Why Philosophy?

Mark Oppenheimer and Jason Werbeloff, the two South African hosts of the irreverent and fearless Brain in a Vat podcast, join Spencer to discuss the uses of philosophy its role in a flourishing human life. Along the way, they also discuss the permissibility of outsourcing your religious duties to an AI and other surprising topics.

Transcript

Spencer 0:34

Mark. And Jason, welcome to micro digressions.

Jason 0:37

Thanks for having us Spencer.

Mark 0:39

to be here.

Spencer 0:40

I've been a guest on Braden event a few times, and it's good to have you here.

Mark 0:46

I didn't make up for all the grilling that we gave you on our show and you can torture us. We're a bit, who's the big man. Now

Spencer 0:56

the topic today is the value of philosophy. And I wanted to begin by laying out a range of views that one could have on this. A high bar view would be that philosophy is essential for realizing our highest potential as human beings or something like that. It's necessary for the examined life. And the examined life is necessary for a good life or necessary for the best kind of good life or something like that. So that would be the high bar. On the other end of the spectrum, you could have the view that philosophy is positively harmful. You could think that like it's a boardwalk distraction from significant social issues, or you could think that it causes people to lose their faith in God or something like that. And then in the middle, you have the idea that it's kind of a harmless and maybe amusing hobby. So between those, you can imagine a different sort of high and sort of lowish views. But that for me, I think represents the spectrum of views. One could have about this.

Jason 2:06

I'm very curious, mark, whether you think it's a necessary condition to live like a very accomplished life, that, you know, philosophy that you at least practice it and have read a lot and have analytic thinking skills.

Mark 2:21

I don't know if it's a necessary condition because it strikes me that the people who do lead very accomplished lives, who are not philosophically mine. But it strikes me as the kind of thing that can make your life go better. I think you can probably also make your life go worse. So I've got a very close friend who his early initiations philosophy kind of made him quite depressed. I think he felt that there was this weight of ideas that he hadn't been exposed to that once exposed to opened up all these rabbit holes that made him question the fundamentals of his life. So I think at varying stages, it probably can make your life at least feel worse, but it makes you think about what is valuable. I mean, the classic line is it's better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a pig. Satisfied. And thinking about these deep questions might reduce your happiness levels, probably make you a bit of a social pariah as well. I mean, I think we've probably all had that experience of sitting around a perfectly nice dinner party being the only philosopher. And you start to ask these rather embarrassing questions about. Because you're genuinely interested and people start to feel attacked and they might not want to have you at the next dinner party, but there's something else which is that the spectrum that spends set out strikes me as the intrinsic things about philosophy. In other words, where will philosophy take you in and of itself? The other kinds of things are the instrumental arguments, which I see are the kind of reasons that universities will tell people to study philosophy. So they say, well, it's not. So you can lead a more meaningful life because of the things you'll have learned. It's that you'll get all these analytic skills and you'll be a sharp, I think. And that'll help you in a real job in our lack of management consultants or.

Jason 3:59

Yeah. And I mean, I've based my career on that. So in my other life, I'm not a philosophy lecturer. I used to be many years ago, but even then I was only a part-time lecturer. So nowadays what I do is I use my philosophy skills for the goods. Maybe not for the good of mankind, but for the good of me. So one thing I do is I run an advertising agency and I find that the analytic problem solving skills, that philosophy has taught me invaluable in advertising. And then secondly, I lecture logic to lawyers. So I teach lawyers how to argue better. And again, I teach almost no actual philosophy other than fundamental logic, but applied to the legal profession. So there you philosophy is being applied as you say, instrumentally rather than a study in and of itself, but it's highly useful.

Spencer 4:48

Are you saying Jason, that philosophy has helped you be a better advertising?

Jason 4:54

Yeah, massively. So, So, you know, when you advertise, run off Facebook ads and I have a lot of different clients and basically a lot of these clients have already run ads themselves or through other ad agencies and they didn't work and that's a troubleshooting exercise. You know, why isn't your product selling? Why aren't you ideas spreading? And there's hundreds of different reasons why that could be the case. And it's a deductive logic exercise. It's basically a deductive game to work out, which of these reasons are the reasons for failure. And then there's some induction involved in the sense that we have to create samples. So small sets of ads that, that work for a period of time and then try and generalize from that to those ads working for a longer stretch of time. So there's inductive principles, um, and there's abductive principles. And so we try and find the best explanation for why things have, or haven't worked and what will work in future and what won't. So yeah, philosophical principles are used all the time. And I find that in all my work clear thinking is very important. So

Spencer 6:00

the sorts of things that philosophy departments say on their websites to attract majors actually seemed to be born out in your experience that you think that your, your education has actually refined your thinking skills in a way that's helped you be better at this job. That's totally unrelated to.

Jason 6:19

Very much. So I think the question I was curious to ask mark is, is that a necessary condition? So is it a necessary condition for me to be doing what I'm doing that I had studied philosophy? And mark is saying, I mean, the question I asked mark was an accomplished life, but you know, maybe this is a narrow question, you know, is the study of philosophy, a necessary condition for very precise analytic thinking in any field. And I would lean towards the answer being yes, or at least it's a necessary condition for very clear analytic.

Mark 6:54

Yeah. I mean, I think it might be, I mean, so one of the things that Jason does in teaching lawyers is to say, I'm going to equip you with a set of skills. That'll make your life much easier and make you a better lawyer. Specifically for lawyers are arguing in court. And he says you know, up until now, you've been, with a tree branch and I'm going to show you how to fight with a broadsword. And a lot of your opponents will still be fighting with those three branches and you'll be able to whittle them down to size. And so in some senses, I suppose some of the creme de LA creme of south African lawyers that I know have philosophy backgrounds, and I think it probably hastens your ability to become excellent in your field. And that probably is the case for a range of fields. I suppose maybe to say that there's a strong correlation between having good for this optical analytics skills and being excellent in your field. I think that's true. I just think there must be instances of people who have no philosophical training, but have that sort of lust for knowledge or that ability to kind of argue with people without ever having formally studied philosophy. But we might think of as philosophers broadly, I think the other distinction that's worth having is that when we refer to philosophy, I think all of us mean analytic philosophy. I'm inclined to think that people that are studying concept of philosophy are coming out stupid. So I think you learn a array of jargon terms. And I think a lot of that stuff is nonsensical and I think it makes people muddied thinkers. And I really think that stuff amounts to poisoning the youth. So I think that. University departments that are teaching those kinds of courses are making the world a much worse place. I think you won't find it very often in philosophy departments you'll find it in other places. So you'll find that English departments and sociology departments are quite keen on alleged philosophers like FICO or Derrida, who I really think are making the world a much worse place. And not just in terms of making those people demo, that some of those ideas that are coming along destabilize our actual world. So you know, when you start to poke holes in the of, of truth, or you focus too much on things being about battles of power, I think we sort of see some really negative effects from this.

Jason 9:07

Yeah, it's a hot take, but I think it's right. There's just such a premium on power dynamics in our daily discussions these days. In the social realm and it just seems to me like it's all gobbledygook, it might just be gunk.

Spencer 9:24

one of the uses of philosophy is to function as like a defense against the dark arts course. Like you can defend yourself against destructive ideas.

Mark 9:35

Yeah. So there's two problems I have, I suppose I don't have a concern with the nature of the topic they're engaging in. I think those topics are well with having good discussions about, but the way that an analytic philosopher would deal with those discussions is through rigorous argumentation, through analyzing evidence through putting forward the best argument. But I think what we found in the sort of continental schools is to say, well, there's other tools you can use those dark arts tools. So what you do is you say, well, you're a white male, so we don't need to listen to you. Your voice has been heard throughout history for a long. And so who your genitalia and your levels of melanin and needs to shut up, and we need to remove you from the cross-curricular and your ideas are irrelevant, regardless of the content of those ideas, we will just judge you based on your immutable characteristics. and so there's that kind of problem. And one of the arguments that say, well, this is a very good way to seize power. How else do you beat the patriarchy, but to use other kinds of tools, the is a very keen on, as you say, the sort of logical argumentation staff, and you're never going to win any of those arguments. So rather use other tactics, shame them, silence them, do the kinds of things that fascists and totalitarians have done. You know, it works for a while and you can seize the means of production for and you can get your ideas out there. utopia is only one bullet away. So it doesn't matter if we run a few lives.

Spencer 10:57

Well, some of what you're talking about there, I think shouldn't even be called bad philosophy, right? Like if you're explicit purpose in propagating ideas is to achieve power for yourself that isn't any kind of inquiry, not even bad inquiry. And I think it's a conceptual constraint on what philosophy is that it is a kind of inquiry.

Jason 11:21

I like that. I liked that constraint on what philosophy is. So basically if I understand you correctly, Spencer its truth, aiming.

Spencer 11:30

Yeah. And maybe also wisdom maiming, but wisdom involves some apprehension of truth. So yeah, I think it's a kind of inquiry. What I was thinking though, when I was hearing mark talk about this as suppose we just deleted all philosophy. So-called philosophy you know, the bad stuff and the good stuff. Would that be a net loss or could it possibly even be a net positive? It depends on how pessimistic you are about the pervasiveness of bad ideas and the relative scarcity of good ones, I suppose,

Jason 12:00

might be a great averaging exercise. So you'll delete some really positive experience and delete some really negative experience. So the range of experiences might be very much a more central.

Mark 12:15

So Jason's a utilitarian, so thinks we ought to be maximizing the good, it would seem then that the more gumph gets produced by grievance studies departments, the more junk produced through basically postmodern essay generators, the more reason to delete all of it. And so at some point, Jason's gonna have to say, I guess we should explain this to the good stuff too. If, uh, that's the trade off we get, so we can get rid of the rules and the Plato and the, you know, the Derrick prophets, if we can get rid of the junk on the other side, I do like Spencer's move, which is basically say a lot of that. Stuff's just not philosophy. It's something else. It's propaganda. It's the way of kind of keeping people busy. So I think there probably are some people who are smart. They go to university, they want to engage with big ideas. And unfortunately they wind up in one of these departments that does continental philosophy. And there's probably a lot of. Fake busy work that you can do. We know engaging in that stuff. You've got to learn this whole vocabulary, but no, one's got the balls to say the emperor's got no clothes. So everybody else seems to be using the terms and you kind of you know, fake your way through it. And you can probably fake your way through it till you die, because you can, you can publish journal, journal articles that are basically meaningless. No one reads them anyway. So you never going to be called out for it. And as long as you use the referencing style and the sort of particular terms, and you'll just do fine. And you know, maybe some of those might people could have been valuable for the rest of us if they'd applied their minds useful disciplines. But you know, maybe some of those people are dangerous activists and it's better to kind of put them in a hall where they can't really do any.

Jason 13:49

I like Spencer's move as well to just call a lot of that. Not philosophy at all. There might be some ardent, uh, continental philosophers. So continental philosophers who really believe in what they do, not just in the sense that they're trying to make the world a better place by giving themselves and those, they believe in more power, but that they really think that they're aiming towards truth. But I do imagine those other minority, I think that built in to the cake or baked into the cake to not mix metaphors of continental philosophy, is this idea that you should be doing it for a reason, whether that reason is something other than for the truth, seeking the truth. It needs to be for a reason, similar to improving society or fixing power structures. I think that's, you'll find that in almost all, all required outlines for PhDs or masters dissertations for, um, con continental.

Spencer 14:46

I should say, in all fairness, I've read very little Fuko and very little Derrida, and I don't know how much of this garbage is actually there to blame for it, or it's second rate knockoffs of them. But I want to stick to the principle of trying not to criticize something I haven't read very much of. On the other hand, what I did read did not impress me. I'll say that Christmas break one year. I thought, okay, this is it. I'm going to plow through dairy does on grammatology and then I will S I can say, I have read it now. I can say whatever I want about Derrida. And I got two pages in and like, Nope, Nope. Not spending my Christmas break this way.

Mark 15:34

So I signed up for a, for a course on Harbor mass wines. Harbormaster sort of seen as one of these deliberative Democrat. And has engaged with some analytic philosophers in a rotor interesting exchange with John rolls. And I had also spent a holiday sort of trying to read between facts and norms. And my initial feeling was I'm a very stupid person because I don't understand any of what this person is saying. And it's taking me half an hour to read a page. Sure. I thought, I thought I knew something about the world and clearly, I'm a, uh, a pitiful rich and sort of dragged myself through as much of the stuff as I could. And I used to kind of like harangue strangers and Austin to kind of read a paragraph with me and sort of see if I was the only fool around. And then I started reading this, a guy, Stephen K. White at Oxford who wrote these losses on all, sorry, that's someone's like, this is incredible. These ideas are wonderful. Like, wow, there's some really beautiful stuff here. And then I started to wonder, how would you tell. With which one held the ideas because that the Stephen K Y stuff made total sense to me, it was very crisp, clear, compelling. Interesting. But I'm not sure it had any relationship with Habermas whatsoever. And I think the problem is that the kinds of norms that we've created are that, very smart people use these arcane terms. And that's a way of showing us macho in the legal profession, the classic movies, two spotlights of Latin, and it sort of has the smack of legalees people go, wow, jeez, that guy knows Latin. I mean, he must be a really good lawyer, but I think it shows a vulnerability and a weakness. One of the things that we do on Brandon Nevada, we tell all about. Look, our audience are intelligent people who are philosophically inclined, but not all of them are professional philosophers. So if you're going to use any jargon term, please explain it to us. And it's a little trick I picked up from Daniel Dennett. So Dan had had this thing where he would organize these interdisciplinary conferences. So you'd have philosophers and scientists in a room. And he said, I'd seen these guys sort of retreat into jargon and talk past each other on so many occasions that what he would do is he'd invite a group of grad students along and you would tell them, look, I've got some grad students they've read your work, but please try and use neutral language. And he said for the first time you could see these experts speaking in a way that was crisp and clear and understandable. And they understood each other. They had this aha moment of, oh, that's what that guy has been saying over the years, but they felt too embarrassed to ask these fundamental questions, like, sorry, when you say this, what do you actually mean? And I think that's a much better sign of intelligence when you're able to express yourself. Through as simple language as possible.

Jason 18:10

I think that's right. I think that there's an enormous amount of obfuscation unnecessary up for station. I'm using big words like obfuscation, but I think there might be a slightly more charitable position on the Continentals. So you might think that the Continentals are not actually doing philosophy at all. Like Spencer says, but doing something more metaphorical. So I did a course on salt in my post, postgraduate as, and I really enjoyed it, but I only started enjoying it once I stopped seeing it as a truth seeking exercise, I stopped seeing SART as trying to tell me what the fundamental nature of reality is. We were reading, being a nothingness and I started seeing SART as giving me. Of what it is like to be a human being alive, not in some metaphysical sense, but in a psychological sense, what is it like to experience life? What is the phenomenology of life? And there, it seemed very, very useful again, using language that was unnecessarily complicated, but still very, very useful. And I think maybe if we reinterpret continental philosophy in this way, it can be valuable, but the moment we start to take it seriously in the sense that it's telling us something true about the nature of reality. That's when we go astray.

Spencer 19:30

I just wanted to say, as far as people who can put things into simple language, I think Richard Fineman is a pretty good candidate for the all-time master of this. Have you listened to any of his public

Jason 19:43

lectures? Yes. He he's the physicist.

Mark 19:47

Right. That's an interesting thing. I mean, it might be the case that there certain scientists who are in the public imagination are in a brilliant, because they're understandable. So if you think about five minutes or call, so they get Sagan, they've captured the public imagination because they're able to take immensely complicated things and boil them down often through the use of thought experiments as well. So to sort of take a complicated theoretical thing and bring it down to a concrete case. And that's the technique that we use on brand Nevada. So all of our episodes start with a thought experiment, some kind of narrative device. And then from the concrete, we can kind of build up into the abstract and we can start talking about theoretical principles.

Spencer 20:25

And I want to ask a different question, mark, that goes back to your very first set of comments. You said that there could be people who are really accomplished, who aren't philosophers, that haven't studied philosophy, but suppose we understand philosophy more broadly to mean deep thought, deep, careful thought about it. The most important issues of life, including issues of value what's right and wrong the big picture kind of stuff. Is there part of you that's tempted to say that any life that doesn't have any of that in it says something missing it's deficient in some way. Like if you talk to, I don't know, a really famous businessman and he just hadn't given any thought at all to what's right or wrong. He's just drifting around with the conformity, to what his peers believe on any given subject. I would not be able to continue to respecting the person regardless of how successful he was in other domains. But maybe that's just me.

Mark 21:29

Yes. I think, I mean, this is going to be the philosophical movers. Say, what do we mean when we say a con. And it seems like there's a lot of ambiguity there. So we could say, for example, someone who is accomplished in her field, that she has developed a degree of excellence in that lot. And to say that person is not accomplished, would be inaccurate given what it is that she's done. If what we mean is something broader than that. In other words, excelling in your field, but leading an accomplished life, a full life, a meaningful life, then I think there are certain kinds of values that are really important to embrace. So one of our guests that I wrote a book called meaning in life, and we've produced a separate book with him and David Benetton called conversations about the meaning of life, where we try and talk about these questions. And that has three different things that he thinks objectively matter. It's truth, beauty and goodness. And it's not just that you engage in activities that seek those things or gain those things so that you do with the right disposition. So if you. A nurse who works in a hospital and you're doing the good thing of tending for the sick and easing their suffering, making people better. That is a good thing. But if you do it because it's nearly a job and you do it with a degree of drudgery and really feel nothing for those people, then it might not be meaningful that you have to have the right disposition towards it. But one of the things that that talks about is that search for truth, which means that ability to be able to work out what are the things that would make things true and false. What are the things that would further human knowledge? And if you engage in truth, seeking exercises, you're making it more, your life more meaningful. Now, I suppose one of the questions is whether you have to do all three, whether it's okay to be an unrounded person, a very sharp person, who's incredibly good at one of those things. And to still say, well, I've led a meaningful life. Jason's often very fun. Quoting Susan Wolf and her idea of leading a perfect life. And one of her examples for why, if you stray too far in one direction, is that you could be undermining that perfect life is the notion of a moral Saint, someone who dedicated their life to being morally perfect, but they give up so much. So they donate a kidney, they only eat vegan food, almost all of their income is given to the poor. So they lead an incredibly, a Ctech existence, very little room for things like seeking truth or embracing beauty. And we might think that's a suboptimal life, even though they've become incredibly good at being moral.

Jason 24:01

Yeah. So I really like Spencer's conception of philosophy as not just the study of philosophy, but the practice of philosophy, the practice of thinking deeply about things, which you don't necessarily have to have studied philosophy to do. And it seems to me. If you look at the perfect life in the sense that it has all these different values and its sub perfections in it, it seems that a lot of those sub perfections would be enhanced by deep thinking. And you might say that without deep thought, you can't live a perfect life. You can live it to some degree, but not to a great degree.

Spencer 24:40

I wanted to say, I find Susan Wilson article on moral saints, profoundly unconvincing. She doesn't really make an effort to imagine what a really saintly person would be like. It's just this caricature anyway, but it also seems to me that anybody who is saintly would really have to know what is good. And so it has to be exercised. Rational thought on a pretty high level, right? It would just seem amazing that this person could get a morality, right. So consistently, and it, and had it not be the product of rational thought. So I think in that case, it is hard to imagine that kind of a person, someone who's cultivated this high degree of moral excellence, who doesn't also have a pretty high degree of intellectual excellence as well.

Jason 25:34

It's a nice objection. One response that she might offer is that's fine. The moral Saint might be supremely intelligent in thinking about what the good is. There might've read an enormous amount of Bartlett. They might've thought a lot about it, debated about it, but the point is that their entire intellect will be devoted to that only. And that seems like an imperfection. It seems like there's a lot of other things. Our intellect should be diverted.

Mark 26:01

So I'll give you an interesting case. There's a guy who is the youngest billionaire in the world, his name's Sam Bankman freed. I think he's accumulated almost$30 billion from Bitcoin arbitrage. And he's decided that the best use of that money really is not with him, but with others. So he's a huge believer in the effective altruism movement, but he also knows the limits of his ability. So he said, look, I'm really, really good at making money, but I'm not really good at knowing what's what is right. So what he's done is he's hired a bunch of philosophers to go and find out. So one of our, one of our guests, Bob Fisher, who we also did a book with on, on harming animals is tasked with finding out what is the best way to reduce animal suffering. What are the kinds of harms that matter? And it's interdisciplinary. So they're engaging with a lot of the science. we often talk in broad terms as philosophers about certain kinds of practices being immoral, factory farming, whatever it is. And the idea is to go, well, maybe there's certain practices that are less bad than others. Maybe there's certain particular species of animals that have a high capacity for suffering than others. That's going to find out. And so what's interesting about the billionaire is that he has a certain kind of ability, which he's really perfected and also has the virtue of humility to say, well, I don't think I'm the best guy to know what would be the most optimal, but there are a bunch of other people who are really, really smart, who are experts in their fields. And maybe they're also the kind of sharp narrow people like me, but just in different directions, but all of us together can maximize the good can do all these wonderful things. And, I think when we've been talking about what it is to lead a good life, we often think about, as you say, someone who is running. But maybe that's the wrong way to think about it. Maybe we should be thinking a little bit, like what are good projects to be involved in? And those might be rounded projects, but they were acquire a bunch of non rounded people to do them. And then when you start to think in a, in a way of what is the group doing? Maybe that's the more meaningful, significant exercise I'm saying group specifically to upset Jason, because his PhD project was on group groups.

Jason 28:12

Yeah. Feeling twitchy at, at the trigger word. But one way to rephrase what you've said in a way that I really agree with is maybe perfection can be outsourced. So perhaps the billionaire is living a perfect life. Not because he's extremely good at all activities, but because as you say, he has the humility to know which activities he's not good at. And to trust those who are good at those activities to use his money, to enact them.

Spencer 28:40

Yeah. Seems like knowing the limits of your intellect and the limits of your knowledge. Is as Socratic as a guess. But if you imagine truly outsourcing that, that seems problematic. Like, I don't know. I'm trying to think of, of what that would even be. You're going to go live your life. Unreflectively but you're paying someone to like meditate and think really hard in your place. It just sort of seems like that's inalienable. I want to use that word from the declaration of independence, I suppose it seems like you can't put off your duty to be reflective and thoughtful to somebody else.

Jason 29:18

I need to write the story, Spencer. This is a great story. I mean, imagine I'm getting some of the

Spencer 29:24

royalties

Jason 29:25

I, yeah, deal. I think outsourcing all of your activities with a little bit of tech thrown in. So imagine you outsource your meditation to someone, but then there's a bit of technology that gets inserted so that the calm that they produce through their meditation gets implanted into your mental.

Mark 29:43

I mean, here's an interesting case for it. So I think we think delegating certain tasks is very useful and that it allows you to focus on the things that are important. One of my big objections to bill gates is that he, while he was married so that at the end of every night, he would wash dishes with his wife. And that struck me as the kind of thing that only a psychopath would say, because then you've got more important things to do than wash dishes. but there are interesting things where we think that maybe you've to fulfill the duty. It has to be you that does it. So in South Africa, it's quite common for people to hire a nanny and a full-time basis to look after. And sometimes that nanny will live with the family. And so as a surrogate parent, and we might think that that frees you up to do other things, but that you couldn't not see your children at all, then you'd be a neglectful parent, but having the supplementary help would be good. But imagine you took that view that your wife has certain sexual needs, and it's your obligation to ensure that they're satisfied, but you're too busy reading books and creating art and helping other people. So you hire a professional sexy, you know, for your wife, a guy that looks like Fabio flowing, flowing long locks and Jason six-pack and he comes in and he has incredible sex with your wife and she says, oh, it's actually fantastic. I feel totally and utterly thrilled by this. But you might think that you are neglecting your personal obligation to be the one into the satisfying, even if it was less

Jason 31:06

good. I wonder if that's not what's the basis of polyamory is. It's like, I just don't have the time to satisfy your needs right now, sexually, intellectually, emotionally, whatever it is. Can you please ask another partner?

Mark 31:18

you have a set of needs and we, as the other members of the molecule have a set of obligations, but they're less personal. In other words, as long as everybody's needs and obligations are met and everybody's sort of playing the right kind of role, it doesn't matter. Who does it? Um,

Jason 31:36

yeah, you're interchangeable. It's a functional system, right? So certain people have certain needs. Anyone can fulfill those needs within the public fuel and wham bam. You've got a functional relationship.

Spencer 31:48

I was thinking about this stuff, this things that you can't delegate, and it seems like religion might be one, like you couldn't pay somebody else to say your prayers and do your religious rituals. Well, you know, you live in. Leave your enjoy your sinful life. Don't worry. Someone else is taking care of your eternal soul. A few years ago. This thought occurred to me that with everything being automated, like suppose that's true. So most, I suppose, more and more things get automated. There's less and less that humans are needed to do. I could imagine like a revival of religion, because this would be one domain where it seems like really, you could not delegate this. You could not make some AI responsible for your salvation or something like that. And it seems like whatever it is, that's important about the examined life. If it's important in the fundamental way that I intuitively think it is, it would be something like that.

Mark 32:52

It strikes me that. People have had the reverse idea for quite a while in different faiths. So, one of the reasons why you had a split in Christianity was over this question of being able to like buy favors, right? That you could, you could pay someone to say the hell Mary's on your behalf because you were too busy doing other things, but it also seems to be the case that people go and pray. So they say, I pray that you have, that you recover from a disease. That's a good things happen to you in your life. And that does seem to be the case that you're delegating the task because often people will say, please, will you pray for me? Or please will you pray for so-and-so? And that's sort of seen as an odd normal part of being a religious person. And that's interesting to think maybe you could delegate all of it as long as the thing is being accomplished. As long as those prayers were being recognized. In other words, if God said, well, all I need is to have X number of people saying my name and the right intonation, that the thing that they ask for will results doesn't really matter where it comes from. Or where's the kind of thing where no, no, you gotta be the one who asks

Jason 33:59

again, this strikes me as such a good story. As Spencer. You're getting lots of royalties today. If it's not clear, I'm a writer as well. So I write science fiction and science fiction really melds well with philosophy because as mark described earlier, philosophy and thought experiments go hand in hand, at least for some philosophers like us. And you might see science fiction as just a giant collection of thought experiments or long form thought experiments. So yeah. Thank you very much, Spencer and mark for developing money.

Spencer 34:33

Ursula Liquin I don't know if you're familiar with her writing, but she's explicit about, yeah, she's explicit in saying that she conceives of her work, even like her novels, not just a short stories as giant thought experiments science fiction is just thought experiments for her.

Jason 34:52

Yeah, I think that's great. I love her with, by

Mark 34:54

the way. So this is to kind of return back to our core question about the value of philosophy. It seems that one way to think about its value is how it influences other disciplines. So we can imagine the Saifai writer who's able to translate philosophical puzzles into a fiction setting. We did this book on philosophy and science fiction, where we use the Derrick prophet experiments, but someone who steps into a teleporter and pops out in another place on earth instantaneously. And the question is whether it's still them. And this is the kind of thing that you'd see in startup. And it sort of raises these interesting philosophical puzzles about the nature of identity is it's. If we dematerialized you and took all of your original physical matter and destroyed it, and you used kind of 3d printing machine to make you on the other end, is that still you, if all your mental states are there, Jason's first novel sort of plays around with this idea of 3d printing people with different kinds of states. Um, and so that seems to be the one sort of important function of philosophy as a influential discipline. And we might think as well that it makes people more rigorous thinkers. And so we can imagine know, a scientist who's trained in the philosophy of science is able to generate hypothesis in a crisper way, can help develop technology that will, further the interest of humankind. I wonder about talking about philosophy as a good in and of itself. So there are certain things that. Really aren't aimed at anything else. They're not aimed at making better novels. They're not aimed at having better tech. They're just trying to solve these sort of fundamental questions about the nature of reality. So I've got a friend who spent seven years doing his PhD, a university college London on what properties are it's a very niche topic in metaphysics, and it's the kind of thing where other metaphysicians are going to be very interested in this and they're going to feel enriched, but it's unlikely to have any kind of like other world effects and it's the kind of thing that's immensely, cognitively challenging to do. And I think there's going to be a range of areas in the philosophy that are like this, where we just want to know, because we want to know, is that a valuable exercise?

Jason 37:04

You know that friend who's a mutual friend of ours. Yes. I mean, it seems like what he is studied is very, very niche. Although it has quite big implications for other areas of philosophy, perhaps not for outside of philosophy. He is also happens to be very, very worldly. So he's been very involved in politics and his clear thinking is very evident in his political engagement. So even there, there seems to be instrumental value. The question is, and the question you're asking is, is his work in and of itself regardless of its instrumental value valuable, it

Spencer 37:41

seems like if there was no intrinsic or inherent value to philosophy, you could at least in principle, imagine it being substituted by something else. My advisor Graham, ADI, his example of. if the humanities are only instrumentally valuable, then it's really just like flossing your teeth. Like you wouldn't bother with flossing your teeth. If you didn't need to do it, if your teeth didn't get stuff stuck between them. So if, if we could realize all the same ends that we currently realize through the humanities, but by some other way, And that way was easier and maybe more pleasant or something then, well, forget about literature and forget about philosophy and forget about all that. And he had the intuition that like, well, no, that

Jason 38:35

couldn't be, yeah. It's interesting. I mean, could you get everything that we get from philosophy through other mechanisms? So the enjoyment we get from philosophy, perhaps the ability to think deeply about things. Where could we get those all from something else, maybe playing Sudoku all day. And then the question is, have we lost anything? I don't know. It feels to me like we've lost something, but the response will be well, the Sudoku is really fun and the Sudoku lack really does help your analytic skills. It still feels to me like something's been lost if we just replaced philosophy with Sudoku.

Mark 39:09

Yeah. I'm inclined to think that there probably a range of tasks that you could engage in that would make you a sharper, a Whittier thinker that are non philosophical, but they would be a poorer place. If I think about what I do for a living, which is being a practicing lawyer, that that kind of practice generates all sorts of interesting puzzles for me, I get the joy of being able to present before our constitutional courts on issues of fundamental importance issues around the line between free speech and hate speech, or whether we ought to have race-based affirmative action policies or not. But I still have this very strong desire to engage in the more abstract discipline of philosophy itself. And I think philosophy is particularly well attuned to conversational modes. You think about. The Socratic method, this idea of being able to have a deliberative back and forth, the improvisation that happens, the sort of delight in coming up with something new that neither of you had seen openness to disagreement that philosophy, I think really is built on this notion of clashing swords of saying both of us want to know what's true. And so we welcome disagreements. I think a lot of people sort of feel like disagreeing is somehow a bad thing to do. It's in polite philosophers. The greatest compliment is to disagree. I think about going to people's retirement ceremonies and you'll have a group of people invited to disagree with their fundamental work. And that's sort of seen as the greatest way to pay homage is to say that your life's work was wrong. And let me tell you why, and that the person hearing this almost like a roast will say like, wow, thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Like you're helping shine lights on, on this topic that I'm interested in and maybe even technologies that they were wrong.

Spencer 40:48

Maybe you could pay me the second greatest. Which is I read your work and I was completely convinced by it.

Jason 40:56

Has any philosopher ever said that?

Mark 40:59

I mean, it's interesting that there are people who you say you changed my mind and I'm indebted to you for that. we had Stephen Crushin on our show and he talks about his evolution in terms of which moral theory subscribed to, and that he would go to conferences and he would clash swords with people. And it would start to think maybe, maybe I'm wrong about this. Maybe being a deontologist isn't the correct method. And he's become more and more influenced by consequentialist thinking. and I imagined that maybe sometimes in the moment, it's quite hard to sort of say to the person you've persuaded me, but it dawns on you later. I mean, often these sort of things take some time to, to embed it. That's not all of the computation can be done in the conversation, but.

Jason 41:39

Yeah, that strikes me as right. It strikes me that we have a profound impact on each other as philosophers, although perhaps that impact isn't felt at the time. So, I mean, I was half joking that no philosophers ever said that we are changed entirely. In our perspective, the moment we read someone else's work, but I think we register each other's arguments and that's something very important among philosophers. I remember my supervisor, Mark Leon. He taught me throughout my undergrad and post-grad and through to my PhD and he. Used to outline different positions, different answers to a question. And what was so good about what mark did was he would never say this position is incorrect. This position is correct. He'd say, here are the arguments in favor of this position, and here are the challenges for this position. And what's so interesting about this perspective is it shows that no matter how persuasive or intrusive your position is, they are always going to be challenges. There's always going to be live problems for your position. Those problems might eventually at the end of time with perfect knowledge turnouts to be resolved, but we don't know that yet. And I think philosophy encourages you to be quite humble about whether your position is ultimately.

Mark 42:54

I mean, if we contrast this with how debates happen in other arenas, if I think about listening to the arguments in the American Supreme court it feels in some senses enjoyable, but there's some sense in which it's unsatisfying, because people have positions that they have to argue for. You've got a client who you're representing on behalf of that, the kinds of conversational moves that are made often look like Dodgers because you can't make the concession in a way that a philosophical dialogue is so much more free and open because you are open to changing your mind.

Jason 43:26

I think it really returns to what Spencer said earlier is that one of the constraints on something being philosophical inquiry is that it's truth seeking and truth. It seems for philosophers is the ultimate goal. And so we don't mind being wrong. If we've learned something. Because it's not about being right or wrong. It's about asset the end of the day, realizing what the truth is. And if we can do that by dumping our position and taking up our opponents position, we're more than happy to do. So if we've got compelling reason, whereas in political sphere, it's not truth seeking, it's winning, seeking. So it seems to me like philosophy is quite pure in a way our identity is not wrapped up in being right. Our identity as philosophers is wrapped up in having the epistemic humility to realize that we could be wrong and that our opponents could be right. And so listening to them very carefully,

Mark 44:23

we've sort of talked about philosophy in a kind of idolized way. I wonder how it goes in practice. So is it the case that. Actual academic philosophers that actually universities are doing things in this way. Are they inviting the kind of open debate and criticism on a range of fields or are there a set of holy cows that you dare not tip over?

Spencer 44:46

It seems to me that the term motivated reasoning for a certain kind of fallacy is kind of a mistake because all reasoning has to be motivated by something reasoning that isn't motivated by a desire to seek the truth is the issue. So I think people who have that mindset are rare in any field. So I guess it isn't so surprising that you don't find them ubiquitous in philosophy.

Jason 45:19

Yeah. We might want to distinguish between philosophers and philosophers. And philosophers might not always do philosophy.

Mark 45:28

All that. You can set up the incentives in such a way that they're no longer able to practice their profession in the way that it ought to be done. That if the consequences for exploring certain ideas are so severe that you will never be promoted or that you will be fired, or that you'll never be able to, to change universities because you've said the unnatural, but then what we've done is we've robbed philosophers of being able to practice their profession. And that seems like a real loss

Spencer 45:59

in as much as philosophy is inherently valuable. We want to structure not just the academic discipline of philosophy, but all of society. We would want to structure it in such a way to allow as many people to practice. As possible or at least to remove as many impediments to practicing it as possible.

Jason 46:20

Yeah. That strikes me as right. It seems like you're more likely to arrive at truth and to pursue that truth with greater Gusto and more effect. If you allow philosophers free reign over what they think and say,

Mark 46:36

so one of the things that we do on brain about we record a formal episode. And then at the end of the show, I say to the guest, I'm stopping recording, let's stick around, let's have a chat. And one of the things that often comes off from our guests, as they say, the space that you've created is so different from the university space, because they feel at Liberty to say whatever they like that we feel at Liberty to entertain whatever ideas we want and that there are no sanctions and that we don't have this kind of administration. Who's making sure that you have, a certain diverse panel of people or that certain ideas on said. I don't think we feel that we're at professional risk. Jason and I are not academics. We have our own businesses. And I think that grants us an enormous amount of freedom, but someone like Douglas Maria said that it's unsurprising that any salary individual would feel like they need to toe a certain line because the consequences for them are so severe and people that are willing to entertain a heterodox views tend to be those who are self-sufficient to work for themselves, run their own businesses and don't bear the costs. And I think it's unfortunate that universities which are supposed to be this place of open inquiry have become the reverse where they're the place where I think people feel that that's a place where there certain things that are totally and utterly unnatural. And there's two questions here. The one is, do we try and save universities? Do you try and remove all of those bad incentives that are play and return them to a place of open inquiry? Or do you seek alternative avenues? And I think we're seeing more and more growth in these sort of alternative spaces for people to have these deep philosophical discussions in a way that is totally unconstrained. I also will say from a personal level universities, so Africa have sort of not operated as well because of COVID. And for the first time, in a long time, I went to a public lecture and there were parts of it that I really enjoyed, but there's something about a kind of conversation. That's so much more enjoyable. That idea of being able to listen to someone for awhile, Oscar precise question, have this back and forth in a way that's different to listening to an hour long lecture.

Spencer 48:42

We've been talking about the big institutional picture here, but I wanted to take it back to something totally different, which was just how universal is the urge to do philosophy. I really don't know. So like when I was very young, like before I was 10, I remember there were certain philosophical thoughts that I was definitely entertaining. And I don't know, is that universal or not? Does everybody hit on certain philosophical thoughts from time to time or is it just us weirdos who ended up getting PhDs in it? Who when their kids think about, could there have been an absolute beginning? For instance, that was one that occurred to me when I was quite young for this podcast I did on aesthetic value in December. We mentioned that aesthetics is sort of infused with everything. Like everybody has some appreciation for beauty just about, it's not like something only artists do, but I don't know if that's similarly true of philosophy or not. Do you think average people, most people have a little bit of philosophical interest or awareness. It's just not as heightened as in some other people or

Jason 50:07

so I have a very good feeling what Mark's going to stay about, which is that it's very much personality driven. So if you look at the Myers-Briggs personality types, there's only certain personality types that would lean towards philosophy and they're going to be in the vast minority. So the type that is the most common amongst philosophers, I would think is the NT type, the intuitive thinkers. And they represent a very small proportion of society. If I understand correctly, it's about 10% of society. Now that doesn't mean anyone outside of NT, can't be philosophers. And we do know some very good philosophers who are NS, but it does seem like your personality is going to strongly drive whether you're interested in philosophy or not.

Mark 50:50

Yeah. This is my kind of pet theory. And I'd be interesting to sort of see some actual data on it. I think that there are interesting distributions on Myers-Briggs. Myers-Briggs one of those things that's kind of bashed in a one line sentence, which is that it's not scientific and that the scientific one is the ocean or five big personality traits. I take the view that they're kind of translatable into each other and that intuitiveness corresponds with openness. It seems to me that just from the little bit of small polling that I've done, that the philosophers I know tend to be in that intuitive thinking category, barring the inf JS, which is introverts, intuitive feeling and judging who seem to also fall into this sort of philosophical camp. The other type is the sort of sensing type. And so sensory thinker for example, is going to be an excellent accountant or engineer, and a certain kind of scientist is going to be very good at that. They're doing the calculating work, the technical work, and you need people like that in a society. But if you ask an engineer about the sort of deep philosophical question. But they're not animated by it. It's not the kind of thing that keeps them awake at night. They're often interested in something very practical. Like how do I keep the bridge going as opposed to, why should we have bridges? So I'm inclined to think if I think about my experience in teaching philosophy, I always found that there's a very narrow set of people who clicked with it. And I don't think that everybody is one interested in philosophy or two capable of it. I think you can teach people up to some level. I think some people have the ability to memorize some philosophical arguments without actually internalizing them. They're unable to think in a philosophical way. I think it requires a quite high degree of abstract thinking. And so there's intuitive types, prefer things that are abstract as opposed to things that are concrete. And I think that's okay. I think we don't expect everyone to have equal abilities and things. I, for example, I'm not a good dancer. Spencer turns out to be a very good swing dancer, and I think it's wonderful that you have that additional ability. David. He's good for. But like, it just might be the case that some people are absolutely incapable of engaging with these kinds of ideas. but so be it, and maybe they can sort of reap the rewards from the others. As I say, like if you had to ask me to explain how a television works, it would be very, very hard for me to kind of unpack that you'd need someone who's got that technical understanding in terms of how things are operating and someone might feel completely overjoyed at being able to explain that thing to you in a way, for me, it's not interesting. My interests lie in those sort of higher Ellsberg abstraction. And I do think being a philosopher is a certain kind of life. There's a solitariness. I think you'd be able to sit on your own and read enormous amounts and think deep things on your own in an armchair. But then also to be able to have these kinds of engagements where you're able to speak to someone in a very long focused way, or you can have a good philosophical chat in five minutes, we had, we had on a guests the other day, who we spoke to you for three hours. Because the conversation was so interesting, but because often to really fully understand the position requires putting in the hard yards. And I don't think everybody has the interest or attitudes.

Jason 54:00

So a question, do you think that living a life is the same thing as watching television in the sense that you don't understand how the television works? So you don't understand the mechanisms involved. You have some understanding that there's electronics and there's lots of emitting diodes. If it's an led screen or whatever it is like, you wouldn't be able to construct that television if I gave you some spare parts. So the question is, do you appreciate watching television the way that a philosopher appreciates living life, if you don't understand how that television works, so it wouldn't electrical engineer appreciate watching television more.

Spencer 54:41

where I thought you were going was the examined life is really important. If this is an important part of living a human life, maybe even a necessary part, then it seems really, really disturbing if it's only accessible to 10% of the population

Jason 54:55

or something, I once went to a music concert with a trained pianist and I really enjoyed the concert. It was a classical concert. I really enjoyed it. I sat there and listened to it and he said, halfway through the show in the intermission, he asked me, did you enjoy it? And I said, yeah, yeah, this was great. And I said, did you enjoy it? And he said, well, no, not really. The sound was a bit flat. I thought the oboist wasn't great. And the clarinet is, could have been better, et cetera. And I didn't pick up any of that pose. It was a very, very good concert, which he did enjoy. And I also enjoyed it. Was I not enjoying to any way, the degree and the level of richness that he would enjoy it because I just don't understand the inner work.

Mark 55:38

I mean, this is a great way of thinking about things, right? That a certain kind of connoisseurship will allow you to experience things at the extremes. So if you're a wine connoisseur, there's certain wines that you and I might drink and we say, yeah, it tastes good. And they're either going to say, you don't realize how good this wine is, because these are all the flavor notes I can pick up, or it's not very good for these reasons. And so your life kind of polarizes, and you might think that the philosophy is in a similar situation, right? That there are a connoisseur of certain kinds of things. And they've got a kind of extreme knowledge about something can have a deep appreciation for it. And sometimes that deep appreciation, this was something incredibly fundable. I want to say that not everyone has this ability to do philosophy. I do think there are certain philosophical questions that occur for everyone. So I think people sort of wonder as children often, like, is there an afterlife, what would it mean to only have one life? What is the nature of death? Should I be afraid of it? There are certain questions that I do think rattle everybody and maybe the sort of interest that you have in being able to pin down that question and find the answer that is truly satisfying, that isn't even distributed, that some people are quite happy with a very simple answer, and we'll never think further. And other people aren't, they're dissatisfied by nature and they need to kind of keep pushing in that direction to find out what's actually true. And that might be the same with a certain kinds of connoisseurship apps that people who are interested in the field want to do it to excellence so that they can rarely on earth, all the potential in this thing in a way that for me, I just say, Mike, Happy to know a little bit of basic electronics, but a small amount.

Spencer 57:19

I wonder then if there's any value to a little bit of philosophy, so philosophy could be really extremely valuable in the way we're talking about, but maybe one semester or two semesters or one or two philosophy books that you've read over the course of a lifetime doesn't appreciably, add anything. Maybe the only way to capitalize on that value is to really devote a lot of time to it.

Jason 57:45

So I think the value in philosophy for non philosophers is not in the answers to philosophical questions because those answers are often complex and there's lots of competing answers and it takes quite a lot of time to work. I think the value is in asking the questions. So there's a burgeoning field called philosophical counseling, where instead of going to a therapist, you would go to a philosopher. So the kinds of questions that philosophical counselors deal with are questions around kind of the routes that my life should take. So should I marry my partner? Should I get divorced? Should I change careers? Should I move countries. These are the kinds of questions, which it seems psychologists shouldn't be answering because they involve many different values and psychologists are only interested in wellbeing, but the kind of values that might be involved here are moral questions. They're aesthetic questions. They're meaning based questions in addition to wellbeing based questions. So it seems like if you were to go to a philosopher and ask them these questions, they'd say to you, well, you're asking me a question that has an impact on your life, in all these different areas. All these different values are affected and they're all important. So they'll reframe the question for you in a way that perhaps allows you to engage with it more fully without having a full account of what all these values are. So you don't need to know exactly what wellbeing is and meaning is and morality. But at least what the philosopher does is they reframe the problem for you in a way that allows you to ask the question. And often the solace is just in knowing that this is a complex issue and multifaceted problem, and I need to engage with all these different parts of the problem in order to come up with a solution and then you send the person off and they go and do that.

Mark 59:40

I mean, this is something that I do with my clients all the time. Someone comes to you with a problem and often it's framed in financial terms. And the more that you talk about it, you realize this isn't actually a financial problem. This is some other kind of problem that what you're trying to do is restore a relationship or to punish someone and having that sort of broader view about what it is that they value, what it is that they want often will change the shape of our litigation. And I do think the philosophy is good at a couple of things. The one is to sort of, as you say, explicate, the range of things that are valuable. The multiplicity of things that one could care about and then to help that person maybe work out which one is the one that's important for them that they might have misdiagnosed what's valuable for them or that upon reflection, they realize I do care more about love than beauty in this instance, or truth is more important than kindness in this particular choice. And I think that engaging oneself in philosophy helps you do that. But I think having a philosophical guides to make decisions really can help you make a much better richer, more impactful decisions.

Jason 1:00:49

And I think this is a good example where, and little bit of philosophy goes a long way.

Spencer 1:00:54

Yeah. Somebody asked me once or somebody said to me, I'd like to study philosophy, but I'm afraid that I would end up with more questions than answers or I just end up with more questions. And I said, yeah, but they'd be better questions. Exactly. It'd be better.

Mark 1:01:10

Yeah, I think as you say that the notion that, uh, having too many questions would be bad is itself interesting. I mean, I think philosophy helps you solve certain problems, but then it starts to open up more and more problems, but you get crisper and clearer. And so there might be the great philosophers on their deathbeds wind up with more unanswered questions, but they might have answered some really fundamental questions that are important. The other thing I think about, so we had Barry lamb on the show and, you know, Barry runs a really excellent philosophy podcast called Hi-Fi nation. And we spoke to him about David Lewis and in Barry's miniseries about David Lewis, you get the sense of someone who was incredibly brilliant and influential, but an absolutely strange person who seemed to be very romantically. Ill-equipped very socially awkward, very strange. And I do think there is something to be said about. Brilliant people, brilliant philosophers who just have these other deficits. And my inclination with those kinds of people is always to accept the sort of strangeness about them, the weirdness about them, because I think they're so brilliant in this way. And often those two things are connected. The fact that they're absolutely bizarre to have it identify party is also the reason why they're such an interesting thinker. And I also think culturally, we ought to be cutting people like that, much more social slack that, you know, brilliant people often going to say things that someone else might find incredibly offensive. A non philosopher kind of comes to mind, might be someone like Elon Musk and the world's richest, man who's running five simultaneous companies that are doing incredible things in different areas, but he's clearly not a normal kind of person that the way that he processes information and interacts with other people is. But I think we ought to be quite forgiving of that because the abnormality, uh, yields

Jason 1:03:06

it is an interesting question because Susan Wolf who Spencer's unconvinced by, but I quite like would say that if that is the correct characterization of brilliant philosophers and those brilliant philosophers are really quite imperfect, she thinks the kind of life that you should live is the kind of life that's quite well balanced and where there's not some area of glaring deficiency. And if it's inevitable that you're a great philosopher, but have these glaring deficiencies, if you are a great philosopher, then it seems like being a great philosopher is not the way to live your life on her theory.

Spencer 1:03:43

I assume. Unlike Jeff McMahon, you guys do watch movies. Yeah.

Mark 1:03:49

I mean, this, this is a very good cost for being a great philosopher. When we asked Jeff about the mento, he said, well, I haven't watched the movie in the last 20 years. Yeah, I

Spencer 1:03:58

know. But anyway, D if you seen the movie whiplash,

Jason 1:04:05

yes. Think so

Mark 1:04:07

about the jazz drummer?

Jason 1:04:08

Nah, I don't think I've seen it.

Spencer 1:04:12

That is a movie that really focuses on the question of, would you rather be really, really great in one narrow thing or a well-rounded person? There's this aspiring drummer who is the main character. And he's trying to please this almost impossible to please really, really strict disciplinary. Band leader. And it's quite clear that for the bandleader only excellence matters, you got to sacrifice everything in your life to be the very best or what you're doing is bullshit basically. And his line is the most damaging to words in the English language are good job. So he's, he's very opposed to the culture of mediocrity. And he's got a point about that, but this kid becomes more and more obsessed and he's a really brilliant drum player, but the rest of his life, his moral character even is degraded by this experience. And it does make me wonder because there are people like that in a lot of different fields. Miles Davis was kind of like this, but you can think of athletes who were like this people who were just incredibly excellent in one domain of life, but terrible in others and all others, Bobby Fischer would be another good example of somebody like. And you ask yourself, is that a good life or not? Of course, it's not the ideal life, right? The ideal life, you would have excellence in a variety of qualities, but is it a life that you would recommend someone to live a highly angular, highly focused life of extreme excellence in one area, is that preferable to a well-rounded life. I've been puzzling over this. And I think it's not obvious what the answer is.

Jason 1:06:08

So I, I think the answer is different from mocks. I think mark is wrong about this. We don't always agree on everything in case Brandon Nevada listeners. Don't don't think that Mark's view is that we should really cut slack for people who specialize in one area of their lives and have deficiencies in others. And we should appreciate them for what they are. I think a very good example that suggests otherwise is have a, have a look at the case of you just gave Bobby Fischer. So Bobby Fischer extremely good at chess. Was world champion, but really bizarre and other ways, bizarre figure that upset a lot of people in various ways. I was a conspiracy theorist, very strange man, not consider Magnus Colson. The current reigning chess world champion. He is a very rounded person. He doesn't only play chess and he is an astonishingly good chess player. Not just because he's world champion, but he's been well checking for a long time. There's currently a debate, whether he's the greatest world champion of all time, the debate really is whether he's number one or number two, the other person who might be the best champion of all time would be Gary Kasparov. And the thing about Carlson is he does a lot other than chess. He also does fantasy football. He's one of the world's best fantasy football players. He's a superb musician. He has a bad. He's a very rounded person and that doesn't detract from his ability to play chess exceptionally well. Now the question is, is it better to be Magnus Carlson? Who's this rounded person and also a superb chess player, probably better than probably Fisher was always at better to be Bobby Fischer, who isn't a rounded person. And it seems to me like the answer's clear that you want to be Magnus Carlsen. Now mark would say, well, you

Spencer 1:07:59

need to, that's not the right comparison though. Right? The right comparison is, was you rather be Bobby Fisher or somebody who is pretty good at chess and has a pretty good band and is pretty good at fantasy football?

Jason 1:08:12

Well, no, I think you can be exceptionally good at something and well-rounded at the same time, I don't think the options are always well-rounded and mediocre versus. Exceptionally good at one thing and bad at everything. I think you can be good at a lot of things, but

Spencer 1:08:29

for some people that is the trade-off right.

Jason 1:08:32

I don't know if it has to be, even for them. I'm not sure it has to be. I mean, what are you saying? You're saying that some people are only talented at one thing and nothing else. And so in order to be even mediocrely good at other things, they have to sacrifice. The one thing they're exceptional at is that the clap.

Spencer 1:08:49

Yeah. It sounds like the reigning chess master is really, really, really talented in a lot of areas, but other people can maybe develop one really excellent talent to a very high level. In fact, most people can't even do that, but certain people are in the position where they can focus on one talent playing one musical instrument or are getting good at one game or what have you. But only if they invest all their time into it, like I've made certain trade-offs. I S I stopped playing guitar. I gave up. Uh, when I was an undergraduate, so I could focus on my writing. Those were trade offs I make, and I could imagine people making much more serious trade-offs and becoming much more angular.

Mark 1:09:37

Okay. So I'm inclined to think that there are certain trade offs that have to be made, but Jason's onto something very important, which is this notion of having range as being a way to become excellent. In a particular thing. The other famous example, I think, is a tennis plan adult whose mother forbade him from only playing tennis and that he played basketball and he did a variety of different things. And because of that variety, you end up picking up skills that make you very good. You've cracked. Jason himself is an exceptionally good chess player and played for South Africa when he was a teenager and then stopped playing chess. Partly because it's, I think it felt like such a brutal discipline and we play a lot of other games together. And I think Jason then returned to chess after having played all these other kinds of board games and picked up skills from those games. And it made him think differently about his chess playing. Then we can imagine something similar for Carlson that that ability to become a really good fantasy football player is because you've got certain analytics skills that you've picked up from chess, but also maybe your chess playing gets better because you've looked at other fields. Now what's interesting is, as you say, there's only so much time in a day, and there are any certain things that you really can throw yourself at. And some stuff is mutually supporting and some stuff, the tracks, I still hold that you should be forgiving of the people that wind up being quite. And I think sometimes because let's say for example, having a child might be the kind of thing that's incredibly time consuming. And maybe there's certain skills that you learned from being a parent that will make you more patient and that'll make you better in whatever endeavor you have or make you more creative because your kid looks at the world through a different lens, but it also might be that just from a time perspective, you just become a lot less good at your thing. I was listening to an interview between Joe Rogan and Dave Chappelle, and they both talk about how becoming parents changed them in a fundamentally positive way and that they are both better for it. But I think as I said, there's going to be this tension between range, where you've got the mutually supporting things and some cases where you've got to pick.

Jason 1:11:45

It seems to me like the ability to live a good life is the ability to live a coherent life. So mark suggested that. You could practice a number of behaviors that cross train each other. You kind of share skills across different parts of your life. And it seems to me like to do that, well, philosophy is quite useful because what philosophy does is it analyzes activities and beliefs into their component, parts, at least a few performing analytic philosophy. And so when you analyze the different areas of your life into their component parts, you'll see that some of those component parts are common. And once you notice that you can develop those common parts in a way that allows you to do multiple things well, so good example, practicing basketball, practicing tennis, practicing table tennis, they all teach you coordination skills. It's one of the component parts that's common. They all enable you to be very fit and to run around a field. They all. Promote a sense of mental strength in competition. All of these things are useful for one another. And so what the philosopher does well, I think is he looks at his life and he says, well, these are the component parts of what I enjoy. Let me develop those and try to apply them in all the areas of my life, in which those component parts apply.

Spencer 1:13:17

Do you have any final

Mark 1:13:20

well-spent? So I just want to say thank you for, for hosting us on the show. It's always a delight to have you on our show and I've thoroughly enjoyed our conversation. And I think you really are doing some wonderful work by having these phenomenal conversations with people that's stretched people's minds. And I think we've managed to probe quite deeply the value of philosophy, but also to think more fully about what it is to lead a good life, which is where we really started our conversation.

Spencer 1:13:49

I like to have these conversations sort of. Going on unexpected directions and go into tangents. And that's what makes it a conversation. That's what gives it, gives it the texture of a really good conversation. And I would just recommend my listeners check out the brain and of that podcast also. Very excellent. And I hope to have you guys on against

Jason 1:14:11

them. Yeah. Thank you so much for hosting us spend. So it's been a great discussion and thank you again for having your show and adding to the knowledge pot or the wisdom pot,

Spencer 1:14:24

at least the question

Jason 1:14:25

part. Yeah.

Track 3 1:14:32

Alright, just Spencer now. I wanted to just add a couple of things. One is that. On reflection, it seems like. This thing that Jason and mark were saying about the virtues of. Being well-rounded. Actually helped my earlier point with regard to Susan Wolf and moral saints. Which is that. Wolf assumes that the moral Saint would have to be grotesquely narrow. And this is repulsive, and this is a bad thing about being a moral Saint. But if it's the case that well-rounded this. Helps one in particular activities in other domains, be it, chess or sports or what have you. Then I don't see why that couldn't be the case. And. The moral life as well. The other thought that I had. Thinking back over this conversation at any that now. Is that. Mark said that. There are scientists who are respected by the public because they're so clear and easy to understand. Whereas others are not so appreciated. That might be true. But I suspect that the reason that people like Stephen Hawking. And Albert Einstein. Become sort of symbols of intellect has a lot to do with their books. Einstein has that sort of frizzy hair and he just looks genius. I think the people. And Stephen Hawking. he's stuck in a wheelchair. He was when he was alive. He, uh, Sort of represents. The disembodied mind. By being confined to a wheelchair in that way, He had this electronic voice that made him sound like an Oracle. And I really think those superficial things probably have more to do why certain people are regarded as celebrity scientists well-known to the public and others. Languishing obscurity. Well, that's all I have.

Track 2 1:17:48

Um,