Modern Wisdom - #1012 - Alex O’Connor & Joe Folley - Is Being Smart Worth the Depression?

Episode Date: October 27, 2025

Alex O’Connor is a YouTuber, writer and a podcaster. Joe Folley is a philosopher, writer, and host of the Unsolicited Advice YouTube channel. Philosophy has spent thousands of years trying to teach us how to live well. But the deeper you go, the darker it gets. So what’s the point? What can we take from all that heaviness—and how do we find beauty in the darkness to make our own lives better? Expect to learn if philosophy always meant to be practically applicable, or if that is that a modern reinterpretation, which ancient schools have been most unfairly ignored, which branches of philosophy should be jettisoned entirely, why everyone hate philosophy of mind, the differences between academic and practical philosophy, the darkest philosophies you’ve probably never heard of, why modern discourse always feel ironic and why no one speaks earnestly any more and much more… Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Get Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D, and more from AG1 at https://ag1.info/modernwisdom Get $100 off the best bloodwork analysis in America at https://functionhealth.com/modernwisdom Get 35% off your first subscription on the best supplements from Momentous at https://livemomentous.com/modernwisdom Get a Free Sample Pack of LMNT’s most popular flavours with your first purchase at https://drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom Timestamps: (0:00) Can Philosophy Actually Help You Live Better? (6:04) Is Modern Philosophy Trying to Be Too Intellectual? (11:44) What Do Philosophers Often Overlook? (22:35) Why Philosophy Can Feel a Bit Depressing (33:41) Is Life Worth Living? (44:47) Why Context Matters in Understanding Philosophers (54:24) Why is There Growing Interest in Panpsychism? (01:08:40) Is Consciousness Unified? (01:23:59) Emotivism 101: The Morality of Emotion (01:29:03) Is Morality Just Vibes? (01:40:59) Emotivism and the Incest Question (01:49:05) Do Philosophy Influencers Have a Moral Duty? Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: https://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: https://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: https://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Was philosophy always meant to be practically applicable, or is that some modern reinterpretation? Ah, that's a joke question. Oh, well, I mean, I suppose one of the differences between, like, very broadly speaking, between something like ancient Greek philosophy, say, and the way that we conceive of philosophy today is that, you know, philosophy today is largely thought of in terms of different fields. You've got your kind of epistemologists who discuss questions like, you know, what is knowledge and, you know, more importantly, how do we attain knowledge? What are the kinds of systems and processes that produce reliable knowledge, that kind of stuff? And then there are kind of ethicists talking about, you know, what is the good life, you know, vitally important question. Also, you know, what are the right things to do?

And then you've got kind of logicians talking about, you do a lot of proofs and try to often model ordinary things using formal mathematical or at least semi-mathematical systems. You've got philosophers of language, philosophy science. But suddenly, in the ancient world, these weren't as differentiated. certainly as they are today. And so, you know, Aristotle wrote different treatises on these different topics. But even in his philosophy, everything is so interlinked. And if you go, you know, back before Aristotle, it's very, very hard to separate you. So, for example, the Stoics, although, you know, in kind of popular discourse around Stoicism today, we talk a lot about Stoic ethics.

The Stoics thought that their ethics fell out of their metaphysics and their logic, which was their word for what we would call today things like logic and epistemology. And so I think that's, that's one major difference. In terms of practicality, I mean, yeah, a lot of ancient philosophy is incredibly practical. You know, these are, especially, you know, one of the paramount questions that are asked, that's asked by almost every ancient philosopher is, you know, how to live a good life. The first philosopher, like, in, like, received wisdom is Thaley's, he's kind of ancient Greek philosopher. But before that, there are lots of kind of, we have scraps of, like, ancient Egyptian philosophies and things like that. And they're often concerned with, you know, what's the good life?

How do we live it? Zerai, I think philosophy is eminently practical. I also think, you know, maybe this is just my own bias showing. I think that today philosophy at its best is often very practical. How has something gone awry? Is there some sense that modern philosophy, a lot of that, is kind of like string theory and physics, where there's not much progress being made in quite the same way for people's practical applicability? We're trying to do the ethics without the metaphysics.

As Joe just said, like, a lot of these ancient philosophers in particular are remembered for their ethical teachings. The Stoics, you might know what a Stoic is. It's someone who sort of is resistant to suffering and pleasure and is sort of neutral. But why? Because of their metaphysics, because of what they believed was true about the world. Same thing with Epicureanism. People might know that Epicurus, for example, thought that you shouldn't worry about death. You know, like death is nothing to us. He said literally nothing to us because when you're alive, it's not with you. And when it's with you, there's no you. That stems out of the Epicurean tradition of materialism. They were staunch materialists. They believe that everything is.

including the human soul, was made up of matter, so that when that goes, there's nothing left. And it seems like they really thought that these metaphysical commitments were what led to these ethical commitments. And so if all you have are the ethical commitments now, that there isn't really a way to make progress, because ethics is kind of conjectural if it doesn't have a metaphysical grounding. It's just like, you know, what feels like it works, what feels like it vibes with your worldview. I mean, I think a lot of people approach these philosophies now, they'll look at stoicism and Epicureanism, utilitarianism, emotivism, and they'll sort of think, which of these do I like? Yeah, that makes sense to me, and they

sort of adopt it. So all that's really being done by reading these philosophies is some ancient guy elucidating something you already kind of believe. So you're not going to make much progress in terms of actually developing your thought unless you believe something new that's true about the world that will cause you to commit to something else, you know what I mean? So it's like, you know, if you ask someone what Stoicism is on the street or indeed in a podcast, they would list, you know, 50 different things before they told you anything about their metaphysical claims, about what they actually thought a world was made of. It all be about, you know, how to live your life. In Stoics for, you know, the kind of one of the reasons why Stoics are so big on acceptance and accepting things, things that happen to you and accepting the kind of state of the world in kind of very, very broad strokes is that the Stoics. is that the Stoics were big believers in what today we would recognize,

something like divine providence. You know, they had a real kind of teleological view of reality. So they thought that the universe was inherently rational, inherently reasonable. And as a result, this, whatever is happening is in accordance with the rational will of the universe. So it's kind of, you know, it's sort of a, you know, in modern Stoicism, people tend not to have that assumption baked in. But this is a huge part of ancient Stoicism. And it's actually interesting to the kind of we see, you know, we're talking about kind of how things get stripped away over time, even in the difference between Greek and Roman stoicism. You already see less emphasis placed on stoic logic, for example. You know, Chrysippus, I have no idea if I'm pronounced that correctly. But he wrote, you know, reams and reams of parchment on stoic logical systems. And, you know, you don't, you don't even see that in my favorite Stoic philosopher, Epictetus, you know, he's not that concern with Stoic logic. And I think, you know, he's the kind of the goat of Roman stoicism. And, you know, so it's not like,

it's not like a necessarily just a modern thing of this, of stripping back aspects of philosophies. But of course, you know, there is an argument to be made that this is part of what development consists of. Although I do think it's sometimes worth going back and going back and revisiting some of the assumptions that maybe we ought to reconsider. Is it fair to say, well, I guess at least for me, good avatar for the lay person. Uh-huh. When you think about development, you think about sort of refining over time, about becoming sort of more accurate, more detailed,

seeing things with a higher resolution. How fair is it to say that modern philosophy is more sort of concerned with intellectual masturbation than it is teaching people fundamental questions about themselves and the world? Very fair indeed. I think that philosophy doesn't develop in the way that something like physics does. The idea with something like physics is that you're born into a world with a particular understanding.

You develop that understanding. You learn new things. You maybe dig a bit further down into an atom and you find out what it's made of. And then you have children. And you tell those children as a starting point, this is what atoms are made of. And then they're off to the race is trying to go even further. Philosophy, I don't think, quite works in the same way. You might disagree with this.

I don't know. I think it's instead of something which you sort of go from ignorance to knowledge over the course of 20 generations, you go from ignorance to knowledge over the course of one generation and everybody has to sort of start afresh, which is why you find that these ancient philosophers and early modern philosophers and modern philosophers and guaranteed future philosophers too are all essentially saying the same thing. You know, if you read, if you read Epicurean philosophy, it's kind of very similar to utilitarian. It's got a very sort of similar thread. At the very least, it seems to be based on similar intuitions. So you might sort of think that philosophy is a bit stagnant, that it hasn't actually

progressed anywhere, but it's maybe not kind of what it's supposed to do. You know, you're supposed to do that throughout your own, your own life. Somebody asked ChatGBTGBT, what it's like to be itself. I imagine you've probably done this. You've done everything with ChatGPT. Everything within reason. Not everything. Not everything.

Everything within reason. Yeah, yeah. Oh, ha. Subscribe. He said it. And one of the things that it said was imagine basically every time that you had a conversation, your memory of the last one was wiped. Each new context window is a brand new. So it makes me think about what you're talking about here.

This generation needs to rediscover or it tries to answer the same questions over and over and over again. Because the important stuff with philosophy is probably the way that it allows you to live a good life or a life that you see fit or to console you in some. some regard, and that is something that will happen over the course of an individual life. I would take what Chat ChbT says with a pinch of salt, because, of course, it probably is not in fact conscious. But it does give us an interesting sort of like in for thinking about what it might be like to be such a creature. What would it be like not only to have your memory wiped every time you started a new day or conversation, but also to kind of be one thing with many avatars. You know, like ChatGBTGT is one thing. We're speaking about it as one entity. But

You could have a conversation on your phone. I could have a conversation on my phone with it. And it's this sort of one thing, but having two distinct and separability. And I think that a lot of philosophies kind of view human beings in the same way. You know, this is how an ancient Indian philosopher, like, who's reading or indeed composing the Upanishads, might think about human consciousness. That it's sort of all one consciousness that somehow the localizing of individual cells, is kind of an illusion, and it's all just sort of one big thing. And we're probably somehow restricted in the sense that we have our memories

and our localized experiences. But if we knew the truth, if we could somehow step outside of that, we'd recognize that we're all actually just one big thing. So I imagine if chat GPT was conscious, it would probably be a little bit like that. It would be this sort of illusory individuation across different computers and things, which is what a lot of philosophers think is going on in human beings. It's interesting to talk about kind of, because there are clearly elements to how, you know, people kind of go on their own, have to wrestle with the questions of what makes a good life for themselves. I do have a thing that, you know, we can chart progress in certain philosophical problems and it's more nebulous than others. One of the, one of philosophy's historic successes is just creating lots of new fields. So, of course. So, so, so, so, so, so, so something like something. Philosophers are good at making jobs for philosophy. Philosophers are good at making jobs for other academics.

So, you know, like originally maths was inseparable from philosophy. And then, you know, that becomes its own field of study. And, you know, physics is originally rolled into philosophy and it becomes its own field of study. Economics is another one that stems from philosophy. I mean, you know, something like psychoanalytic theory or psychology. You know, this comes from, partly from Freud. Freud is, although he denies ever reading Nietzsche, his theories are so incredibly influenced by by Nietzsche and by earlier philosophical thinkers.

So I do think that one, it's very, it's very easy to hide some of philosophy's successes, partly because quite a lot of the time they are, they're hidden away, they're handed off to other fields. You know, I think that, I think this is a point that Bertram Russell made was this idea that, you know, one of the measures of philosophy's efficacy is just in giving birth to, to other fields. You know, linguistics is another one. Very sort of philanthropic field in that way. I mean, you could also argue that it's taking credit for other people's work further down the line. Okay.

But, you know, that's one way to look at it. That does sound like Alex, actually. So you mentioned stoicism there. Are there some ancient schools that you think have been most unfairly ignored? You know, if you were to ask any person about, give me some ancient schools of philosophy, stoicism would be up top. Maybe they'd think buddism, Taoism or something. They'd go, oh, I'm going to be like real.

a different approach to this, I'm going to go to the other side of the planet. But beyond that, we're probably really bouncing off the limit of most people's knowledge. And there's some schools that you think you should have got a little bit more time at the table. I think, well, yeah, I mean, you're quite right to point out that certainly any Western thinker is probably going to have neglected Eastern philosophy to a significant degree. But even within so-called Western thought, yeah, I suppose one thing that jumped out of me while you're speaking is not so much a school, an idea, which is, like, I've been thinking a lot about, like, Aristotelian metaphysics, so from Aristotle, right? And when I ask people about cause and effect, like, what causes

particular things to occur, Aristotle famously, one of the foundational, like, doctrines of his, of his metaphysics is that there are four kinds of causation that go into anything. Like, why is this beautiful and tasty can of Newtonic on the table? Well, it's got four different kinds of explanations. There is its formal cause, which is sort of the shape that it takes. There's its material cause, which is the stuff that it's made out of, right? We don't think of the stuff that's made out of, strictly speaking, as a cause, but it's clearly part of the causal story that puts this on the table. There is the efficient cause, which is like, who actually made it, right? You put this together, somebody put it in a can, I put it on the table. And

finally, there is the final cause, which is what it was done for, what it's going to, and towards the teleological course. In the modern era, we essentially, when we talk about causation, we just talk about the efficient course. If I say, like, why is that on the table? And you say, well, because I put it there, question is answered. But I think that neglects a lot of really important questions about, like, the nature of the thing itself, why it's there in that particular time's life, taking that shape with

that particular form. I think we neglect that. And I think that modern science is lacking in that it's. It only seems to concern itself ultimately with efficient causes and maybe a little bit of the material cause too, in that like if you ask a scientist in a laboratory, in a laboratory, you know, why is that shuttle like flying and escaping the atmosphere? They'll say, oh, because it has an escape velocity and the thrust of the rockets. But if you ask the same scientist at the pub, they'll say, because we wanted to go to the moon. and certainly they become an Aristotelian again and I think that the

the influence of these other kinds of causation isn't really there the only other thing that came to mind is potentially the pre-Socratics you know and Joe already said that the sort of first philosopher as it was as it were was Thales but people might have thought when he went to say that

the first philosopher that people generally think of is Socrates if you ask somebody who was the first philosopher they'll say Socrates but there's you know Socrates didn't just spring up ex-Neilo you know he's working in sometimes, and him and Aristotle and Plato, they're working sometimes in response to, but certainly after and contemporary with other thinkers too, who a lot of the time their ideas just, you know, because they weren't particularly popular or didn't win the war of ideas, we don't

even know about. Parmenides didn't think that change could occur. In fact, you've heard of Zeno's paradoxes. So Zeno had these wonderful paradoxes of motion where, like, I can't clap my hands, because first I'd have to half the distance, then half the distance, then half the distance. and you can't complete an infinite series of tasks, so I can't clap my hands. Everybody knows about Zeno's paradoxes, but do they know that the reason he came up with them is because he was following in the school of Permanides, who believed that change was literally impossible, and these were paradoxes which were kind of supposed to demonstrate the paradoxical nature of change for that reason.

Again, we've got the conclusion, but we haven't got the working, and sometimes the working is the most interesting stuff, you know? I definitely concur with the kind of neglect of aspects of Aristotle's thought. I mean, especially really with regard to something that Aristotle's ethics, you know, Aristotle's book, The Nicomacian Ethics, is, I would say, you know, even after over 2,000 years, the most useful book of philosophy for anyone to read. I would say, you know, go on and get yourself a copy. They're great.

There are some excellent translations. And the most recent Penguin one is an excellent translation. And Aristotle's ethics is, I think, one of its real strengths is that it's incredibly realistic. So he's very, very concerned with virtues. But as opposed to say someone like certain Stoic thinkers and also the cynics, Aristotle denies that virtue is sufficient for a good or flourishing lie. He's very good at getting down to brass tacks. At one point during the Nicomachianetics, he basically says, you know,

like there is no philosophy that's going to make you happy on the rack. You know, you always need certain, like, minimal levels of your physical needs fulfilled in order to just, like, calm down the bestial part of you that recognises that you need to eat and breathe and sleep in order to live. And I think that, you know, and again, Aristotle has a number of incredibly, I think still incredibly insightful ethical insights. There sometimes sound obvious when you say them out loud, but we're talking before we started filming about the idea that actually sometimes very, very obvious things bear. repeating because we just forget them very, very easily. I mean, about, you know, this is, again, a point that Tolstoy made where he talked about that idea of loving your neighbor as yourself. And Tolstow basically says, yeah, like, that sounds trite, but have we ever got round to doing that? He argues that we haven't, and I'll probably concur. And one of Aristotle's ideas here is, I'll just focus

on two. One of them is the idea of a golden bean. So his idea that virtue lies between the poles of two vices, you know, being brave is in between being cowardly and being reckless. being generous is in between being, you know, profligate and being miserly. And, you know, he has, and I think that that's a very useful framework. You know, it sounds, you know, almost like common sense when you say it out loud, but actually attempting to think in these terms can be incredibly useful. And the other thing that Aristotle really, that I'm so bullish on, with regards to Aristotle, is he's got an incredibly well-worked-out theory of friendship. It's in two books, book eight and nine of the Nicomachian Ethics. And it's some of the best writing on friendship, I think,

there's ever been. Aristotle, in some ways, following the footsteps of, um, some people who was thinking, like, Epicurus is a very, very big fan of friendship. Actually, I can get my time. I'm confused there. But either way, you know, Aristotle is incredibly, um, he thinks that having a group of friends and, and moreover, friends that you're, uh, that are friendships of virtue. So friends that you're not just, you're not just there because you enjoy their company. You're not just there because you, you know, they have something that you want when you're trying to get at, you know, the way that someone might, might schmooze up to their boss or, or just, your friends with somebody, but simply because you enjoy their company.

These are friends who are sort of getting together in order to make one another more virtuous. And moreover, hold like duties and loyalties to one another. You know, Aristotle thinks that this is, these are enormously contributive factors to your life. You owe them things. You know, this is a, I think can be real antidote to the sort of, you know, ah, nobody owes anyone anything anymore. You know, that kind of, that approach life, which I think is sort of can be very unhelpfully individualistic. And yeah, I think that sometimes stepping into the footsteps of an ancient thinker like Aristotle is one way to sort of, you know, get a bit of distance from the way that we might currently live.

And I think that books 8 and 9 of the Nicomacian ethics where he so clearly thinks, you know, groups of friends, these are, this is, you know, halfway to the good life effectively, is an insight that we could really use. You know, everyone thinks friendship is important, right? It's very easy to say. But like, culturally, we place significantly less emphasis. is on friendship than almost any other point in Western history. This is like, you know, think about, I don't know if you've, you know, ever read through sort of like letters from, from the World Wars or from like the Crimean Wars or even the Polyonic Wars. These are people writing to their friends.

And the way that they talk about their friends is amazing. It's more passionate. Passionate, passionate and sort of vulnerable. And more, it's just very clear that friendship is a huge part of the way that they organize. their lives. You know, like we, you know, the kind of standard way of, I suppose, of organizing your adult life now is to organize it around a romantic partner. And I, you know, I think, I think there's an awful lot to be said for romance. I just think that there's, there's also an awful lot to be said for friendship and it very much gets overshadowed. Like, when was the last time, if we were to

compare the amount of great films that view, that are, that are about, you know, two people getting together versus two great friends. I mean, you know, films about two great friends, what, like Bill and Ted? Harold and Kumar got the White Castle. Yeah, Harold and Kumar got the You know, these are, I mean, freak films at all. But, you know, it's completely outmoded. I think, I think, you know, that's why I'm very bullish on Aristotle, books eight and nine of the Nicomacian Ethics. Uh-huh. Yeah, I, um, I wonder what it is about stoicism. I guess just very good PR and branding kind of suits the modern world, a time when people are a little bit lost. They're unsure. Yeah, it's, it's, it's, I've never been super attracted to it on that level. It's really popular as a, as, I guess, kind of a means of consolation and way of sort of structuring your life. But I sort of, I don't know, I guess people who are suffering are always looking for alleviation from that suffering. And traditionally, it's come with a lot of metaphysical baggage.

Be that religious, or be it not. And I suppose it offers people a way of seemingly achieving that without the metaphysical baggage. Good news, AG1 just released their next gen formula. It is a more advanced, clinically backed version of the product that I've been drinking every day for years. So you still get the same one scoop ritual, but now with an easy. even more thoughtful formulation flavor and four clinical trials behind it. AG1 has been evolving since 2010, continuously improving alongside the latest research. And AG1 NextGen is the result clinically shown to help fill common nutrient gaps and support gut health,

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That's drinkag1.com slash modern wisdom. You are somebody who tried nihilism as a life philosophy. Yes, I suppose. Look, the thing, nihilism, man, it's... Here we go, bull case for nihilism. nihilism is often thought of as a synonym for all things depressing and upsetting and in many cases it is but nihilism just means there's sort of no purpose to it all there's no it's no it's a difficult thing to define in analytic terms that's why it's generally in the wheelhouse of like existential

philosophers who tell stories to try and sort of grasp it a feeling but in theory you know if you're if it's not just that you're suffering you could be suffering but not be a nihilist as if you're suffering and suffering all the more because you think you're suffering without reason. That makes you an nihilist. But I think you could just as easily be having a wonderful time and think there is no rhyme or reason to this. I'm having a great time, but there's absolutely no purpose to this. And you'd still be a nihilist because you think that there's no purpose behind it all,

but it doesn't mean you have to have a bad time doing so. So I think it is worth, if you are somebody who wants to toy with the idea that there is no meaning, like try it on, see how it fits. That's what you've got to do with all philosophies, you know? If something seems like it sort of chimes with you a little bit, like live in accordance with it for like a week and a lot of time it will be way too hard, but sometimes it will teach you something.

There's a lot of memes about philosophy making people depressed. Yeah. The more that you learn, the worse that you see the world. What's the darkest philosophies that you guys are being exposed to? Chiran. I mean, I love Chiran. I think that I'm sure of Tiran is incredibly under-raced, kind of Romanian-stroke French,

wrote lots of his work in French, but was Romanian, kind of adopted France in his later years. Well, that will make you depressed straight off the back. Well, potentially, and Chiran, comma Emil, Emile, Joran. Yes, Emil Chirang writes. He's incredibly pessimistic tracks of philosophy. You know, one's called The Trouble with Being Born, another's called A Short History of Decay.

And he's kind of incredibly... Love it already. His first book called... You sure he's not British? Well, it's... I don't know if it's just because I'm British that it kind of... I like it so much. You know, his first book is called On the Heights of Despair.

It's, you know, truly melodramatic. Sanguine shit, yeah. One of the things that I find very interesting about philosophies and are supposedly dark, and I'm specifically thinking of the pessimistic philosophies here, people like Schopenhauer and Choran, maybe to a lesser extent, someone like Philip Mainlander. It's, I don't know, this is something I think Chirang is so good at,

is that oftentimes when you're reading him, he's very good at subtly shifting the scope. So you're reading him, and, you know, he's complaining about life. You know, his view on life is far more pessimistic than might. of your life is this kind of the characteristic property of life is suffering for a variety of reasons. But he occasionally just this kind of dark pessimistic outlook breaks through into a kind of natural lightheartedness that I think is absolutely amazing. So one of the things that

one of the things that is interesting I say about reading a pessimistic philosopher is that is that if, and I think that nihilism to a certain extent shares this, broadly that it's kind of framed in a certain way, is that if, you know, you're not expecting things to go very well. And if you think the characteristic property of the world is meaningless suffering, well, then to a certain extent, like, the stakes are kind of lowered. It's sort of, it's very similar, I suppose, to that advice that Seneca gave in one of his letters, which is to kind of imagine how things are going to go horribly wrong. So that you feel much better when it comes to it. Low expectations. Yes. Yeah, yeah. And I think that on a kind of existential level,

reading an incredibly darkly pessimistic philosopher, sort of, as I say, there's there is sometimes a moment where it breaks through. I suppose the only way I could kind of try and contextualize this is like, have you ever had an astonishingly bad day, just like a comedically bad day? And I do mean like comedic, you know, and you get to like five o'clock and, you know, you've been mugged seven times. And a car drives by and it kicks up a puddle of dog shit over your nice suit or whatever. And you can't help but just laugh. Because at that point it's like, oh, wow, like, This has become funny. And I think that's something that Tehran is very, very good at. And that's why, you know, I often talk about him as one of the darkest philosophers of all time. He's also one of the funniest, one of the few philosophers where you can read him and laugh out loud. It is hilarious that suffering is dose dependent in that way. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like your response to it, you shaped curve.

Yeah. Too little. Everything's probably okay. A bit. Oh, God, this sucks. And then too much. You're like, ah, it's okay again. It was at least a frivolity, right?

And that makes it livable. I do think sometimes the more pessimistic philosophers can be a little bit self-indulgent. It's a bit sort of, you know, woe is me, oh, like because, you know, I don't know. How sophisticated my thoughts. Yeah. And deep my engagement with the world is. But actually, you're just like, you know, you got dumped by your girlfriend and now you're writing about how terrible life is. I mean, look, I asked Joe this the last time that we sat down.

I often think philosophy is just clever branding for depressive thoughts. It often is. But it's also often just clever branding for like any kind of thought. I think it's like you literally just have a thought and you try to systematize it, right? This is why the greatest philosophers, another thing we said before we started, tell you something you already know. If you open Wittgenstein's tractors, the first line of the introduction is something like, I don't think this book will be useful except to anybody who's already like in agreement with the things that it says. It's just supposed to be sort of elucidating an idea. And so, yeah, a lot of the time it is just sort of feeling out a vibe, finding someone who puts it into good words, and saying, oh, I think that person that resonates with me. I feel less alone. By the way, is why when people ask me for like a recommendation of what philosophy to read or something, if someone says, you know, where should I start with philosophy? You might be tempted to say, okay, well, let's start with Plato, read about Socrates and Aristotle, then do a bit of existentialist. I just tell people, just literally read what you've heard of. And the reason for that is because these people will have come up in contexts

that are relevant to you or of interest to you. So if you've heard Nietzsche mentioned a bunch of times because you're a big Jordan Peterson fan, like if you like Jordan Peterson and Jordan Peterson obviously likes Nietzsche quite a lot and finds a lot of use in him, you're probably going to find some use in him. Whereas if you just randomly pick one of the great philosophers, like if you just pick up Sartre, as I did the other day, I told you this and read existentialism as a humanism

and think this is complete nonsense, that was a complete waste of time because you're not going to resonate with it. It's not going to, strictly speaking, convince you unless I think you've already got sort of one foot in the boat. I did think on the pessimistic philosophers, or you said the darkest philosophers, which doesn't necessarily just mean pessimistic, right? Dark philosophy, pessimistic philosophy, what do you mean?

I think Schopenhauer comes to mind. He's writing his On the Sufferings of the World. That's your sort of indulgent pessimist. I think he had trouble with women for some of his life, and he's got this infamous essay on women, which would read like a comedy. In fact, one version of his essays I have in the introduction or the preface, the translator says, by the way, the essay on women

isn't a joke, he's not being sarcastic, this is what he actually thought. He comes to mind. It's an irony disclaimer. Yeah. But in order to sort of avoid that, I think that a good example of a potentially non-self-indulgent pessimistic philosophy that seems genuinely just philosophical might be something like anti-natalism, the view that it is immoral to have children. David Benatar is the sort of superstar of anti-natalism. He wrote a book called Better Never to Have Been, which sounds like one of these sort of, you know, know, I'm about to write about how terrible, how terrible life is. You know, I wish I was never born. But it's not. It's like, philosophically speaking, he tries to make a case that it's just better for no one to be born. Even if their life is filled with more pleasure than suffering, he thinks that it's still immoral to bring them into existence. It's an interesting, it's an interesting take. We had a debate about this five years ago in the barbican. That sounds about right, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, when we first met. like canteen at the barbican and we were having the conversation and people came

tried to be social, listened for five minutes and then left and it was just this sort of steady cycle of people coming and going. This doesn't sound very nice at all. So yeah, Benatar actually probably does fit. A good example of why you might find it dark. I mean, I call it dark if you like. I mean, for an anti-nationalist, they'll say no, I mean, the darkness is that you're, you know, unconsensually bringing people into suffering, you know, that's the, that's the dark thing. But in terms of how it's perceived, I think that as far as pessimism goes, the idea that it's immoral to have children. I mean, you've heard of like the pro-life and the pro-choice crowd. Benatar and his crew are like anti-life, you know. Like, it's like this sort of third option that everybody

forgets about. He's got some wonderful sort of little tidbits in there. He takes a divergence into the philosophy of disability for a time, sort of making a case that, in principle, we are all disabled in some philosophical sense. How so? Are we all disabled? It's been a while since I've read it, but I think he's sort of imagined. So one way of thinking about this would be like, imagine if everybody whose legs worked suddenly just died. And the only people left on planet Earth like don't have functioning legs. Maybe not instantly because people would have memory.

But after not very long, it just wouldn't be considered a disability to not have legs because that's just how everybody is. And Benetar sort of imagines in principle the things that we could have that we don't. which means that in principle we are disabled in the same way. We just can't fly. So there are, exactly. So there are all kinds of sufferings that come about in our life, like having to climb the stairs, which we don't even notice as sufferings. And if you add all of these up, they become pretty significant. It's a bit of a trip, but really interesting.

And I think probably, probably dark. The other thing that's, that's quite nice about Benatar. I said it was sort of dry earlier, and I did mean that as a compliment, sorry. As opposed to like frilly. Yes, yeah, yeah, is that Benatar is very, he gives a very, logical argument. As in, you know, I would say there are problems with the argument. But, you know, as in like, it's very

clearly laid out in a way that quite a lot of pessimistic philosophers write in sort of semi-poetry. Benatar, if you're a hardcore analytic fan, he's probably that's probably the pessimistic going to enjoy. It seems that way, I suppose. He spoke to him, right? I did. I had him on my show. He doesn't show his face. Yeah, he doesn't, I

actually don't know if he uses his real name, but he doesn't show his face. So there is also that added element that he doesn't want to be seen. Oh, so he's the sleep token of the philosophy world. Oh, are they the mask wearing slip-knock? Joe, don't make that face. No, no, no, sorry, no.

I don't. It's very cool, very popular. You know when you guys start telling me about, you know, anesthetist of ancient city. And I go, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I need to nod along like this. This is your turn. Oh, yeah.

Okay, there we are. Thank you. What's the philosophy of sleep token? If you go on the Reddit, really deep. really really, really deep. The law goes hard. The law goes hard on many subredits. I have a subreddit too, which

has some interesting laws of its own, I think. I've seen them, yeah. I've seen them. Yeah, you've got cannon. Yeah, apparently. Apparently, apparently so. Okay, so Benatar's got this. I remember you his whole thing is this balance between suffering and pleasure.

Yeah. Is that even a tiny microcosm of suffering is so great that it doesn't, it outweighs any amount of pleasure. He calls it like an asymmetry argument between pleasure and pain. So a lot of just pulled that out of a five year, five and a half year old canteen condescension. I've got a memory on you. Thank you. This is this is why you've made it so far. If that's not a great advert for a tasty drink. Yes. Zero calorie. Some three million subscribers later.com slash modern wisdom. I don't know what is. And he remembers. Um, it's, I think

when a lot of people would consider is life worth living. One crude way of working it out is adding up the pleasure, minusing the pain and sort of seeing what you're left over with. Is it worth living overall? Benessa thinks that, crucially, before you exist, the potential pleasure that you might experience if you come into existence doesn't matter like one job. It's literally irrelevant. But the potential pain that you would avoid does matter. And he tries to prove this through some sort of intuitive thought experiments. For example, there are no conscious beings on Mars, right? We don't really think that it's a bad thing that all this pleasure that could be on Mars is being missed out on. We don't think what a tragedy that all of the potential pleasure that could exist on Mars isn't actually happening. But we might think that it is a good thing that there's no suffering up there. And some people hear that kind of example and go, yeah, that makes sense. Some people go, well, no, I am. I am sad that there's no pleasure on Mars. It's sort of an intuitive thing. He also, one other way of thinking about this, at least for the imbalance, might be a question, which is would you take five minutes of the worst imaginable, conceivable suffering that you could experience if afterwards you got to have five minutes of the best possible bliss? I mean, I don't know what you guys would do. You wouldn't take it. No, thank you. I think that's, I don't think I'd take five minutes of the best possible bliss anyway. The rest of your life, was the rest of your life. Expectation. Yeah, you just be complete, you just feel empty. Well, I mean, that's another.

asymmetry. Yeah. That's an additional asymmetry. And that actually might be just a sort of good response to this kind of thought experiment. Because what Benito's trying to say is that most people would say no. And so crudely, it seems like the suffering kind of counts for more. But as so much philosophy does, it kind of relies on intuitive, your sort of feeling of... Have a sense of negativity bias and loss of emotion. Another way he talks about, and crucially, this is only before you exist, right? Once you exist, your pleasure is good for you and your suffering is bad for you. But before you exist, the fact... Which is when other people have a choice about whether you do or don't.

Yeah. Before you exist, for someone who doesn't exist, then not experiencing pleasure is not bad, but then not experiencing suffering is good. And so before you're born, the only moral calculus is the goodness that you're not suffering. And so that's all that should be taken into account. It's good that you're not suffering. Let's not bring that into existence. Another sort of line of reasoning he goes down is a kind of like a rights-based approach where he says, suppose, for example, that if I were to, like, break your arm, you would get an encyclopedic knowledge of philosophy or something. If I gave you that option, you might think to yourself, like, you know what, I think that's worth it. Probably definitely be worth it for me.

I'd take that. However, even if I would actually prefer that, if you didn't ask me first, if you just did it, like, you don't have the right to do that to me, right? If I found you in need of an ambulance and the only way to save your life somehow was to break your arm, then I think most people say you should do it. But if by causing you suffering, I can not save you from worse suffering, but bring you something good, most people think that I don't have the right to inflict that suffering on you, even if it would be ultimately worth it. So for Benatar, same thing before you're born, right? You're allowed to inflict suffering to prevent worse suffering, but you're not allowed to inflict suffering on the promise that there'll be some good that comes out of it unconsensually. Because what you're essentially doing is causing a bunch of people to unconsensually experience masses of suffering that they had no say in. Some people have actually tried to sue their parents for wrongful birth because that has actually happened.

If you're Benatar pilled. Yeah, exactly. So the asymmetry thing is quite important to Benatar's flavor of antinatialism. You can have anti-natalism without it. You can just say that life consists in more suffering. And if you think it's consists in more pleasure, you've fallen for the Polyana principle, as I think. think they call it, which is the idea that we tend to remember the good stuff more than the bad stuff, the sort of rose-tinted view of the past. Most people, says Benatar, like, vastly underestimate

the extent to which their lives are going terribly. They, like, sort of, in retrospect, think, oh, you know, it's all good. But if you actually were to live through it again, you'd realize that at every moment, it was going very badly. He then, after convincing you that you're, he sort of, he sort of says, like, you know, it doesn't matter how much you suffer or experience pleasure in life. it's immoral to bring people into existence and then after convincing you of that he then says but just so you know life is actually does actually contain a lot more suffering

and this detour into disability ethics or metaphysics I suppose is sort of part of this case you know these these menial sufferings that you don't even notice it's not you shouldn't have been here you should be upset that you are here and by the way the fact that you are here also is a reason for regret

yeah it gets a little bit tricky because like once you're here, I mean, the inevitable question for David Bennettar is, then why don't you just think we should kill ourselves? And David Benetar, in a footnote, compares this to going to a movie and when you're about halfway through, thinking like, this is kind of a crap film. It's not bad enough that I'm going to leave now that I'm here, but I kind of wish I'd never come in the first place. That's sort of his position on life. He's, he's. How robust do you think that is is an answer to why shouldn't I just kill myself? I think it, it doesn't really work very well. Because I'm quite suspicious of the asymmetry argument, like, anyway. So I think that a case that sort of makes life not worth living and therefore not worth beginning will inevitably create a powerful argument for not continuing life. Benner, like, is, as far as I can remember, quite sort of staunchly, not that.

But I'm not so sure that they can be so definitively separated. Has someone taken that? Is there a suicide cult philosophy? There have been examples. I think Camus talks about a few examples at the beginning of the myth of Sisyphus, doesn't? He sort of mentions, I think, like, one or two examples of some philosophers who, like, Rodotract. He mentioned, I can't remember who it was. He mentions who rode a tract and then killed himself in order to, like, bring attention to his work.

But it didn't work, because no one liked the work anyway. Philip Mainlander killed himself. But I don't know if that, I can't remember if that's what he's talking about. I can't know who Camus is talking about. But, no, you tend to find that people who are. are genuinely committed. I mean, Camus says in the myth of Sisyphus, for the man who does not cheat, what he determines to be true must determine his action. So if you become convinced that life is not worth living and you're like certain enough of that in order to kill yourself, then you're

probably not going to sit around writing a book first. So it's sort of like self-selecting. There's an interesting sort of evolutionary deselection for views like this and for views like anti-natalism. And again, Beneter addresses this. It doesn't affect the truth of the claim, but it means it will never take off because. Menatically, it's cancerous. Exactly, yeah. Which in reverse is the explanation, I think, for the general optimism that sort of just just see throughout all, exactly, to some degree. I mean, there are people who are not optimists, but they're not quite pessimistic enough to fully commit to the bit, as it were. And if they are, then they select themselves out of the mean pool. If you haven't been feeling as sharp or energized as you'd like,

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and that our system is too and we got halfway through the episode and it's the only time this has ever happened he bailed out of the episode partway through had a bad night's sleep and wasn't he felt like he wasn't making it and I thought well that's kind of on brand for somebody who had this sort of a worldview

that everything is about avoiding things going badly that partway through an episode about it he decided that it was going so badly that he didn't want to continue yeah yeah another thing Camus says is that the meaning of life is literally whatever is keeping you from killing yourself. Yes. You know, and I think that's, that's more or less true.

Yeah, why don't you kill yourself? Yeah, and I think that there are, most people who engage with that topic do so on an emotional level, and that's the motivation for these kinds of thoughts. There are people who are just like intellectually interested in the worthiness of life, like whether it's worth living. But that very rarely is actually what's what's going on, I think, when people, people are seriously struggling with this. And so, I don't know, it makes it a sort of difficult philosophical terrain. But I think that people who are just interested in it intellectually

often will appreciate someone who can just forthrightly discuss it. You know, because a lot of the time it's like, you know, you open a, open a YouTube video that's going to discuss abstractly the philosophy of suicide. It opens with a help line. It's like, way to give away your position, you know, like it's, I think people will like, like, loads of ideological bias in the suicide discussion because people I think people want to feel like they're being taken seriously right and if you if you come with a with a with a philosophical or emotional conviction to the table and someone before you even get started says hey just so you know like you know we're going to we're going to move towards this direction I think I think a lot of people would

appreciate like a forthright direct approach which is why so many people are attracted to the myth of Sisyphus by Camus because it's sort of it's starkly opens with that um you know there is but one serious philosophical question and that is suicide And it captures a lot of people's attention because even people who aren't feeling suicidal are like, whoa, yeah, that's interesting. And they just want to read about it in a relatively straightforward way. I unfortunately think it's pretty overhyped, the myth of Sisyphus. Why? Why do you not like the myth of Sisyphus?

I sort of, I don't have an aversion to existentialist philosophy sort of generally, but it sort of doesn't really capture me. Like, I think that, I don't know. I mean, I don't know if Camus like sufficiently answers the question. His, his famous conclusion is imagining Sisyphus happy, right? And I just, I don't know if that's like a satisfying thought to me. For some, it might be, but for me, it's not. It's just as meaningless as the situation that we, that we began with, you know, this sort of happy pushing of the boulder.

I don't know. Joe, you can probably make a case. Is there a bull case for, Well, just imagine this thing to be different. Just play pretend until you believe the theory. It's like an act of rebellion for Camus. It's almost like an existential irony, right? Like he's sort of, you're just going to like enjoy the thing.

Well, it's interesting. So I find the development of Camus thought over time very interesting for this. Because the myth of Sisyphus is often, you know, the thing that people take away is, of course, you know, imagining Sisyphus happy. It's such a famous image. But a lot of the myth of Sisyphus is, is significantly more, I don't know what the right word is, like more intuitively abhorrent than that, if that makes sense.

And even to Camus. So Camus writes a myth of Cisphus. He paints a bunch of characters who are meant to be like absurd men. And some of them are like really awful people, you know, like kind of philanderous or, you know, one of them is kind of, you know, the actor who never becomes themselves and is just playing characters all the time. And there, and he has this idea of like, okay, well, if you're an absurdist, and you are you think there's no objective or you know no way to say that that one aspect of life is better than any other you're kind of trying to live out valuelessness well then in that case camus thinks well if you decided not to kill yourself the only value that you're at least enacting is that life is better than no life and so you should value the quantity of life over the quality of life now of course although that's not existential nihilism that's pretty close to moral nihilism and camu clearly is troubled by this because one of the next things he writes is a play called caligula

which is all about the Roman emperor or kind of fictionalized version of the Roman Emperor Caligula going absolutely batch it and killing lots of people and you know there are various if analyses you can make of this when I read that

I think yeah this is Camus wrestling with his own philosophy and he's painted himself into a corner whereby you can only value the quantity of life and not the quality of life and then he's teasing out some of the consequence of that he's clearly not happy

because he then writes books that are ostensibly attempting to go no, hang on a sec, we can't, there are, there are further things that we can do with absurdism. That wasn't definitive. Yes, yeah, yeah. And we just, you know, the myth of Sisyphus is, is one of the first things that Camus writes along with the stranger. Oh, it's the difficult first album. And it's like an explication of the outsider.

And it's, you know, I like the myth of Sisyphus partly because it's so counterintuitive. But some of his later works, things like the plague. The plague is an amazing novel. It became like a bestseller of COVID for obvious reasons. And it's about a kind of a plague hitting the town of Iran in, I think it's, you know, in French Algeria, what was in French Algeria. And how people cope with that. And it's, you know, people have given various different analogical readings for this. So one is to read it as an analogy for the Nazi occupation of France.

another is to but part of the kind of tying this back to the developments of Camus thought from them with the Sisyphus one way of looking at it is to say

well these are lots of things that Camus thinks when the chips are down people turn to one of them is friendship I'm very bullish on friendship generally but you know

another one is kind of this kind of shared struggle there are bits in the in the plague where they sort of say okay yeah we're fighting a kind of nile omnipotent disease

but what we're going to fight it because that's the way that we're coping almost, you know, in a time of kind of abhorrent struggle and people are dying around them all. It feels like the human centipede of philosophical arguments. A little bit, yeah. As in like, as in it say it's, and so, you know, and then Camus writes the rebel, which is one of his, one of his later works, which is, again, discussing, you know, what can an absurdist coherently value without simply falling back onto a kind of leap of faith or something. And I really like those later works. I'm not convinced that they actually are consistent with this earlier. position he has of like kind of hardcore absurdism. But I do think they're still, they're still worth reading. That's something that's actually like understated in a great deal of like philosophers

who are now dead is like what they thought. As if they just like, like lived for one year, wrote everything down and stayed the same, you know. Like we sort of, we forget that people like, you know, if you've ever thought about writing a book, and I'm sure we all at this table probably have at some point, one of the thoughts you have is like, you know, am I, am I ready? You know, is this the right time? Because you recognize that whatever you write now in 20 years, at least some of it, you're going to want to revise or you're going to change your mind about. And you're also going to have to answer to.

Exactly. And you're going to have your name in a bookstore and you have to grimace every time you walk past it. I would probably be driven mad. I'd like pull it off the shelf and scribble out the paragraphs by hand. And this is what humans do, right? And so when we talk about what Camus thought, as if. his life was actually just that day when he finally said and done yes yeah yeah yeah like he's just had a he's just had a fantastically bad day and the car is just and he thought you know what

fuck it let's go yeah like david hume writes the the what's the first one the treaties concerning human nature and it's like this did he spell human with with an e because that would have been fucking brilliant it would have been would have been properly bad well he didn't know much about peer art because the book didn't sell. And he later sort of revises his thoughts into the much shorter inquiry concerning human understanding. The same kind of thoughts revisited. And it's posited as like a sort of like an update. And he tells people not to read the other one. But some people think it's just because the first one kind of wasn't selling. And in fact, when I went to university, they made a study the treaties because it's more like fleshed out. But he literally like writes the kind

of same thing again in different form later in his life. And so there is always sort of development of thought with philosophers and we only tend to be aware of it when it's grand and dramatic when someone converts from one side to another when Anthony Flew becomes a theist or something but it happens throughout the history of thought too

when you're reading a text by somebody if you're interested in their thought try to keep in mind some chronology of like when it was written because otherwise you might be reading the goblet of fire before you read the Chamber of Secrets and you're probably going to get the wrong kind of idea I'm sorry. No, no, it's good. Even someone like Plato, who we quite often think of as having a very strong, stable, consistent set of literally made out of marble.

Well, is it, and he, if you, if you, you know, he's one of his earlier works, which is both a kind of political treatise, but also a theory of the human mind is called the Republic. And then later, he writes a book that's also a political work called the laws. And you can see the development of his thoughts. In the republic, he's very focused on what makes a good ruler. And in the laws, he's very focused on, okay, he'd had a quite a disillusioning experience with a tyrant called Dionysus, I think. Cool. Yeah. In Syracuse, where he tried to. Dionys had invited him over twice, actually, and both times it went terribly and said, yeah, yeah, I'm really interested in being, in being like one of your like philosopher kings. Yeah, like this sounds really cool. You can help me rule better. And then he shows up and Dionysus is just like drinking himself silly. And Plato was like, look, like one of the really big things about being a kind of philosopher king is like temperance and, you know, not gorgeing yourself and kind of staying because how are you going to make like really good decisions if you're drunk all the time? And Dionysus kind of goes, look, I'm going to stop you right there.

Like, you don't understand. I'm in charge and like, you do what I say. It's very on brand. And so he basically kind of imprisons Plato for a bit. And he eventually gets free and then he goes back. Same thing happens. And disillusioned by this, Plato writes the laws, which are much less concerned with what makes a good ruler. And I'm much more concerned with if, you know, rulers come and go, how are you going to keep everyone in check?

These philosophers often have, like, extraordinary lives. Why does Thomas Hobbes write the Leviathan? Because he had to flee him being a royalist during the English Civil War. He has to flee to France because of the English Civil War. And he writes this tract about how we should all submit to a authoritarian dictator, essentially, and who should be able to dictate everything with full submission, including religious affairs. You've got to be aware not only of the chronology, but also the context. Some personal motivation.

And also one other thing on this thread is beware that sometimes when you're reading people, they're writing under the laws of a country. Dostoevsky is Notes from the Underground, one of the most famous of his books, because it's so short and easy to read, originally contained a chapter which essentially argued for the necessity of Christianity, as Dostoevsky saw it, but it was censored and taken out. And so you end up with this sort of quite fully nihilistic tract. But I think a lot of that is also going on historically too. So beware that, you know, these are human beings with developing thoughts and political considerations inspiring their writing. When it comes to history of thought, is there someone that you think changed thinking forever but was sort of useless in practice? Like someone who contributed to moving thought forward most without having any real life applicability? That's a tricky question. I'm tempted to say in a non-insulting way, theologians, only because, like obviously if you're a believer in God, the nature of God will greatly affect some practical things in your life, the way that you were

You know, should you worship the saints or not? Are you worshipping a tripartite, you know, God or a singular unity, you know, that kind of stuff will be important to your daily practice. But if you're talking about in practice like for society, as it were, then it's probably not particularly relevant to anyone who doesn't care about that kind of stuff. So that sort of springs to mind. But outside of that, I don't know, maybe some of the more abstract. The name that actually sprung to mind was Bertrand Russell. which you might jump down my throat for. But was he actually a practical philosopher? Everything he tried to write in practice was awful. It supposed it depends on me by practical. Butchromass was very important in the kind of history of studies of the foundations of mathematics and stuff like that. And although he wrote a three-volume insane project, is it two or three volumes? I always get too confused.

Nobody's read the whole thing. This is like, because it's deeply impenetrable. It takes him like, what, 300 pages to prove that one animal. one is two. Yes, it might, yeah, it's, it's between, it's like, I think, the round of 200 page mark. Which is quite a thing to do from first principles. It's a real battle of attrition. It's difficult, yeah, yeah. But, you know, but, and that ends up. It's like the terms and conditions of philosophy. It's like, no one actually read it, but you kind of, you kind of need it to be there. It's, it's important. And he writes that with Alfred North Whitehead.

And that's, that's very influential, you know, that it's, in, even though the grand project failed, there were some operators they coined that are very important. Things like, there exist a unique object such that, which is now very helpful in areas of maths. So, you know, not kind of helpful on an everyday level. But a lot of Russell's academic writing is very much in philosophy of language, philosophy of maths, foundations of mathematics, logic, you know, which I think are very handy. But, you know, it's not necessarily like you're going to read his theory of descriptions and then just be out and about being like, oh, yeah, like my life is so much better. Okay. So I guess even broader than that, are there some,

branches of philosophy that should be just jettisoned entirely? Any bits that are just intellectual cosplay dead ends? No, because philosophy, if you find a philosophy useful, then it is useful. Like, that's kind of what it's there for. It's like asking the question of sort of, you know, are there any like music genres that you think should get in the bin? And the answer is like, no, because somebody's enjoying that, right? Like, I'm sure it's useful to somebody. But, you know, if we had to get rid of one of them. I don't know. Maybe... Your logic puzzles? Philosophy of mind. It's way too important. A philosophy of mind is the next big thing. It's excruciatingly boring for a lot of people. I mean, we've talked about

how it's quite difficult to talk about it in a concrete way that's... No one on YouTube likes it, and I can't work out whether it's because it's harder because it's pointless. You know, my audience have quite taken to the philosophy of mind. I think because I have too, and so I've got this like enthusiasm for it. I think it's really important. And I think like watch this. Sell me. Sell me on philosophy of mind. Watch this space, as it were. I think sell me on it. People are beginning to realize that consciousness, it's always been like, you know, you'll have someone and they'll say, like, consciousness, it's just such a mystery. And like, you know, it's like trying to view the window pain through the window pain because we experience the whole world through con. That's interesting. But everybody kind of already knows that. That's why we're at the table having the conversation. There is a, there is a stark increase happening in the view that consciousness is, so to speak, fundamental. Here's the interesting thing.

Yeah, so panpsychism, right? And here's one interesting observation, which is that there are these clichés that crop up basically everywhere you look, right? If you look at ancient Vedic literature, if you look at a meditative monk who achieves enlightenment in the forest somewhere, if you look at Joe Bloggs, who took LSD last week and had like this insane experience at the peak of his hero dose, They will say similar things, which is this sort of cliche of everything is one, I am one with the universe, the ego death, the disillusion of the self. Exactly. And this kind of stuff has been present in these philosophical traditions. Like from the beginning of history, the pre-Socratics talk about it a little bit too. And I think that we're beginning, like people are beginning to become much more open to the idea that there is something true about. that and there's a reason why that keeps coming about um panpsychism is is growing in popularity

because the problem is like we believe that there is a world of matter and we know that we are conscious and you've got a few options available to you either the consciousness is like a totally separate thing from the material which makes it seem really weird and why does it interact with me if consciousness is literally immaterial if it's not made of matter that like my brain and my body is then it is a complete mystery how it would interact with my physical body like it's not like it's floating around out there. It has no spatial dimension. It's not, it's not materials. It's another piece of matter that is not matter. So the idea, it is as mysterious that my mind would interact with my brain as it is, as it would be if my mind suddenly started

interacting with your brain or with that can of tasty new tonic on the table. Like, it would just be like, what are you talking about? If these are two separate kinds of things, you're talking about like taking the number two, adding in a chair and like getting, you know, the color orange. It's just like just categories of different things that seem like they shouldn't be able to interact. Okay, so then maybe the mind is just made out of material, but then you run into some intuitive problems about the nature of thoughts. You know, people keep coming at me because I like to sort of froth at the mouth over the thought of closing my eyes and imagining a triangle and asking where on earth that triangle is. There are true facts about that triangle. It's got three

sides, right? That's true. It's really like I can see it in my head. It's true that it's got three sides. But where is that triangle? It's not just made up of the matter of my brain. If I cut open your brain, I'm not going to find a triangle in there. It's, you can sort of find the material activity that's correlated with the experience of the triangle. That's not the same thing as the triangle. So you've sort of got this, this sort of barrier problem of where you get from this material stuff to this non-material stuff. And the panpsychist says there is no barrier. But instead of saying everything's made out of material and so is consciousness, they just say that everything is consciousness from the get-go, and therefore you get consciousness. The biggest myth for the panpsychist

and other related schools in consciousness is that complexity is required for consciousness. That might be the big myth that needs to dissipate in the false of your mind. Because the brain is the most complex thing, we know it's the one that's got the most consciousness. It's got, the things that we think consciousness is are actually sometimes. just what consciousness does. Okay, let me, let me, let me, I'll explain it this way, right? So, so if consciousness just means, like, some kind of experience, some kind of awareness, right? When we talk about what makes somebody conscious, we might talk about things like memory,

first person, conscious experience, awareness, these kinds of things. But, like, rudimentary consciousness on its own wouldn't necessarily require any of those things. Imagine for a moment that you had no memory. I don't mean like you forget what happened yesterday, like you've got dementia. I mean literally no memory laid down in any instant. What would that be like? It's kind of impossible to imagine. Imagine you were falling through the air and no memory was being laid down at any instant.

Would you even know that you were falling? You'd have no sort of instant before to compare yourself with you. You wouldn't even know that you were a being. You wouldn't know that your feet are part of you. You wouldn't have, there's no time for that to happen. You would literally, like, it's impossible to even conceive of what the content of your thoughts would be. They'd be the simplest possible thing that consciousness could experience. And yet it would still be conscious and aware.

And so this, like the laying down of memory is something that consciousness can do, which gives rise to more complex conscious behaviors, like our conversations and me knowing that we're in a building and that this is a microphone and that kind of stuff. But that is not consciousness. That's just one thing that consciousness does when it's completely. complexly arranged. So when we look at like a rock and say there's no consciousness and look at a brain and say there is. And it's because, oh, the brain is complicated. The panpsychist says, no, consciousness is at the foundation of all of it. You've just got more complicated consciousness, which does things like memory and self-awareness and communication. And you've got less complex consciousness, which just sort of at the atomic level just sits there and sort of fizzes around, right? The analogy I sometimes give to explain this is imagine comparing the rock to the empire state building. And we said, look at the empire state. building with its complexity, with its elevators and and cash machines and it's got like light switches and electricity and you kind of think it's this, it's, it can't be made of matter, you know, because like a rock is made of matter. No, it is still made of matter. It's just arranged in a more

complex way into doing much more interesting things. And our brains are like the empire state building of, you know, fundamental consciousness, which is you arrange it in a particular way. And suddenly it can do all these magical things like, like have conversations and talk to each other. But the panpsychist thinks said at root, it's consciousness. Before we continue, if your sleep's not right, you're taking ages to nod off, waking up at random times and feeling groggy in the morning. Mementis's sleep hacks are here to help. They're not your typical knock-you-out supplement overloaded with melatonin,

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slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. What do you make of pan-psychism? Jim. I like it in the sense that I think that it's kind of satisfyingly empirical, which sounds a very strange thing to say. But, you know, ultimately it's somebody saying, okay, we've got matter and mind. It's very difficult to reduce mind to matter. We can't deny that mind exists because it is in some sense the precondition for thinking that everything else exists. And so, right, if we can't reduce the two, we'll just have to make mind, you know, and matter play together. So I'm sympathetic

in that sense. I think that I think that for me, the aspect of the panpsychist approach that will probably need to be worked out of more detailed. Somebody probably has, because I've not that well read regarding panpsychism, is a kind of detailed account of what complexity amounts to. So like, you know, for example,

you know, we can arrange the brain and, you know, we have brains. They're arranged a certain way. You can arrange a series of rocks in that way. You could try and simulate it with a kind of similar aspects of the mind with a binary gate system, stuff like that. Like, in what, I think that that kind of, I worry that sometimes a lot of the work is then being thrown at this notion of complexity and that I sometimes think that the plausibility

of the panpsychist program is going to rest on how that idea of complexity is cashed at. This may just be, however, a neurological or a neuroscientific problem. There's a guy called, a neuroscientist called Francis, either Francesco or Francisco. Francisco, I don't know, Francisco Varela, who his whole project is, okay, I want to try and contribute to the hard, to solving the hard problem of consciousness, which is the idea of, you know, bridging the gap between the material world and felt experience. And so he's going to try and do that by, and has been trying to do that, by charting as many possible neurological correlates as you can between phenomenologically reported experience and stuff going on in the brain. And he just kind of, and I have a lot of, I have a lot of of sympathy for that. Partly because I think that, you know, no matter what your philosophical stance is, you're clearly going to have to deal with these findings. Whether you think, as Varela does, that this will actually allow you to bridge the hard problem of consciousness eventually and that you'll be able to reduce mind to matter, or whether you're a panpsychist, and this will help you

with your fleshing out your account of complexity. I think that, you know, this is one of the reasons why the philosophy of mind, I think, is in such a boom period, academic-wise, is because it's, I often think that philosophy is most helpful when it's interdisciplinary. I really like, for example, the intersection between philosophy and linguistics, because I think that there's a real strength in taking empirical results from linguistics and empirical results from neuroscience and from psychology and looking at it through a philosophical lens, you know, trying to, you know, very broad terms, I suppose, trying to see what it means and then applying it to different things. I think that a lot of the best philosophy work occurs at the intersection of philosophy in different

fields and specifically i think philosophy and neuroscience is a very promising one i think i think there's a lot of very good work being done there what else is like it felt to me uh when i say i started learning about panpsychism who's the dude from durham university philip goff thank you so philip was the first guy i had an entire conversation with about and that was on his first book was 2019 yeah galileo's era yes and then he's done a new one um so that was it but before then i'd sort of seen it had a bit of an understanding about what it was. Anika has done two books on it now, I think. Something like that.

Well, she, she, Anika, the way she conveyed it to me was, like, the only conclusion I can draw from my interviews on consciousness is that I have to take seriously the idea that consciousness is fundamental. Not quite sure what that means, and it sounds like, it's sort of the agnostic of the theory of mind world. Yeah, and she's totally materialistic, and she's like, look, it sounds totally insane, but bear with me, and she does this, like, you know, 12-part documentary. interviewing all these people and thinking, actually, there is something very, very strange going on.

The biggest problem for panpsychism is the so-called combination problem. That's like the actual biggest critique that a pan-psychist would recognize, which is, crucially, pan-psychists don't really think that, like, everything is conscious. They don't necessarily think this can is conscious as a unified entity. They think that it's made out of consciousness. The consciousness is the stuff of the universe out of which things are made. You know, like, calling this a can. This is an artifact.

We've put this together as human beings. beings. We've taken materials and arranged them. So it's like, there's nothing to say that it would get this unified center of consciousness. That would be kind of weird, right? If we took a bunch of consciousness and just put it together in this shape and suddenly it had a unified sense of consciousness, that would be strange. But that's what happens in the brain, according to the panpsychist. Right. So it's like if one person is in a field and turn of other people are in different fields and then you put them all together in the same field and then somehow to combine. One brain. Exactly. Why does my, why does my consciousness, if my brain is made up of consciousness,

then why, when it's arranged in a particular way, do I get this singular unified sense of self? And why is it not that like all three of our brains have a singular sense of consciousness? And if we got close enough together, which we're not going to do, then it would happen. They call it the combination problem because it's like how do they combine? And interestingly, maybe, right? Like, I don't know if you've come across these split brain patients. I talk about these all the times. We've got some evidence to suggest that you kind of have two like consciousnesses that are battling out with each other

inside your very own brain. So that's the interdisciplinary thing, like a lot of scientific research into the way that the brain works in weird cases like split brain patients. Look into it, ladies and gentlemen. It is freaky what your brain can do, like the two hemispheres, what they can do independently. What's your favorite examples?

My favorite example of this are, so your brain, the two hemispheres of your brain are connected by the corpus colossum, right? It's the connective tissue, which actually does more to inhibit communication than facilitate communication. There seems to be an evolutionary advantage to keeping them separate, right? Some people as a severe treatment for

epilepsy would undergo a corpus callosotomy where you sever it, right? This is what a split brain patient is. It's someone who has the connective tissue severed. They can still communicate throughout the means a little bit, but basically the communication is like a vertical decapitation. Exactly. Now, most people know that the left hemisphere governs broadly like the right visual field and the right hemisphere broadly the left visual field. Also, the right hemisphere is supposed to be the kind of like creative one, and the left one is the sort of rational math-y one, a bit of an oversimplification. But take a split brain patient whose hemispheres aren't communicating properly, you can show them something just in their right visual field. So you block off the rest of their view,

and you just show them something to the left hemisphere and vice versa. So they've done some experiments on such people, where they will, for example, show them a picture of an apple, and they'll say, what can you see? And they'll say, I don't know, I don't know what you're talking about. And then you ask them to draw a picture of something and they'll draw an apple because part of their brain has seen it, but part of it hasn't. You will find those kinds of cases, but the most interesting to me, I needed to say that to set it up, is a study that was done. I can't remember what it was. Anika writes about this where they took a split brain patient and they showed one hemisphere of the brain an instruction. It's an experiment, so you're ready to do an instruction.

And the instruction just says something like, get up and walk over there. So the person reads it, they get up, they walk over to the wall. And then you ask them verbally, why did you just walk over to the other side of the room? And do you know what they say? It would be weird if they said, I don't know, wouldn't it? But they don't. They give a reason. They can fabulate.

But they're not making it up. They're not lying. They're not like, oh, they believe it. They're like, oh, I was trying to get some air. It's kind of warm in here. And they believe it. So there's this idea that one hemisphere of your brain is the so-called interpreter. And that you've essentially got your brain working on like doing particular things.

Like you can imagine working on your like emotive impulses. You just do something because you just impulsively want to or like instinctively feel it's the right thing. And then your left brain comes in and retrospectively says, oh, no, no, no, this is the reason why I did that. I've got good reason for that. And you've kind of got these two. parts of your brain governing different parts of your activity. What's the implication of that philosophically? The implication of that is that consciousness might not be so unified as our sort of present

experience leads us to believe. You know, the sort of unity of self might not actually be sort of what's going on in reality. I have a pet theory that a lot of the reason why we feel like we're in our brains. It is the sort of center of our, you know, neural activity, of course, But I feel like the reason why we really experience ourselves as up here is because it's where our senses are, where our eyes are and our ears are on our hips. We might sort of, and our ears were down there too, we might sort of feel as though we were located. Because that is where everything is being fed through. Exactly. It sort of feels like you're up here because that's where the information is. A lot of weird stuff to think about, this so-called combination problem. I mean, there's a lot of weird stuff and experience. Like if I pinch myself in the hand, I feel it in my hand. I'm told that it's my brain that's doing the experiencing. but I really feel it in my hand. You know, it's very strange. I think that poses a good analogy for those people who think that, like, there is one consciousness or one, like, one self, like Atman,

which we're all sort of avatars off. It's like the left hand, if I pinch it, my right hand doesn't feel it. And that's within something that is supposed to be discreetly kind of its own localized. We are one thing, but I can get this localized pain in my left hand that my right hand doesn't feel. So let's just scale that across the one thing that is everything. Yeah. I mean, people say like, well, my, my, my, consciousness can't be the same as yours because I don't have access to your thoughts and you don't

have access to mind so they're separate minds right but when you're asleep you don't have access to your waking thoughts but it's still the same mind right there are a lot of like weird avenues to explore this this unity of consciousness as this sort of fundamental uh the um principle of the universe. One of the interesting kind of corollies, I mean, one thing that I find very interesting about that kind of, you know, one part of our, a lot of our conscious reporting is the kind of PR brain, so to speak, is that it reminds me a lot of, of, of, kind of Nietzsche's picture of the will and of the mind, which is broadly speaking that we kind of have a parliament of different drives and that, you know, those drives do, do what they will, so to speak. You know,

there's not one will. There's all of these forces pulling in different directions. And then once we've won out on a course of action, we then put a, we then justify that, you know, at least that's part of what Nietzsche thinks is going on. I'm always reminded of that kind of split brain going over to the other side of the room and saying, oh, yeah, I went here because, you know, I want to look out the window or something. It's like, yeah, it's quite a, it's quite a surprisingly Nietzschean picture. The other part of having a picture of consciousness that is in some way combinatoric. So functionalism works like this, as does panpsychism. is that in theory, you can start scaling things up quite extreme. So there's the, it's known as the China brain experiment.

You'd actually need far more people. It's just because China is the most populous country, but you need far more people than the amount of people in China to do this. And the sort of experiment goes that, say you had billions and billions and billions of people, if you made them all behave like neurons, kind of, you know, they all had walkie-talkies or phones or something. And they were, you know, they'd say, you know, they'd give a code to someone else and they relay information that way, exactly like a brain would.

would that give rise to a consciousness? And I know, I think that's a fascinating, partly because, you know, it sounds crazy. Well, there's a lot of complexity. Yeah, I mean, it sounds absolutely insane. But why not? Isn't it just as insane that you can do it with atoms and get yourself a brain? And also, you know, we talk about things like hive minds and insects and things like that. And we kind of, you know, you can say that's just a metaphor.

But a lot of the time, you know, you describe it as if it's in some sense, you know, sharing a conscience. You had Peter Godfrey Smith on recently. Yes. Yeah. And something he says in his book is that in an octopus, a huge amount of its neurons are in its arms. So I don't even mention this in the podcast. I'm so sorry. I haven't seen it yet.

But one thing that he might, one thing he says is he ponderes whether when an octopus gives an instruction to its arm. It kind of gives it the general vibe. And then the arm works out the details. What if the arm does it itself? It seems like the arm sometimes does sort of feel it and then sort of like, oh, what's that? But interestingly, they sort of seem to be able to act independently in that way. But when they need to, they suddenly become unified. When there's a predator, they can suddenly like, we'll shoot together and swim off as fast as they can.

So it's like it's separable when it needs to be, but unified when it doesn't. And our brains probably do the same thing. Why do we have two hemispheres? And also, you know, because there's some utility in it. And to build on that point, you know, the, if we're, you know, scaling up to the idea, we talk about, or at least we used to it, this kind of fall out of fashion. But a lot of the, a lot of the, you know, 19th century writing, not necessarily philosophy, writers, very keen on the idea of spirits of nations and things like that. You know,

Stondale, the French author, travels around Europe. And in his little note, he talks about, like, oh, yeah, the spirit of the German, you know, this bit of Germany and the spirit of Italy and, you know, that kind of, the spirits of the different regions, of not nations at that point, but the different regions that he's visiting. And, you know, we think that's kind of quaint now and a bit, a bit funny. It's, you know, it feels like, you know, largely it's kind of a collection of stereotypes. It's kind of amusing to read. But the idea of, you know, having groups of people having animating principles and treating them metaphorically as bits of mind is, you know, is a metaphor. The idea that groups of minds can coalesce to form something analogous to a mind, if you believe

in that, that makes that metaphor a lot more substantial. I mean, you know, I was, but then, you know, the further you go down this rabbit hole, the more interesting the question to become, you know, could, could a bunch of people simulating a mind have a conscious experience? You know, we think about it, you know, we think about mind as having, it's much easier to think about, you know, a group of, you know, 10 billion people having a thought or an idea than it is the idea of 10 billion people in this neurologically configurated way. So it's a unification area issue. Yes, yeah, yeah.

But like, I know, I think, you know, the more emotion-based you ask those questions, the less intuitive it becomes. What I like about this as an example is that you can bring this down to your own experience. It scales in that way because is it, can you make one of your neurons have a thought? Yeah. Can that localized part of this localized part feel anything? Because you can, kind of, there, okay, but what about if you do individual nodes and then you think, well, if we scale it up, whereas, and this makes sense with the combination problem. It's a little bit weird to think about, right?

Interestingly, David Hughes. Maybe this isn't as boring as you, as I accused it of being. David Hume didn't think that you would know. Like Hume, the famous empiricist, like, yeah, there's a lot to say about Hume, but he thought, for example, if you had no experience of the world, if you just, you know, had a pain in your big toe or something, and you'd had no experience before, you wouldn't know it was in your big toe. It's like, it's a really weird sort of implication of Hume's view, which I think is ridiculous. It's one of the many things that Hume says, which is completely ridiculous. He thinks that you essentially need to have this experience, which you then know, you really. is, has been due to something happening in my finger, and that allows you to draw that

memory. I think memory is the key to a lot of this consciousness problem. Memory allows you to string this sequence. Yeah. When we think about memory, again, we think about it in terms of like remembering what you did yesterday, but I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about remembering like remembering the instant before this instance, which when you start thinking about it in those terms, it becomes revolutionary. If you imagine yourself falling as we were picturing earlier with no memory, you'd probably act and, and according to the panpsychist, experience the world a lot like the can. Would that not, but, would that not preclude a Boltzmann brain? Would it preclude a Boltzman brain? Yeah, just that if they

coalesce into this single form for such a short space of time, how is it if it didn't exist prior to that? Oh, their argument would be the neurons are created in such a way as if you had memories prior to that. Yeah, exactly. Right, okay. So, you understand what I meant by Like if it's so transient, but encoded in its transient, is the fake memory. Yeah, exactly. I want to point out that we're talking about this in the context of like panpsychism and it's all a bit sort of woo-woo and people are like, this is totally crazy. But the kind of like the example Joe just gave of the, what do you call it, the China problem?

It's called the China brain. Like we brought this up in the context of panpsychism, but most people listening to this are probably materialists to some degree about consciousness. They will probably think, you know, I think that consciousness is just emergent of material, a bit like how, you know, zeros and ones become a picture on a screen, something like that. This example kind of poses a challenge to that, because it's like if you believe that you can just take atoms, put them in a particular order and get a unified conscious experience of pain, then why can't I do that with individual brains, put them together in a particular way,

and get a unified experience? In the same way that you can make a triangle out of wood or out of stone or out of metal, you know, if you define something relationally, what you're making it out of ceases to be as important. Exactly. If consciousness is just an arrangement of atoms, then you should be able to get consciousness out of an arrangement of atoms in other ways. And if you think that's not true, then you either have to explain why it's different or, I suppose, abandon materialism, or abandon the view that consciousness is in fact emergent and is not somehow fundamental. It's wacky, right? It's weird. Maybe this is, it might just be the messenger. It might have been the messenger so far. Sorry to everyone that's done theory of mine. It's come on my podcast because it's like five or ten people. think it might actually be like the next sort of big thing i'm i'm excited about this idea i think it's fun i mean i think there's there's a lot to there's a lot to dislike about it too of course but like it's exciting and i think people are interested in it and well it the first thing that it gives everybody is i have always had questions about my own experience everyone is always

kind of narcissistic when it comes to that and this is the most direct you're ever going why am i a thing why do i feel anything at all why do i sort of exist in that way my the other thing that I'm very interested in, which is one of your pet theories is emotivism. Can you explain emotivism to me like I'm 12? So emotivism is a kind of a theory about ethics and a theory about language. We've been talking so far about sort of what stuff is made out of. And there's lots more to be said about that, by the way, like why everything is made out of consciousness and how we even get there.

That's like a kind of metaphysical question. In the realm of ethics, like what's good, what's bad, what should you do, what should you do? Everyone's familiar with that kind of language. If I say like, you know, it's bad for you to kick a homeless person on the street. You kind of understand what I'm saying. You get what I mean. But a philosopher will hear that statement and try to break it down. What literally do we mean? What does this word like bad mean? The ethical emotivist is someone who thinks that ethical statements are just expressions of emotion. It means that when you say something is good or bad or that you should or shouldn't do something, all of that moral language is a kind of emotional expression.

A big confusion about this is that suppose I think that, suppose I just don't like murder. I just don't like it, right? Ethical subjectivism says that when I say murder is wrong, I mean to say something like, I don't like murder. That is a reporting of my mental state that I don't like it. Ethical emotivism is not a reporting of your emotional state. it is the expression of the emotion itself. So it's the difference between saying, I don't like murder and going like, ugh, murder,

like literally expressing it. Because when I say, I don't like murder, that's a claim that you can investigate. Is that true? Is it true that I don't like murder? Maybe I'm lying to you. Maybe it's false, right? So it's sort of, it can be true, it can be false. It's a fact about my psychology.

Whereas the expression of distaste for murder, just going as it famously has been boo murder, is not the kind of thing that can be. be true or false. You can't really like debate it exactly. It's just an expression. The emotivist thinks that that's what's going on with ethics. So AJ Ayer is kind of the father this emotivist theory in the 20th century. And it's only one part of his philosophy, but it's probably what he's most remembered for. And so he compares saying, like the difference between saying murder and saying murder is wrong is a bit like the difference between saying murder and then saying murder with an angry emoji in three exclamation marks.

It's just this like emphasis on something. So, okay, why think this, right? Like, why would you believe this? Well, pay attention to what your brain is doing when it moralizes. If I walk down the street and I kick a homeless person, you will notice a fact about the world, which is that I have just kicked a homeless person. And you could be completely like morally, emotionally detached from that.

You could just report as a fact if you were like a robot. It's a true fact. Alex just kicked a homeless person. right? But if you think that it's wrong, there's something more going on. You think Alex just kicked a homeless person and, and what's the extra thing? What is that extra thing that makes you say that it's wrong? Well, I think that if you pay attention to what your brain is doing in those instances, it's something that belongs in the category of emotion rather than that kind of rational thought. Like that extra bit that's making you say it's wrong versus just reporting it, is that

extra bit more like, you know, when you burn your hand and take it away or when you get angry at someone for doing something? Or is it more like two plus two is four and the sky is blue? Like, which of those is it more like? I think it much more strongly belongs in the category of emotion. And so that, the actual isolated moral element of the statement, it's wrong to kick a homeless person is an ethical expression. Okay. An emotional expression. You've probably heard me talk about element before. Come on. Frankly, that's because I'm dependent on and it's how I've started every morning for the last three years. Element is a tasty electrolyte drink mixed with everything that you need and nothing that you don't eat.

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That's drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom. If emotivism is true, does that mean that morality is just vibes? More or less, yeah. Although I think that the one thing's worth noting is that even if you put forward this emotivist thesis, it doesn't necessarily mean that anything goes.

So we're very quick to... Yes, because that's an obvious sort of follow-on. Just because we're very quick to generally say, okay, something is, I'll say subjective in the sense that, you know, I say it's different from subjectivism, but, you know, somebody can say boo and another person can say, yeah, at least in theory. But, of course, there are constraints on this. I think that sometimes we get very caught up in ideas about objectivity and subjectivity.

And actually sometimes, I think what we're actually often getting, at is the difference between stability and instability. So, like, most people think that beauty is subjective in some way, right? Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, famously. And there are people that dispute that, but that's a pretty majority view. It doesn't follow from that that you can, in fact, find anything beautiful. You just, like, try. If you try and, you know, look at a dog turd on the street and just be like, there's so many of my analogy is than dog term related. But, you know, a dog turd on the street and just try and find it beautiful. And you'll find that you can't. And so plausibly, there are still restrictions on the kind of things that people can and in fact do find beautiful.

And so you kind of say, it doesn't follow just from, if you were a motivist, it doesn't follow just from the fact that or the idea putting forward that all ethical statements are emotional expressions, that this means that we're going to have total chaos and everyone's going to value different things. There are plausibly just pragmatic constraints on the kind of things that people feel moral disgust about. Which is going to cause some kind of consensus. Yeah. So, I mean, you know, the class, I mean, one way of looking at it is the tribe of 150 people that say, yay, murder aren't going to be, they're not going to last very long. They're going to be outcomputed by people who are very boomer. Cancerous memes here. Yeah.

These kinds of responses function in a similar way to ethical subjectivism, which, like, most people are familiar with this idea that some people think that ethics is real. Maybe it's given by God. maybe it's inscribed into the foundation of the universe, and some people think, no, we essentially kind of make it up. And the debate is always this practical one. It's like, well, then, you know, how can you say that this was wrong? How can you say that that was right? Some people just say, well, you can't. So one thing to know is that it may be true that if we all became a motivist, the world would become a complete disaster and people would just start being self-indulge in it. That wouldn't make it untrue. It would just make it not very practical to believe.

And therefore, maybe, you know, we should cut this segment and not let anyone hear about it, right? But if you're asking what is- What is true, it will evolutionarily self-de-select. So, like, it's not, it's not, if it were actually a bad thing to believe, that that doesn't mean that it's a false thing to believe. We could have had a lot of emotivist's ancestors, but they maybe didn't stick about. Yeah, or, like, if it is in fact something that would lead to this sort of this arbitrary disaster. Do you think it does?

No, for a few reasons, partly because I agree with, I mean, people will be listening to this going, like, well, I think I could see a dog shit as beautiful in the right sort of context. And I think that's true. But the point remains that there are things. that you find beautiful that you can't just choose to not. And there are things that you don't find beautiful that you can't just choose to become beautiful. I think there is a degree on fundamental matters of like somewhat universal agreement in the same way that we kind of broadly agree on many artistic points, right? We might have, you know, I don't like impressionism and I think Van Gogh is overrated.

But broadly speaking, we have an idea of one piece of art being like, you know, a good, beautiful piece of art and one thing, like not really being a piece of art at all. But of course, there's so much room for subjectivity there that on the moral particulars, you run into a problem. How do I think this can be addressed? Well, one important thing to note is that AJ Ayer talks about this. Most moral debate, because this is the thing that you undercut, the ability to debate morals, to say, I think I'm right and you're wrong. If it's all just feeling, you can't do that. We're just feeling. So you can't morally debate.

Ayer points out that the vast majority of moral debate that you hear on a regular basis is not actually moral debate. It's debate about facts, which then inform your moral view. So imagine you're having a debate about gun violence in America. The debate might sound something like, you know, did you know that, you know, if we criminalized guns, then gun-related deaths would drop by 10,000 every year. Oh, but, you know, having a swimming pool is more dangerous than having a... These are factual claims that you can test, you can run statistics, and you can find out whether they're true or false. And a lot of the debate consists in that sort of factual disagreement. But the actual moral element isn't actually being thrust up against each other.

What people are trying to do there, which would, I guess, at least reinforce the emotivism view, is get further up the stack from someone's emotive outburst and say, well, actually the fact that your emotions are based on are different. Let me change those facts and see what kind comes out. And it would just bring about a new emotional state. Because suppose you were like, you were really scared of getting on a train. And I said to you right now, oh, we're going to go to Edinburgh. And you felt an emotion of fear. And then I just told you a fact, which is, oh, we're going to get the plane instead. Your emotion would change.

I haven't, like, convinced you on an emotional level. I haven't, like, changed your emotions exactly. I've changed facts, which then dictate what your emotional state is. Presumably, you could also teach me some things about the safety record of trains. That's also true, which would change your emotional state without just you saying, I'm scared of trains and me being like, no, you're not, and then we have debate. That doesn't make any sense, right? That's not actually how it goes.

And that's actually not how it goes in morality a lot of the time, you know, because if you find two people who are debating about guns and one says that, you know, if we have guns on the streets, then, you know, people are going to get attacked. And another person says, yeah, but when somebody's attacked, like, do you only want the bad guys to have guns? Don't you want good people to be able to defend them? What's the, like, moral boo and yay there? It's something like, you know, boo, innocent people dying, you know?

Like, they probably agree on that. And then it's just sort of a factual dispute of what will sort of bring about that innocent people dying. So does that suggest that people's moralities aren't actually as divergent as we think they are? That most people agree on most things when it comes to morality? Not necessarily. It's actually a very difficult question to answer. The thing I'm intending to get across here is that if it is the case that there is this big problem with something like emotivism that it doesn't allow us to have these debates and say that people are wrong,

think that it would be much more restricted than people would first imagine. Because you first think, gosh, I can't say, you know, I can't say that you're wrong to do it. I can't say that you're wrong to steal that apple from the store. I can't say that you're, you know, it's a good thing to, you know, walk your wife home or something. You know what I mean? Like, that's not the case. If there were some kind of disagreement that we were unable to resolve, it would be much more foundational and much more broad. That might exist. It might not. Our evolutionary psychology might be such that we, on the most fundamental levels, like, basically are made of the same stuff. But it does seem plausible to me that there could be genuinely irresoluble, like, foundational

value complex. I suppose one potential candidate for that will be the notion of rights versus consequences, which is a sort of, you know, so. Oh, yeah, that, yeah, that's interesting. And that's like one way, one way of, you know, a lot of, say I'm having an argument with someone about, I don't know, let's do the gun control example, but I know nothing about the facts on the ground about gun control. But one thing somebody might say is just, no, I have a right to this. And that's, that would be an ethical statement and thus an expression. But people do use that in a kind of load-bearing, justificatory way. I think that would be one example of a type of moral disagreement that emotivism would struggle to accommodate. You might be able to get it in

some sort of thought. You might find that it would break down, because I agree with you. Like, you'd break it down to like, you know, someone ultimately isn't just going boo innocent people dying because that's the sort of consequentialist view. Like innocent people dying, that's a bad consequence, boo. Another person might be like, boo, taking my rights away, right? And that would actually conflict. However, I think... One person's priority and another person's priority and who trumps. But I do think that both of these, in fact, are not actually foundational, right? Because you've got to break down this, you say, boo, innocent people dying. And like, I can think of 10 examples off the top of my head where you'd be okay with an innocent person dying, right? And likewise,

you know, boo rights are notoriously difficult to actually justify or ground. So if you had further conversation with these people, you might find that the emotional motivation that has led one person to innocent people dying is bad, and another person to rights being being violated as bad, is actually the same wellspring, as it were. And if that's the case, then this problem goes away. It might not be the case, though. And then you are left with this problem of, like, value conflicts that can't be resolved, but it's much more restricted and would probably operate on the level of, like, societies rather than individuals, which guess what? It does. And we kind of, like, just accept that some societies have different morals and some don't.

I suppose the other... At least on the particulars. The other cannibals we don't. Well, the other potential issue you might find is that it is entirely possible that we just have a non-foundationalist moral psychology. So on that, we've kind of said, oh, well, you know, maybe we won't end up disagreeing because we'll get down to fundamentals. But I would potentially, you know, it's certainly a possibility that we have just

loose branches of moral statements, you know, like, there's something about, you know, that's a good example. So, like, the example that was it, I think this in Jonathan Heights book, he uses the example of he takes a bunch of consequentialists and then ask them about, like, the kind of theoretical consequence-free incest scenario. Yes, yes, yes, yes, which basically just never exists in real life, but in this kind of laboratory setting, he kind of posits it. And he often finds that, you know, that's a kind of, that's something that people will condemn regardless of the foundation, their stated foundation to morality. So that's, that's one potential counter. You talked to Simon Blackburn recently. Is he still calling himself a quasi-real?

He actually regrets inventing that term. Okay. What does he call himself now? I'm not sure what he actually calls himself now. I think he's still a non-cognitivist. Blackburn is a, is a, is a non-cognitiveist, a kind of emotivist. He's got a lot of interesting things to say about that. I just did a whole episode with him, so, you know, watch it. I think what you just said, what did you just say? Was a realist? Before that. Oh, about the idea of, it's possible that the ethical statements that we will boo and hooray at are not a foundational structure.

In emotivism, we might expect that to also be the case in emotivism. Because whereas in a kind of standard cognitiveist picture of ethics, we come to our ethical propositions through having a kind of base level set of ethical. principles that we believe are true and then derive our ethics from that. And emotivist kind of throws out that picture entirely. So another explanatory problem you might posit for ethic, for emotivism in ethics, which is basically a variant on Fregegege, which is, would be like, oh, well, we have this whole inferential setup for our ethical propositions that we don't for emotions. You know, do, it doesn't, you know, I don't, I don't get angry because I've inferred anger from some kind of previous emotional principle.

I might get angry because somebody does something that I perceive to be an injustice. But that's going from a thing that I believe to be true. And that kind of this whole inferential structure that our ethics seems to follow. And at the very least, we want our ethics to follow as an ideal. We hold people being ethically inconsistent as a bad thing, seems to rely on some kind of underlying intuitive cognizum.

So there are like, there are different problems you can have with emotivism and non-cognitivism and ethics more generally. But there are responses to those problems. and I think you know some of the incest. One good proof of emotivism might just be the incest question. It's famously difficult for people to deal with incest. And it's always funny

watching people sort of wriggle thinkers on stage when somebody's brave enough to ask the question why it's wrong. Consequentialists are notoriously bad at justifying this. And they'll say things like, well, because you know, incest leads to having disabled children. In response to which there are a few questions, firstly,

what's wrong with having disabled children? And secondly, you know, obviously, what about the, like, in cases where procreation is not going to be possible, that's obviously like a side issue. We can obviously, oh, well, there's like a power imbalance between, okay, we can obviously just, like, just answer the question, right? You know what I'm asking you, and people can't do it. The emotivist, but bear in mind this is one of the most universal taboos in the world is the incest taboo. It's like everywhere. Interestingly, some societies have variant forms where it's like it's okay to marry your older sister, but not your younger sister, stuff like that. It's kind of weird.

I mean, famously cousins were in the royal family. Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, cousins have always been a sort of, uh,

uh, a sort of stick in the, stick in the mud for this. Like, people don't seem to care so much about cousins historically, but, but quite clearly like, that the Goldilocks zone of familial relation.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. For keeping it in the family, but not too much. Yeah. They're close enough that you know them. You don't have to actually go that hard looking.

Exactly. You end up with these 15th century monarchs with chins out to air. It's true. It's true. So they say. But clearly there is this universal taboo And most people just instinctively think it is just Well, what's the word?

Realistically, what's the word? It's something like, it's just gross, man. It's just, oh, it's just, it's not. And the emotivist says, yeah, that's what's going on, right? And so the wrongness of incest, when you recognize how difficult it is for people Of a non just prescriptivist moral theory, like if you're a believer in God who thinks that it's just

revealed that it's the wrong thing to do, then fine. That still doesn't actually explain why it's wrong, just tells you that it's wrong. But for any secular ethicist, it's notoriously difficult when you select out those other factors. And so if I ask you, Chris, like, if you think incest is wrong, I don't know what you would say. Well, I'm an only child, so it's actually really difficult to difficult to. I've thought about this at least a little bit. It was you that first taught me about the incest question and then Jonathan Haight kind of like I read it in full. Two things.

First off, the reason that humans feel incest a verbat. is because of something called the Westermark window. Is familiar you with this? No. Okay. So the Westermark effect is young children that are raised together that spend sort of infant and young child years in close proximity, especially if they see their mother raising another child, they have sexual aversion to them.

This is adaptive, right? You do not know who your sister is. You don't know who that person is. what you do know is that that particular individual was fed and cared for by your mother and you played with them and they were around between zero and ten years old this leads to some pretty difficult situations if you have twins or brother and sister that are separated at birth they've missed this westermark window they do not have sexual revulsion now cognitively they might but that like ick that apparently people who have brothers and sisters i don't have a brother brother or a sister. So I don't, like, to me, that innate sense, when you do this, any time that you do the incest question, people's faces start to sort of squeeze a little, there is, I feel, this is the one time in my life that I feel like a psychopath. For you, the incest question is just intellectual masturbation.

Specifically intellectual. There's no sense. Not to get, like, I don't like to make the examples like this personal, but I mean, you have parents, you know, like. That's true. Surely the thought of, without going any further with that sentence, you get what I'm driving at. I can map that. I can map that on. There's something you can.

That's true. But anyway, Western Mark Window, really interesting. So if you have brother and sister or specifically the classic sort of daddy issues thing, daughter and father, deadbeat dad, dad leaves, dad comes back in. Oh, right. Sometimes this happens and they don't even know, you know, adopted kids, so on and so forth. And you end up finding, because there is a kind of. resonance that's in that. You think, wow, like, this person just seems so like me. And it's like, yeah, they share quite a lot of your genetics. Well, look, the thing is, like, I think there are

all kinds of explanations you can give for, like, why this, this taboo has emerged. But, like, there are explanations for things that do not equate to justifications for things. You know, I could explain why human beings have an inherent, like, racial bias, you know, because when you're living in tribes, it makes sense to be suspicious of other people. So I can, I can explain evolutionarily why, you know, somebody might be a bit racist. But most people think actually that's wrong. Like, we don't want to do that. So it's not, it's not a justification for it. It's an explanation for why it exists in the human psychology. So you can explain why the incest taboo exists in the human psychology and why it cropped up in some areas and not others. But if you think

it's wrong, I'm going to ask you why. And as an emotivist, I can, I can, if someone says, well, I just think it's, I've had this conversation with people in the pub. And they say, they give me an emotivist answer. They say, but it's just, it's just disgusting. It's disgusting. That's your brother, you know, that's just, it's just, I'm like, yeah, exactly. And it's, it's like one of the most, I think, compelling cases for emotivism. Everybody's lopping as an emotivist when it comes to the incest question. Or rather they're lopping as something else until it comes to the emotivist. Around every question. Okay. Yeah, so much of it actually breaks down to, to, emotion. There are lots of reasons to think. Do you identify as this? An emotivist, to be

clear. Yes. Yeah, not that, yeah. Yeah, I think, I think so. I find it, I've sort of got some sort of qualifier, quasi. I've got kind of philosophical commitment issues, you know, like I, I find it very difficult to call myself anything, really. Like, it's, it's, it's, it's, because, you're sort of philosophically non-monogamous. Yeah, not just because, not just on a practical level of like, oh, you'll be held to it and people will, but just because like, you know, who, who bloody knows, man, like, realistically, who, who, because we like to put labels on things. Yeah, that's right. Like, we like to put labels in emotions such as good and bad. I mean, I think one way I've, I've tried to explain this, and why I do call myself an emotivist and say, yes, I am.

one, but like, you know, pending corrections, as it were, I would, you know, drop it in a moment if there were sort of good evidence against. A motivist agnostic. Yeah, like, like, emotivist with a degree of... Emotivist curious. Confidence, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I think if you imagine what it would be like if we didn't have a word for anxiety, just like there was no word for it, right? And you were feeling anxious. You would try to describe your feeling to me by using other emotional terms. you'd say like, oh, well, I feel a bit. It's sort of like sadness, but I'm like excited. And so you isolate that feeling, give it its own word. So if I ask you in that kicking the homeless person case,

what is the extra thing you're feeling other than just the knowledge of the descriptive fact that I kicked a homeless person? Well, it's something like no or something like stop or don't or boo or gross. And it's none of those things, but it's something a bit like that. So we sort of put a box around this feeling and give it a label. And I think we've done that and that label is bad. And so you kind of, it belongs in that category. One big mistake people make, I think, with emotivism is that you say that ethics is an expression of emotion.

I don't mean that bad or shouldn't maps on to preexisting emotions that we know of like, you know, boo and anger and frustration. It's its own unique emotion. Those are just like, it belongs in that category, right? People often think that an emotivist thinks that murder is wrong means something like expressing anger or distaste or disgust. It's not. It's its own unique thing. It's expressing wrongness, which is its own thing distinct from those things. But it belongs in that category.

It's a kind of emotion. You know what I mean? Yeah, I do. I'm interested. Is there a philosophy of influence? Because you two are both influential, study this stuff. do you have a responsibility that is philosophically interesting given that you are supposed to be at least in some way sources of insight

around the study of ethics, the study of logic, the study of philosophy? Is there an additional level of responsibility that you have as the closer to the source of where this comes from to be extra highly scrutinous with the way that you sort of put ideas across and what you talk about? I suppose, I mean, I suppose there's a base level of trying to be accurate, right? You know, you try and get things right. And inevitably, you sometimes get things wrong, but, you know, you try and get things right.

I think that, you know, I think that's, I think another thing that I'm very keen on when presenting philosophies is to try and get across that this is only really a starting point, right? This isn't, this isn't me from your computer screen telling you what's definitely true about the nature of the life and the universe, that being ridiculous. but that hopefully if you find some of this helpful or you find some of this insightful, it will be kind of grist for the middle of your own thinking. I'm very like, I think that, I think this about a lot of, you know, people quite often talk about things like videos on YouTube or podcasts or various different types of just disseminating media will sort of react with a little bit of skepticism. And people do it's about news articles and journalism, where they sort of.

sort of say something like, oh, yeah, but, you know, there are flaws within this medium. You know, your errors will creep in, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And they're suddenly right. I think that the, one of the correct, correct, one of the appropriate responses that I, I feel to that is to, is to try and front load a kind of a statement of your own fallibility so that inevitably, like, you'll get things wrong. We all get things wrong. This is a justice privilege thing that we were talking about. Yes, yeah. And I think it's important to say that because quite a lot of, you know, you're on, you're on YouTube. You're at the very least presenting yourself as knowing more than the viewer about something.

And so it's very easy. All of the kind of implicit signals there are saying, I know, I am right. Listen to me, position of authority. I am authority. And I think that it's, I think that it's in order to kind of do what I want. want to do, which is to largely get people doing this philosophy for themselves, and for this to just be something that they look back on in five years and think, oh, yeah, that was a kind of quaint starting point, but now I'm much further along with that. I don't need this anymore.

Part of doing that is to front load the idea that you're wrong, you don't have the final, you might be wrong, you don't have the final word. This is just a smattering of the literature, you see yourself as kind of the child's Hulk Hogan play set of lifting weights before someone actually goes and gets a gym membership. Well, I suppose the thing is that, you know, you're never going to be able to get, you If you're able to like compress all of the complexity of even a single philosopher into like a 30 minute YouTube video, it's just not possible. They're all very complicated. But you might be able to give people a general idea and also hopefully put them in a position whereby if they choose to go and look at that philosopher or that philosophy or that philosophical question for themselves, they are then slightly better equipped to do that.

And hopefully if they find some bit helpful, it helps them in their everyday life. It might do. It might not. But that's what I tend to think. I think that no medium of communicating any kind of information is perfect. And I think that a lot of the way that I like to react to that is to just front load the flaws if they're not obvious. I mean, you know, I think. Disclaimer, disclaimer. Yeah. Like, you know, public debates are a bit like that. You know, public debates have numerous flaws, right? They are oftentimes people be persuaded by emotional rhetoric rather than, you know, strict logical reasoning because that's just part of how we're wired. I don't think that that's necessarily a problem until we start pretending that public debate is something that it's not. As long as we bear that in mind. Some unique insight into wisdom and accuracy. Yes, exactly. As long as we're not watching. Nod's the guy who does debate very regularly.

I think you pretty much share my view on this as well. There's nothing wrong with theatre, you know? But you've got to know that that's what you're doing. What's your thoughts on this? You know, if we're moving into a world with philosophers as influencers, surely the platform comes with a huge ethical duty not to mislead, given that ethics is part of the source code of what you guys, at least in part, is supposed to do or be remotely educated in?

Yeah, I mean, look, we find it interesting and fun, and there's a kind of academic duty to not mislead, not misrepresent people's opinions and that kind of stuff. If you're going to reduce this sound to do as I say, not as I do. No, no, no, no. It's the reason I trip over myself to indicate my agnosticism, even about things I believe. It doesn't mean I don't have an opinion, but it means that I could be talked out of it at any moment. I do that with something as inert as like meta-ethics because, you know, earlier today, we spoke for five or ten minutes about suicide and there's somebody listening to this podcast for whom that's going to be the most significant discourse that they've heard on the subject, possibly in their life, probably in the past few days and, you know, past month or year or so. If somebody's thinking about that a lot, you might have some influence over their thoughts on an issue as important as that. That's not something to just sort of, piss about with, you know. It's serious. This stuff matters to people. And it's worth remembering

that sometimes philosophy is just people in this sort of intellectual playground having a bit of fun. And there's nothing wrong with that. But it's not always that. And if it is always that, then you're kind of probably wasting your time in idle leisure. And you should do something more constructive. You always end up castigating. You always end up sort of finger wagging after a little while. Yeah, but you've asked me to reflect upon my own sense of duty, and I think that you need to wag your own finger in the mirror every now and again, and remember that, like, it's great fun, and I love what I do, and it's, it's an amazing thrill and beautiful opportunity to be able to make a living doing things like this. But it's not all fun in games. Like, it does come

with a kind of a duty and a responsibility that it's easy to forget about, because here we are, having a conversation. We talk about this stuff all the time. We're going to, you know, go off to the pub and forget about it later on today, but that's not the case for everyone, for people who are listening, you think of, you think of certain areas of philosophy, or maybe even most areas of philosophy is kind of like information hazards in that way. I think that information hazards are a bit of a, I mean, we were talking about the concept of overrated philosophical ideas or ideas that should, you know, get in the bin. And I kind of think information hazards are one example. I think it's sort of part of this whole AI hype that a lot of it is just sort of sensationalist and I think doesn't have a very good grounding. You know the analogy that I mean, though, like a high potent cognitive pathogen. Specifically not an information has it in that literal sense. But yeah, like there are maybe there are things that are sort of not worth knowing or not worth exploring, right? There are topic areas which just aren't worth sort of getting into.

But that's sort of for you to decide whether you find it. interesting whether you find it, find it worthwhile. I don't know. I sort of, we stand on the shoulders of giants, as were, as Newton said, in that I've seen myself as a communicator of ideas. I don't really say anything genuinely novel or unique. There's nothing new under the sun. I'm just trying to communicate other people's ideas. So my principal responsibility is trying to do so in a way that makes sense. Like, why am I talking to people about this? There must be some application for why I'm doing it. but but I think yeah being a communicator rather than somebody who's who's trying to put a steadfast view into the world makes it a little easier is that just a very slippery way of never having to actually stand your ground maybe but if in order to be successful in any field including my own I would have to plant my feet firmly in the ground and say this is what I believe and I don't think that I'm wrong about it

then I'd probably give up and go home, at least for now. I mean, maybe I'll feel that way one day, but for now at least, I mean, you know, the idea that the idea that a 26-year-old philosophy YouTuber would, like, know anything significant with the level of certainty that is immune to a healthy dose of agnosticism is completely bat-shit insane. There's just no way that's ever going to be true, you know, or justified. Even on the incest question. Even, especially on the incest question.

Yeah, yeah. Gentlemen, I appreciate both of you very much. I wish that we could keep going for longer, but this location is going to kick us out at some point. It looks like it's literally about to collapse in on us. Yeah, perhaps. If you say you're any longer. Look, I genuinely appreciate both of you. I think it's so cool that we've got two British guys leading, contributing to leading forth philosophical influence, unsolicited advice and Alex O'Connor within reason. You don't have a podcast to you, Joe. I don't. I'm going to start interviewing a few. few people. I've got a few people lined up. I told him what to call it. You know what you should call it? Solicited advice. Oh, let's know. It's right there in front of you. Boys, thank you very much for coming through. You got it, man. Thank you for having. Rinse takes your laundry and hand delivers it to your door, expertly cleaned and folded.

So you could take the time once spent folding and sorting and waiting to finally pursue a whole new version of you. Like tea time you. Or this tea time you. Or even this tea time you. Said you hear about Dave? Or even tea time, tea time, tea time you. Mmm. So update on Dave. It's up to you.

We'll take the laundry. Rinse. It's time to be great.