Agnes Callard on Dark Empathy, Being Straussian vs Being Sincere, and Philosophical Progress

Sometimes you just have to think, and there's just nobody that's ever going to do it for you. And that's part of like being a human being is that there's certain things you're going to have to use your, your own mind and not anyone else's mind to figure out. That's why I think the good framing of philosophy is what would you do with leisure? What, what could possibly be worthy of the use of your leisure time? And I haven't really found anything else, like even high art for me. Doesn't really come close to being something where I would say I could do it for eternity in leisure. What conceptual literacy should give you is a sense that you're not going through life on autopilot, being kind of commandeered by your basic biological needs, your health. That's one. Number 2 is other people. So it's conformity, belonging to a group, status, et cetera. People often think of themselves as free thinkers and as rebels because they ignore one of the commands, but then they're just ever more slavishly responsive to the other. Sincerity is like the only tool we have when it comes to those things. When there's questions you actually want to know the answers to, there's just nothing else at your disposal but sincerity.

Agnes Callard is a philosopher and essayist who specializes in ancient philosophy, ethics, and Socratic communication. Her work has won the 2020 Leibovitz Prize for Philosophical Achievement and is centered around how humans can become better. She and economist Robin Hanson also co-host a podcast called Minds Almost Meeting. In this conversation, we discuss Agnes's views on disagreement and progress, her inclination to question and operate outside of accepted societal structures, the role of self-reflection, relationships, and more. Agnes, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for joining.

Thank you.

Agnes, we met on Twitter maybe 4 or 5 years ago when I asked philosophy Twitter, what progress has the field of philosophy made over the past century, and what progress will philosophy, uh, make over the next century? And, and your, your answer, if I remember correctly, was That philosophy identified a bottom and maybe a top, but it has yet to identify how to reconcile the— I'll let you edit that characterization because I'm sure it could be better— how to reconcile egalitarianism and meritocracy. We'll get to that. But first, I want to identify that someone responded citing this paper that I believe David Chalmers wrote, where he surveyed his colleagues and asked his colleagues why there's hasn't been as much progress in the field of philosophy as they might have liked. Some answers were that the low-hanging fruit had been picked, and so it was harder to have new discoveries, as some people have said that that happens in other fields. And other people said there were more structural issues with the academy, et cetera. So I'm curious if you would agree with that claim that progress has slowed down to some degree, and if so, why is that the case?

Yeah. So, well, progress has slowed down. Is the implication that it was once going faster and now it's going slower? Or, like, I think it was never going very fast. So, I mean, there are a lot more philosophers now than there used to be, so maybe you would expect it to have sped up. And I guess I don't have the sense that it has. It's really hard to think about what does progress in philosophy mean. And one reason why it's hard to think about that is that, you know, as you were talking about philosophy, I was thinking about combs. I have a comb right here. And I was like, has there been progress in combs? And, you know, I mean, this looks like a pretty old design. It's my comb, but it works well. And maybe there hasn't been so much progress in combs, but maybe we're done. Maybe we did it, you know? It's not the case that we always want progress in everything, right? And the thing about philosophy is that It's an attempt to answer certain questions that show up in your life where other people can't do it for you. So I can't get your philosophizing done for you in a way that I can get other things done for you. And when there's something that I can get done for you, then maybe I could get it done quicker as opposed to slower. But when you have to do it for yourself, it's just less obvious that there's so much of a question. question of how quickly is it being done. And I almost feel like the kind of obsession with the question of philosophy, of progress in philosophy, but especially by the world outside of philosophy, is a kind of unwillingness to reckon with this fact that we're never going to get it done for you. No matter how fast we do it, no matter how good we get at it, it's going to be totally irrelevant to the rest of you guys unless you do philosophy. And that the subtext of the question is like, when will it be over? When will my work, my philosophical work, be completed by these other people? And the answer is just never.

You're an academic philosopher, but you're also a public philosopher. And you have kind of explored the tensions of what that means to be a public philosopher. Is it good work to do philosophy in public? you've also explored, um, or written about how, you know, it's— it's in some ways it's a shame that academic philosophy is so impenetrable, or, you know, so, um, structured in a certain way that appeals to a very small demographic because it's so good. Why don't you reflect on sort of the tensions that you've explored?

The main difference between academic and public philosophy is like how much familiarity and buy-in to the questions you can presuppose in your audience. If I tell an academic philosopher, I think I've got a solution to Moore's paradox, which in fact I think I do, the philosopher will be like, whoa, okay, what is it? Right? If I tell that to like somebody who's not in philosophy, they'll be like, what is Moore's paradox? And then even when I tell them what it is, they'll be like, why should I care?

Yeah.

I just take a lot of joy in speaking to that second kind of audience, the audience that demands to know, why should I care? Because I think it's a kind of perpetual danger in philosophy that we lose hold of that question and that we in fact start to treat philosophy as something that we're doing on behalf of other people rather than on behalf of ourselves. So I see it as a personal benefit to myself. I think it's kind of inevitable if a small group of people keeps talking only to each other that they're going to talk in ways that are A bit impenetrable to people on the outside. You know, the more competitive it gets to join that group of people and the more number of years of study it takes, that the wall is going to get higher and higher. And my simplest answer to what I like about public philosophy is that, like, when it comes to the stuff I produce, like say a podcast, or if I write something, that stuff people want to consume it. Whereas when I produce academic philosophy, nobody wants to consume it. So you're producing something that nobody wants to read. As an academic philosopher, that's very depressing, I find. Some people will read it, like for instance, as a favor to give you comments on it before publication, or because they need to read it to write their paper or something. But that being embedded in that system It's really demoralizing. It has very bad effects on people. So the people are very interesting. They're some of my favorite people to talk to, but I hate writing for them because when I'm writing for them, I'm basically writing for an audience that doesn't want to read the things I'm writing.

We did an interview a few years ago on Clubhouse with Marc Andreessen, and in helping us prep for the interview, he said that you, you had an exchange once around, or one question that you were curious about was whether philosophy makes the world a better place. Can you, uh, unpack your, your exploration, uh, into that massive question?

Okay, okay. I, I don't have any memory of this, but I trust you. I think it's, it's hard to answer that question as though it weren't already a philosophical question, which it is, right? Um, and so it presupposes the value of the activity that it also calls into question. So that's the kind of odd structure to the question. There's almost a sense of— it's not self-undermining, but It pretends to be more open than it is. It's like, oh, does philosophy make the world a better place or not? I'm open to either answer, but I'm going to engage in the activity as though it were of some value, right? So I see that tension there. But that said, so that's to say, take everything I say with a grain of salt because I haven't— I'm not really— I can't be approaching it as openly as I might pretend to be. But yeah, I think it definitely does. That's why I do it. So I mean, I can say more about why, but—

Well, I guess another version of that is, if philosophy is the love of wisdom, and we certainly need wisdom in all sorts of decisions in our life, why aren't we consulting philosophers? And why do we— who do we consult ahead of philosophers? Therapists, religious, you know, people, other kinds of academics, coaches, leaders of other types? Like, it feels like if philosophers have the deepest understanding of wisdom, it feels like they aren't getting the credit Or the, uh, aren't putting to the test. It feels largely academic, which is to say divorced from practice. I don't know if, is that a fair characterization? And if so, why?

I think that people do consult philosophers somewhat. So people consult me about a variety of things, but in consulting me, they might become frustrated because consulting a philosopher is a little bit like consulting a therapist where they don't give you answers. And that's because philosophers understand this thing that I said at the beginning, which is that we can't do your philosophizing for you. That is, there's certain kinds of thinking you just can't outsource. And so you're asking me, well, these supposedly wise philosophers, why aren't we outsourcing our thinking to them? And it's like, well, because we found the kind of thinking that you can't do that with. Sometimes you just have to think. And there's just nobody that's ever going to do it for you. And that's part of like being a human being is that there's certain things you're going to have to use your, your own mind and not anyone else's mind to figure out. And I think philosophers can help you do that if you want to do it, but a lot of people don't want to do it. And so then they don't do it. And I don't think philosophers feel slighted by that. In fact, it's interesting. I think, like, say, economists are often consulted, right? But they're often not consulted. And they feel, as a group, I think, slighted in the sense that we should be consulted more than— we should be more important than we are, something like that. Philosophers, I think, don't feel that at all. They couldn't care less whether you care about us. Um, I might be slightly an exception to that. That is, I'm someone who somewhat cares what the, like, outer world thinks of me. But, but most philosophers are just, like, totally happy for you, for the rest of you to just completely ignore us because we, like, found the best thing. And if you don't want to share it, that's your problem.

I, I certainly don't doubt that you're consulting a number of things, but I understand you as being one of the foremost philosophers around. I understand for things like, hey, you need to know what is the interest rate going to be, you need an answer, you go to an economist who gives the answer. But it feels like with therapy, you go to a therapist to help you do some work too, just as you described philosophy. So why don't we go to philosophers instead of therapists?

Yeah, I mean, I think there's a very small group of philosopher therapists. It's like a thing. I have never gone to one nor served This is one, so I don't know much about it. I think that maybe we philosophers are not great at making ourselves universally open to conversation. Like, we are open to certain kinds of conversation in certain sorts of contexts. Lots of people have had some experience of a philosopher because lots of people go to college, and when they're in college, like, there's a good chance they'll take a philosophy class at point. Like, when I'm in an Uber or whatever, I often talk to someone, they'll be like, oh, I took one philosophy class. It's common, right? So, which is to say, philosophers have made ourselves available. We've made ourselves available to teach people in college, but we haven't really made ourselves available in a kind of broader way. And sometimes I think of it like the invention of writing, right? So, I don't really know the history here, but like writing is something where it took a while for it to take off. So like literacy, I mean both reading and writing, right? So like in the ancient world, you know, that I study, like not— you couldn't take it for granted that someone would be literate, that someone would be taught to read, that they would be able to read and write. And you might have asked, why didn't they— why didn't like literacy just immediately spread? Um, why didn't everyone avail themselves of this great thing? You know, you see someone like Socrates who's like, I'm very skeptical of this newfangled thing, literacy, writing, you know, it's going to mess up people's memories. It took a really long time. Like it kind of took thousands of years for it to become near universal. It's not even universal today, but near universal. And I think philosophers have a thing that's like, like that. It's conceptual literacy. It's being able to take the very terms in which you understand yourself. And understand them and break them apart and rearrange them. And that's incredibly valuable. It's sort of like your, yourself becomes kind of an open book. And why wouldn't anyone want that? Well, for kind of the reasons that not everyone wanted literacy at first, which is that it's not obvious how good it is until you have it, I think. And the other part I have to say is that it's also maybe not so obvious how good it is when not everyone has it and it's not really obvious how to deploy it in human interaction. And so, you know, the history of like the past, let's say, 100 or 200 years of philosophy has been like real serious doubts about philosophy. Wittgenstein's probably the most important philosopher, you know, recent philosopher, and he is somebody who seem to see philosophy as largely existing to cure our desire for philosophy. That's contentious, and some people will disagree with me about that as a matter of interpreting Wittgenstein. But so there's this question: if you could have this skill, if you could have this ability of deconstructing the way that you think and seeing inside of it and seeing where the problems were, would that even be good for you? I think it is, but not everyone who has it even thinks it is. Just as you might doubt, as Socrates— Socrates was literate, but he doubted the value of literacy. So you can— so there's the question, you know, could you appreciate the value of it if you didn't have it? And then even if you did have it, can you appreciate the value that it really only would have in a world where more people had it?

That's fascinating. So you're saying it might not be as valuable in a world where only a few people have it, but it becomes more— there's network effects. Hey, we'll continue our interview in a moment after a word from our sponsors. Hey everybody. If you're a business owner or founder like me, you'll wanna know more about our sponsor, NetSuite. NetSuite provides financial software for all your business needs. Whether you're looking for an ERP tool or accounting software, NetSuite gives you the visibility and control you need to make better decisions faster. And for the first time in NetSuite's 25 years as the number one cloud financial system, you can defer payments of a full NetSuite implementation for 6 months. That's no payment and no interest for 6 months, and you can take advantage of the special financing offered today. NetSuite is number one because they give you, your business, everything you need in real time, all in one place to reduce manual processes, boost efficiency, build forecasts, and increase productivity across every department. More than 36,000 companies have already upgraded to NetSuite, gaining visibility and control over their financials, inventory, HR, e-commerce, and more. If you've been checking out NetSuite already, then you know this deal's unprecedented. No interest, no payments. So take advantage of the special financing offer with my promo code at netsuite.com/upstream. That's netsuite.com/upstream to get the visibility and control your business needs to weather any storm. netsuite.com/upstream. I mean, going deeper as to why it makes the world a better place, I'm curious, like, let's, let's unpack that on kind of like an individual level and societal level. So, you know, people need to spend time and money to undergo philosophy, you know, the state subsidizes it somewhat. And so it needs to have some sense of ROI on that relative to other things. At the same time, I've heard you talk about, and other people talk about, how it's valuable for its own sake, but we often need to justify, you know, there's opportunity cost to everything. And so why don't you make the case a little bit or unpack that further?

So I think that philosophy is the best answer that we have come up with to the question, what could the serious use of leisure be? Say, you know, we want progress And we want to be spending our time and money well. The reason we want that is to free ourselves from want and to free ourselves from the need to struggle and work, or at least to make it a little bit easier. That is, to have not every ounce of our energy be occupied by the need to survive and help other people survive. And so suppose we relieve ourselves from that for some stretch of time, every day or something. Suppose we relieve ourselves for an hour or for 3 hours or maybe for the whole day in a really ideal world. And then the question will be, what, what are we going to do with that time that we have where we have relieved ourselves from cares? And I think the contenders are going to be basically forms of entertainment, and they may be very high-class entertainment like art or something, and then forms of thought and inquiry and understanding. And we better have something to fulfill that slot or we really don't have much of a reason to be trying to make a better world.

There's a scene in the book Moneyball written by Michael Lewis Are you familiar with the book?

Yes.

Okay. Well, for the audience, the book is about how the Oakland A's had this, you know, new mathematical way of evaluating talent and, and, you know, doing baseball strategy that was, you know, far superior to the, to the one that preceded it. And these analysts on the Oakland A's have this, you know, analytical superpower. And they're wondering if they should tell one of their players about it. And the coach says, No, because it'll confuse him. Uh, like, if he— if he— the more he learns, it might shake, shake him up a little bit. And so I'm curious as to when the idea of, like, when increased self-knowledge is helpful and, and when it isn't. There's another example you've brought up in the past, or you've written about, which is the idea of, like, um, status games, where we have these kind of indirect ways of communicating status. And this is my projection, sometimes, like, the more you are conscious of status, It might confuse you in a way because you actually can't be direct about it. Yeah, sometimes the more you know ain't so. I forget what the phrase is, but you get what I'm saying. How do you think about that? Or what comes to your mind when I bring up the Oakland A's example or otherwise?

Yeah, I mean, I do think that when you're trying to understand some activity that you're engaging in, And there's a kind of reflexive or natural way that you engage in the activity that could be disrupted by giving attention to it. I think that's true. That's a real phenomenon. And I often use that effect actually, like in the classroom, you know, um, I will, if I'm discussing, I don't know, recently I was giving a lecture about, and I, and I wanted to talk about various kinds of conformity. And I'm like, well, notice what you're wearing and that you look similar to everyone else in this room. Notice that you have certain expressions on your face. They're like lecture-listening expressions. I pointed out somebody had given the example of scoring points in some way and I pointed out, well, he was asking his second question. So I'm like, look, you asked your second. The first one was what you had to do in order to score points, but now the second one, You know, that's just for free. Um, so you probably wanted to know something. So anyway, there's certain things where I would like call attention to what's— to the person's peculiar condition. And it's just a bit disruptive for exactly this reason, because there was a naturalness that they had sitting in the classroom, raising their hand, asking a question that is no longer there. And then the question is, when is that worth it? It's, it's going to be worth it when your desire to understand something Is going to be stronger than your desire that it get performed one way or the other, regardless of whether that performance is itself based on a misunderstanding, right? So sometimes you're like, look, I just need this to happen. I just need it to go through, even if it's founded on some illusions, because I just need to get through the next 15 minutes. And I think that's a lot of life. A lot of people for life is just, I just need to get through the next 15 minutes. And philosophy gets in the way of that. It throws a wrench in the getting through the next 15 minutes. But the philosopher's perspective is like eternal, right? So it's just that what you wanted to do in the next 15 minutes probably isn't that important. It's probably okay to throw a wrench in it. And whether or not you win a baseball game or whether or not you feel comfortable in a classroom, like it's not that important compared to eternity. And so it's really, that's why I think the good framing of philosophy is what would you do with leisure? What could possibly Be worthy of the use of your leisure time. And I haven't really found anything else. Like even high art for me doesn't really come close to being something where I would say I could, I could do it for eternity in leisure. Like I would say, ah, I wouldn't wanna read that many novels.

Yeah, I do like the eternity perspective. Donald Hoffman has a book called The Case Against Reality. One example He's basically trying to show that we're not evolved to seek truth first, or we're only evolved to seek truth when it helps us. And one example that resonates with some people who play basketball or sports is when the ball is out of bounds and it's unclear who knocked it out of bounds, we instinctively think it's our ball. Like, we're not optimizing for— or the first thing that comes to mind isn't like, hey, whose ball is it? It's our ball. And so To your point about illusions, it seems like a lot of life is like that, that there's, um, you know, just benefits of self-deluding yourself when you're trying to sell something or pitch someone on something. Like the more you believe it, the more compelling you are going to be. And so there seems to be some practical benefit to self-delusion. I'm curious how you reconcile that or think about that.

Yeah. So I think that's true, but only if you allow that the benefit itself could be a delusion. Like the thought that, look, obviously it's just better for me to get the ball, or obviously it's just better for me to sell this product to that person. That's— you want to do that thinking pretty fast and not look at it too long, right? Because like, maybe it's not. That is, maybe selling this thing to this person isn't actually as important as you've told yourself on the basis of very little reasoning that it is. And as you've maintained, because you're like, look, I just need to get through the next 15 minutes and So I need to just hold that fixed for the next 15 minutes. So part of our thinking that is really fixed is the thinking about benefits, right? We don't think very reflectively about benefits. And a lot of times we come to periods in our lives when— okay, great example that I talk about in the book I'm writing right now is Tolstoy wrote this book called A Confession where he had this midlife crisis in saying, do I have anything of value in my life? Does my life have any meaning at all? He was constantly on the verge of suicide. He would have to do things like hide. Like ropes so that he didn't like hang himself. And when he went out into this field, he wouldn't take his gun so he wouldn't shoot himself. And so he was just totally depressed and feeling like nothing in his life had any value. Okay, this is after he has written War and Peace. He has a giant manor. He's rich. He's an aristocrat. He has a family, has a wife, has a bunch of kids. He has the respect of like all of Russia. He is a kind of idol and hero. He has everything you could possibly want in life. He's just like, yeah, but what's the point of any of it? Because what he finds is that he never really spent any time thinking of whether he was really benefiting himself by writing a novel or having a successful property or having kids, et cetera. And so all those benefits that you think you can get by deluding yourself, they're themselves part of the delusion system.

That's fascinating. You mentioned you're writing a book right now. Is this the one on love and marriage, or is it a different book?

No, that's gonna be my next book. This one's on Socrates.

Okay. What are you hoping that people take from the book? And the people being people who are very familiar with Socrates, what do you think is misunderstood about Socrates, or where are you looking to correct the record, so to speak, or introduce a new way of looking at Socrates?

A lot of ways, but I guess here are 2 that spring to mind. So first, I don't think that Socrates is ironic. That is, I think he's basically just saying what he actually thinks, even in the parts that seem sort of crazy, and that those parts can be made good sense of, and that it's something like— Socratic irony is like a defense mechanism that readers have used to convince themselves that Socrates didn't actually produce good arguments to turn our lives upside down. There's literally that phrase in the Gorgias, Where Callicles is like, if he is serious, then our lives should be turned upside down. Could he possibly be serious? So that's one. And then the other is, I think, just that Socrates's most important insight, which is pretty simple, but I, I don't think it has been so well appreciated as his most important insight, which is that there are certain things that you can't think about by yourself. That is that some of the most important kinds of thinking have to take the form of talking. That the thing you're trying to think about has like 2 sides. And talking allows you to see both sides because the other person's helping you see the other side. And you have to see both sides at the same time in order to see the very thing. And so Socrates was interested in those questions and the questions that could only be pursued by more than one mind.

Going back earlier for the benefits of conceptual literacy, would we say that the benefits, like conceptual literacy may not make that Oakland A's baseball player a better baseball player, but it will give him something of value. That is bigger than baseball that you could do for eternity? Or like, what's the way to, to sort of think about the benefits of conceptual literacy?

The, the Oakland A's baseball player, like, let's, let's say, I don't know what the actual case is of what he was supposed to be told, but maybe it was certain kinds of attention to the way that he's swinging the bat or something. There, it just may well be that there is no interesting question to which that is an answer. And so whether you know it or not is kind of incidental. That would be Socrates's reason for not looking into it, not because it would harm his swing. What conceptual literacy should give you is a sense that you're not going through life on autopilot, being kind of commandeered by the 2 sources we have to answers to questions about what should I do. There's just, I think there's just 2 of them according to Socrates, if you don't do philosophy. One is your body. So Which is just your basic biological needs, your health, but then also wealth because that helps you fulfill your bodily needs. That's one. Number 2 is other people. So it's conformity, belonging to a group, status, etc. And everything you do is just you're unthinkingly, automatically obeying one of those 2 commands. And people often think of themselves as free thinkers and as rebels because they ignore one of the commands, but then they're just ever more slavishly responsive to the other. And so that's what you're giving the Oakland A's player or anyone else who has conceptual literacy is liberation from enslavement to their bodies and the groups that they belong to.

Well said. You mentioned that in your view, Socrates is, is not ironic in the way that some people think he is. Dave Foster Wallace, a few decades ago, famously wrote about how our culture has become drenched in irony. And it's kind of a— I don't know if he said a defense mechanism against seriousness, but that we've become way too ironic. And this was before social media and the internet, and things became much more ironic from there. From my limited interactions with you, you seem to be a very serious person, and I haven't seen you use a ton of irony. Do you agree with that self-assessment? And what do you think about irony today in this culture?

Yeah, it's so interesting because irony, that word, is just the same word in ancient Greek, ironia. And it literally shows up in the dialogues. People like Callicles are like, hey, Socrates, you're iron. You have ironia. You're ironic. And Socrates denies it. And you know, at the time, the word really meant something like deceptive, deceptively withholding stuff. Like, come on, we know you have the answers; you're just pretending not to have the answer. Thrasymachus says, right? It's not the it's not the cooperative interlocutors who accuse Socrates of this; it's the people who are clearly like the bad guys. Thrasymachus calculates Alcibiades. The Socrates imagines the people in the jurors in the audience who are against him. He's like, if I If I explain the way it is, you're all going to say I'm being ironic. Okay. Which is to say, yes, unserious, but more specifically, deceptively withholding. And so what happens is, to the reception of Socrates over time, people, of course, eventually are consuming basically Plato's Socrates or Xenophon's Socrates. There were other Socratic dialogues, but they didn't get preserved. I mean, they did get preserved for a little while and then they didn't anymore. But you get people like Cicero and Quintilian. Praising the irony of Socrates, and they find it delightful and urbane and sophisticated, and it becomes this virtue of Socrates. So this Socratic irony that so annoyed Callicles and Thrasymachus is actually— it's considered a rhetorical kind of power to be ironic, right? So it graduates to a kind of a virtue, an ability to control your speech in a certain way. The greatest Socrates interpreter of all time— I think I can say that— like, classicists, you know, ancient philosophy people would agree, Gregory Vlastos, he actually claims that Socratic irony is Socrates's greatest cultural contribution. Cultural, not philosophical, but still, it's very striking, right? So that in some sense, like, we got irony From Socrates, or rather we got irony as a good thing, right? Now, I think all that's based on a mistake. Um, and I think Plato thinks it's based on a mistake. That's why he puts it in the mouths of all the enemies of Socrates, right? But so irony is this very complicated thing where on the one hand, when you're on the receiving end of it, you're a bit irritated. If the person's talking to you, they seem to be withholding. On the other hand, if you're a third party and you're watching the interaction, say I'm being ironic to you, and then we have listeners, right? They kind of enjoy it. The listeners kind of enjoy it. Why? Because they think I'm just withholding from you, not from them, right? Because they think they can tell what the hidden meaning is or whatever. They're smart enough to see through it. So irony makes an observing audience feel smart and feel like something was reserved for them, something that was hidden from Thrasymachus and Callicles. It was just for the audience.

Okay.

So I think that's the sort of dynamic of irony, and that if I'm— in effect, if I'm too direct with you, then there's nothing special that the audience is getting. So I think if you have a lot of spectated conversations, you're gonna get either a lot of irony or a lot of perception of irony or enough anticipation of the perception of irony that It creates irony. Um, and, um, that is what we have on at least on some forms of social media, like on Twitter. And so it makes sense to me that yes, that you end up with a lot of irony.

I agree. Also, irony to me seems like, uh, in some cases to be kind of like a subversive tactic, like a way to punch up or perceived punch up. And in our culture, Status is often unclear and very mobile and people don't know where they fit. And so they have anxiety around it. And so being able to punch up is a way, is an accepted way to maybe elevate your own status. There seems to be something there, like cultures that have more rigid status hierarchies probably have less irony, I could imagine.

Yeah. And I guess there's some overlap between irony and making fun of people. Maybe a lot of irony is making fun of people and maybe a lot of making fun of people is irony, but More generally, I just think we have a lot of making fun of people. And yeah, maybe you're right that that's going to happen in a world where there's some status fluidity, but also just a world where there's a lot of possibility of people watching your interactions with other people. So you would behave very differently if there were no spectators.

Yeah. And in a world where it's so easy to remix everything and we've all We all have these cultural shared memes, basically. So it's easy to reference references and know what people are talking about and make all these comparisons. So it's so much kind of artillery for our irony. Is status a game where the more you think about it, you lose? The more you understand, like, the— or everything, anything done for express purpose of increasing one's status is unlikely to Increase your status or—

Yeah. So I think there's a lot of things like that. In fact, not just status, like apologies like that. Like when I apologize to you, if my apology is too directly driven by my desire for you to forgive me and it's too transparent, it won't work. Right. So there are a lot of intentions that have to erase their own foot tracks or something. That's just like a thing. I'm just amazed by how even people who think a lot about status and it might be very perceptive about it, Engage in the same status-seeking behaviors in totally unreflective ways. And I'm sure I do it too, so that it's like the parts of our brain that govern our status climbing, they're off doing that regardless of how we're theorizing. And so we're not super able to control that, or to the extent that we do, it becomes very legible to other people in ways that then undermine your status. That is, there's a lot of stuff where we're much better at reading other people than we are at faking out other people.

And going back to Donald Hoffman's book, Case Against Reality, he says we're, we're pretty good at, I guess, faking out ourselves, or the people who— the best people who are able to fake out other people truly fake out themselves, which gives them the ability to fake out other people.

Right. I think that convincing yourself of something is going to make you the most persuasive liar about it. Yeah.

George Costanza once said, it's not a lie if you believe it.

Uh, right.

This Seinfeld character.

I think that's true, by the way. Like, I think you're still saying something false, but you're not— you can't be saying it with an intent to deceive if you think it's true.

Right. Going back to Socrates for a second, my Very cursory simplification or crude simplification of Strauss, of Leo Strauss, or one of his ideas was that there's this deep tension between the world of philosophy and the world of politics. And we kind of need to shield both from each other in the sense that you shield philosophy from politics because we don't want more geniuses like Socrates being put to death. And you shield politics from philosophy because politics requires compromise and it requires half-truths in order to motivate nations of people. And most people can't handle the complexities of life that come with philosophy. So what I'm curious— feel free to edit that characterization if it's missing something critical, But 2, I'm curious, people say sometimes that Tyler Cowen is Straussian. I don't know if that's true. It kind of resonates with me, but hard to truly know what one is really thinking. Me and my peers often ask ourselves, how Straussian should we be? Should we be, to the extent that I defined Strauss correctly, should we be saying what we really think? Obviously, you're a philosopher, so my sense is you say what you think. Often, but yeah. What do you think about that?

I did an event with Tyler at the University of Chicago on politics. Sorry, philosophy versus economics. And after that event, like you know, I always talk to students after the event. They come to my office, whatever, and I ask them like what they thought of the event. And he's like, "They're they basically this was the like consensus from the students I talked to." Something like, "He was a lot smarter and more impressive than you, but you're a lot more sincere." And I thought that was a good sort of summary. And I think of being Straussian as in a way not being very sincere, but not in a way where you're lying exactly, but almost in a way where even you aren't really sure what you think. That is, the really convincing liar convinces themselves, right? And so there's a certain kind of, you get I suppose you develop a talent, a certain kind of facility for saying the right thing under the right circumstances where you yourself believe it in a way, to the extent that you're not lying, right? And I think that's the sort of skill or ability that Tyler was demonstrating, and the students were very impressed by it, but they also found it to be in a certain way insincere, right?

Okay.

I suppose that that skill probably is good at not getting you killed or something. So I disagree with Strauss about some things. I respect him a lot as a reader. He's a very rich reader. Like, you read his, just his close readings of texts and you see all these things you didn't see before. But like this thought about, I'll just sort of accept your formulation, which I think is sort of fair enough, keeping politics and philosophy apart from each other. Like, there's a question, who separates them? Is it the, is it the politicians? Is it the philosophers? Which one are we? Are we somehow standing above this whole thing at some position where we can perfectly see the virtues and vices of both and we don't, and these 2 groups have these blind spots, but we don't have them? And that character often shows up in Strauss of the idea of like, well, most people can't see or appreciate something, but like, luckily I don't have any of the problems I'm diagnosing. I mean, that's just what it is to not have diagnosed the really deep problems. It's like if you say most people can't handle the complexities of life, but I can, that means I haven't found the real complexities. Those are the ones I can't handle. I think like a real philosopher is looking for those complexities, the ones they themselves can't handle, not the ones they can just call out other people for not being able to handle. So I guess I think sincerity is like the only tool we have when it comes to those things. When there's questions you actually want to know the answers to, there's just nothing else at your disposal but sincerity. And there's a kind of desperation you have when there are questions you want to know the answers to. So the thought, oh, how Straussian should we be? That's from the point of view of somebody who— that's from the point of view of a wealthy person or something who's like, well, I could say this or I could say this. Either way, I'll be fine.

Right.

But suppose you're desperate to know certain things enough Literally nothing else matters to you, then there's no question arising about how Straussian or how, like, how sincere should I be? Just be totally sincere all the time because maybe this is the chance, maybe this is your chance to learn something from someone. And so like, maybe there's a question, like Socrates fundamentally was out to learn things from people. He wasn't out to impress them. And because like, if I impress you, you know, that's great for you. You got something out of it, but what did I get out of impressing you? That's just my reputation's like in you. It's not in me. I didn't learn anything, right? So there's a weird way in which the person who's impressing other people is kind of altruistic. They're thinking about what's in the minds of those other people. And the Socratic is much more selfish and is like, I want to know stuff and sincerity is my only way to do that. And I think that, you know, the moral of the Socratic story for Plato was not like, oh no, a genius like Socrates got killed. The moral of the story, which is very— there's so many dialogues about the death of Socrates, and they all say the same thing: it was not a bad thing for Socrates. Socrates was not harmed. It was fine for Socrates. It was bad for Athens. Athens was committing an injustice, and an injustice is like an injury to your soul, and that's what was happening to all those jurors, and that was terrible. And Athens, you know, that was a bad thing, but it wasn't bad for Socrates. And the other part is, Socrates wasn't a genius. That is, at least Plato really tries to depict him as lacking what would be the markers for impressiveness in the world that he was in. So like the Tyler Cowens of Socrates's world would be people who had good memories. Okay. So they would be remarkable. I mean, that was like a thing in the ancient world when you can't really record stuff, just being able to remember a lot of stuff is basically, that's code for intelligence. Right. And Socrates in many, many places, he's like, talks about how he has a bad memory. And the number 2 for impressing people is being able to talk in sophisticated ways. So like how you talk in a law court. And Socrates, in a number of places, including in the law court, says, I can't do that fancy talk that other people do. I'm just going to say the words, the same words as they come into my head in that same order, right? Non-Streusian. And, and I think that That's in a way Plato trying to say there was nothing else that was special about Socrates. He wasn't some super smart guy. He wasn't a genius. He wasn't impressive. He was just somebody who wanted to know the answer to certain questions, and he put that in front of everything else.

So would you agree then that Tyler is Straussian? It's funny because Tyler, I think, is one of the great thinkers of our era in some ways. And yet when I hear people like Bryan Caplan or your co-host, Robin Hanson, talk about Tyler, they obviously have worked with Tyler and love Tyler, but they will also be somewhat critical in this way of, oh, he's kind of hedging or not willing to say exactly what he thinks or put stands on the ground. So I'm curious if you resonate with that assessment.

I think he is saying what he thinks. I think his thinking is very flexible. And, but I told Tyler that, I mean, this about the responses of the students, I told all this to Tyler, so this won't be news to him. There are a lot of different niches for public intellectuals, right? A lot of different roles that a public intellectual can have. And Tyler's like uniquely well-suited to his peculiar role, which is a very altruistic one. It's really about benefiting other people and it's not about inquiring into the truth or learning anything, but it's great for the world that such altruistic people exist.

You wouldn't say his Marginal Revolution blog is about kind of better understanding the world and trying to Or his books about don't take stances or try to present ideas or worldviews?

There was some blog post he once had where he said he could almost say that every one of his blog posts is who should be raised in status and who should be lowered. And I think that he's trying to make the world a better place, and that's what the heading says, right? And he's trying to think who is underrated and should be boosted a little bit more. Which worries should be downplayed and which should be upplayed. And that's fundamentally the sort of business that he's in.

Yeah, I think that's well said. Going back to Socrates, you wrote a blog post about Socrates and sort of politics, and I want to quote you here. You say, Socrates wouldn't respect the point of view of the protesters outside his window. He would want to know who is right and who is wrong. And he wouldn't stop talking to them until the difference between points of view was obliterated. Persuade or be persuaded. And so I'm curious, why aren't you publicly invested in the biggest culture war issues of our time and, uh, taking, you know, finding out what's right and presenting your findings? How do you respond to that?

Oh, I think I am invested in it. I am trying to figure out what's right and presenting my findings. That was one instance. Of it. So, I mean, I think I might have, like, I think that, I guess I see free speech as the biggest, if I had to pick number one biggest culture war issue of our time, and I've written a number of things on it, including that piece. Probably that's the topic I've written the most about. Often when people summarize me, at least recently, they've been like, most of her writing is about romance and relationships. And it's like, I've written maybe 2 or 3 things on that. Most Most of it's actually been on free speech. What is free speech? And I think that we really don't know what it is, and the people who are stamping their feet about it least of all. And we don't— a certain conception of free speech, which is just kind of like, leave people alone and let them say what they want, has worn out. It's worn out its welcome. And now we don't know what to do. And I mean, I think it's the Millian conception of free speech. I'm a fan of Mill, but I, um, I think the thought that ideas are somehow duking it out in a notional marketplace of ideas doesn't make a lot of sense because the marketplace is not a place. It's— ideas are in people's heads, and that abstraction is just kind of— it worked for a while and it doesn't, it doesn't work anymore. No, I should note the phrase marketplace of ideas is not in Mill. Mill scholars will be angry at me, but I think even though I read a paper on this by scholars saying, yeah, and that's really significant. I don't think it's really significant. I think the idea is in Mill, even if the phrase isn't, but I'll just acknowledge that.

And when you say worn out its welcome, do you mean that people are now upset with it? Or what does it mean? Like, why doesn't it apply anymore as well?

You might study, like, you might go to study a musical instrument and you might have this idea, a vague idea of what you're going to get. And then You never get anything more than that. And, and you have this image of yourself, the violinist or something, and, you know, you're playing the violin and it kind of sucks and you hate it and you're bad at it. And, and that image of yourself being the great— it sort of wears out its welcome after a while because it was never meant to be the thing you ended up with. It was meant to be the thing you started with, and it was meant to evolve and improve. And that's sort of what I think about mail on free speech. It was meant to be the beginning of a process of thinking about what it would be to be in a community in which speech, public speech achieved its proper ends. And step one on that road, and of course mail's not step one, but still we can say step one would be something like— Don't ban heresy. Okay, that's really what Mill's thinking about. He's thinking about heretical, um, you know, people who seem to not be believing in God or even giving arguments that God doesn't exist, right? Um, like, he's like, don't, don't ban those. That's not how we're gonna live in, like, the ideal space of communication. That was a good thought. I think he was right about that. But that isn't the end-all and be-all of free speech. And I think that a certain kind of permissivism doesn't capture what we actually want. Like, what, what are we listening for? And, um, how can we learn from each other? Those to me are like deep questions about speech that just don't ban stuff doesn't really address.

You had an episode with Robin Hanson on your great podcast together, um, on free speech, and he talked about in his mind, it's, it's really the freedom to listen.

Was that No, I don't think Robin's right about any— I mean, I think it's a good thought to at least remember that there are listeners, not just speakers, and that the battle over who speaks is really a battle between the elite over eliteness, right? It's like, who gets honored, really? It's about who is publicly honored. And, um, there's an— and, and so Robin is drawing attention to the fact that, like, most of the characters in this story are actually the listeners and not the speakers, and that you're listening, you know, there's a question: what kinds of information are listeners getting? And as a listener, what kind of information do you have a right to? So that's how he's thinking about it. And I think that that makes sense, but that ultimately that too has is still infected by the million thought because the thought is like, okay, I get in all the information, right? Let's say I got every— and now I have to figure things out. And then where is that going to happen? Like, am I just supposed to figure that out inside my head? Am I— is the whole marketplace of ideas going to happen in my head now? And it somehow battles it out and I come to the right conclusion. No, that's what we were supposed to be doing outside, right? We were supposed to be having conversations. And so the idea that there's just a bunch of speakers and a bunch of listeners, to me, doesn't get at the real issue, which is like, how do exchanges work? Um, how do we listen to each other or argue with each other? Um, I think I tweeted, uh, I recently read this like Chesterton, uh, essay. Uh, it was like a— maybe it was a book review or something. But anyway, it was this little bit of it was, um, I mean, it was like everything he writes, just the big big whiny complaint about how things are nowadays, right? Um, but it was just people fight instead of arguing. He said people fight when they can't argue. And I think it's like free speech is arguing. That's what, that's what free speech really is. And so we have to figure out not how to listen or how to talk, but how to argue.

To me, uh, so free speech is certainly a massive one. Another massive one that maybe is even upstream of that is, is in terms of like philosophical problem that relates to everyday life in all sorts of different ways. And you've written about this as well, is sort of how do you justify hierarchy or partiality or variance? You've written about in the context of how do you reconcile sort of egalitarianism, meritocracy, or at the bottom, having natural or inherent kind of honor, just points for just for being alive, with sort of the idea that People should earn things and strive for more. You'd probably put it much better than I just did. And that sort of question around hierarchy, partiality, variance, disparities between people, between groups of people. Is there a justification? What is that justification? Because the idea of egalitarianism or equality is just so deeply rooted in our culture such that You know, Marc Andreessen famously once said, like, software is eating the world. It seems like, you know, much further back than that, like, equality is eating the world. We're just continuously introducing more and more forms of equality. And sometimes that is, you know, empowering, and sometimes that messes with sort of the order, or destabilizing, I guess, to say the least.

So I remember earlier I said, like, there are these 2 basic commands that autonomous— that Dictate how we live our lives. One of them is body, our bodies, and the other is kinship groups. So equality comes out of that. That is, it is the principle of just about every kinship group that at some level or in some way everyone in the group is equal or has an equal claim on something. And this can be, you know, brothers or sisters in a household, It can be fellow citizens in a city who each, like, let's say in Aristotle's city, each have a claim to rule. So this kind of equality, first of all, is always artificial in the sense that there's no sense in which the siblings are equal. They're not inherently equal. The equality is a function of the group. It's the group dictates that everyone in it is equal. And that, that's part of what it is for the group to be a group. Now, these equalities always— the, the sort of— there's a sort of default, but then there, there are some hierarchies that are always justified, right? And so there might be like the firstborn child or the male child or whatever is going to be hierarchically above the other. So it's, it's certainly just as much as equality, so is hierarchy a principle of kinship. And the kind of struggles in kinship groups are often this attempts to balance equality and hierarchy. Maybe we are gravitating towards forms of kinship that are very equality-centric. I guess my thought would be, my underlying thought about that would be similar to what do I think about the fact that we indulge in a lot of luxuries Like, in terms of answering, um, our— like, the bodily— the body set of commands, which is kinship groups. Group membership is not a great source of answers to questions as to how you should live. It is one of our defaults that we have, that we get for free without thinking. So that's useful to us, just like our bodies are. But, um, This is to say, I don't think egalitarianism is any kind of fundamental truth about the way the world is. I don't think there's any sense in which people are fundamentally equal, that it's a fiction of a group. But I also think there's no fundamental sense in which we have to pursue pleasure and avoid pain. That's just what our bodies tell us. That doesn't tell us when it's good to do the thing or when it's bad to do the thing. I think there are certain hard-won philosophical truths, which is like, Like every human being has a certain kind of dignity, but that's to say that each one is incomparable to any other, which is not at all the same idea as equality. So this is something where I, like, I've come into a lot of, like, you know, I'll write something about it at some point, a lot of incredulity because a lot of people think of equality as some kind of a moral principle, but I don't think it's a moral principle. I think it's a principle that groups employ to get along and it's always balanced against hierarchy. It's always like, which hierarchies are justified exceptions to equality?

What are the implications of that shift in thinking? Like, um, if you don't think of it as a moral principle and you instead think of it as a kind of group adaptation, do you have better, more sympathy for, or more understanding as to why it continues to emerge? Or why is it important to have that shift?

Well, one thing is, if some scenario makes things less equal, that doesn't, for me, make it worse because I don't think it's a fundamental moral principle. If that scenario involves treating people disrespectfully or not respecting their dignity, then that's bad because I believe that moral principle. So that's important because it's important to know whether you're tracking what people think matters or whether you're tracking what actually matters. So I think equality is a thing that people think matters, but I don't think it per se, it matters at all. I think sometimes it correlates with something else that matters. For example, I think often egregious forms of inequality just make it hard for people to have conversations. Now, I think having conversations is super important.

So if we need a bunch of equality for the sake of conversations, let's bring on that equality, but not because it would somehow otherwise be intrinsically bad not to Some people have a broader sense of morality that kind of follows, I'm trying to think, almost like a Darwinian morality, like whatever evolves to the next generation or passes on to the next generation is what's right. And some people say, hey, you shouldn't mess too much with this idea of kind of what has worked and what has passed on and what is most likely to continue to pass on. But then some other people say, well, it's also Darwinian to mess with that cycle to begin with. Like, um, to some degree. And so we, we, we can change that nature or change that, um, to make it more likely such that this thing that seems in some abstract way more fair to, to pass on. I'm curious if that thinking brings up anything for you.

In judging like what works, we're making a moral judgment. And, uh, it's not always true that the people with the right answers are the ones who survive. So I think you can't read morality off of survival in that direct way. When a serious and concerted effort to try to figure something out, I'm an optimist about that. I think it tends to move in the right direction over, at the timescale of hundreds or thousands of years. I think we should be optimistic about our progress. We should be optimistic, for example, that let's say some versions of the moral intuitions that we have, say against slavery, in favor of children's having a role in their own self-determination, in favor of sort of exposure to a variety of forms of culture, whatever, that's some version of that, we should be sort of optimistic that it's going to succeed. But I think we also need to be humble in the light of the fact that the future, like that very fact, the future will be wiser than us. And so they're going to know that we were wrong about some things. So we shouldn't want to pass down too many of our ideas to them. We should only want to pass down the correct ones. So I guess, but to me, that's not really an evolutionary— the point that Figuring things out tends in the direction of— trying to figure things out tends in the direction of figuring them out. That's not an evolutionary point, I think. That's like a point about the faith in inquiry, but just about anyone who's ever having a conversation has got to be committed to that. Otherwise, what is the point of the conversation?

Unless they're trying to persuade, but without truly inquiring, but then it would— we're back at our question about self-delusion. It seems that one challenge that many people have is, is differentiating between sort of the idea that someone has equal moral worth and yet that they would have difference in outcomes or, or, or status or other things if they have equal moral worth. That, that feels difficult, a difficult sort of thing to reconcile or to intuitively understand for, for, for many people.

I, so I think that this is something where I definitely need to think more about it and my own, I'll say why my, my own initial responses are not very intelligent, I think, because I actually just happened to viscerally not get this very well. So, uh, and I think that it's connected to what I call the dark empathy problem. So like, we live in a world where people think empathy is really awesome, and they think it's really good to be able to sort of channel and feel other people's pain. The thing is that empathy doesn't determine how you're going to respond to feeling someone else's pain, right? So like, say I can feel your pain. as though it were happening to me, then I could either— I could be sad about that on my own behalf, right? Or I could be happy about it. Um, that's dark empathy. And I think empathy doesn't dictate whether it's going to go in the nice or the dark direction. And people tend to assume it's going to go in the nice direction, but I think lots of times it goes in the dark direction.

Okay.

And so, like, I think that The empathetic people feel on behalf of those who are suffering. They feel the good kind of empathy, but then they also feel dark empathy on behalf of those who are thriving, a joy in the prospect of those people's pain, envy, etc. So the empathetic people are also the ones— so it's like Uh, I, I see this because I have children and some of my children are empathetic and others of my children are not empathetic. And I see that the, the, the good and the bad side of empathy go together. Um, and so because I'm, I'm not very empathetic, and so I find it odd that, um, uh, somebody would be unhappy with the fact that someone else is doing well, but it's mostly like, cause I'm like, why would you care?

Yeah.

In the same way that I'm like, why would you care if someone else is doing badly? Why would you care about any of it? But it's, you would care if you had empathy, right? So if you had empathy, you would care that the people were suffering and you would care that the other people were thriving and you would feel outraged about the one and sad about the other. And I just don't have any of these feelings. And so I'm having to decode them from some distance that makes my responses somewhat unintelligent. So I'm still processing. I guess I think that What we have to do is hit some kind of foundation where we have some thought about what is the community for? And then to what extent does the community have to be a community, right? What does it have to do together? And then what do we need for that? And maybe we need lots of material equality. To have what we want our community for. Say we want— say the purpose of our community is conversation. I think that's a pretty good purpose for community. And say, like, people just, as a psychological fact, really have a lot of trouble having conversations across, like, giant wealth gradients or something. Then maybe we need lots of material equality. But, like, say they don't, then— Then maybe the people who are worried about that just need to be educated that that thing wasn't actually very important. So I think you can't use empathy as a guide because of dark empathy. And we need something else as our guide. And that something else is going to be, what does it take for a community to function? But that question is, we can only answer that question when we know what is the function? What are we trying to do with our community? And I have an answer to that question, but I'm not sure what that answer entails about, say, material conditions.

Have you said the answer or what is the answer?

I think it's to figure things out. Philosophy, basically. That is, I think we don't know the answer to the question. What is the meaning of life? What are we supposed to do? Why are we here? We don't know the answers to those questions. We go through our lives acting like we know the answers, but we're really just parroting answers that we get from other people or from our bodies. And we can't figure the answers out on our own because I'm a Socratic. I just think you literally cannot think about it by yourself. You can do a thing you call thinking about it that's actually just you rehearsing some things other people said. And you really could think about it if you would talk to other people about it, but there's lots of reasons you don't talk to other people. And it's because basically the groups that we're part of, our kinship groups, are not structured to facilitate conversation. That's what I would call the problem of free speech. And maybe part of the problem there is inequality. I'm open to that thought. And then we need equality. So that's where equality would figure in my bigger picture understanding of communal life.

Your answer reminded me of When I first read Paul Bloom's book Against Empathy, it was the first time that I considered that empathy is not only a positive thing. The term empathy has such amazing branding, uh, where someone who doesn't have empathy is seen as almost a monster by some people. Um, and we all— the answer to everything just seems we need to have more empathy. And yet, uh, Paul and we, we kind of just alluded to the places where empathy leads us astray.

Yeah, I mean, empathy is a skill as I see it. And skills can— skills do not teach you how to use those very skills. So skill, like memory is a skill, speaking well is a skill. In general, it's good to have skills, but someone who has a skill isn't necessarily going to use it well. And so you shouldn't conflate the skill with the right use of the skill. That's what I've done with empathy.

That's well said. The, um, Kind of closing the loop on some things we brought up earlier. Some people, there's this term out there that is used to describe the idea of just thinking for thinking's sake. I think it's certainly a crude term definitionally, but it's also, I think, crude, or I think it's certainly inaccurate. They call it intellectual masturbation. Do you think that term is like, there's any valid use of that term? Or is that term just like a misunderstanding of what thinking is for? Or it just misunderstands the— that underappreciates that thinking for its own sake is valuable. I'm curious how you— you've heard that term before, I'm sure. What do you think about it?

I have heard it before. I've never really reflected on it, but now that I do, I'm almost tempted to say it sounds like a description of what Aristotle thinks God does. So Aristotle's God, the prime mover, is thought thinking itself. So, God thinks about God, but God is thought thinking the thought of God thinking itself. I mean, if that's not intellectual masturbation, I don't know what is, right? And Aristotle just thought, well, what else are you going to have there at the very top of your being pyramid, right? And Aristotle's God is the linchpin of the metaphysics and linchpin of the physics, right? So, it's constantly holding the whole universe together and Metaphysically holding all of being together, all the things that exist. They're kind of, they're beings in a qualified sense. I mean, the real being, the real thing that is, is this immaterial thing, this thing that can't change. It does not, it doesn't have the defects of being material or can change. And it's just a thought that is sort of filled up. It's saturated with activity and the activity is thought itself. You know, who are we to judge? I mean, if this is God, right? Um, so, uh, but, but like the— I— so I, so I think it maybe that thing has it, has its place. I think it would just be inappropriate for beings like us to do that because we don't already know the answers. So what are we going to think about? We're supposed to be thinking about problems to try to come to the end, get answers to questions. And so we are not supposed to think for its own sake. We're supposed to think in order to get answers. Maybe at the end of the story, once we've got all the answers, we can do the God thing and do intellectual and it'll be great, but we're not there yet.

Seamless segue. I want to talk about Love and Marriage. You mentioned that that's your next book. You most recently had this New Yorker profile or New Yorker piece that was written about your perspective on the issues as well as some of your background. And I'll broadly summarize, which is to say that you evaluated Well, you're a public philosopher, not just in your thinking, but also in your practice of living life and living philosophically. And you, you know, you don't just do things because that's— they've been done before. You, you know, evaluate them from first principles. And, and some of the things that you did from first principles were this idea of, hey, it's this thought that typically when someone divorces someone, that they, that they can't be good friends or something, or that's like a stereotype that people have, or let alone that they might be good friends with their, you know, with your future partner. And it's actually interesting because I grew up in a house, my parents were divorced before they had me. So I have a half-sister and my parents are friends with my sister's new parents. So kind of a similar situation as you described for yourself. And people would comment on how strange that was. So I'm used to this idea that this is a strange idea. Anyways, I say this to, one, give background, but two, to ask you to share a little bit with us about what you hope people take from the book that you haven't yet written, or more broadly, do you want more people to live philosophically in this way as well? I think the charitable take is, hey, any progress comes from reevaluating certain things and experimenting with certain things. Discovering what makes sense for each individual. To that extent, I'm curious how much do you think, if you're prescribing at all. But then 2, I think a cynical take might be on living philosophically. Hey, can I just justify anything I want to do by using philosophy or fancy words to justify instincts, which sometimes maybe is the right thing to do, maybe sometimes might not be the right thing to do.

I'm really trying not to prescribe. I try pretty hard. I don't always succeed in not prescribing in anything that I write. And I find it overwhelming how much public writing is advice or we need to, we must, the time has come for. And I think that's part of the free speech problem as I understand it, which is that we only know how to yell at each other. And how to be extremely sure that everyone else ought to think the thing that you think, which is probably wrong, right? So, like, inquisitive speech is, you know, as my kids' teachers would say, still an emerging skill for humanity. And I'm trying to speak in that way and to live in that way as well, which is to say, you know, I'm trying something out. That's what life is. It could be wrong. But, like, you know, someone else who— like, everyone's life is an experiment and everyone could be wrong. And the fact that your life looks a lot like the lives of the people around you doesn't really make it more likely to be right. So that's a kind of terrifying truth about life that we're all experimenting, whether or not that's obvious. You know, I, I, I wouldn't say that I had very articulate thoughts about what people— what I wanted people to take away from the profile. I mean, I didn't write the profile, so I didn't like have aims in writing it. But I was pleased by how many people wrote to me and said things like— like the reaction to the profile, like say on Twitter or whatever, was very negative, but I got a lot of people writing to me being like, oh, I had like a real conversation with my spouse for the first time in a long time about your piece. Or like, oh, I can't stop talking about this. Lots of people talk to their spouses about this. That was like a, like a real effect of this piece was that it started conversations. And also to their friends, those people, some of them then came and talked to me. It made them feel like these topics could be talked about. And I think that's what it is to speak inquisitively. It's to like, Open the topic as something that the reader has a contribution to make. And if I come across as somebody who doesn't look like they have all the answers, all the better for that effect, right? Because in fact, I don't. So that's truthful. And trying to make myself— I do think a lot of public intellectuals want to put forward a face of at least maximally looking like they have answers to the degree that they can, but That tends to close off conversation, not to encourage it, right? So that's the sense in which self-exposure is really beneficial to you, like me, if what you want is not— it's like to hear back from other people and to also for them to make progress in the conversation to the extent that you haven't. So can't you just justify anything you want to do? I think the answer is yes, but you can You can do that anyway, with or without philosophy. You can do it with convention. You can do it with impulse or the bodily desires, right? So your body and the people around you give you resources for justifying things. And the difference with doing it philosophically is that you have to form conversational agreements with other people who then have to see it your way. And so, like, I didn't just do all this myself, right? I had to have a lot of conversations with not just my husband, my ex-husband, husband, but, you know, my kids and my friends, and to explain myself, to come up with agreements, to modify those agreements as time went on. And very little, if any, of this was done with a view to getting people in the outside world to think it was okay. Almost all of this happened well before I was anything like a public philosopher. It was with a view to figuring out what would actually be okay. But in fact, that's the best way to produce justifications, right? It's similar to the point we were discussing earlier about trying to trick other people, is that if I want to make what I do seem justified to other people, the best route is for me to actually think that it's justified. So I can only do that to the best of my ability and to the best of the ability of the people around me, right? because they're helping me do that. So of course I can be wrong, but I do think you have a better chance of being right if you actually try than if you don't try. So.

That's fascinating. What are you hoping to achieve or get through with your, the book when you set out to write it that you haven't yet with that profile or other pieces you've written?

I think that there's just a lot I want to know, and that's why I think that's why most people write books. Is that they want to know stuff.

What are the things that you want to know or find out?

I want to know, like, what is marriage? Um, and, uh, like, there's some— and what is sex? So I'm really interested in, you know, there's been a lot of writing on sex, but very little of it actually answers the question of what it is and why is it important to us. I'm thinking about that right now because I'm writing something for the Wall Street Journal on, um, on sex. Um, and, uh, but when I say what is marriage, I also mean Like, getting some of the heterogeneity in view, as I think there are really interesting differences, different kinds of functions that marriage can play. And even within a single marriage, these can come to the fore. So I'm interested in understanding all of that. And like, the difficulty is going to be kind of focusing and, you know, having a narrow enough topic. And then what is divorce? And what, like, What, um, what kind of ideals should we have? Like, we have ideals for marriage, and I think we ought to have ideals for divorce too, and we don't. And so what should they look like? That, those are some of the questions that I hope to have better answers to.

Well, we will, uh, we will look forward to it. In closing here, I've, uh, something, maybe it's a silly question, but did we just do philosophy this past hour and a half? Like, am I a street philosopher in this? That's my, story I tell myself in the sense of I don't have a lot of the body of knowledge, but I do ask, hey, are things true? I do seek, seek what is true and seek to, seek to find out. And I'm able to somewhat separate between what is expected of me to, to think and what is, you know, maybe actually true.

Yeah. Um, so I think the answer is yes, but like the, the difficulty with doing philosophy on a podcast is just that you have to shift around a lot. Because we're also trying to entertain an audience of people who might get bored if we stayed on the same topic for too long. And so it's almost like we started to do philosophy on a whole bunch of different topics, and then we quickly gave up.

Yeah. That's a good place to wrap the podcast, perhaps. Agnes, this has been a delightful conversation. Thanks so much for coming on the podcast. I highly recommend for people who enjoyed this to Follow you on Twitter, read your— you have links on your Twitter of your columns, your books, and look forward to promoting your upcoming book on Socrates.

Thank you. Thanks so much.

Upstream with Erik Torenberg is a show from Turpentine, the podcast network behind Moment of Zen and Cognitive Revolution. If you liked the episode, please leave a review in the Apple Store.