Episode 185: The Devil's Playground

[00:00:00] Very Bad Wizards is a podcast with a philosopher, my dad, and psychologist, David Pizarro, having an informal discussion about issues in science and ethics. Please note that the discussion contains bad words that I'm not allowed to say, and knowing my dad some very inappropriate jokes.

[00:00:35] Welcome to Very Bad Wizards, I'm Tamler Sommers from the University of Houston. Dave, we're recording this a little over a week before this episode is scheduled to come out. What do you think the world will look like next week?

[00:01:37] Shit, I won't know because I'm fucking stuck in my house. I'll have no idea. I don't know, but I'm scared. I already have a high level of obvious existential anxiety, but like I find myself actually kind of being freaked out with all of the exponential growth charts that

[00:01:54] I see. I wish that I were the sort who could believe that this was all a media hoax, but not even our president believes that anymore, I guess. Yeah, now, who knows what will happen in a week?

[00:02:04] It is unbelievable the way in which it just changes day to day. I got back from a trip last week, like last Sunday night, and nobody was that worried about this. You know, people were a little bit, but you could still legitimately think this

[00:02:21] is like SARS, and then just every day something unbelievable happened. NBA season cancels or suspended. No tournament, no NCAA tournament. No travel from Europe is banned. Travel now from the UK and Ireland is banned. Canada just closed its borders.

[00:02:39] It's crazy, and I thought I was going to go back to school. Like right now I should be in a seminar, but no. We're doing this remotely. I don't know how to do that. Yeah, I know. You're doing...

[00:02:49] We've been, at least we've been practicing for remote lecturing for like seven, eight years. Yeah, are you moving all your classes? You moved your class online. You have to figure that out.

[00:03:00] Yeah, I mean, we have one more week to figure it out, so I'll probably do Zoom for my grad seminar and I guess recorded PowerPoint lectures for... I have to figure out the lies of my daughter. This is where I am right now.

[00:03:15] I need the help of my 15-year-old daughter to plan my... Or just put together my lectures because she knows how to do that stuff. It's like the red light, dad. Is it on? Is the red light on?

[00:03:29] This has given us actually surprisingly little practice in terms of teaching classes online. Although tell the lies so that if she needs to explain tech stuff to you, like I've been practicing that at least. That's true.

[00:03:42] I'll just call you when I have a question that I don't understand. Yeah, luckily I'm not teaching any big classes. That seminar I was co-teaching is canceled. Both of them, both two seminars that I was co-teaching are just canceled because they're

[00:03:54] like super low priority, like kind of graduate training seminars and we were just like fuck it. But we had a job search. We had a job search with six candidates all supposed to be flying in within the span of these two weeks. And that's just...

[00:04:07] You can't just do that over Zoom. I mean, we're lucky that we can do so much over Skype or Zoom or whatever. I feel really, really bad for the people who can't. Like they just have to go out. Yeah, no.

[00:04:18] My brother-in-law is a jazz musician and he's essentially unemployed for the next two months. Like there's no gigs, there's no accompanying work at all and there's no like benefits, there's no... It's just totally fucked. Yeah, so underprepared man. We're so underprepared.

[00:04:33] But for you at least it's like a sabbatical. Like you're golden right now and you're kind of a homebody. I am a little bit too. Yeah, I don't. Like I hate that I kind of like this, you know?

[00:04:45] But it shows that I'm truly kind of introverted to me being able to be in my pajamas and just put a right shirt on. This morning today I had Zoom, Skype and Microsoft Team.

[00:04:57] All of those were open because I had to use a different one for all of the meetings that I had. It was best to make myself coffee pee when I want, fucking bring it, bring the corona.

[00:05:07] It is a good time then under the circumstances to revisit an essay by the philosopher Bertrand Russell called In Praise of Idleness as you are about to and many of us are about to have at least more idle time on our hands.

[00:05:25] Definitely time on our hands whether it's idle or not, I guess it's up to us. Yeah, so that's what we'll be talking about in the second segment, that essay as well as a book that neither of us have read but we've listened to and interviews with the author

[00:05:41] and read about this book. It's called The Meritocracy Trap by Daniel Markowitz, a Yale Law School professor. I think it sort of an updates some of the arguments and ideas that Bertrand Russell has and it introduces a lot of different new layers in terms of economic inequality

[00:06:01] as well. That's what we'll talk about in the second segment. In the first segment, this was I believe recommended to us on Twitter but it could have been Reddit. It could have even been an email.

[00:06:14] It would be nice if we gave credit to the actual people who gave us these ideas. But I remember what they said. I don't, I have no idea who it was, but they said this could occupy you guys for

[00:06:26] an opening segment I think and then just gave the link. The link is an essay by the philosopher Robert Gressus called Is Pansexuality Obligatory? And the argument is no. That's actually, Betteridge's Law of Headlines. Have you heard this?

[00:06:45] If a headline ends in a question mark, the answer is always no. Is that right? Yeah. No, that makes sense. Yes. I don't know. Just read through it and riff on some of the ideas here. We haven't talked about what either of us thinks about this essay.

[00:07:04] So let's talk about, he opens up by defining pansexuality, something I admit I hadn't thought too much about. But pansexuality or omnisexuality according to Wikipedia is always good to start an article with a Wikipedia entry.

[00:07:16] Is the sexual, romantic or emotional attraction towards people regardless of their sex or gender identity? That will not be his first reference to Wikipedia by, I mean his last reference to Wikipedia. Wikipedia also gets invoked for the Kinsey scale later on. Yes.

[00:07:33] So is the sexual or romantic or emotional attraction towards people regardless of their sex or gender identity? You might think of pansexuality as of little interest. Most people are either hetero, homo or bisexual with very few people identifying as pansexual. Why talk about that?

[00:07:54] I think will be a good question that I'm not sure receives a satisfying answer. I mean, we are talking about it. So yeah, so he moves on to a question that we've actually, I've asked, I know on this

[00:08:04] podcast which is by analogy, he says, imagine that it was socially acceptable to say, I don't find black women attractive or I don't find Asian men attractive. Were they socially acceptable and it may be actually in most the country then black

[00:08:16] women and Asian men would find themselves at a disadvantage in the dating market. So it would be bad for them. Can I just say that he's gonna, he is tap dancing around the people who are actually

[00:08:27] asking this question because I don't think he ever actually says who is making these argument. I mean, I think that no never not once and we can talk about who we think maybe is making this argument.

[00:08:39] But let's just talk about the analogy for a second and what he says about it. Were this socially acceptable to say I don't find black women or Asian men attractive, then they would find themselves at a disadvantage in the dating market. So it would be bad for them.

[00:08:55] Yeah, I mean maybe that's true, but does that mean that you would have to find them attractive if you don't as an individual or is it about whether it's socially acceptable just to say it? Well, that's the problem which is that people's actual attractiveness doesn't

[00:09:13] need to be said. And in fact there's data which I swear we've talked about on this very podcast before with speed dating across races that finds that in fact those two groups do have a big disadvantage on the market.

[00:09:28] So you don't have to say it to have this happen. So it can't be that the reason that we don't say it is because they would be disadvantaged. But in addition, the thought goes not being attracted to black women or Asian men

[00:09:40] is probably a malleable preference empirical claim we could talk about one that may exist due to negative and unfair stereotypes about black women and Asian men. Consequently, trying to convince people that such preferences are unacceptable would improve

[00:09:56] the fortunes not only of black women and Asian men but also of people who were depriving themselves of opportunities to find suitable partners. It's not again it switches back and forth between saying the thing which does maybe

[00:10:11] seem a little objectionable to go around trumpeting that you don't find black women or Asian men. But then to convince people that such preferences are unacceptable like I this is I don't know what even that means your preference that's unacceptable for you to have that.

[00:10:27] What's clear is that if I had only known this in high school I could have dated many Asian men. If only someone has convinced you that your your preference against Asian men was unacceptable. I was walking around saying no to all the dates they were asking me.

[00:10:44] Yeah, no, no. OK, so so already he's trying to pull an intuition that I don't think we have. And when you kept saying preferences at first I thought you were trying to distinguish this from the word orientation.

[00:10:55] But no, you just mean that he is going back and forth between the expression versus the preference right that we have preference preferences is really what's if anything is problematic. And he says this is another empirical claim, although I think it's masking as a moral

[00:11:11] claim trying to convince people that such preferences are unacceptable would improve the fortunes of everybody right. The black women, the Asian men. I mean, is that true? Like just people kind of scolding you for your lack of attraction for a certain group of people.

[00:11:30] Is that going to improve their fortunes? That sentence should have said consequently, not he says trying to convince people that such preferences are expected. It should say if he wants to make just the full on moral argument, consequently convincing people that such preferences are unacceptable.

[00:11:43] Like if there were an empirical way where we could put in the water that everybody would be completely oblivious to the race of the people that we were we found attractive, then that might be better because it would improve everybody's chances in the dating pool.

[00:11:58] We'd have fewer in cells and all that. But it's putting something in the water where people's preferences are changed maybe against their will is different than like there's a question of to what extent we can be morally persuaded or scolded or condemned

[00:12:16] into finding a group attractive that we don't. Continuing to insist that you're just not attracted to people with vaginas as gay men and straight women claim or people with penises as straight men and gay women claim is supposed to be problematic not only

[00:12:35] because it deprives trans people of sexual opportunities and relationships satisfaction, but also because it does the same for cis gendered people. Consequently, well let's stop there for a second. I think here is where he comes the closest to kind of targeting who's

[00:12:51] really upset about this. And it's the trans people. I don't think it is the cis gendered people. I'm not complaining that there are lesbian females who don't find me attractive because I have a penis. And it's some probably some that the most vocal are trans

[00:13:10] individuals. I don't have data on this, but every time I've seen the argument raised it comes from trans individuals. Obviously not all trans individuals because I think there are a whole bunch who wouldn't bother to make arguments

[00:13:21] like this. But that is the thing that he never says in this article and that's the thing that we're going to fucking say because that's like don't don't dance around the whole thing. Like when I first read this honestly, I think maybe you had

[00:13:33] the same same notion which was like, wait, who is he arguing against? And there is someone and I apologize if this is wrong, but my sense from looking at the arguments is it tends to be people who have transitioned into female from male gender.

[00:13:48] But it's not like gay men wishing that Tamler would have sex with them usually. It used to be. But they weren't they weren't complaining that it was like prejudice. It's just inconvenient. This is something I don't even know what he means. Consequently, just like we should sanction people,

[00:14:04] sanctioned people who claim to have a preference for non black women or non Asian men. So too we should sanction people who claim to have a preference for cisgendered men or cisgendered women. Moreover, we should also encourage people to work on developing a pansexual orientation.

[00:14:23] Call this view that we should sanction non pansexual orientations and promote pansexual orientations uncompromising pansexualism. So I want to know what he means by sanction. Electric shock. Canings. Encouragement, hundred dollar bills. You know, you need the carrot and the stick.

[00:14:42] I think that what he's saying is morally shame on Twitter. I think that's the sanction. So if you're not on Twitter, this doesn't apply to you really. And again, there's that thing of claim to have a preference versus just having a preference.

[00:14:56] And I just don't know, like maybe he's right that you shouldn't go on Twitter and saying, I own and say, I only like people with vaginas. They can't have a penis no matter how they identify. I just like people with vaginas.

[00:15:10] Like, yeah, like I guess you probably maybe shouldn't do that. Like why would you? We don't usually announce our sexual tastes online, but actually having them is the problem here. Not announcing that you have. You know, this, this reminds me of a conversation that we

[00:15:28] once had when we were looking at the porn hub data. It was actually the book that the guy wrote when he was looking at the porn hub data. And he was arguing that because so many people search for search terms like chubby women or or whatever

[00:15:41] overweight, that there was a market to be had that was untapped of a bunch of these presumably men getting together with these overweight women. They're just afraid to say it in public. So there might be data to tell us exactly how many men

[00:15:54] are attracted to male to female transsexuals. And I think that it's probably a lot more than than we might think. But but again, there is a distinction between expressing it. So you could do make a different version of this

[00:16:07] argument, I guess that you should and if you have an attraction towards people who typically in our culture tend to be on the losing end of the dating and sex market, that maybe you should be encouraged to announce that both to sort of identify yourself

[00:16:27] to those people and also because it might make that more socially acceptable. I mean, we're getting a little far field here, or I am at least, I think that's part of the problem is that you might be identified as a fetishist

[00:16:41] of some sort and that that itself seems to humanizing. You know, if I were really attracted to amputees, it would be hard for me to go out and say it because I would be afraid that people would think of me as weird

[00:16:52] or the amputees themselves would think of me as only liking them for their lack of a limb. So you you like amputees, you're sexually attracted to amputees. You know, actually, you know how when you do the opposite of what you really feel to try to

[00:17:06] throw people off the scent, I like people with like three arms, six fingers. Now, the obvious response to uncompromising pan sexualism is to attack the analogy that motivates it. While there isn't much reason to think that a strong preference for people of a certain race is

[00:17:21] genetically hardwired, there is very good reason to think that there is at least a strong heterosexual preference is. After all, there's a pretty straightforward story for why it would be evolutionarily important for most men to have a strong sexual preference for women and evolutionary useful for most women

[00:17:39] to have a strong sexual preference for men. The survival of the species kind of depends on it. Just a totally gratuitous and unnecessary invocation of evolutionary psychology. And right, because presumably this article is about people who already have sort of a fixed sexual sexual desires, including gay men

[00:17:59] and gay women. And so to invoke the survival of the species is kind of to throw them under the bus. I guess the idea is to attack the analogy with black men and Asian women and to say, well, that's not genetically hardwired. That's cultural.

[00:18:13] First of all, none of it is either one. It's a combination of both. But secondly, like just because I mean, we've talked about this a million times, but if it's culturally influenced, then, you know, doesn't make it easier to overcome.

[00:18:24] So that's he is he is saying that's the obvious response to uncompromising pansexuality. I'm not sure I totally agree that that's the obvious response, but I would I would question whether we should sanction people for having preferences for various groups, period.

[00:18:43] But if that's the obvious response, here's a reply to that. First of all, the pansexual could note that if most men prefer to have sex with people who have vaginas, then they shouldn't have a problem having sex with someone who identifies as male, but who has a vagina.

[00:18:58] The pansexual could note that if most men prefer to have sex with people who have vaginas, then they shouldn't have a problem having sex with someone who identifies as male. He's doing some analytic philosophy. If they're saying that this is the necessary

[00:19:13] condition and sufficient condition for who I'm willing to have sex with, then I should shouldn't matter what gender they identify with. Right. But presumably like cis heterosexual men like you and I are not going to be attracted to a trans man is the idea, even though

[00:19:33] the man might still have a vagina. Similarly, most women shouldn't have a problem having sex with people who identify as female, but who have penises. And yet they tend to have such problems. So those problems are probably a result of how sexual desire is socially constructed.

[00:19:49] And again, there's the there's the implication that if it's socially constructed in any way, then that's problematic. If it is, then then balance sex diets is the solution. I'm telling you, we've got to go back to that. Expose children to all manner of sexual objects

[00:20:10] from very early on and we wouldn't have this problem. That's that's going to be fucking everything. That is the logical implication of your view in that episode. I think that like myself, this is a pandemic. The only solution is to go back and re litigate that episode.

[00:20:29] God, we would need a list of readings. Would we? Do we ever? Well, you would. I need to be indoctrinated and sanctioned for my views. Second, even if it's true that most men natively have strong desires to have sex with people who have vaginas,

[00:20:47] it doesn't follow from this that they can't ever develop desires, perhaps even strong ones to have sex with people who have penises and the same goes for women. Such a preference may have to be one you'd have to work to develop,

[00:20:59] unlike say the desire for sugar, which comes naturally. But that would simply make it the sexual equivalent of scotch and acquired taste. Does anyone really make this argument? And if so, I want to know exactly what they mean by like, I work on having a preference.

[00:21:17] You know, I do think that there are there are a fair number of people who over time were moved from ever so slightly curious to full blown willing and eager to have sex with somebody of the same sex.

[00:21:30] But but did they do it because they worked on it? Well, that makes it. Yeah, it makes it sound like you have a meta desire to do it, but a desire not to do it like that.

[00:21:40] You're exerting self control, exposing yourself to like the right kinds of porn. Yeah, that's what I mean. That's such a weird way of thinking about sexual attraction, I think like you first find out what the morally optimal attraction that you should have would be.

[00:21:57] And then you just work on like aligning your taste with that. I mean, like the scotch analogy behavior, right? The way that you do it is you just start like there's whatever sufficient like with me, I started trying whiskey because there are people around

[00:22:14] me who said it was tasty. I tasted it. I didn't like it. Didn't like it. Started liking it. The same hasn't happened for me with scotch because I still find it fairly aversive. I don't know if that's biological or if I kept doing it.

[00:22:25] If I kept hanging out with people who like scotch, maybe I would. No, I mean, maybe vegetarianism is a better example. Like if you just made the moral decision to be a vegetarian, but you love meat, maybe you could work on really starting to like vegetarian.

[00:22:40] It's there's something very strange about it. It just like I feel like I'm not trying to be attracted to people for moral reasons. Maybe if you were somebody who was attracted to children or attracted to something, you know, like dead bodies, dogs actually is morally

[00:23:01] optimal. So forget that. But dead bodies. Yeah, exactly. You would try to work on not being attracted to that. Right. I think that that the problem I fundamentally have with any of this line of reasoning, which is not to say I could be wrong.

[00:23:15] But I don't think that there is intrinsically ever a moral reason to be sexually attracted to somebody or not. So being sexually attracted to somebody like a child, that's wrong for other reasons. That's wrong. It's wrong because of the group of people that you're attracted to

[00:23:34] don't have the ability to say protect themselves with the dead bodies. You know, society frowns on it, the relatives would kill. There are all kinds of reasons not to do things to children and to dead bodies. But I don't think that it's a moral issue at all.

[00:23:48] That is like if you have well, well worked your way into only being attracted to your partner, you've excluded not only people of every race, of every other appearance. To me, it's not it can never be a moral requirement. Morals in that that's kind of preference.

[00:24:07] Just don't match up. Plus on the flip side, if the reports are true that Pornhub has made Pornhub premium free in Italy. Maybe you do have reason to expand your tastes a little bit. There's a whole world that's going to be opened to people over in Italy.

[00:24:26] You had a funny tweet about this time to invest in VPNs. Yeah, I just I retweeted Pornhub, Arya hoping that she would pay attention to me. So then he says he addresses those points, but he brings in the Kinsey scale.

[00:24:42] And then he says the Kinsey scale shows again, I think there's some Wikipedia invoked here. Some people are just fully on one end and fully on the other. And even if you're conditioned or you work on trying to be

[00:24:59] attracted to opposite sex or same sex, you won't be able to. He concludes that section. So my main objection to uncompromising pansexualism is this pansexuality can't be obligatory for everyone because sexuality is not is just not that malleable to sanction zeros and sixes for not being pansexual

[00:25:20] and to pressure them into being pansexual is just as bad as condemning homosexuals for not being heterosexual and pressuring them into being heterosexual. I guess, right? Like if that's what it means to be on that spectrum, right, which is a step that I'm not convinced about.

[00:25:38] So suppose that being from a seven point scale, I am a three where one is is heterosexual and seven is homosexual. It may or in the middle, it may just mean that I am attracted to men and women, not that my sexuality is more malleable.

[00:25:59] Right. So this scale has nothing to do with the malleability of someone's sexuality. It has, right? Not at least not necessarily. It only has to do with how willing you are, perhaps hardwired, perhaps socially constructed, how much you are attracted to members of the same sex or opposites.

[00:26:17] But that's OK with his point, I think. I think you would already be by luck at the morally optimal position there due to your place on the scale. And therefore, you're not the problem. The problem are the people who aren't already open.

[00:26:37] No, I think that this is kind of the point I'm trying to make is that what he is so take the bisexual, who is often the target of these arguments to say that you are perfectly bisexual, that is, you would date either

[00:26:51] a woman or a man is not to say that you're pansexual. And it's not to say that you've malleably arrived at bisexuality. It's simply to say that you're bisexual. You could have been born that way or whatever, whatever the etiology of sexuality is, that's who you are.

[00:27:07] Just from those numbers, it doesn't mean that you're malleable. Right. It's a weird theory of like, well, everybody's either gay or straight. And some people can kind of make themselves and some people can kind of make them like, that's not that's not what Kinsey meant.

[00:27:20] Do you know what? So there's in some of the passages we skip that he talks about some future LGBT estapo, LGBT estapo. Is that like Gestapo from a conservative fever dream threatened them with permanent solitary confinement in woke prison?

[00:27:39] Yeah, that's that's where he's sort of letting his color show. What colors are those like very anti SJW color? LGBT estapo. It doesn't totally work because of the B gets in the way, right? El Jogobasstapo. OK, so because of the Wikipedia and the zeros and the sixes,

[00:28:00] we can't be uncompromising pansexual list people. But this objection establishes at most that pansexuality is not obligatory for everyone. There's still the following weaker view. Pansexuality is something that most people should be. If you sincerely try to be pansexual, but can't, then you're off the hook.

[00:28:21] But we should at least pressure everyone to try. Call this view compromising and sexualism. I love that that's the compromise. Like we should at least pressure everybody to try to be pansexual. Like we're compromising here. So this this annoys me to no end because it's assuming

[00:28:39] not only the point that I just made that somehow the people in the middle are people who are more malleable when in fact it's just like we. But also like a weird empirical assumption that most people are in the middle, just because the scale has seven points

[00:28:54] through it doesn't mean there's equivalent numbers and that therefore like I would probably venture to say that most people are not in the middle but toward one end or the other. And so a very small people should be pressured to try.

[00:29:09] Well, but even that like so this idea that if you sincerely try to be pansexual, but can't, you're off the hook. Like I like what does that even mean? How long do I have to try?

[00:29:20] Like do I have to actually have sex with a woman, a trans woman with a penis? And like no, this really just didn't do it for me. Well, that could have just been that person. So let me do another.

[00:29:31] Like I have to like how many times do you have to have sex or watch porn or do something to try to get yourself at, you know, to the point where you can say, I guess I'm just on that. The extreme end of the Kinsey scale.

[00:29:44] So I'm off the hook for you. The answer is at least once. I don't think that defeats it too much because that's like saying like, oh, I'm not supposed to steal. Like how am I supposed to stop?

[00:29:54] Like all of a sudden like how many days do I have to not steal in order to be? So you're saying every person should be pressured into having sex with one person who has the genital, the genitals that you tend not to be attracted with.

[00:30:08] No, I'm saying that's what this view holds to be pressured would mean at least once. Like it doesn't mean that you have to do it 20 times. It means that at least once I was looking on Reddit when I googled this to try to find it again.

[00:30:22] That sounds like rape. Like you're pressuring people to have sex with somebody that they don't want to have sex with. I mean, I don't think so. Like it depends what you mean by pressure. Well, you just said like you should try.

[00:30:35] You should have sex with you should pressure people to have sex at least once with somebody. I mean, if that all turns out what you mean by pressure, right? So if I am pressuring you to donate donate to charity, am I rubbing you a gun?

[00:30:47] Of course, like no, there's levels, right? Like you shouldn't harass somebody. But if somebody's never thought of it, then I'm not defending this view. I'm just trying to actually represent it. And I don't think that it means like sticking a dick in someone's mouth and

[00:31:02] saying like, do you like it? But I mean like what does it mean is my question then. If it doesn't mean that, does it mean like you should condemn like just morally condemn people who haven't at least tried to have sex with one person with the

[00:31:17] different genitals than they otherwise find attractive? Should you should you just try to encourage them to do it? Like be like, well, what does that mean? I don't know. All I'm saying is that it doesn't have to mean rape.

[00:31:30] Like not even like the kind of like pressure rape that you're referring to. It could be other things. That's all I'm saying. Well, that's why I think he might not even be talking about like, I think the charitable view here is it's not pressuring people to necessarily have

[00:31:44] sex with a person like that you're not otherwise inclined to have sex with. It is pressuring you to at least be open to it. Maybe take advantage of Pornhub premium and, you know, just check it out. Let Pornhub serve you.

[00:32:00] Let Pornhub serve you up a random video and see if you like it. Exactly. Like putting here. So if that's what it is, but it just seems to me like you should never pressure anybody to have sex with anybody like ever pretty much. Yeah.

[00:32:14] And however you mean by pressure, it's like unless you really want it. Unless you really want it. That's the Louis C.K. Mr. All right. OK, and what is our longest opening segment ever? Is this a let's get to his should we wrap it up then?

[00:32:35] I mean, like he then goes and the boring part of the essay is when he answers all of these with no, you know, I think the do you have anything to say about the rest of the essay? No, but let's talk about yeah.

[00:32:49] It's just he tries to take down all of these arguments and I don't know if any argument I would agree ought not be taken down. I don't know if his way of taking them down is the best. But but I wanted to talk about like this.

[00:33:01] I do just you shouldn't be racist. You shouldn't treat somebody differently because of their race. You shouldn't treat people morally differently because of their appearance, like that their face, their weight. You shouldn't change the way that you treat

[00:33:17] somebody in the way that you in in the sense that you would treat them worse because of something they can't control, something they've chosen to control. But that's not wrong. All of those things I buy.

[00:33:28] But to tell me that I am morally required to be sexually or physically attracted to anybody is, I think, the wrong move. And that's not just because I can or can't control it. Even if I could control it, I don't think anybody deserves my sexual desire.

[00:33:49] Like, I just don't. I think it's a ridiculous argument to begin with. It doesn't get off the ground. And I fear that that is the sort of argument that's being made by some of these individuals who they think you listen, you're morally required to like me.

[00:34:04] Like me. It's not fair. It's not fair that you don't like that you're not attracted. You won't have sex with me. It sounds a little like in cells. Yeah. It's not fair that that the Stacey's are only attracted to the chads and the alpha guys.

[00:34:19] And they get like like 10 women and we get none. They should want to have sex with us too. And it's like, I agree. Like there's something very weird about that that view. Like if it's if they're complaining that they are,

[00:34:35] that their sexuality is somehow socially condemned in itself as it has been with with the trans community and the gay community, that people are trying to say that it's wrong to have sex with them. Like if that's the problem, then I am fully on board.

[00:34:55] But if it's but if the problem is that just not enough people want to have sex with you, that's just not that's that that I agree. That's right. Yeah. I think you should make your, you know,

[00:35:07] if if you find yourself not becoming friends with people or ignoring people or treating people poorly because of whatever their sexuality, their appearance. I think that it's good that you work on that because I think there are ways in which we can treat people.

[00:35:23] There's no obligation to like love them, but we should treat everybody in in the way that is required by morality. But like to toss in that you have to like get hard. Like how dare you not get hard for me? That's just like the worst kind of move.

[00:35:42] I just I am like I am attracted to a slim, slim portion of the world's population. Blonde blue eyes like Aryan descent. Well, from those posters that I have from 1942 ish, like if you found the pattern and you found all of the people excluded,

[00:36:00] it probably would include categories of people who I believe deserve moral protection or who have been shit on by society. But to say that I am somehow shitting on them is regardless. I want you to shed on them.

[00:36:14] Well, I was going to say if porn hub randomly served people up porn, this is a serious question. So there's an algorithm that randomly serves you up porn. You're required to watch at least let's say like half a day. That's like all the only porn you can

[00:36:33] watch and you have to watch that porn. How much do you think you would come to like that? You never knew you would like. Like it's that question of the malleability, like, yeah, you know. Not much. Like I feel like my tastes have shifted. You're in a bubble.

[00:36:55] You're in a bubble. Yes, I have a very like my sexual tastes are and have been since I was a teenager, like pretty stable. And, you know, like every once in a while, there's something that catches my eye, you know, but it's really on the margins.

[00:37:15] It's like I feel like this was set for me. I was happy with it. The world until now has been OK with my tastes and. So why did you try to grab my dick in Vancouver? I don't know.

[00:37:32] I think actually that maybe porn is not the right way to do it. But if you have a partner who's into stuff that you've never been into, I think that's the only way that our sexual desires get expanded or at least one

[00:37:46] serious way, like if somebody you really, really like or love tells you, hey, have you tried this? You give it a try for them and you might actually find that you that you like. They stick their finger up your ass.

[00:37:57] You're like, whoa, well, that's just that's just not only good. That is almost a bent the right good. That is just that is just everyone's a winner singer on. When we have you ever. All right, that means we should move on to the next segment in praise of

[00:38:17] idleness, hey, we'll have time to see exactly how malleable our tastes are over the next couple of months. All right, we'll be right back. This week's episode of Very Bad Wizards is brought to you by Better Help.

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[00:40:47] Welcome back to Very Bad Wizards. This is the time where we love to thank everybody who gets in touch with us, who emails us, tweets at us and contacts us in all the different ways that you do. It's been really fun.

[00:41:02] These almost eight years now, this is pre most of them pre coronavirus, pre-apocalypse, that we have had this community. And so many people just even when they're arguing with us, even when they're objecting to something we say as many people did with

[00:41:23] the Dawkins segment, but also with other aspects of whatever we do, they tend to be respectful, is enlightening and gratifying. And we really appreciate it. If you want to get in touch with us, you can email us verybadwizards at gmail.com, tweet at us at P's at Tamler

[00:41:47] or at Very Bad Wizards. You can follow us on Instagram, like us on Facebook. And you can rate us on Apple Podcasts. Did you see the most recent review? I don't think so. It's actually related to our first segment. The second best podcast ever is the title.

[00:42:07] I could leave it at the subject I would be remiss to not elaborate slightly. Every time I have sex with my girlfriend, I imagine that I'm either Tamler or Dave alternatingly so I can feel she's being completely satisfied.

[00:42:21] I'm a little insulted at the alternating Lee, I assume I'm going to assume that it's one of those like one for you, two for one for me, one, two for me, one for you, Deleys. I get what you're trying to go for there.

[00:42:35] I was trying and it didn't come out quite right. Yeah. Yeah. This was from Christopolis via Apple Podcast. I think it is a moral requirement to imagine that you're one of us when you're having sex with your partner.

[00:42:50] If you think that it's not, you should be pressured into doing so. Come on. Come on. There just play that over and over again until you fantasize about us. Yeah. So thank you for all the various ways you get in touch with us. And we're very grateful.

[00:43:16] And if you want to support us in more tangible ways, we really appreciate that you can go to our support page on our verybadwizards.com. You'll see a link there for support. You can go straight to our Patreon page, patreon.com slash verybadwizards.

[00:43:32] There you will see that you can sign up. And if you do sign up, you get some goodies. You get the beats that I've made over the past few years. You also get a bunch of episodes. So yeah, we very much appreciate it.

[00:43:46] You we just posted an episode. Well, actually, by the time you hear this, it will have posted a week ago. But an episode on Deadwood, which we had been planning to do for quite some time, but we had a lot of fun doing it.

[00:43:59] We're probably going to do the next one on the leftovers. So support us. We love our supporters. We love everybody, but a special place in our heart for our supporters. Or you can go donate, give us a one time donation on PayPal.

[00:44:11] And we very much appreciate that, especially for those people who don't have access to Patreon. So thank you for all of that tangible support. We really appreciate it. Yes, thank you. All right. In these times where idleness actually becomes a possibility, maybe even

[00:44:30] a reality for some people, we thought we'd go to an essay by the great philosopher Bertrand Russell that was first published in Harper's in 1932. And it's still on Harper's. I know, yeah. You can't get like Harper's is I think subscription only normally, but this one

[00:44:49] you can get, he was this was in his more public philosophy phase where he wrote a bunch of essays that are accessible for everybody. So this one. It's an argument against work and workaholics, workaholism. It offers a kind of historical and sociological and economic analysis of

[00:45:15] how we got to this place where people work so much and they value working and value industry so much. I think that's one of the more interesting aspects of the article that this kind of Marxist take about the origin of the belief that working is a

[00:45:33] moral duty and that it's virtue. Yeah. And then it's also an ethical argument that this widespread attitude and belief is pernicious and oppressive and often exploitative. So here's what I take the thesis of the essay to be.

[00:45:50] He writes, a great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by belief in the virtuoseness of work and that the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organized diminution of work.

[00:46:04] And so he spends a lot of time on the analysis of how we got here less than on the question of what we would do if we did work less and value leisure more. But yeah, given that many of us are going to have some time

[00:46:17] on our hands in the next month or two, we thought it was worth talking about. So what did you think of the essay? I liked it. I found myself sort of feeling like I needed to know more economics,

[00:46:27] given this the sort of empirical claims or maybe even history to given the empirical claims that he's making cavalierly and the historical claims that he's making. Well, perhaps cavalierly. My point is I don't know as to how we got to the point where we value work

[00:46:44] for its own sake. But that aside, I think that there are a couple of pieces of insight in here that are really, really important. And so I like it for that reason, right? Like the sentiment is one that's not expressed that much and his his ability

[00:47:01] to lay out why he believes that I appreciate. I think that that more so than ever now, even more than when Russell was writing this, we have a cult of work. And I think we'll talk about the modern version of this work as virtue in a bit.

[00:47:20] Yeah, I mean, the way he talks about it in this essay is that the cult of work developed so that the aristocratic classes, the leisure classes could have people working for them long, long hours. It almost sounds conscious, which I don't necessarily think it was. It's more subconscious.

[00:47:42] And I think the Marxist way of understanding this or a kind of false consciousness, just it developed because of the economic system that you were thought to be lazy and indolent if you weren't working constantly, assuming you were in the working class.

[00:48:04] Somehow we started to moralize working and think of it as this virtue. And that that's a really bad thing. And I think when you talk about it being updated, the way it's been updated is interesting because in some sense it's more fair.

[00:48:23] But in other sense, it's just worse for everybody. That view has now extended and even to the elite and the upper class people, the people even who inherit their money or who start out with all the advantages,

[00:48:41] they still feel like working is a badge of honor and something that they're doing something immoral or non-virtuous if they aren't devoting most of their time and effort to their job. He kind of Russell, even in that, even in this essay in 1932,

[00:49:04] points to this as a phenomenon that he thinks is more distinctively American at that time, but probably because of globalization has broadened. And he makes this claim that through through industrialization, the working individual had a bust their ass

[00:49:23] and was given barely what was required to subsist and the rest to the big haunchos with the fat cigars. And he makes this claim that in fact it's this is the economic claim, I think, which I have no idea about that every that we could get away

[00:49:37] with everybody working for four hours a day and everybody would be happy. That is instead of hiring a bunch of people and having an unemployment rate of a certain amount, hiring a bunch of people who work eight hours or more

[00:49:48] per day, we could hire everybody, put them at work for four hours a day that we would have the same same amount of production. But people would get a chance to chill out. So he basically says if we could get back those four hours,

[00:50:05] you would have a variety of changes. One for one, we would obviously like the obvious. We would have more time to do the things that we actually like, that we enjoy, that we want to do.

[00:50:16] But rather than having people sort of work all week and then on the weekend, just watch TV and be lazy, which is what you might think. You might you might worry that if we give everybody four extra hours a day that people will just be lazy.

[00:50:31] He says no, that that's probably just a result that people are working their ass off and by the time they do have free time, they barely have any energy to do anything. So so of course they're not engaged in in more sort of valuable endeavors.

[00:50:46] So he's not making an argument for laziness when he's making an argument for illness, what he's saying is civilization was built by people who had enough time to fuck around and do things that they really like to do.

[00:50:58] Right? They had to subsist, but they also they also were given time to pursue arts, to pursue whatever studies they wanted to. And that this is a net good for civilization that we've lost. Yeah.

[00:51:12] And so the idea is, you know, if you look at all the people like Plato and Aristotle and I'm just picking philosophers and Darwin, who we've talked about, that had the benefit of this, Isaac Newton, like these are the people who had

[00:51:31] enough time to pursue their interests without worrying about, you know, if there was going to be enough food on the table, if they didn't work 12 to 15 hour days. And now you're just expanding that to everybody.

[00:51:46] And he does worry a little bit about somebody objecting that nobody would know how to fill their days if we only had four hour work days. He says, insofar as this is true in the modern world, it is a condemnation of our civilization.

[00:52:01] It would not have been true at any earlier period. There was formerly a capacity for lightheartedness and play, which has been to some extent inhibited by the cult of efficiency. The modern man thinks that everything ought to be done for the sake of something

[00:52:17] else and never for its own sake. So he kind of waffles between like if we just switched to this four hour work day, everyone would be happy and intellectually curious enough to pursue the projects that are worthwhile with their extra time.

[00:52:33] But also that the modern world has kind of shaped us and deformed us to such an extent that it might even be true that if we if we did have more time, we wouldn't know how to use it.

[00:52:47] And so it would require a more radical overhaul of civilization to feed that part, to tell people, OK, you're not just going to play video games all day and watch reality TV, you're actually going to do something that will stimulate you and perhaps provide value to the world.

[00:53:06] So he says the wise use of leisure must be conceited as a product of civilization and education. You have to learn how to use your free time. Quote, a man who has worked long hours all his life will be bored if he

[00:53:17] becomes suddenly idle, but without a considerable amount of leisure, a man is cut off from many of the best things. There is no longer any reason why the bulk of the population should suffer this deprivation, which yeah, so that that might be the case.

[00:53:31] People would have to learn what it is to have this time. In fact, I don't know if you feel this, but sometimes when I have free time on my hands, I genuinely don't know what to do. And that's sad.

[00:53:43] But what do you think about this idea that this is a new phenomenon that we formally had this capacity for lightheartedness and play? But this new cult of efficiency has inhibited that. So part of me thinks that's true and that there is a cult of efficiency

[00:54:01] and there is this almost like guilt you feel if you're not working, that society has instilled on us. At the same time, I wonder to what extent this this is painting a too idealistic picture of how it was in the past.

[00:54:18] If you think of the Romans, you know, in ancient Rome late, the later periods. But even the earlier periods, there's all this meditation on indolence and just not knowing how to fill your time. And you fill it out.

[00:54:33] You end up filling it out by indulging your worst perversions, just like the Puritan Protestant work ethic. Like I don't know if our image of the Romans has been tainted by that world

[00:54:49] view, but you do get the sense that it was a problem that a lot of these wealthy land-owning Romans just didn't know how to spend their day and ended up spending it in self-destructive and other destructive ways.

[00:55:02] Yeah, you know, it's hard to know, given that the economics of those cultures were so different at some point, I think Russell goes out of his way to say, you know, just doing nothing is terrible too.

[00:55:14] And he says that when women were cut off from doing anything like they were just like, yeah, like if you're a rich woman or married into a rich family, not only do you not have to work, but you don't get to pursue any of your interests.

[00:55:29] And that's not good either. So I don't know. I think that one of the things that I was thinking in that line, in that vein is the comparison with other cultures where the cult of work just isn't as strong.

[00:55:43] My family's in South America, definitely not that strong, although it's changed with the generations. But I remember having postdocs visiting my lab when I was a grad student from Spain and they could not believe how much we worked and that that we had some sort

[00:55:58] of weird guilt for not working, right? They said this thing that everybody says, which is in Spain, we work to live in America, you live to work. And so I've been completely brainwashed by this, by this mentality in a way

[00:56:13] that when I go, when I go to those other countries, I'm not. But I don't think that these countries are producing great works of art and like novel feats of engineering, but they are happier. They definitely are happier.

[00:56:25] I lived for a period in Montpellier in France, which is in the South and got a sense of a more Mediterranean and ethnic. And yeah, this idea that you would we almost fetishized work. We do fetishize it.

[00:56:41] You know, like I found myself saying it's just the other day when you said something about and I said, well, I had a bunch of meetings. Like that's just me flexing that I was busy. Why should I do that?

[00:56:51] Right. Why would and why would you think like you almost do it subconsciously? Now, I have to say I exempt myself a little bit from this. I was so for bad reasons, which was that my mom who was divorced died when I was 17.

[00:57:11] And I got a look, you know, just a chunk of cash in a life insurance policy that allowed me to to do things for a few years. It ran out, but to do things for a few years without having steady work.

[00:57:27] And I was never I never felt guilty about it. I always appreciated it and I always and I made use of it. And I carried that over into like I'm not somebody who's constantly bragging to everybody how busy I am or or yeah, or fetishizing it.

[00:57:47] I think one of the great things about our job is that we don't have to beat work 70 or 80 hours a week if we choose not to. It's weird though, because, you know, as was true, like this happened on Twitter not too long ago, there was some professor

[00:58:02] who posted that they were it was a weird flex where they were saying they were working eight hours a week and a bunch of people like bullshit. Like, come on. But but I think that yeah, I remember feeling this weird pressure when I got

[00:58:17] to graduate school, it was a better school than I had ever been to. But also it's graduate school like you're you're supposed to do work. And I remember thinking to myself, fuck man, these people all around me like they work hard.

[00:58:31] And I remember thinking that it was only because of the cultural pressure to work at least slightly harder than I had been. Like that's the only reason I had any success. And I find the roots of my sort of a

[00:58:42] cultivation into that worship of work started in graduate school. I mean, in part economically, right? You're going to if you if you need a job, you're competing against against other people who are working even longer hours,

[00:58:56] taking even more out or all right, sacrificing their family life even more. That's that's the modern problem that I think is is a direct result, perhaps of if Russell is right of these historical features. And this is something that Daniel Marquette talks about. So he says so well.

[00:59:14] So part of what drives that is the the elites. And this is he's not talking primarily about academics, although I think it applies to academics, it has become this intense competition. Like it didn't used to be if you were rich.

[00:59:29] And you had a good education and rich parents that you were thrust from preschool on into a world where everything is so competitive and you always have to be better than the next person, you know, like the gentleman see George W.

[00:59:45] Bush at Yale, like that was like a real thing. And now in kind of rebelling, revolting against that bit of aristocratic inequality, we have turned the elite life into one of grinding competition where you just end up working and what Marquette says.

[01:00:09] And I wouldn't surprise me if it was right is that the elites, the people who work in finance and the high end law firms and yeah, and investment banks, they are working harder than the average person in America. They're working longer hours.

[01:00:27] They're not spending time with their families. And it is in part or in large part because of this ethic that has evolved. And I think you see, I think a delayed happening in academia, but it's definitely happening now where everybody is just

[01:00:45] even if you're not working that hard, you kind of feel pressured to saying you are. You don't kind of say, oh, I'm looking forward to I love being an academic. You get our summers off like you'd never say that now. How defensive do we get when?

[01:00:57] So so I'm at a research university and part of my job is supervising PhD students and running a lab. Right? So when I tell people who aren't in academics that I only teach, you know, three classes a year, they're like, well, fuck, man, that's nice.

[01:01:13] Like you must not you must have so much free time. I immediately start rattling off all the other things that I do, even if I didn't teach, you know how much I would be working with. Yeah, I mean, it's true.

[01:01:23] Like, you know, I'm also at a place where I only have to teach two classes semester. And if somebody said, yeah, you must have a lot of free time only teaching two classes, even if I believe this, like I would never just say, yeah, it's awesome.

[01:01:36] I I only have to work like four or five hours a day and the rest of the time I can kind of do what I want. You would feel it's almost like you you're being,

[01:01:48] I don't know, like your what is the ethic that makes you feel guilty about saying that, even if it was true, you know, for a period like you wouldn't. You never want to say it maybe just because it's like me saying I haven't voted.

[01:02:03] It's like me saying I don't vote, right? Like it's become so moralized that that you would be looked upon sort of like as a I've seen this happen in in cases in which one of my colleagues who, for instance, was well known for working way too long.

[01:02:19] But I remember having a colleague set up, set a meeting for one of our vacation days. And I remember having a junior faculty member with a small like an infant child being afraid to say, hey, like this is the only day I have to be with my kid.

[01:02:34] Could we set this meeting for some other day? So I remember telling this person like, hey, this like I took one for the team. And I said, like, I can't make it on this day. And that professor looked at me and is like, really?

[01:02:47] I was like, yeah, that's it's a vacation. Like this is everybody should be off. And she's like, I guess, like and gave me the fucking judgiest look. And I was so upset. But that works its way in like it just works its way in. Oh my god.

[01:03:02] Like having a kid is golden for getting out of it. That person should not waste that opportunity with their infant. I yeah, so it's funny because so sometimes the way Russell talks about it and the way Markowitz talks about it sounds almost deterministic, this in this

[01:03:22] kind of Marxist way where it's economic forces are driving it and social and cultural forces like and it just bleeds into the ideology. But it's not like you have to do it, right? Like you don't. And I think I am a little like this.

[01:03:39] And I have a couple of colleagues who are like this too, where they're almost actively resisting, kind of fetishizing how how busy you are and how much you work. And I I sort of wonder to what extent the problem is it almost feels

[01:03:54] like you're letting other people down if you say, yeah, no, I have been. I've been reading some good books like, you know, I've been I went back and I read Anna Karenina again because I had the time to do it.

[01:04:10] If you said that it would seem frivolous and also like unfair somehow, which is weird because it doesn't hurt anybody. You're still doing your job to and you're not like not fulfilling obligations that you're given.

[01:04:25] So that's what I think such a bizarre development in how we talk about this stuff. Right. So one reason there are a couple of things they want to say about that one reason that I would not put like once I wanted

[01:04:37] to post to me work like work life balance is when Netflix asks me if I'm still watching. Like that's all that's awesome. But the reason I wouldn't post it is because I actually do owe things like manuscripts and emails to people, right?

[01:04:53] And if they saw it, they would be like this motherfucker is working and he hasn't emailed me back in a month. And then I would feel terrible about it. But the other thing and I think that we are still of a generation in which

[01:05:03] people like us could make it through the system. This is what I think Markovitz in that box in the As Reclined podcast said so nicely, which is it's that the people who are making it right?

[01:05:17] So one problem is that this meritocracy is one that is that is one of competition. It's not a good enough kind of meritocracy. Like if you're good enough to do this, you can do this. It's that the best people are going to be able to do this.

[01:05:32] And so what you get is people from very early on entering this mentality, usually because of their parents pressuring them. I certainly probably see this too, like in your kids, the amount of pressure in your students, I mean, the amount of pressure that they're having already,

[01:05:48] just like as freshmen, so we're self selecting right all the way up into elite universities and any university at this point. We're self selecting kids who are kids who are overachievers. And they're the only ones who are going to be able to make it.

[01:06:07] I think I've mentioned this before. I remember talking to some fellow faculty members in my university and they were concerned about the anxiety of like the students and the depression. And I told them one of the ways that we can combat the anxiety among our

[01:06:22] students is to not fucking accept students who are so anxious. This is just who we pick. And Markovitz has this great, this great turn of phrase when he says that the modern meritocracy, the elites are alienated from the products of their own labor.

[01:06:37] By that, he means that what's become the end in itself is working. And the things that we would think we would value because we can work right and make enough money to do it would be things like having fun time

[01:06:52] with friends and nice time with family and doing things like hobbies that we love to do. But you've worked so hard to get to that point that you no longer know how to do anything else, right? So you're just like, oh, I'm with my kid.

[01:07:04] Right. And so he says, we call it quality time. We should be called a quantity time, which is totally true. Like and one of the reasons I love my job is it gives me a lot of time to

[01:07:13] spend with my daughter and I value it more than I value anything. Fundamentally important. So the, you know, if we're structuring society in a way to make that more difficult for, for most people at whatever level. But I want to talk about this alienated work.

[01:07:31] The elites are alienated from their own labor because what it's a call back to the Marxist view that the the working class, the lumpen proletariat, are alienated from their labor because they're working in like factories, producing things that they have no ownership over, that they this is not

[01:07:50] personally interesting or fulfilling to them. They will never even see the final product. They're usually just working on a small part of it. And so they're alienated from their labor in that way. The way, so what Ezra Klein says is, well, how are they alienated from their labor?

[01:08:08] The factory worker has to do that to live. But the elite person, they make choices to go into these businesses, to go to a high end law school or a business school and then to, you know,

[01:08:21] join Goldman Sachs where the expectation is that you work 70 hours a week, 80 hours a week, you limit your bathroom breaks. You're there around the clock seven days a week. And that's how you succeed. They're making the choice to go into that in a way.

[01:08:35] And what he says is they are and they aren't like if you want to make a shitload of money in today's economy, there are, you know, not that many businesses where you can do it. And almost everybody is either in finance, law or medicine.

[01:08:51] And if you're not in one of those, you're not going to make the shitload of money that you were brought up to think is the ideal, the thing that you need so that you can raise your children and give them the advantages that you had.

[01:09:06] And so you end up going into a business like finance or down here, oil is a great example of this where you make a ton of money, but you're not interested in what you're doing necessarily. It's not what you're naturally the best at your skilled at it,

[01:09:20] but it's not maybe what you're naturally most capable of doing or more most inclined to do just out of your out of your interests. And so in that sense, even though you've made the choices along the way, you are alienated in an analogous way.

[01:09:37] Though he says don't don't pity these people because they're more advantage than anybody else, but it's an irony of this new system that that and that phenomenon is real. That is a real phenomenon.

[01:09:51] And I know because a lot of I meet with a lot of people who work in oil here and some percentage of them love it, but some percentage of them. And I would say probably the majority really don't like what they do,

[01:10:05] but they don't see any way out of it. Like this is they have a family and they have a house and they have mortgages and they have and this is just what they've been trained to do. Yeah, I like that. Markovic says don't pity these people, right?

[01:10:19] Like save your pity. But from the eyes of somebody within that life, it's important to understand how they're how they're perceiving this, right? Like how they're going through this and why they're going through this, right? Like that's that is their only lens.

[01:10:34] So they find the most elite preschool and then like I see this even in my daughter's high school, they overload them with homework. Like she's getting indoctrinated into thinking that work is a good, you know, is like a really good thing.

[01:10:47] And I remember myself thinking like at this other school that she was in Canada when she was younger, that they didn't give the kids enough homework. What are you doing at school all day? One thing I wanted to mention also is that that Markovic talks about is

[01:11:03] that the structure of the economy now is such that you're either one of these highly skilled people who has to bust their ass and will make more money than they know what to do with or you are a low skilled worker, not trained,

[01:11:23] who finds it hard to make a living wage. He gives a lot of examples. I thought the best example was the mortgage broker. Like it used to be that you could be a mortgage broker, you'd have to go to school for it and get certified or whatever.

[01:11:38] And then you would have a nice middle class job where you would have, you would be looking at individual houses and individual buyers and making the decision for whether the person should get the loan or not for your bank.

[01:11:55] So it had some sort of intellectual challenge to it as well. But now all that stuff is done by algorithms and derivative trading and all of that at the top by really highly skilled people and the people who are mortgage

[01:12:10] brokers now are basically people who fill out forms and who don't make enough money. And their job is no longer as rewarding as it was before this. And this has happened in so many different areas of life and the economy

[01:12:28] right now where you're either at the very top where you've been training your whole life, like a third of your life in school and in programs to get yourself to the point where you can do this really high end stuff or you're like an Uber

[01:12:42] driver or somebody who's just struggling with no benefits to make a living. And I love that that London taxi cab driver versus modern Uber driver analogy where it because it also points out the kind of meritocracy that he doesn't think

[01:12:59] is so terrible is this just enough one where it used to be that if you were a London cab driver, you had to pass an exam and that was not a trivial thing to do. You had to train a whole lot.

[01:13:08] But if you passed, you passed and you had this position that was you could do with pride, right? They had this pride. And now your new driver, it's all concentrated at the top. Yeah, it's the people writing the algorithm that you put on your phone

[01:13:20] and that tells you where to go and how much money to have. You're not making that much money. You're not that happy with what you do. That example alone made me understand his point, to be honest. Do you think this?

[01:13:30] I mean, I think I'm convinced at the getting back to Russell, he thinks that it would make people happier to have this leisure time. I don't know if we've gone too far. I don't know. I don't know if we can go back. And that's the interesting question.

[01:13:44] Like how how would we do this? Because when it's structural, it's one thing. But when it's cultural, man, that shit's hard to change. I think maybe this came at the end of the podcast with Markowitz, where he says, if you just shift the power sometimes,

[01:13:57] maybe the values will follow to try to install the values from above is a really hard thing to do. And I don't think it's what's happened here. I think it evolved in conjunction with these economic changes that were governed more by the market.

[01:14:13] And so like an ethic, like I'm kind of Marxist about this. I'm convinced that a lot of times our morality evolves or arises from economic conditions and economic changes. And so if you can make the economic changes, you sort of hope the morality will follow.

[01:14:31] Now I understand why you're a Bernie bro. Yes. I also think that what Russell says about this cult of efficiency and he that things are more instrumental now. Like, do you find yourself, I'll watch a movie and I'll think, is this movie good

[01:14:48] for a book project that I might be working on? And I'll try to think of it in those terms. But I find myself trapped into thinking certain things are instrumental where they really should be just intrinsic.

[01:15:03] Like, this is what, you know, this is, I think it's true that we're so instrumental at least again, I know we have worldwide listeners. So maybe this is feel free to let us know if this is just not as bad in other places.

[01:15:16] But I suspect it's growingly bad in all places. But I think that, yeah, it's mostly instrumental because or else you're wasting your time like right even we can say like, oh, well, the movie that we watched was perhaps something good for the podcast.

[01:15:32] Now, I also try to resist. I think I'm on the more content with laziness side of my colleagues. It's something that is increasingly rare. But I've always resisted when people so people would say, oh, you should you like

[01:15:46] hip hop, you should do something with psychology and hip hop. And I always thought like, oh my God, that's terrible. Like that would just ruin it for me. I want to enjoy this shit because I like it not because it's going to do something for me.

[01:16:00] Sometimes dungeon porn is just good because it's dungeon porn. Yeah, you don't have to have a philosophy and instrumental reason for it. Yeah, I don't know if we're too far gone. I think, you know, I see in my friends and I have a workaholic wife actually

[01:16:18] that she would laugh if she heard me complaining about the fact that, you know, we work too hard because I've always been like the narrow do well of my group of friends and like I'm like the deadbeat.

[01:16:30] But they I really like the people I'm thinking of would have a really hard time if all of a sudden they were just given. They are very much in this instrumental mindset. At the same time, they also aren't loving the workaholic phase that they're in.

[01:16:51] I wonder like less than they used to, you know? The real insidious nature of workaholism is that you're constantly doing it for when you won't have to do it. And that for when you won't have to do it just never arrives because either economic

[01:17:09] circumstances or your cultural values have changed so much. I think I see some of this in the the weird kind of anxiety people are expressing on social media. It's not quite anxiety, anxiety, but it is this like for those who are lucky

[01:17:25] enough, lucky may not be the right word. But for those people who can stay inside, there is this sort of weird like, is this should I relax more? Like how am I going to work is hard.

[01:17:38] Right. Like there's this weird it's like a weird people are checking in with each other if it's OK to slow down a little bit because of this, even though you're not sick when the truth is, of course, you fucking have to slow down.

[01:17:49] We're not we can't have the number of meetings. We can't just slow down. So we're dancing around this the meritocracy aspect of the Markowitz argument, which and but I think it's related to what you just said, because I think if we've built this idea where

[01:18:07] if you have certain advantages or a position, you have to work really hard. And if you stop working really hard, then you don't deserve the position. And so I think the idea is if at any point we admit that we're not

[01:18:21] busting our ass, then all of a sudden the position we have the status we have, the esteem we might have, it's like it becomes undeserved. And so we are very anxious to make sure and project again, whether it's true or not,

[01:18:38] that we are working hard and therefore deserve what we've acquired. It's very much a Protestant ethic and in the spirit of capitalism kind of argument where we have to we have to virtue signal our work so that people

[01:18:52] know that we rather than in that case Calvinists signalling that they were saved here, I think you're totally right. And I hadn't thought of it that way. We have to signal that we are that we deserve to be in our job. And I've done this many times.

[01:19:06] You see tenured professors sometimes who slow down and who just aren't doing as much, they're not supervising as many students. They don't have a productive lab. And you say to yourself or to your fellow colleagues, you know what, man, they're just taking up a slot.

[01:19:20] Like there's some hungry Benny Blanco from the Bronx over here who really wants that slot and you're dead weight. Like literally calling people dead weight is not an uncommon thing. When they've worked their ass off to get tenure and now we're like, sorry,

[01:19:33] you don't deserve to be here. And like with anything, there are some people who do take advantage of that and who do let down their students and don't put any effort into their teaching. Don't in any way work hard and I let down my students.

[01:19:48] But that doesn't mean that. And this is the last thing I want to say about this is these two critiques of meritocracy that has led to this cult of workaholism. The first is that it's not really a meritocracy, that actually people are

[01:20:03] still lucky that they have the education and if that we can just refine it in a way where people really are paid based on how much they work, then it'll be a fair and just system. That's one critique. And then there's another critique which is like, no,

[01:20:17] this whole thing is kind of fucked. It's this whole ethic that everyone has to work as hard as they possibly can. And if they do, then they deserve the millions and millions of dollars that they get from their jobs.

[01:20:30] So what Markowitz is saying is no, like it's not that we have to make it better. That would make it fairer to some degree. But the real problem is we have to overhaul the meritocratic system in

[01:20:43] such a way that as you said earlier, you need to be good enough. But once you've passed the good enough bar, you don't have to continually be in this endless competition. And I think that this the way in which we envision this meritocracy,

[01:20:59] Markowitz actually in this in that interview has a nice sort of discussion of the cheating scandals as recline asked him about the cheating scandals. And it's like, you know, ironically, this served to reify the very values that I'm saying are harmful, right?

[01:21:12] Like how dare you cheat my kid, Mike, when my kid is the one who did extra extracurriculars for 40 hours a week. It's a real shame that the view has to then become with this. This everybody pushing, pushing, pushing a sort of arms race for productivity

[01:21:30] is that there are losers, right? You it becomes so zero sum that the competition becomes central to whatever it is that you're doing when, you know, being a lawyer, being in finance or being a professor isn't inherently a competitive sport.

[01:21:48] It becomes a competitive sport because everybody's pushing to get into all of these nowadays, pushing to get into any institution like as a professor, right? That will take you that will pay them, pay them enough to live and be comfortable and secure.

[01:22:05] And so as those kinds of jobs are limited to only highly skilled people who have, who are able to get a ton of education and who are willing to bust their ass in this nonstopic, like soul sucking grind of competition, then yeah.

[01:22:25] It is a kind of everybody is a loser thing and it's not going to help that you, you know, complain about some parents who tried to cheat their kid into a college. It's the system itself that's the problem.

[01:22:39] The parents are it's almost like a symptom of the problem. Well, without having red mark, without having red mark of it's his book, I feel like we've done it. We've completely distilled all of his main points. Yeah, nobody else has to read it.

[01:22:55] All you have to do is talk about an interview that he did with somebody else. It's this is better, though, since we like it, it's better than the Josh Green one where we criticized the book that we hadn't read. That's true.

[01:23:06] That's true. It is it is as irresponsible, but through moral luck, become a tenured professor and you too can talk very confidently about books that you've not read a page of. Russell just makes a lot of just blanket statements that I think I don't know

[01:23:25] how much support they have that used to be able to do. Yeah, I know this is what professors used to be able to do. Now there would have to be like 18 million citations. There's no citations in this. There's one footnote and no citation. Well, that's what became podcasts.

[01:23:40] Yes, exactly. It really did. This is now what just essay writing was for philosophers in the past. So everything's good. Everything's fine. Then now I'm going to try to work on being pansexual. You're pressuring me. OK, let me take my pants off. Let me take my pants off.

[01:23:57] All right. We have leisure time to feel guilty about enjoying. I'm going to go make a hello fresh, which is work. Hard work and intense grinding competition. Join us next time on Very Bad Wisdom.