the left and the right, you know, um there's a kind of creeping climate of censoriousness and that a liberal uh society is a maximally tolerant one. Uh and that and that like the the urge to publicly shame and punish is not healthy. Um 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 the mistake is the timing, as though there's a better and a worse time to say that societies should be maximally tolerant.

• 1:00:49Speaker 0

  It was just a very strange reaction.

• 1:00:52Speaker 1

  I think if you look at what like uh you know, the idea Neil Postman talks about this that like sort of whatever the dominant uh medium of culture is uh 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? There the take of like this is pretty good is not an interesting take. That's true. It's not because

• 1:01:22Speaker 0

  you've got a ton of uh yeah, uh uh of dopamine rushing in your head for saying this is basically anodyne and good.

• 1:01:29Speaker 1

  You have to you have to work it it it's rewarding the person who can most creatively misinterpret or discover the secret evil or you know, subtext in in the thing. And uh 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 peeledness, there's no market for that.

• 1:01:58Speaker 0

  That's exactly right. Yeah, I mean, it's I mean, it's it's unfortunate that the the medium of social media and Twitter specifically is so um dominant for for public thinking, because it it does incentivize incentivize certain modes of behavior that I don't think are necessarily um in the best interest of public thought. Uh 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 1

  Yeah, but you know, you were talking about this uh with uh with Dostoyevsky earlier, that you 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

• 1:02:49Speaker 2

  that

• 1:02:50Speaker 1

  he managed to do like that that through space and time you manage to connect, even though you know it 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 some old Southern writer, whether it's Walker Percy or or Faulkner, and you're like, this person almost certainly was a vehement racist, almost had all sorts of uh uh 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.

• 1:03:36Speaker 1

  Jefferson's writing is better than who he is. Uh 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.

• 1:03:47Speaker 0

  Oh, you absolutely do. And you also, I think, make life a little bit boring. Yeah. Um, you know, it it is boring. It's intellectually boring, but it's also just bland uh to basically reduce questions of interesting, uninteresting, insightful or not insightful, profound or not profound, to good or bad in a kind of uh you know, preordained the frame of uh, you know, the 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 isn't that way. Uh you know, Jefferson is a perfect example because whether we like it or not, he authored our country.

• 1:04:36Speaker 0

  That has to matter in some way, even and part of what our country is is a place that did really horrific things, but it also had mechanisms inside of its um structure that continuously sought to correct for for things it did wrong, and that has to count for something. We have to be able to hold these contradictory um ideas in our head at once and and appreciate the the entirety of uh of the 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.

• 1:05:17Speaker 1

  Well, it's also disempowering, right? It's like you have to accept this person all or nothing, right? 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. Um, there's a Seneca line that I love. What I what I love about Seneca is so Seneca's the stoic, but he quotes more the philosopher he quotes more than any other philosopher in his writings is epicurus, his his rival. And he has this line that says, he says, I'll quote a bad author if the line is good, right? And I like the idea of like I don't they're dead. They don't get that they don't get to enforce some fundamentalist uh interpretation of their work.

• 1:06:06Speaker 1

  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

• 1:06:25Speaker 0

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

• 1:06:35Speaker 1

  Yeah. And uh right. It it's like and it's it's dogmatic, right? The idea that that they were that you have to take all of it, that the whole thing is there. It 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 that's that's what uh an intellectual journey is is a cobbling of influences together.

• 1:07:01Speaker 0

  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 uh is that there's the kind of um algorithmic incentive for the bubble and for the echoing of uh uh of what one already agrees with um 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.

• 1:07:26Speaker 1

  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. Uh 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 uh I mean that's

• 1:07:48Speaker 0

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

• 1:08:09Speaker 1

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

• 1:08:25Speaker 0

  Yeah, I think so. I mean, it definitely did lose some, you know, it is it lost uh some of us, some some uh, 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.

• 1:08:43Speaker 1

  Yeah, right. No, uh the the more you are locked into an identity uh or a frame of 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 0

  That's right, yeah, absolutely.

• 1:09:02Speaker 1

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

• 1:09:29Speaker 0

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

• 1:10:05Speaker 1

  Yeah, there's a line in one of Cicero's dialogues where someone quotes something that he said before and says you're contradicting themselves, and he goes, Um, yeah, I'm a free agent.

• 1:10:15Speaker 0

  Uh

• 1:10:15Speaker 1

  and and that you should be like you should be able to change your mind, and you should be able to look at each individual uh each individual issue anew. And and there's a certain uh what did Emerson say about uh consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, you know, like you should be able to change. It's a bad sign if you can't.

• 1:10:35Speaker 0

  Yep. Yeah, no, I I that that's a line. Is it Emerson? My mother used to always uh tell that to me, and it always made me feel better. Yes. And then I used it to get out of uh out of being reprimanded, you know.

• 1:11:50Speaker 1

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

• 1:11:55Speaker 0

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

• 1:11:59Speaker 2

  me on

• 1:12:09Speaker 2

  the