Have you ever found yourself in the heat of a pizza topping debate, staunchly defending the honor of pineapple and jalapeños? Well, you're not alone. Our latest episode is a smorgasbord of culinary conundrums and philosophical ponderings, starting with my own guilty pleasure pizza and a taste test that could save your palate from an unfortunate citrus coffee soda mishap. We chew over the joys of local dining and how our personal tastes can elevate a meal from mundane munching to a full-flavored feast of conversation.
As we move from sizzling burgers at school games to the celebrity-induced frenzy of Logan Paul's hydration drink, we touch on the ripples created by food trends and influencers. We're not just tossing around opinions on charred Brussels sprouts here; we're diving into the shared experiences and cultural shifts that dining out brings. Plus, we discuss the unexpected delight of air-fried veggies with a side of salsa verde, and the communal joy of a pizookie at BJ's Restaurant.
But we don't stop at the dinner table. The episode takes a twist into the paradoxical nature of our world, from the analysis paralysis brought on by too many choices to the elusive nature of originality in an era of AI-assisted creation. We debate whether a Civil War author's work is a tapestry of influences or a beacon of original thought, and we examine the tightrope between inspiration and imitation. Join us for a feast of ideas that will leave you savoring the flavors of thought long after the plates are cleared.
Infographic used in Episode
Have you ever found yourself in the heat of a pizza topping debate, staunchly defending the honor of pineapple and jalapeños? Well, you're not alone. Our latest episode is a smorgasbord of culinary conundrums and philosophical ponderings, starting with my own guilty pleasure pizza and a taste test that could save your palate from an unfortunate citrus coffee soda mishap. We chew over the joys of local dining and how our personal tastes can elevate a meal from mundane munching to a full-flavored feast of conversation.
As we move from sizzling burgers at school games to the celebrity-induced frenzy of Logan Paul's hydration drink, we touch on the ripples created by food trends and influencers. We're not just tossing around opinions on charred Brussels sprouts here; we're diving into the shared experiences and cultural shifts that dining out brings. Plus, we discuss the unexpected delight of air-fried veggies with a side of salsa verde, and the communal joy of a pizookie at BJ's Restaurant.
But we don't stop at the dinner table. The episode takes a twist into the paradoxical nature of our world, from the analysis paralysis brought on by too many choices to the elusive nature of originality in an era of AI-assisted creation. We debate whether a Civil War author's work is a tapestry of influences or a beacon of original thought, and we examine the tightrope between inspiration and imitation. Join us for a feast of ideas that will leave you savoring the flavors of thought long after the plates are cleared.
Infographic used in Episode
Welcome to help yourself. Food and philosophy with Brian and Nick. I'm Nick.
Speaker 2:And I'm Brian.
Speaker 1:Can I take your order? No, no. So what do you, Brian, what do you call it when two docs evaluate each other for their performance?
Speaker 2:I don't know.
Speaker 1:Peer reviewed paradox. See that works, whether we talk about medical doctors or you're talking about right, yeah. Yeah, yeah, all right what do you mean?
Speaker 2:I like I wouldn't have guessed the peer reviewed part. I had then my head. I'm like it's something paradox. I know that. But what am I eating? So I'm having a. Actually there's a local pizza place called New York pie that you're like, oh man, that sounds really good and I like Pete. Well, first of all, it's nice every once in a while to go to a place that actually makes their own dough, like they actually do the dough at the place, and you know, it's not just like a.
Speaker 1:I mean, I hope everyone makes their own dough, like otherwise.
Speaker 2:I'm saying that some places have it shipped in from other places. You know what I mean. Where?
Speaker 1:I know, I know.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I'm Tom, I was making the money pun, oh yeah. Otherwise they used to be in business.
Speaker 2:Yeah, got it Okay.
Speaker 1:Back to you. So so they make their own dough, so they make their own dough.
Speaker 2:Sorry, and and their, their toppings are pretty good. They have some sort of semi unusual ones, but I will always I'll get a, a what's it called? Oh, antipasto salad. My wife and I like to get that because it has, like you know, it's cheese and meat and a bunch of other stuff. They actually put artichoke hearts on theirs, which I get. I get all of them because my wife doesn't like them and and they have a good, good ranch dressing that goes with that and but they have different form. Facts. Some people will do these little pinwheels of like meat and cheese that go in their antipasto salad. This place does little cubes of different kinds of meat Pepperoni is in there, Cheese, some ham and stuff like that. So it's a really good salad.
Speaker 2:And then I last night I was able to just get my own pizza. I usually like a lot of other toppings that nobody else in my family likes, so I just get. A lot of times I'll get a small pizza just for myself that has all the crazy toppings. They call them the crazy toppings, but they're not crazy to me. So so I got pizza last night with well, the base pizza was just I think they called it the New York basic, which was olives, mushrooms, green peppers, pepperoni sausage, and I think that might be it. And so they got that. And then what's the other thing? Oh, so then I added all right, this is going to create a huge rift in our audience, but I added pineapples and Wow, just your basic pineapple pizza.
Speaker 2:So I added pineapples and jalapenos. So you know, so really interesting. They put a lot of jalapenos on it, so it was really really spicy. Spicy it was and it was good. I don't necessarily like pineapple all the time, but every once in a while that sweet and spicy Like. One of the things I like a lot is there's a Mexican restaurant nearby our house that does pineapple, jalapeno margarita and so sort of the same kind of thing. It's like super sweet but then you get like a burn that you're getting and it's served with the jalapeno.
Speaker 2:And so. So I got that and it was really good it was. You know, like I said, I usually am just stuck with sort of getting what the rest of the family wants, because I'm a nine and so I'm just like, yeah, I get whatever you want, I don't care, Just get what you know, and so that you know, basically I was able to get the full deal, which was really really good.
Speaker 2:I will say that the places that make their own dough, they do make their own dough because it's more expensive to buy pizza there. But sometimes everyone, like I said, every once in a while I feel like it's worth it to, you know, to get something that's a little bit more than just the standard. I guess I don't know how would you. It's like you can't really say fast food pizza, because it's not really fast food pizza, but I guess chain, commercially produced chain, chain chain, yeah, and that that place, new York pie, has a few locations. They've got, I think four or five locations around where we live, but they're not a mega chain, they're like across the whole country and so sort of a local, locally owned chain. Maybe that's the best terminology. So that's what I have and the. So then Brian's beverage corner. I've drank the I've drank. I've had these before on the podcast. Drink is the proper drink, I don't know. I always you don't say drink.
Speaker 1:No regular verb. You don't say drink. You definitely don't say drunk. It doesn't feel right though.
Speaker 2:It just doesn't feel right I drank. I don't know, I drank, I drank it, I drank it. I don't know it. Just it sounds like I should have some kind of an accent when I say it. But so slingshot coffee company makes these little coffee sodas and yeah, I think you talked about them before.
Speaker 1:I have had them before.
Speaker 2:This one's a little different. This one is a citrus vanilla cream soda. It's a coffee flavored citrus vanilla creams cream soda, if you're, if you are familiar in the last episode, if you didn't listen to it, go listen to our first episode of this, because this is part two that I talked about having coconut flavor with coffee and thinking that that was not a good flavor, and then in this case, I thought, hey, citrus vanilla cream soda that doesn't sound like it's very good good flavor in a coffee, like coffee with citrus vanilla and cream soda.
Speaker 1:Right yeah sounds like a lot of acid added to very little and base.
Speaker 2:And I was correct, it is not a good flavor.
Speaker 1:Good stuff, good delivery.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, I like what they try it, what they're trying to do. You know they're trying to like broaden, broaden the thing out and everything. I like the attempt. It just there's a lot going on with it. I can't really taste. It tastes very bitter coffee, like when you, when you drink it. It's, I mean, makes sense. The number one ingredient is organic cold brew concentrate. So obviously that's the number one ingredient in there and I don't know, I don't know if it's like worth it to to like to have the flow. Well, let me put it this way, I would much rather just have like cold brew or something like that from Starbucks. That's just, you know, regular plate flavors, or just maybe even just some sweet cream in it, than this. I don't know that I would reach for this, and it's nothing against slingshot. I've had some other stuff that slingshot is done, that's good, but this one seems to me like not my cup of tea. It's not my cup of tea, or, in this case, not my cup of citrus, vanilla cream soda, coffee, soda, coffee soda.
Speaker 1:It's not. It's not your cup of coffee soda.
Speaker 2:Right, exactly, exactly. So I'm going to, I'm going to give it a few more sips throughout the podcast to see, but the first sip was it was quite intense. So I'm going to see, I'm going to see if it actually changes flavor a little bit or if I my taste buds change. Maybe it was just shocking the first sip that I had. So do I have that as part of BBC? And then my water jug for hydration, and I know my BBCs are getting lesser and lesser. You know, I did say I did send you that picture the other day, though I was at a conference and had like multiple drinks.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I guess. But I did send you that picture the other day when I was at the conference where I was like they had drinks, you know, they had coffee, and I had my flask with me, not flask, my water water bottle, and I had all these drinks and I send you that picture. It was like hey look, bbc had a legal conference, you know. So I.
Speaker 1:It's normal for me that I have you know multiple drinks everywhere. So better to have BBC there than at an at an illegal conference.
Speaker 2:That is true. That is true, yeah, so that is what I am eating and also what I'm drinking. And what are you eating?
Speaker 1:Well, I want to call back briefly to you talking about the, or is it this? The jalapeno margarita.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah.
Speaker 1:Pineapple jalapeno Pineapple yeah, pineapple jalapeno margarita yeah, my sister handed me a beer at one of our recent holiday family gatherings. Yeah, she wanted me to try it and it was a spicy margarita, like, like a can of beer, spicy margarita. Oh, okay.
Speaker 1:Beer, yeah, and it was bad like she was hitting it to me because it was the last one left. I think she had two left, last two left, and she'd already kind of pawned off on other people to try. She thought might like it or be interested in trying it. But it it was just bad like I couldn't even. It tasted like Pickle juice but then had the if the cumulative, cumulative effect of heat in the mouth like jalapeno right ice often does you know?
Speaker 1:like the first, first time you something's got jalapeno flavor, jalapeno spice in it, you're like, oh, this is so bad. Yeah, then the second bite is a little more warm. And third, it was just. It was just jalapeno pickle juice is what it tasted like, and and I Couldn't finish it and she convinced me that the next holiday gathering to go ahead and give it another try, the last can right wow to get it out of the fridge and like, okay, I'll have a couple sips, but I'm probably gonna pour it out and so that's fine.
Speaker 2:She was a good that's always, that's always good. Yeah, hey can you drink this, just so I can get it out of my refrigerator.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's like if, and that to me is probably a good indicator that I've got At least a little bit of nine in me, right? Because?
Speaker 2:yeah. Yeah, sure. I can help out. Yeah, no problem, I was a peacemaker.
Speaker 1:Yeah, just if I don't know if I would an achiever and she dared me, then that might be more effective. Right finish it anyway. But what I'm actually eating is some air fried chicken cooked in olive oil, and Dory was even sweet enough to cube it up for me for easy eating nice. She also. Her secret ingredient was Some Monterey chicken spice. Oh yeah which it does. It does give it a bit of Like a friendly Earth-tone flavor. Yeah, we use the, we use the.
Speaker 2:Monterey steak seasoning On our. So when we cook hamburgers for the football games at the high school, that's the season of choice for the hamburger patties, because it makes it has the salt and the pepper and has a little bit of like Garlic in it and a little bit of other stuff, rather than just a plain old salt and pepper on a burger, you know.
Speaker 1:Mm-hmm but, it's good, and my side dish for Our frozen veggies heated up a belief, the air fryer as well. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Russell sprouts, sweet potatoes and onions and I've got a bit left. It's kind of cool a little. I might throw some salsa verde on there, just to spice it up a bit more. Yeah and I can say that it pairs very, very well both the side dish and the chicken with, like the classic round crackers, good old, you know wheat flour with, you know vegetable oil and see, yeah, the vegetable oil is safflower oil, but it's, it's all. Vegetable oil is just bad for you, I'd yeah as is wheat.
Speaker 1:Now I'm like feeling bad for parent crap this healthy food.
Speaker 2:The Brussels sprouts sound yeah yeah, there's just a little.
Speaker 1:Edges are nice and crispy. That's good burnt, burnt tips to him, yeah.
Speaker 2:I Used to not like that. I used to not like any kind of you know, charring or anything on, even if it was like on meat or if it was on something else. Now I've got, I've actually like sort of developed a flavor for that, where it's like, yeah, I want a little bit of, especially with that, like when they do the Brussels sprouts where they're Baked and the you know, even some of the outside parts will fall off and just be sort of crispy like on the side, so gives a little bit of extra texture when you're eating them, you know. Yeah, because I remember growing up.
Speaker 2:I didn't like them because it was always boiled like they always boiled the.
Speaker 1:You know, or, or like steamed the Brussels sprouts and it was just sort of like this a baby food texture.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah yeah and now I've gotten into it. I think it's sort of trendy, though, because I know, I know of at least three or four restaurants I've been to where they have Brussels sprouts on the menu, either as a side dish or as a as an appetizer, like a starter, where you can get Brussels sprouts for the table, which is the James Brute house is a National chain in the US.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they have. What is it? The balsamic Brussels?
Speaker 2:yeah, do you have BJ's out and where you are? Oh, we don't have one out here. Yeah, they're lucky. We used to eat the. Bj's. We see the BJ's all the time when we lived in Southern California.
Speaker 1:So yeah, great place to go after work With some friends. You know, yeah, just share appetizers.
Speaker 2:Get a bazooki.
Speaker 1:Yes, that's the the cookie. Yeah, and cookie in a pan. Yeah, iron skillet. Yeah. Drinking. So I've got adequate amounts of water, maybe yeah, but even lots of water, as well as a hydration drink. This is Prime hydration.
Speaker 1:Oh nice not associated with yeah, not associated with Amazon at all. This is the lemonade flavor. You would know that by looking at it because it's this bright highlighter yellow. And one thing that seems that interests me about these drinks is that every flavor that I've tried so far has 10% coconut water in and it really comes out in terms of just sweet and there's a ton of flavor too Like that was something that really like. It literally hit me. Like I know it didn't literally hit me, but it felt like it hit me with flavor, like you taste it right away. Your first step, your fifth sip, as Pretty stimulating, but there's no caffeine, no gluten.
Speaker 1:Yeah it's Sweden with sucralose and and only 25 calories, because I think there's also some actual sugar in there too. So, mark, yeah. But yeah, since I started exercising, getting my hands on some hydration drinks seemed like the thing to do to help make me feel like a part of the community.
Speaker 2:Well, that's a. That's a. That one is a new drink. That's Logan. You know Logan Paul. Have you heard of Logan Paul on YouTube? He was a big YouTuber.
Speaker 1:Yeah, If I had known that I might have.
Speaker 2:Yeah, anyway, he said yeah that's pretty funny. So he's yeah, so he had, you know, he had a YouTube channel and then he now he's like a box like he's. He literally is like has made a lot of money and I think is went on to train and he's had actual like professional boxing matches or at least at least gotten paid to go out and box someone but him and this other guy started he had a pretty like he medium muscle build, but large or long lens, yeah yeah.
Speaker 2:He's a pretty tall guy, but he's yeah, he started that. I actually just pulled up an article, said that. It's like an article in Yahoo Finance and it's like, yeah, they, they were on track to hit over a billion dollars in sales in 2023 after, like the previous year, only being like 250 million. So they've like sort of taken the drink. I know that a lot of the young kids like it, like it's being a parent of high schoolers, like they have it on sale in the vending machines at school and kids like it.
Speaker 2:So, and they also have an energy drink. I'm pretty sure that I think I may have actually reviewed that, not reviewed it, but that might. That was definitely in a BBC at one point, I don't know if it was the hydration one or the energy one, but yeah, Okay, yeah, man.
Speaker 1:But yeah, maybe I'll probably stop getting those drinks.
Speaker 2:You're like this is the last time I buy that.
Speaker 1:I know there's always kind of like a neutral, nearly negative, I don't know connotation around that guy Like yes, yeah. I love to hate them, or Yep. I don't know much about them.
Speaker 2:I don't think I've ever posted on YouTube I think there was a recent. Well, we did an episode a little while ago about cancel culture. I'm pretty sure that he got either partially or completely canceled at some point for doing something like he did, something that was not acceptable, and I don't even know what that is, and you know but I know that he got like sort of people were like okay, you know, that's not cool.
Speaker 1:You're done yeah.
Speaker 2:And then he opened a drink company and is making hundreds of millions of dollars in a drink company, so Sounds like an enigma.
Speaker 2:Right? Well, this is part two, as I alluded to, of our series on paradoxes, the paradoxes of modern life, and last episode we went over about five of them and we've got a few more that we can go over today, that just have conversation about them. But before we get to that, I'm going to re, I'm going to review the definition of paradox, just so that if you didn't listen to the first episode, you'll know what we're talking about. But if you didn't listen to the first episode, go back and listen to it, because it's pretty good stuff. There's lots of good stuff in there, if I do say so myself.
Speaker 1:Anyway, I mean, I feel like it's the most recent episode we've published. You know right, You're not saying something.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly that is saying something. So let me just go over the definition of paradox, in case somebody hasn't listened to our past episode, just to make sure that we're still all on the same page. So paradox is a seemingly absurd or self-contradictory statement or proposition that, when in fact investigated or explained, may prove to be well-founded or true and, as we talked about in the last episode, talked about sort of a bunch of them. Five is a bunch, that's my definition. A handful, huh Five fingers, it's a handful Right.
Speaker 2:So we talked about five of them. I think that they are all. I don't want to say that they're not like mind bending or anything like that, but I will say that you know, talking as we said in our that other episode we did about counterintuitive truths, there's just so many things that you, I think your mind plays tricks on you and you think that it should be a certain way based on logic, but when you start actually looking into things, that logically doesn't play out that way. So that's sort of the cool thing about these is that if you, you know, not that these are super profound or anything like that, but at the same time I think most people think in a certain way and sometimes the logic doesn't play out. So so the next one, or the one that we were we left off on that we were going to do, is called the paradox of abundance, and that's talks mostly about information abundance, but I think it could be really applied to any kind of abundance.
Speaker 2:So they talk about it says information abundance, like all markets of abundance. Oh there, hey, look at that, it ties it all in there. Information abundance, like all markets of abundance, are bad for the average person but great for small numbers of people.
Speaker 2:So which I think is what we're sort of yeah, well, I think we're also seeing that in the last 20 to 30 years, the amount of information that's available to us at our fingertips 24 hours a day, seven days a week, between AI and Google searches and everything else, is a massive amount of information right, and so, for most, product, product abundance, to write their stuff, that, and 1700 different versions of charging cables and phone cases and sweaters and books that you can get on Amazon.
Speaker 2:Yes, you know, it's which which touches on the one we we talked about last in our last episode the paradox of decision making, having that abundance of stuff where you're, you're like paralysis by analysis and you've got man, it's better to have three, three choices, like back when, back in the day, back in the old days, you know, back back in the day when there was only three network television channels and you didn't have cable and you didn't have anything else, you had three choices about what you're going to watch on TV. And sometimes I spend an hour scrolling through trying to figure out what I want to watch before I start watching it now, because there's so many things that you couldn't watch.
Speaker 1:So and I there's people I play games with that you know identify with this too that it's the same problem with gamers. There's such an a saturation of games and games on discount and games that people bought on discount or bought just wanting to play or figuring they would play that they've never played. Right. And and they still aren't getting around to playing them. And they have the choice and they don't know what to play. They don't know what they want to play.
Speaker 2:Right. So, and I think also we are seeing this play out relatively recently, just within the last 10 years, and unfortunately I don't not that I don't want this to be a political podcast, but I think in politics that's that has really where it's gotten to, the, you know, sort of information overload. And then, you know, for, for people who know and see the internet for what it is, as a tool to use in very specific circumstances, I think it works out great. But the minute that you use it as I'm going to go out there and, you know, basically fill my cart with all this information about the subject that I'm talking about, or, you know.
Speaker 2:Going back to making another reference, when we talked about the cognitive biases, you know that confirmation bias is really really, really strong when you have a source where you can phrase a question in a certain way and you can get an answer that you want because there's someone else out there, there's someone you know, there's someone out there that thinks the way same way that you have and probably has put that on the internet somewhere. So when you do a search and say, oh, does this, this, this, this happen, If this happens, then there's probably somebody else out there that, and it has no basis in science or any kind of research or anything. It's just some person that had a platform and said, yeah, I believe this because it makes sense logically. Which is exactly what we're talking about is paradoxes, things that should make sense. You know, logic doesn't always play out, you know.
Speaker 1:So I think there's an old Bible proverb that's oh, actually it's Ecclesiastes that there's nothing new under the sun.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:You know. But yeah, Just coming to the whole, like you were saying, somebody might have already thought of it. Yeah. Because tons of times where I think I come up with something original. Yes. Now the curiosity. I'll Google it and it's like, oh nope, there's already three different versions of the same thing I just thought of.
Speaker 2:There was a. There was a professor in my law school that on. I thankfully did not have him as a professor, but apparently on the first day of class he came in and said don't think that you're going to have an original thought in this class. You're going to read, you know you're going to read findings from the most brilliant legal minds throughout history. So don't think that you're going to come in here and think of something that's novel, because all of those things have already been thought about. You know so.
Speaker 2:But again, getting back to that abundance of information, I think that it can be like I said. I think I see it going two ways. One is that confirmation bias is you come up with a conclusion and then you go and seek out information to try to support that conclusion and with the abundance of information on you know that's readily available, you're going to find confirmation for whatever you want to find confirmation for, and I think that. But I also think that you know for, for a, for a very few, you know, much smaller group of people, the internet is a very powerful tool that can be used for, you know, for really good things and for, you know, productivity and creativity and all kinds of things, but I think for most people it's not that.
Speaker 1:I think there's an abundance of content creation. We talked about the previous episode.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:And those who, those lucky few, who have just the right talent and they, they caught the attention of the algorithm at just the right time. Yep. End up being the the few people for whom this abundance is good. They went viral. Yeah. But it's difficult for the average person to become a YouTube star or a tick talk sensation or writer. The phrase is um.
Speaker 2:Well, the paradox there is that it takes the. It sort of goes back to that what we talked about the paradox of writing or creativity in the last episode, which is that there's still no secret formula for becoming famous on YouTube or TikTok or as a whole, as a podcast or anything else. What it is is continuing to create content until somebody says, oh, you know what, I like that content. And then you get feedback and you get into a feedback loop and then you create more of that content and then you get a bigger audience and then you know it just keeps on going like that and you're able to develop a large audience, but it's, you know, part of that is luck you know.
Speaker 2:Part of that is you get featured on YouTube as one of the you know. Youtube itself says hey, this is one of our featured content creators. Go check them out. You know, and all of a sudden you know there's a lot, of a lot of people that go to your channel or whatever.
Speaker 1:So I want to say that it sort of implies it with talking about markets of abundance, but I think money is another thing, that we have no abundance today. You know, more money, more problems. Yeah, I think it's true of individuals who have a lot of money, but I think it's true of the marketplace. When you print more money and the dollars are less scarce, less rare yeah.
Speaker 1:And everybody's got some, then it literally means less. That this is like how inflation happens. This is where people who are earning six figure salaries today can feel poorer than people who are earning, you know, 20,000 before the Great Depression. You know it's like there's more to go around, but it still feels like we have less of it. Right. Right, well, and it's usually the who are already very rich have the means to get even more money so that the effects of inflation affect them less.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, and even that, like the way that this particular person phrased it is, you know, it's bad for the average person, but great for a small number of people. I mean, that's why we have 1%. You know, the 1% like, yeah, 99% of it's not great, the abundance of the abundance in the United States that we have, and 1% of people, it's awesome for you know. So now, granted the other 99%, don't have it so bad, you know, until you start getting to the really, really bottom.
Speaker 2:And so and we mentioned that in our last episode as well I think just, you know, until you get to the very, very bottom of that spectrum, even the people that are in the middle don't have it so bad. But again, it's great for a small amount of people and, eh, for other people. Sure.
Speaker 2:But you would think abundance would be a good thing, right? You would think, oh, we should have an abundance of all these things, I mean. But it doesn't play out that way. I think the information one is particularly dangerous just because it is so abundance of information. I've actually thought about this quite a bit.
Speaker 2:But abundance of information isn't the problem in my opinion per se, Like what I think is the problem is that you have to have the ability to process information. So you, particularly like you as an individual, have to have the ability to process whatever information you're given. Right, and we all process things in different ways. And I think that's the biggest thing that education gives you like formal education, or what we know as formal education in America is it helps you to process information. It doesn't help you to basically All right, it helps you to evaluate and process. So it's not necessarily if you get a degree in history that you're going to be a great historian, but you're going to be able to evaluate different sources of historical data and sort of weigh them for their veracity or anything else.
Speaker 1:So one. To me I'd say processing is the same as decision making. Yes, Okay, what do I do with this information? Or what is it I want to achieve of all the information that's out there? What information is going to help me achieve it? And then, basically, filtering Processing is a mix of filtering and decision making, but filtering itself is a decision.
Speaker 1:You have to decide what's relevant, what you're going to use, what you don't need, what's irrelevant. So just kind of a quick callback to our previous episode and such. But I could do all kinds of research on healthcare and healthcare organizations and doctors and fraud and there's tons of information out there. But how do I process it, as you say, such that I know which companies to invest in or how do I process it to know which doctors to go to or how much to save in my HSA? It's information overload. It can make it hard to make a decision if you don't know how to quote, process it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's why we have the term rabbit hole. You know, like you're literally going down a rabbit hole about something that's like and you mentioned this actually, I think I mean we're referring a lot to our last episode but you know, having a like, you know, the larger sort of, the larger the purchase, Like you said, if you're purchasing a business, you might take six months to make that decision. If you're purchasing a car, you might take a little bit. Or if you're purchasing a candy bar, you know it really shouldn't take you any longer than a few minutes to make that decision, right, and you know. But then if you decide, hey, I want to purchase this type of vehicle, if you just go on YouTube and search for that, you're going to have thousands of videos about that car from everything, from somebody just showing pictures of their I mean showing videos of their personal car and then all the way up to reviews and people who produce content for YouTube, right. And if you do all that, that's just prolonging your decision making process, right? So yeah.
Speaker 1:So what's the next?
Speaker 2:paradox. So this one, if you listen to the last episode, is the one that I teased.
Speaker 2:I know it's, we're getting to it. It's called the paradox of originality and it says many of history's greatest artists have found their voice by copying others. We discover who we are by imitating others and watching our uniqueness emerge over time. So it has the example of like true creativity or true originality. Is it really original? There's a big debate going on. We mentioned AI. There's a big debate going on right now about this exact thing, which is AI takes all of the things that it has access to on the internet. Like, if you say, write a story about XYZ, it's going to look up every single story that it has access to all over the place that are stories that are similar to that. It's going to use those and it's going to put that into the story that it's writing for you. So is it actually an original story or is it just an amalgamation of?
Speaker 2:all of those things. Well, a person could do that too. To me the debate is a little bit like, because a person could read 50 books. Here's an example I have a friend who has written multiple books about the Civil War and he's probably read two or 300 books about the Civil War, so probably the most well-read person I know about that subject, but it's his job. So then, when he wrote his book going back to the paradox of reading that we talked about in the last one, where you might not remember all the material that you wrote, but it changed you profoundly, right? So in that case, is his book actually original? Or is it not? Because what people are saying about AI is well, that's not an original piece of work, because it's taking little pieces of everyone else's work and it's putting them together and spitting out something else, and I'm like well, isn't that what a person does? So are you just debating about the speed at which it can do that? And these are all genuine questions to my head.
Speaker 2:You're just mad because it can do it in two seconds, whereas a human being is gonna take potentially years in order to read every single story, or many of the stories that are about that, and spit out their own work that is influenced by other pieces of work. I don't know, I don't know the answer to that. I get it, but it's interesting because, in essence, if you go down that path and what we just talked about, what is actually original, like what's, does originality cease to exist?
Speaker 1:Like it comes back to that there's nothing new under the sun, right, or so much of originality is taking like two seemingly different things and combining them into new and meaningful, interesting ways. And I you mentioned like I think you Mixed-in art was just hey, let's take charcoal and paint and make something you know.
Speaker 2:Well, and you mentioned I believe you mentioned Aristotle in our last episode.
Speaker 3:As I do yeah, as you do, and in every episode there's an Aristotle reference.
Speaker 2:But I will and I'm gonna butcher this, but I know that Aristotle and some other of the major philosophers were like somebody was someone's teacher, so they were mentored by another philosopher and then they came up with their own and they're still widely regarded as somebody who came up with, you know, fresh philosophical ideas or their own philosophical ideas, and but they were taught by another. So that was influenced by the other person and nobody seems to have a problem with that. So so is there a problem if you're influenced by someone else?
Speaker 2:I understand copyright law. Let's just take that out of the equation right away. Like I understand, there are certain rules and a court can look into something and say, no, that's too close of a copy, so you're not allowed to do that. Right, but how do you?
Speaker 1:you know how do you parse that out, I think one. There's transparency about it too, right? There was no secret that Plato was a student of Aristotle, if I got that right.
Speaker 2:I think so.
Speaker 1:So on. You know, someone is a student of Socrates and such Like. They made that very clear in their writings and people at the time obviously knew that they were hanging around each other. But, like with AI, it's well. There's no citation of references and sources. Right. You know, there's no credit where credits do, whether that's social credit by giving recognition, or financial credit in terms of compensation for use of copyright or whatever. Right.
Speaker 1:So it's like I think that's where a lot of people are going. Oh, wait, a second. I am reminded of you know, it wouldn't be, it wouldn't be our podcast if we didn't mention Toastmasters. And you know, in speech contests there's a statement about originality, right? Like you can't just get up there, quote the Gettysburg address and expect to win a speech contest. Right.
Speaker 1:You might not even meet the time qualifications. You might exceed the time qualifications, but aside from that, it's not original and every contestant takes a statement or makes a statement of originality and the rule books gives some objectivity, some quantifying attempts at this qualifying sort of qualitative sort of idea. Right. It says that 25% or less of the speech may be devoted to quoting, paraphrasing or referencing another person's content. Yeah, so we? I don't think our podcast qualifies as original by that, but maybe not. Maybe, so I don't know. Right, exactly.
Speaker 1:But then even then, like any quoted, that's an interesting distinction. I wonder if, anyway, any quoted paraphrase or reference content must be so identified during the speech or within the speech. So not only so 75% has to be original, and anything that's not original you gotta cite your sources. Wow, and I too honestly like I Toastmasters contest, yeah.
Speaker 2:I can recall some speeches I've, given that I don't know that I've cited who the quote was from.
Speaker 1:Yeah, good thing you didn't have a litigious judges turning in context, but yeah, so I think some of that talks to the ideas of it. Of course, this is one standard for a one organization. There's a copyright law and all that stuff but, you know. Even so, by Toastmasters standards, if a quarter of what you say is quoted, it's still considered original. Right. The 100% of what you say is considered or qualifies as original by contest standards, and I think that's an interesting rubric.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think I will say that I don't. I feel like going back to like the other paradox of creativity, right, I feel like, well, it's not, it doesn't really fit there, but just in terms of the creative process, you know, I feel like artists look at other artists' work. You know, if you're a painter, you're gonna go look at other painter's work works and you're gonna, you know, you're gonna take that in, you're gonna absorb that somehow, and then you're going to go create your thing. And was it? There's no debate that you were influenced by that other artists or the person in your field, in your craft. There's no debate that you were influenced. You have to have been influenced by that.
Speaker 2:So then you know, and I understand, like it'd be, but I will say that you know, sometimes you do. You know that imitation kind of thing. Imitation is very flattering, you know, to the person. But I think that I think that's how it starts out. I think you start out as copying. And then I saw an interesting graphic one time that was talking about original thought and it was talking about. It wasn't talking about it, it was showing it graphically and it had a circle and it said okay, here's the circle of knowledge that you get when you graduate high school or elementary school, high school and then college and then getting a master's degree and you know, and then it had a line all the way at the edge. That was the limit of human knowledge. So it was just like here's our collective body of knowledge and it's this big circle, and then it has a little tiny like bump, that is like a little tiny notch that comes out in one little spot and it zoomed in on that you know spot and it said
Speaker 2:yeah, and it basically yeah, exactly yeah, like a little tiny thing, and it said this is what it's like when someone does a PhD thesis, because a PhD thesis is something that is required to be original thought. It's something that is, you know, but it's also been influenced by all of your years in school. But it also has to be some kind of thing that, hey, nobody's ever written a paper about this before, nobody's ever looked at it this way before, nobody's ever. You know it has to be some kind of original thought, and so if you're you know, if you can successfully defend your thesis and get your PhD, what they are, their proposition, is that that's how the total amount of human knowledge is expanded Just slowly, slowly, slowly, by each person doing a little tiny, you know movement of that, and I think that this is sort of where that plays out is they have to have been influenced by all of the things.
Speaker 2:And when you're doing like, for instance, when you are going through your lower levels of education you know college and grad school and all these things that's almost expected of you is, hey, you know, like, if you're an art, if you're an art school, they're gonna say, hey, we want you to paint an impressionist painting and it's gonna be sort of like these other artists that have been impressionists in the past. So try to do something like this.
Speaker 1:You have to learn the rules before you break the rules.
Speaker 2:Right, exactly, and so you know. I mean, like I said, I don't know how to feel about it because it's you know, you wanna think that you have original thought, but then you know, as with most things and this is another cognitive bias too that I can't remember the name of, but it's ultimately, the more you know, the more you realize, the less you know. Or is that Dunning-Kruger, or is that the other part of the Dunning-Kruger effects?
Speaker 1:basically, yeah, yes.
Speaker 2:The further study.
Speaker 1:I would say that's a good connection to make.
Speaker 2:yeah, yeah and so like you begin to understand by going through all those things. Oh, like I thought I knew about this, but now I don't. So now I'm gonna study a little bit more and then yeah, kinda wanna learn.
Speaker 2:Right, but that's where the originality comes up. I think I think that you keep doing it and you go, you keep getting to those levels where you think that you know, and then something else comes up in your study or something that's influencing you or that you're exposed to, that you realize. Oh, I thought I knew again. And it's sort of like the fool myself once you know, fool myself twice. That kinda Don't go over.
Speaker 1:Let's just I think. One thing I'll put out, though, is when it talks about copy and copy and eventually something original or new comes along. It does remind me of the natural evolution of language and of species, right? Yeah? Supposedly our genetic copying process is a perfect copy, but there's always slight differences with each iteration. Yeah, and the same thing with repeating what we hear. All language is just reusing words that other people created. Yeah, but what do kids do when they're trying to branch out and form their own words? They just co-opt existing words and make them mean something else. Right.
Speaker 1:Like bad, like oh, that's bad, like bad to the bone, or it's really a good thing or cool, like I'm referencing various generations, you know there's-. That's sick, Sick yeah. Yeah, that's sick, bro. Wait, I'm not your brother and. I'm not ill, so-. Exactly.
Speaker 2:And actually Like what are you doing.
Speaker 1:Stop messing with my language, make your own. No, that's-.
Speaker 2:Well, I think that's and the other thing is I'll touch on before we go to the next one is that this goes back to also the paradox of skill. Where it's the, you know, basically there's a certain amount of luck that's involved in whether or not you're the so, like famous, famous, famous authors, famous painters, famous philosophers, they were the lucky ones. There were a lot of other philosophers that were around the time of Plato and Aristotle, and all right, but they aren't the household names, they aren't the one that if you walk in, ask someone, they aren't the ones that are gonna get named and potentially they have just as much skill.
Speaker 2:But they just didn't, they weren't the lucky one you know.
Speaker 1:They were the ones that people ended up copying Right. Right, they latched on to, they copied their ideas and decided to mess with those, and then those ideas happened to be better and they were copied, and you know. So I think the current paradox applies, but your point stands too. That's also about what? Was it? The paradox of skill?
Speaker 2:Well, I'm just saying that now you've got people who go back and are you know they are reading about you know? Hey, let's talk about the great philosophers. Well, there's going to be a certain list that that comes up and there might be great philosophers that you've never heard of, and that was just because the lucky ones were the ones that hey, that you know, this was published in some way and then expanded and expanded and talked about.
Speaker 1:And they had better branding. They knew someone.
Speaker 2:Right, right, exactly. Better branding, that's very funny.
Speaker 1:William Shakespeare was actually in the third best playwright of the Thomas generation. The others didn't know how to talk to the ladies, so right.
Speaker 2:Exactly exactly.
Speaker 1:I think you're also touching on the next paradox of the paradox of strategy. I won't let you read the thing, but at the bottom it talks about the things that lead to success are the same things that can also lead to failure.
Speaker 2:Yes, yeah, so paradox of strategy the same things that help you achieve outlier success also increase your chances of outlandish failure. For example, investing with leverage increases your chances of risk and reward, and yeah, and that's that's a, that's an interesting sort of an interesting paradox it's.
Speaker 1:I mean, it touches on a bias for me, like the survivorship bias. Yeah. That's like assuming that whoever, whoever wins, whoever doesn't die in the war, must have this one weird trick that helped him or her survive.
Speaker 2:Soldiers, soldiers hate this one weird trick.
Speaker 1:But you know, when you interview the hero, like, what did you do to survive? I was like, well, I've, I've relatted my men, I buckled down the trenches, I waited for the whites of their eyes, or whatever it was. Well, if you could interview the dead, like, hey, excuse me, I did that too. Yeah. But, but I got hit with one more bullet than this guy did, yeah, you know. So, yeah, I guess there's that comes to mind. You can do all the right things and still lose, yeah.
Speaker 2:And that's the thing that can go. I think awry for me is is the. I can't think about that. You know what I mean? I think I think anybody who's successful and I mean there's that old, the old story that they always tell about, like Abraham Lincoln, if you've ever seen that's like, yeah, he ran for this office and he failed the bar and he did like all these failures and failures and failures, and then obviously he's one of the greatest presidents, if not the greatest president that we've ever had in this country. Right and 16th time to the charm.
Speaker 2:Well, the thing is you just have to keep like in terms of self help, and where this leaves you is you can't think about like, hey, the things I'm doing, like this is where that positive attitude not like the rosy glasses, but the positive attitude comes in is like you have to know that you can fail, but you also have to. You also have to just be like yeah, but I'm doing everything in my power. Oh, this is a good reference to going back to how to win friends and influence people is actually take it back. It's how to stop worrying and start living. That's same author, different book, Because in that book, basically, it's like okay, except that the worst case scenario is going to happen, that you're going to fail miserably and then do everything in your power in order to prevent that.
Speaker 3:So I think you know like I said, that's a good strategy.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah and because. But I mean you have to be aware that you can fail, but I think you have to not think about that. I think you have to just say, like I know I can fail, but you know what Part of the growth process is going out and making the effort to try to get what you want, you know, out of life or out of whatever you're trying to chase after. You know. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So, I guess the other. Yeah, I get that for sure. Like you can't, if you can't always think about how many times you can fail or worry about the failure, you just got to do the thing right. Yeah, do the work I'll just. I guess the thing I'm looking at here is also the flip side of what I'm saying. You can do everything right and still lose, but there's also that there are people who do things wrong and still win. Yeah.
Speaker 1:You got to be careful taking advice from successful people who behave, who do things. Broke people do so to speak right. Right. It's like just because they won the lottery doesn't mean they can give good financial advice. They got rich despite their poor choices in terms of aggregation, right In terms of probabilities, or the hero that runs headlong into war and somehow comes out unscathed doesn't mean you should do what he did to win the next battle right. Right.
Speaker 1:Like he might have got lucky. Just because they won doesn't mean they won. What they did before is the reason they won. You got to have to be careful about your strategy.
Speaker 2:It's the forest gump mentality of just sort of going through life and like it's like when he's like, yeah, I just I don't know. My friend wrote me a letter and said we want me to invest in this fruit company and it was Apple. So I invested in the fruit company and that may be a lot of money and like it's like, yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, there was how could I had had something that it's all good.
Speaker 2:So the last one, that this one's a little bit. This one's a little bit crazy to me and I don't know, I don't know the actually, if I can judge whether or not it's true what it says in here or not, because I don't know Jewish law, but it says so. It's the paradox of consensus and it says under Jewish law, if a suspect was found guilty by every judge they were deemed innocent To or too much agreement implied a systemic error in the judicial process. Beware unanimous agreement often leads to bad decisions.
Speaker 2:So, the way I look at this more and I don't know, like I said, I don't know Jewish law, so I don't know if that's a true statement or not. But what I do know is sort of hive mind mentality, where everyone just sort of jumps into a boat and is like yeah, yeah, we should go, yeah, we should go kill that guy or whatever. I don't know why I went so dark immediately.
Speaker 1:All the mob mentality yeah.
Speaker 2:Like mob mentality where everybody is like sort of like yeah, get them, let's go. You know, salem, salem which trials?
Speaker 1:there's the eugenics sterilization craze. Yes. Some people would say the. January 6th yeah.
Speaker 2:So when people storm the Capitol, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Some people would say that I was yep.
Speaker 1:And then I would say, another one that is probably left still to history would be our response to COVID and rapid approval of vaccinations and compulsory, you know, administering of that to the clinical workers and such yeah, and I think that I think that's the.
Speaker 2:I mean, everyone always uses the. Everyone always uses the old example of Nazi Germany, you know, and a lot of people in you know, in that arena were like sort of along for the ride. They were like, well, this is, you know, and I'd have to look. I mean, maybe this is a bad statement because I don't, I'm not a historian, but my understanding is that you know, there were many people that were sort of on that, you know, on that bandwagon, because everyone else was on that bandwagon. And also, if, if, obviously in an authoritarian sort of situation, if you speak out against it, then it's bad news for you, right, sure?
Speaker 2:So you kind of like choose to believe. Right, you sort of go along with it With the survival mechanism. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And I think that I mean as an overall thing, like with this.
Speaker 2:I feel like this is where we sort of run into some issues with people that are we'll go back to content creators again but people who are on the internet and who are espousing certain views and certain things, and whether or not you're for or against those views. Sometimes, when you see somebody and they, hey well, this person has 10 million followers on YouTube, they must like know something right, 10 million people are following this person and yeah, so? So I think that's sort of the. I think in the modern day, that's what we're. I mean, these are paradoxes of modern life, right? So I think in modern day, that's that's where that can go. Really bad is that all of a sudden, you've got somebody who has a platform and is able to put information out there and other people are looking at that, and one of the ways of determining whether or not it's good or bad is whether other you know whether there's people listening to that person. It's like, well, if they've got 10 million people listening, they must be saying something right.
Speaker 1:And and and then probably not like, like the thing that we should. The paradox, the listener from the paradoxes, which I think you're kind of leading to this point, was that it's you might be a little skeptical because they're probably just keeping it at the base level and appealing to the lowest common denominator feeling, to the masses of of content and interests and topics. Right.
Speaker 1:I would just rely on conventional wisdom. But I would be remiss if I didn't bring up Frederick Nietzsche's quote. It's very Mark Twain-ish like. It seems kind of playful, but it's. In individuals insanity is rare, but in groups, parties, nations and epochs it is the rule.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that makes sense. I mean that plays right into this is like hey, beware of a consensus, you know, beware of everyone is like you know, like you said, mob mentality or hive mind kind of. And I think that's. The bad part is that we all sometimes can well, I don't want to say we all sometimes it's very easy for anybody who even is of really good intelligence to fall for something like that.
Speaker 2:I mean that's why cults happen, that's why all kinds of I mean that's that isn't that cult mentality is, you know the cult gets bigger and bigger and more people are like, well, all these people are involved and, like, this person brought me in and they're sort of my friend and they seem normal. So I don't see how being part of this group is not normal and it's like, yeah, it's a cult, you know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, it is rough. It does remind me like I feel like there's a paradox here of if the paradox of originality tells you you need to copy others to become original, and now we're it's saying be careful about consensus, right, you're copying others' thoughts. Yeah. I guess it's maybe the thing that the bridge there is copy others, but don't forget to find your own flavor right Put in your own flavor Right Right. Don't just follow the cookbook exactly.
Speaker 2:Learn enough about cooking that you can start mixing flavors, mixing uh cuisines or chalmers fusion and such, just don't mix do not mix coffee with citrus vanilla cream soda. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But hey, we wouldn't have. You don't know for sure, unless you try it right. Both from the company doing the taste testing and you doing the taste testing. Now, you both know it was a bad idea, right yeah, but you, you both took the chance and kudos to both of you. Right. I'm glad you learned it so that I don't have to.
Speaker 2:Right, exactly.
Speaker 1:And you're working on the shoulders of Brian and his experience with the coffee drink citrus flavor.
Speaker 2:Well, I think that's it. I think that's what we. We have killed this top topic and we'll yeah, we'll put this, we'll put the JPEG up or the uh, the picture up of the infographic that we used, and the paradoxes will continue. I'm sure you know, the paradox is, whether you're not, you listen to the next episode of help yourself or not. That's a big paradox, because you would think that it would.
Speaker 1:I don't know, I don't even know, what I'm.
Speaker 2:I don't even know what I'm, what I'm trying to get at here. All right. Well, that's it, bye.
Speaker 1:It was a pleasure talking with you.