Episode 224: Hurts So Good (With Paul Bloom)

[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.

[00:00:16] It is a good viewpoint to see the world as a dream. Welcome to Very Bad Wizards, I'm Tamler Sommers from the University of Houston. Dave, David Lynch is doing NFTs now. What the hell is the world coming to?

[00:01:20] Wait, I thought that David Lynch doing them would make you all of a sudden become like a crypto nerd and just be like tweeting about like your favorite Bitcoin and how the economy is changing. Like not even David Lynch can convince you? No, I think he probably could.

[00:01:37] I remember back in like 2017, 2018, but I think it was the end of 2017 where I'm just so obsessed with Twin Peaks and David Lynch at that point. And it's also like a huge bonding experience with my daughter.

[00:01:52] And then he puts out some kind of quote where he said about Trump, like he could be the greatest president of all time or something if he. And what he meant was like he has the potential to reach people that like no other

[00:02:07] politician has a potential to reach or something like that. But of course he didn't clarify who knows. You're a wonderful apologist. Now I'm going to be like our audience is going to be convinced about NFTs and Trump by the end of the day and Trump, right?

[00:02:19] So then I remember a listener tweeting me like that he said that. And I was like, yeah, I saw that. What are you going to do? And she said, well, I don't think he should he should say that or as to

[00:02:30] you. And I said, look, I'm not in the business of telling David Lynch what he should or shouldn't say. But at this point, I'm so in the bag for David Lynch that if he told

[00:02:40] me Trump was a great president, I'd probably just believe he was a great president. And I was thinking of that, right? Like maybe I'm going to get really into exactly as you said. What are NFTs for our list for our naive listeners who aren't like us really

[00:03:00] into crypto? Right. And NFT is that stands for non-fungible token. And what it is is it's using like, please don't email me with a correction. This is my best understanding of it. I know we don't really care. We have some engineers who listen to this. So I apologize.

[00:03:20] It's a digital asset, like a picture or work of art or whatever that uses cryptography from the blockchain to essentially make it unique. So you have whatever it is like a JPEG that's signed through the I think it's the blockchain, but it's essentially just there can only

[00:03:42] be one version of it. So it creates scarcity where digital, the whole point of digital is that it can be copied infinitely. But this creates some scarcity. It gives you only one. There's only one work of art that has been digitally signed. This stupid even if it's identical.

[00:04:01] Digitally to every other version of it. Exactly. This is the one that can get auctioned off for like millions of dollars because it has that. That's right. So you can't think of it as like the work itself being scarce.

[00:04:17] It is it's more akin to having a poster signed by somebody who only signs one poster ever. Right. So yeah, except without the signature. Except for without the signature. The signature is just a bunch of zeros and ones or whatever. You know, like prime numbers.

[00:04:34] They've never gone anywhere near it. I mean, you know, or anywhere near that more than they've gone to all the other versions of it. And it really shocks me as someone who's in like, you know, I'm a somewhat of a nerd.

[00:04:50] I really like reading about the blockchain and about cryptography. And I like I own some some cryptocurrency and just to fuck around with it. NFTs, it feels like the emperor's clothes. I feel like are you fucking kidding me? Like this is meaningless. It's worth it. It's worthless.

[00:05:10] And people are just on it like like people who I otherwise respect or like, yeah, I'm creating an NFT for this. And I'm like, you're just fucking stupid now. Like that's just dumb. I don't know.

[00:05:23] I have to think that David Lynch just like has no idea what it is. And someone told him you could make a video of this band that he was already done Interpol and like, you know, if we do it this way,

[00:05:38] you can get like two million dollars for it. Yeah. He's like, all right. Yeah. It's like that it really feels like the tulip craze in in a way. You're telling me I can get two million dollars for the same video? I'll do it. Yeah, the same exact thing.

[00:05:55] David Lynch is the. I don't actually know what he sounds like. It's a money grab. Like what I guess what do they even tell him? Like put it is it even his fingerprint that created the cryptography? Like, I don't even know who does it, to be honest.

[00:06:12] Like it's a it's a video that he did of this band that I've never heard of Interpol and their song Lights. And he's releasing like eight videos of it short videos that are being auctioned off for the NFT. Yeah, no, what I'm what I'm asking is though,

[00:06:31] like when they encrypted or whatever, when they create this like who even does some software engineering, eating Cheetos, like making David Lynch's NFT for him? Like it's probably it actually is weird to me. So so I just described like some process.

[00:06:47] So so David Lynch at some point films a video of his band or whatever somebody films it, David Lynch has it. It's readily available on the internet, probably and maybe and some some software engineer who's working for some

[00:07:03] startup who does NFTs for famous people decides to do the whole NFT. Like creates the token or whatever, whatever it is that is done and then puts it out and and David Lynch has just only only agreed to it.

[00:07:18] That's the only role he has played in producing this novel new thing that can't be copied. So to sort of foreshadow our guest, Paul Bloom, Paul talks about in his book where he talks about art,

[00:07:34] the his book on pleasure about sort of the reason that that people buy things like Britney Spears is chewed up bubblegum or George Clooney's sweater. Like we really feel like the essence of the artist has somehow been carried over

[00:07:51] into the thing and that's what a real painting instead of a forgery. That's right. How the exact even if it's like Adam for Adam, the same exact paint like in the same exact, you know, you could emulate the brush tricks.

[00:08:04] If it wasn't an original, the forgery, they'll burn the forgery. And and that's because there was some contact between the artist and the work. And maybe that's rational. Maybe it isn't. But for an NFT, it's like, well,

[00:08:18] there's like you've not added the value of the essence of the artist. You know, you've not it feels weird. It feels dumb paying extra money for that. You know, it's funny with this because there's something about NFTs more than any other crypto thing that just gets people mad.

[00:08:37] And I sometimes say just for the hell of it, like it raises interesting metaphysical questions to people who should be receptive to that kind of thing. You know, like like what separates it? Is it ontologically different from other exact copies of it?

[00:08:54] And like nobody wants to even talk about it. Like, no, fuck that. It's so stupid. It's such an idiotic thing. And like there's something about NFTs that antagonizes people. It just inspires a kind of hostility in others that is.

[00:09:09] Yeah, I think it boils down to again, class warfare, because it really seems like what? You don't have anything else to use your money on. Then to buy it, like spend two hundred and fifty thousand dollars

[00:09:22] on the exact same digital work of art that has like what you're taking, by the way, on faith to be a unique digital signature. It's not like you have the ability to go and see whether this is actually like a unique token or whatever.

[00:09:36] And you can't call yourself like a job creator or something. You know, like no, like aside from the guy and his cheetos, keeping them flush with Cheetos. Mountain Dew. Poor poor poor neckbeard engineers. I'm so I apologize for the stereotypes. Could be a woman.

[00:09:58] It could very well be a woman sitting there creating the NFTs. I mean, it could be. What's your credence that's a woman? I mean, you know, God bless David Lynch. If he can use it to bring this new project to fruition,

[00:10:18] which has been teased to us and now it looks like it's not going to happen through Netflix, but it was going to be some maybe a spin-off of Twin Peaks. Or, you know, he always keeps these projects so secret.

[00:10:30] But but then it also got out on Reddit that the project had been suspended and that Netflix wasn't working with him anymore. So, you know, he's just like a smoker. He he's in his mid seventies. It's hard to tell with him because he's always so weird.

[00:10:47] But is he slowing down? Is he getting some sort of like, you know, creeping dementia? You just will never know. We'll never know until like five years later. You can't tell the difference. You can't tell the difference between a script that he wrote with mild

[00:11:02] dementia and the regular script. But he's such a singular artistic voice that I just I just have just give us something else. Well, I like we were talking about up there. There's like sort of this extra David Lynch work that if you're a big David

[00:11:20] Lynch fan and you watch all his movies, you can then just go watch the original Dune, you know, it was like a little bit of David Lynch that you never thought you could have. I mean, I I still have never seen that.

[00:11:35] I think it's the only film of his that I haven't seen. And, you know, I've never seen it either. So he he dis dis about it or disown it or whatever you say. Because he got his he got control taken away from him.

[00:11:48] Because he didn't get a final cut. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, and he's never done an edit like he's never gone back to do. No, I think once he was done with it, he was done with it. And then from then on, he only worked on projects.

[00:12:01] Even the twin when he would direct a Twin Peaks episode, he had final cut for that. And he would. So yeah, he did Blue Velvet. And that was kind of a success. And that just allowed him to do stuff through Fire Walk with me, which even

[00:12:19] though it's a complete masterpiece was not liked at the time. It's like people were angry. You know, I really I really think that I mean, this is almost obvious. But Twin Peaks was so ahead of its time that you you wonder what it would

[00:12:35] have been like had he had an HBO or something. Yeah, backing him and backing his creative vision. Like, you know, people were were upset about who them, you know, who the murder was. And I feel like David Lynch and Mark Frost did not want to review.

[00:12:50] Yeah, that and as I'm saying, like with the backing of something like an HBO where they would be comfortable with that sort of ambiguity, you wouldn't. You wouldn't have had to sort of ruin. Yeah, you know, I mean, Twin Peaks is still great.

[00:13:03] But that part of Twin Peaks is the worst part. Well, no, I think we actually just saw what would have happened if he had had full control on a prestige station. I did not see it. Yeah, you haven't seen it.

[00:13:15] But that's what was so cool about it is you got the full heroine Lynch as it was described and it really was. And it was just so great in every way. Like I am still I still I just put on a couple of episodes the other day that

[00:13:31] I just because I was in a bad mood and I just wanted to sit there and just be odd. Yeah, you know, you really should watch it. I have to figure out a way to get you to watch it.

[00:13:43] There's no maybe we can watch it and I could do another bonus episode with you about it on the same topic. But we were talking about this before, but Dave did a Patreon episode with upcoming guest, Paul Bloom,

[00:14:01] on an episode Star Trek episode called The Inner Light, which long time listeners may remember I have already talked about with Dave. This is a this was a Paul Bloom privilege. This is what he's what he's earned through his influence in my life is that we

[00:14:19] I was like, Paul, you want to do a bonus episode with me on Star Trek? He's like, yes, The Inner Light. And I was like, well, you know where to do. No, no, no, no, that's that's incorrect. You forgot that we had talked about until later.

[00:14:34] I stupidly had thought that that's the one I had done an episode with Barry Lamb. Yeah. And so I was actually insulting Barry. Sorry, Barry, by being willing to redo an episode. But it's even more insulting that I forgot that it was you.

[00:14:50] And for a mean, very bad with it. Yeah, you know, different perspective, different strokes. Yeah, well, I hope it was good. I'll never listen to it. I have just pure bitterness. You were holding yourself back because of your deep Star Trek fandom.

[00:15:09] You were really curious what Paul had to say, but you're like, no, unprincipled, I won't listen. Why do you think you think it's a class thing that people just get mad about NFTs more than anything? And they don't even want to like reflect

[00:15:24] philosophically on what it means in any way. They just want to just want to express how much they have contempt for it and everybody involved in I think so because the easy answer to why they don't want to talk about it is that it sounds dumb on paper.

[00:15:43] But I think that there's a lot of stuff that sounds dumb on paper that would never garner this resentment. And I think the news stories about these Silicon Valley bros buying, collecting, they're now collectors of NFTs and they'll pay like quarter million, half million dollars for something.

[00:16:01] It just feels slap in the face. And decadent, like a kind of like an ugly form of just decadence. Decadence is something that we actually should devote. Like it's an interesting concept. But yeah, decadence because especially at like this all happened during the time

[00:16:22] when people were struggling to feed themselves because of covid and these people are paying and you're just like what? It's a JPEG. It's not like it's an extra high quality version of the thing. It's not like I can't see it. You can like Google image it. Exactly.

[00:16:40] Yeah, well, that said, all right, we're introducing a new Patreon tier at the ten thousand dollar per episode level where we have an NFT for each. For your favorite episode, you'll get an NFT of it. That's right.

[00:16:58] If you do it for a year might as well try it. It could be it should be an episode, should be a picture like one of our one of our Montana. Us playing Cornhole in Montana. That sounds so gay. Exactly.

[00:17:17] We already said one of my friends was making fun of me that we said that we were lying on the bed together watching a cache. I'm not ashamed. I'm not ashamed. Me neither, you know, like what were we supposed to do? There was it was a bedroom.

[00:17:31] Not going to stand. That's where the TV was, you know. Yeah, and we love each other. Exactly. In this day and age. Yeah. Should we? You know who else I love? Paul Bloom. Paul Bloom. We had a fun conversation with him and yeah, we'll be right back.

[00:17:54] This episode of Very Bad Wizards is brought to you by BetterHelp Online Therapy. Check out betterhelp.com slash VBW. I was just talking to a colleague of mine. We were talking about how many people are having trouble coping with the return to normal, with going back

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[00:19:24] That's B E T T E R H E L P dot com slash V B W. Our thanks to BetterHelp for sponsoring this episode of Very Bad Wizards.

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[00:26:27] We really appreciate all of your support and all of your interaction. Let's get to Paul Bloom. OK, we're back with I dare say my favorite very bad wizard's guest, the fifth Beatle Paul Bloom, who is now I have to change

[00:26:45] the introduction, who is formerly the Brooks and Suzanne Regan. The first time I get it right, you're no longer the Brooks and Suzanne Regan professor at Yale University. You are now a professor at University of Toronto and emeritus at Yale University.

[00:26:59] And we are delighted to have you on. Welcome, Paul. Hey, thank you both for having me back. Thank you for slumming it here with us. Like normally you're on like Hoover institution affiliated podcasts. He's like on Dax Shepherd like he went on Dax Shepherd.

[00:27:14] Who are we? Who are we? I'm not going to forget my friend. The little people. I don't care. You guys aren't that important or that special. I love you anyway. We used to be your favorite thing on the internet and now we barely.

[00:27:26] I used to be so proud when I was on your podcast. It was really something. That was a rough time. That was when you hit bottom. Yeah. And I remember that, you know,

[00:27:35] I don't forget that you were kind to me when I when my career was in doing this was all I had, you know, I have you are still you. This is still my favorite podcast and you guys have quite a lot of impact. Thank you. Thank you.

[00:27:46] I know that if I were a behavioral economist, I'd say revealed preferences is what determines whether or not we're your favorite podcast. And given that you're here to talk to us in part about your book, I can say that your revealed preference is clearly for Lori Santos's podcast

[00:28:01] because that's the only podcast that you mentioned in your book. Well, I'll answer this very seriously. I do I do recommend Lori's podcast. It's the one recommendation. But it's a book about happiness and suffering and pleasure. If I write a book on obscenity.

[00:28:18] I don't know what you guys do. So OK, I want to start with saying your new book is called The Sweet Spot, The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning. But before we get there, I like I'm going to put a link to this book

[00:28:30] because we have a little bit of a in discussion about how good podcasts are for book sales and I want to show Paul that our audience actually buys books. So we're going to put the link, the Amazon link to Paul's book in the show notes.

[00:28:43] So if you if you care at all about the future of Tamler and my podcast, use that link to buy it. Or at least if you care about Paul ever coming back on our podcast. OK, in all seriousness,

[00:28:56] how many podcasts do you think you will have been on by the time you're done? I don't know, 20. Wow. Tamler, remember when you and I started there weren't even 20 podcasts? I know we were one of three podcasts in the world.

[00:29:11] You know, it's weird that with the exception of one or two very bad ones where, you know, somebody just reads out questions they got, they're all different. It's just talking to different people with different things. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:29:20] And actually, Dave, I thought we were going to talk mostly about the book. That's what I'm prepared to. We are prepared to talk mostly about them. But it's true that we never do that. And, you know, if if you're a publicist listening to this, this is the exception.

[00:29:33] It's really only Paul and maybe like a Robert Wright because, you know, yeah, we had Bob Frank on because we love Bob Frank. A lot of exceptions you got there. Just white men. It's just white men.

[00:29:46] Yeah, it's not like we've had a Mia Srinivasan or anything like that. She'd be great. No, believe me, the invitation is out, actually. To see her on your podcast, I would die happy. It'd be a really interesting discussion. Yeah.

[00:30:03] Hopefully, you know, we can do both you living and us having her on. It's a yeah. Yeah. OK, so to to talk about stuff that's not in the book, inspired by a somewhat controversial tweet, we thought it might be an interesting discussion to ask you, Paul,

[00:30:20] and then come up with some of our own answers. If you had one question to ask a potential date. So this is a dating profile. You put one question that you think might separate the kind of person you want to be

[00:30:35] with, you want to spend the rest of your life. The weed from the chaff, the weed from the chaff. You have you have one question that will separate those that will be answered. Honestly, what would your question be? Yeah.

[00:30:47] So maybe this is the obvious one that everybody goes to. Imagine the Star Trek transporter works in the following way. It scans your molecular structure, destroys it and creates a duplicate. Is this something you'd go into and feel your personal identity with sustain?

[00:31:03] Or is it a murder machine? So what are you looking for in an answer? Because I feel like your current partner has a very different answer than what I thought. So this is my second point.

[00:31:15] This is my second point because, yes, my partner because they my current partner. Your partner for now. Yeah, my partner. Your partner at time A has a notably different view about this. She has a very different view of consciousness and identity.

[00:31:33] And yet I love her nonetheless and I'm extremely happy. And this is my meta comment, which we're going to talk about other examples in other cases, but but thinking that this is going to work is a terrible idea

[00:31:44] because we are surprised and our views about what's a deal breaker, particularly in a question like this, people find themselves in love in wonderful relationship with people. They would have never they would have never accepted if they first went through a dating site.

[00:32:00] You're saying you're OK dating like a racist white supremacist? Yeah, as long as it's a surprise. Do you have any fasci crushes? Like it's just it's I mean analogy is houses. You know, I've looked for a lot more houses than I've looked for romantic partners.

[00:32:21] And and you think you know what you want. And then you find a house and you say, wow, this is next to an elementary school and it doesn't have a yard. But the deck is amazing. And you know, you just you get surprised.

[00:32:35] So yeah, Paul, I know things are going great between you and your current partner, but let's say they had a rough patch and then you just do your twenty twenty one late record at the time of this recording.

[00:32:49] And let's say you hit a rough patch and you just decide it's not working. And then you get in a transporter and then you're transported somewhere else. You know, she comes try like, what's the deal? Like we can work this out.

[00:33:01] And you're like, no, it's not me anymore. Right. So that's kind of a way to negotiate that. Yes, that's the way that's right. I know I'm convinced that I would never date Tamal or summer. So that's your question. Are you Tamal or something?

[00:33:21] No, my real question will probably just be, will you date me? I think that would separate the wheat from the chaff right away. OK. Tamal, do you have a question? Well, see, I didn't I didn't know we were going to do this now.

[00:33:36] But and I've been off the dating market for a long time to the point where like there were no dating apps when I was still right. They're only getting cassette tapes. You know, the Ashley Madison leaks didn't as far as I know find anything.

[00:33:52] So but like my brother has been and based on his reports, like I feel like I would need to ask like what level of like physical violence I would need to do to her to like for her to feel surprised and turned on.

[00:34:08] Because it seems like they start the bidding at like choking and biting. And then it just escalates from there in terms of your commentary on millennial sexuality that you think they're all into BDSM.

[00:34:20] Yeah, and like I, you know, like it's I don't want to bite somebody, you know? But you will choke them. If I have to, I guess. But you know, as Paul repeatedly says in his book, consensually. In quotes, consensually.

[00:34:37] My level of violence is the silent period, but only for short periods. And that's my maximum level of violence and cruelty. The silent treatment. The silent treatment. Diana Fleischman, a friend of mine and maybe yours, Paul,

[00:34:52] did a series of polls on Twitter in which she asked people if what would you prefer a very long after a fight with your with your girlfriend, a very long period of silent treatment or one slap in the face. And then everything goes back to normal.

[00:35:11] That's such a good question. I remember when that was on there. Yeah, did you respond? Yeah, I would take a slap in the face. I would take a slap in the face in a second. Yeah, yeah. Here's here's the problem to slap in the face.

[00:35:24] To be hit by somebody. It's very hard not to respond with violence. Unless you're like a unless you're a hard boiled noir detective, you know, they get kicked in the ass all the time. I actually I don't think I would ever be tempted to slap back.

[00:35:40] In fact, I have been slapped by a woman and and didn't I was so shocked. I didn't even think to say more about that. It was interesting. I was young. It was I was I didn't even know what the argument I didn't.

[00:35:56] I found myself an argument with another woman from my school. I must have been in seventh grade and she was an eighth grader. And I don't know. To this day, I don't know why she got mad at me and slapped me in the face.

[00:36:06] And I was just in shock. And so if it was a man, it would have been different. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, I would have hit back. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, because that's really disrespectful. Yeah, slap. Yeah, I mean, yeah. They wouldn't take off their gloves and do that thing.

[00:36:25] Then you have to do the whole dual. Hey, this is about your book, not mine. That's right. It's an honor. My honor. So my sincere answer to the dating question would be some sort of question to tap in.

[00:36:38] And I know this is controversial given that you wrote a book called Against Empathy, Paul, but it would be some sort of question to assess how compassionate the person was. So it would be or how much empathy they had. So two possibilities. One, an assessment of cognitive empathy.

[00:36:55] And for that, I think it would be interesting to ask, do that task that I don't know who developed it, but where you ask people to draw an E on their foreheads with their fingers or just take your finger, put on your forehead and draw an E

[00:37:09] or write an E and you see whether they have written it for themselves from their perspective. It's an E or whether they have written it for the external perspective. And this is presumably some sort of measure of perspective taking.

[00:37:25] I think that would if that if that task is true, I think that would be a really nice and easy way because I would I only want to be with people who are compassionate and like taking of the other person's perspective. Kindness is a good criteria. Yeah.

[00:37:41] The other one might be like, would you how reluctant would you be to open a link that was that you were told was a video of a beheading? I think that that that you should feel a lot of compunction.

[00:37:56] There are people who say, of course, like I'd look at it. Really? Are there a lot of people that you date that say, well, yeah, let me see that link. Let me see that beheading. Oh, because I've separated the wheat from the chat.

[00:38:08] I think a lot of you may be selecting away from curiosity. Yeah. That kind of curiosity takes. But you talk a little bit about this in your book, Paul, about seeing things that you like don't want to talk about or that you say

[00:38:22] somewhere I don't remember if it was reading the descriptions of violence or or watching it stuff that you wouldn't want to actually discuss or describe with other people or watch again. Is that right? I mean, yeah, I mean, everybody has their own flavor of unpleasant experiences.

[00:38:36] And I talk a lot about it. But some I don't really share myself and extreme gore of violence. This isn't for me. Yeah. I like scary movies. I like thrillers and so on, but really gory movies. It's just too unpleasant for me.

[00:38:48] Some people get a lot of pleasure from it. But there's also I don't think that these are bad people. Yeah. There's a big difference between a real life beheading and movie beheading too. I don't have a problem with the movie beheading.

[00:38:59] I would have a problem doing a real life beheading. I mean, this is why and it's bad, but I don't look at like factory farm videos and stuff like that. I can't do it like, you know, but that's because this is what's really happening.

[00:39:13] What's the problem you have of real life beheadings? I just I don't know, like you mean if I Is it too upsetting or is it a moral thing? It's yeah, I don't know. Maybe it reminds me of man's inhumanity to man or but I don't know why exactly.

[00:39:29] I never really thought about why I don't like it. But I really don't like to see real life violence that's not in like a constrained setting. Yeah. You know. Is it is it, Tamler, that the like person on person nature of it? Because there are these

[00:39:47] if you're on Reddit long enough, people will refer to these very well known videos of real deaths. So they used to be a subreddit called Watch People Die. And there's one video I've never seen and I hope to never see it.

[00:39:58] But it is a man who gets caught in the lathe in a in a factory and dies in terrible death. So there nobody has there's no violence to speak. It's just gore. He's just a klutz and then he yeah, and then ends up dying.

[00:40:12] And I could see myself dying that way, actually. But but would that bother you more or less or the same? Less. Yeah. So it is something about the fact that there's there's an intention. You know, even with factory farms, maybe it's a massive course

[00:40:27] corporation or something like that. But it's this suffering that is being intentionally afflicted. I wouldn't want to watch people dying. Like I have no interest in watching that. I'm not curious to see that kind of stuff.

[00:40:39] But I think it would still be less unpleasant or I'd be less averse to that than the other thing for me so much of the physicality of it. That's the problem. That's that's that's what would be upsetting and unpleasant.

[00:40:52] You know, I might watch on the news or something a bomb landing in a you know, on a building and blowing it up. And I remember actually having a lot of people a fascination with the September 11 attacks and watching that a few times and sort of getting all

[00:41:05] sorts of emotions, but it wasn't as visually, this early upsetting to watch some guy getting cut apart in a factory. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Well, this is getting off to a really sunny start. Who would date us? Yeah, exactly.

[00:41:21] One thing I think you can't really ask this, you just have to know it. But I feel like the best way to know if you're going to be good with somebody is if you travel well together. If you travel well together, then you're going to have

[00:41:36] then there's hope for your relationship. If you don't, I think it's a real problem. It accelerates a relationship, you know, a week of travel is like six months at home. Yeah. Yeah. You know, this is one of the things that I learned from about my daughter

[00:41:51] early on because I traveled a lot. Her mom and I split up when she was very young and I would often travel across country with her and she she was always so calm and chill during the traveling that I now look for.

[00:42:06] I look forward to, you know, we went to Peru one summer together and it was just such a fun trip. And in part it was because her neuroticism was so low about the trip that I

[00:42:18] it was like we could just sit in silence for long periods of time on public transportation and not feel the need to complain about anything. And it really to me, that's one of my favorite parts of her personality is just how. Yeah.

[00:42:33] We can answer the question by going through the big five personality scale. And for neuroticism, low is a really good answer. Yeah. All right, maybe it's time for all of us to get back out there. I have I've

[00:42:50] despite my jokes before I've found a woman of my dreams and their attributes of that you don't you can't get from short experiences and from the polls and so on, you know, the feeling of being understood, being able to talk to the person.

[00:43:03] So maybe the lesson is there isn't a question that you can ask to separate the week from the chat. Well, I think there's some deal breakers. Yeah. Right. Do you like straw dogs? Yeah. Today's episode is brought to you by chess.com,

[00:43:27] a sponsor that I am so proud to have and I just get excited. One of the few spots that we do that I just get excited to do your dream. It's your dream sponsor. It's my dream sponsor just because I've been I've been a part of chess.com

[00:43:44] in my entire professional career. And it's it's a way I play chess with friends. It's a way I play chess with my brother. And now it's a way I play chess with some listeners. I'm getting a lot of challenges.

[00:43:58] Yeah, I don't accept all the challenges sometimes because their ratings are too low and if they beat me, my rating will plummet. And also just because I can't I don't have the time to play a lot of people.

[00:44:11] But I've been playing a few and that's been really rewarding except when I got my ass kicked, which I did recently just got crushed by a listener. And it wasn't even crushed. It was worse. It was just they chipped away at me and kind of humiliated me.

[00:44:26] I wish I could know enough and see it. Yeah, I mean, well, that's the thing with chess.com. And at the various levels of membership and I now have a diamond membership, you can go through an analysis of every move. And and that and I did that.

[00:44:44] And I learned every single time I made a little mistake or a little inaccuracy or a time or two blunders. I made two blunders. Unforced errors like antennas. Is it? Yeah, it's a little like that. It tells you that this was a bad move.

[00:45:00] It tells you and it tells you why. But then it also shows you what a better move was. And then you can go on to that thread and it'll play that and it'll play out had you done this move.

[00:45:12] So it's like this alternate universe where you were better at chess than you actually are. It's like a Ted Chang story. Exactly. I wish I could communicate with the version of me that didn't make that blunder or that made the best move.

[00:45:28] And there's just a lot of there's these puzzles that I have been doing. I've done almost 40,000 of them. And I still enjoy them, still do them when I'm on the pot, still do them when I want to procrastinate and not feel awful about myself like the

[00:45:45] other forms of procrastination that I do. It's it's great. You can join for free, but at these other levels of membership, you get unlimited puzzles, you get unlimited analysis and deep analysis. But at every level, including the free level, you can play people and and enjoy the game.

[00:46:08] It's a really nice interface. It's really it's easy to use and I love it. So join chess dot com. Help us keep chess dot com as a sponsor by going to chess dot com slash very bad and start playing that's chess dot com slash very bad.

[00:46:29] No wizards, just chess dot com slash very bad to start playing at your friends, your family, maybe even me and maybe Dave, if he can brush up on his game. Well, and learn chess today. They also have a great series of lessons too.

[00:46:45] I was going to say the coupon code might just be a reference to my chess playing ability. Maybe that's right. Thank you to chess dot com for supporting this episode. Tamela, do you want to start talking a bit about the book?

[00:47:01] So Tamela and I both actually read the whole book, which is a great compliment. And I'm touched. I want to get this out of the way because I want to say it and everybody knows I admire Paul quite a bit.

[00:47:15] But as I was reading this this book, I was just again kind of an odd how good a writer you are. And part of that is saying it for you to feel good for people to know about it.

[00:47:28] But part of you also is just like I'm curious about like how you view your own writing and how like you over the course of what how many books have you written now? Six. Yeah, I feel like you get better each time, maybe not each time.

[00:47:45] It's hard to gauge. But do you see that? Thank you. I'm really touched. I think writing has gone a little bit easier for me in some ways. I'm not sure if it's gotten better.

[00:47:58] Sometimes I end up going to an older book like just babies or whatever to try to extract something or quote something and I say, oh, that just sounds like me. But I work at it. I work at it. And the standard things I read a lot.

[00:48:11] People write as I admire. And then my writing is very difficult. And I write and I rewrite over and over and over again. And I send drafts of friends and they give me a lot of comments. And then for some of my stuff, editors are also big help.

[00:48:27] Yeah, yeah, it's great. It's just alive, the writing in this. It leaps off the page, as they say. And it's like it's fun. Yeah, my favorite line when you describe the girl in the exorcist, you know, in that scene and that her head is swiveling like a dreidel.

[00:48:47] I love that line. I got some Jewish content. That's all I need is a little Jewish content. David pointed out, I have a quirk in all my books. There's a sentence over and over again. I always use in all of my books and it is a history.

[00:49:03] The sentences, this is not small potatoes. And the history is that our first publication together, David and I was wrote a critique of John Hite, a friendly critique of John Hite. And we had to line in it about something saying, this is important.

[00:49:18] He said, this is not small potatoes. And editors said that we had to remove it because I think his foreign speakers wouldn't understand. Yeah, I believe and it was Walter Michel who was the great field in psychology. And I believe scholar.

[00:49:30] Yeah, I believe he actually said this wouldn't translate well into Chinese. And he was using it as an example of like a general point. But yeah, it is idiomatic. Yeah. So so when I saw that sentence, I was tickled.

[00:49:41] I texted you because ever since like Paul was so angry when Walter Michel made us take that out of the paper, that it is a level of pettiness that is rare in Paul. He's not that kind of a person and it's hilarious to me that.

[00:49:57] So now you're just like to get revenge. You're peppering your books with this is not small potatoes. People talk about trauma. This is like this is like the world's strangest revenge film. Where I just I write books in order to put the sentence in there.

[00:50:12] Instead of a puppy, your John Wick story is that a sentence got cut. That's right. And instead of killing a lot of people, I write books and I put in the sentence goes fine. The body keeps a score. All right. So let's we talk about it.

[00:50:30] I mean, yeah. So this one after against empathy, which, you know, one can only call contrarian counterintuitive like against the grain deeply immoral. This one seems and maybe this is just something about me. This one seems like it's more flushing out beliefs and intuitions that we have already.

[00:50:53] You know, you're not trying to shock us or or make us rethink something deep. It's more that you're trying to get us to think more deeply about all the different values that are important to us and how they interact with each other. Yeah, that's exactly right.

[00:51:12] You know, on the face of it, this could be seen as another contrary in book. I wrote a book against empathy now writing one in favor of suffering and it's just more, you know, stirring the pot. But but you're right.

[00:51:22] My last book was basically, you know, the subtitle could be you're doing it wrong. And and it talked about, you know, a moral practice we all think is good and arguing it's bad. This really is sort of systematizing and exploring some common sense ideas.

[00:51:36] Yeah, we do seem to like take pleasure in suffering sometimes. What's up with that? We do seem to relate suffering and meaning. How does that go? How does that work? And it really is it isn't telling people to do something different. It's not a critique.

[00:51:50] It's just it is as you're saying, it's exploring some facts of human nature, which I think people broadly accept. And there's a lot to disagree with about the book, but it's not pugnacious like my last book. Yeah.

[00:52:01] And I guess the contrasting position if to try to pick one, you know, it would be Dan Gilbert's and his kind of version of psychological ego is. But I think like he's the one with the weird view there, not you.

[00:52:18] Yeah. Dan, more than just anybody else was a useful person to talk through the book. He never commented on a book itself, but we had an email dialogue going on for many years about this where he's a hardcore eatness. He thinks what I'm saying is just bullshit.

[00:52:33] The idea of seeking after meaning a morality is just it's just bullshit. It's confused bullshit. All there is is pleasure. Yeah. And we should just be trying to maximize pleasure. And it was fun in my book at points I directly address Dan and Dan is probably

[00:52:44] his person I cite the most because I love his research. But yeah, he's the guy I'm disagreeing with. He's the foil. Yeah. He's the foil. The idea that might be controversial here for a lot of people, which you and

[00:52:54] I talked about this part a little bit, post traumatic growth doesn't really happen the way that people think it do. And so the idea is that some people say, well, after trauma, you become a better person, you grow in ways that you couldn't have otherwise.

[00:53:06] And this is not to say that people should go through trauma, but only that there is this very wonderful psychological process that makes you a better person afterwards. And you say that it's not even that the jury's out.

[00:53:16] It's that there's no good evidence like trauma is just trauma and it fucks you up. And what might be happening is just people who respond to these kinds of questions just say that they've become a better person and maybe even believe

[00:53:30] it, but there's no good evidence that it's because of their trauma. And like I'm tempted in some case to say that seems like something made perhaps about all suffering. I mean, there seems like you could you could separate the cases

[00:53:43] in which we're motivated to try to feel pain for some reasons. But the suffering aspect, there is so much sort of. Post hociness to explaining our suffering that it's hard to tell when it actually is something valuable and when it's just something we've convinced ourselves that is valuable.

[00:54:04] It's a really good point. I mean, I'm very critical. My book is all about chosen suffering and I'm very critical of the claim that unchosen suffering, just bad shit that happens to you. You get assaulted, your child dies, you lose your job.

[00:54:17] But that's going to make you happier or have a richer life. We're very resilient and resilience is the good news. But I think claims about growth are overstated. But now you could turn around and say, well, all of these cases

[00:54:28] where people choose suffering and say, wow, I'm a better person and happier and a meaning. Maybe that's the same sort of after the fact storytelling. Right, because a lot of the suffering that people choose and it's not like you don't say this a lot is instrumental.

[00:54:42] So yeah, so you you know, you you write a book and you spend hours and hours going through all sorts of negative emotions. And it's chosen suffering, but it's not that you chose the suffering. It's that you chose to write a book. I think that's right.

[00:54:59] And I actually don't disagree with it. My claim so I have two main claims in the book. One is that often we use suffering to enhance pleasure. That's just a fact. And I try to explore what goes on for that.

[00:55:10] And that that sort of suffering because it's fun, you know, and hot baths and scary movies and all that. But suffering in a pursuit of meaning is kind of complicated. And I think here's the wrong way to look at it.

[00:55:21] The wrong way to look at it is somebody says, I want to train for marathon and I'm going to get blisters and I want to get blisters. And I'm going to have some days where I'm sick and I might fail. I love that.

[00:55:30] I think when people seek out these long term meaningful projects, they actually don't really look forward to the suffering and they don't want it. But my point is just comes with the territory. It comes with it right that a meaning we

[00:55:42] intuit correctly, I think that a project that we would deem to be meaningful is going to come with suffering and pain. And there's just no way they come as a package. Yeah. Yeah. And in fact, a lot of that, one thing I really liked

[00:55:57] in your discussion about flow, which I think, I don't know, Dave, if we've ever talked about that at length, but flow states being where you just lose track of time, the boundaries between you and what you're doing, you and your activity just start to get like blurry.

[00:56:13] You're just in the zone and that's about as pleasurable a state as you can be. And so why don't we seek it out more is the question you ask in the book? Like why are we not just constantly pursuing these flow states?

[00:56:26] And one of the things you say is a lot of the suffering to get to a point where you can be in a flow state comes early. So you really have to go through a lot of frustration and just lack of fulfillment

[00:56:40] to get if you're going to be a great musician, to get to the point where you can just be on there on your saxophone just riffing. Like you would have to go through so much. And a lot of us just don't have the stomach for that.

[00:56:53] I think that that strikes me as totally right. That the hard part of a lot of pleasurable activities, a lot of the suffering is weighted towards the beginning of that. I think that's right. And I think it's right on two timescale.

[00:57:05] So one timescale is a long one where as a musician or an athlete or a scholar to be able to get to a flow state, you have to do a lot of work beforehand. You know, if I'm really out of shape and I start running down the street,

[00:57:18] I'm not going to be able to find myself in flow. I'm going to have to get in better shape before I'm getting a flow as opposed to just, you know, feel like an idiot and hurting a lot. And then there's the immediate part of it, which is,

[00:57:28] suppose I am I am in a phase where if I go to the gym, I get a lot of it. I'll be an hour in flow. But right now I'm sitting on the sofa and I'm watching Netflix and I know

[00:57:37] corn chips in front of me and it's tough. It's tough to get out of there. It's it's there's sort of a, you know, a local minima where in order to get to the higher place, you've got to kind of go through some unpleasantness.

[00:57:50] And, you know, and I hear my book is, you know, entirely, you know, dad's advice, which is, you know, well, you got to get up, you got to do things, you got to, you know, take on these hard projects. But I think it's true.

[00:58:01] And I think the pleasures and value of flow, it's tough to get there. Chik-Chik-Sendmai, who did most of the work on this, has done surveys where he asked people about experiences in flow states and surprising large numbers that they'd never got during their whole life.

[00:58:15] Yeah, I was I was struck by that. By the way, rest in peace. Now, like Chik-Chik-Sendmai. Yeah, how do we go? We passed away. Yeah. I was thinking sort of I was lamenting that I don't think I experienced flow very often in my life anymore.

[00:58:30] And yeah, you used to. I used to feel like I was in flow when really when I was reading good shit is when I would feel it. Like when I was like, I remember when I was first studying

[00:58:47] psychology and the little philosophy and a little kind of science, just really feeling like I felt in the zone when I was reading. And I don't know if reading quite gets there. A few times when I was really in shape in basketball,

[00:59:03] like what like I had actually trained really hard one summer to be able to to have the stamina to play games for a long time, I remember feeling it then. But neither of those. It's sad. So you run. Does that give you a say to flow?

[00:59:21] If I'm in shape enough. Yeah, if you get past the point where it's where you're not out of breath and your muscles, there is this sweet moment when the proximal discomfort is no longer my legs and my inability to keep running.

[00:59:36] It's just like actually it starts being like your actual stamina, just to keep pounding sort of the pavement. It's not that I'm out of breath and my legs hurt. It's just this like fatigue and that feels good to get.

[00:59:49] And that's the kind of pain that feels good to me, like that you push through because you know you're succeeding at this thing. And I remember a point when I was in good enough shape when I was training for marathon where I could basically run not fast,

[01:00:05] but I could run for as long as I wanted. Yeah. Yeah. And then you kind of push it. Yeah. And you know, that was. I need competition. I need to be playing a sport like I've been playing tennis like every week for the

[01:00:19] last couple of years, but I need something like in front of me. I hate running like I don't like I'm fine with running and playing tennis or basketball. I hate running just for running because you find it boring. There's yeah.

[01:00:31] And also like really unpleasant, you know, but I've never been a runner like I've run some five Ks and trained for that. But I think I would never like it. I don't think I would get to a point where I was that it was something

[01:00:43] pleasurable or addictive or anything like that. I always dreaded it. I dreaded it just as much when I was in better shape as when I was in bad shape. Like it just sucked always. Yeah. You know, I I I used to get flow out of writing. Yeah.

[01:00:58] And now I don't. You know, my style for writing is I write for an hour each morning and not necessarily an hour straight. I could do 10 minutes writing then 10 minutes of email. You know, and I'm right.

[01:01:10] And I look at the clock and write a paragraph and they see how much time has gone by. It is a source of satisfaction, meaning maybe because it's really hard and I feel it rewarding and it ticks off all the boxes of a meaningful activity.

[01:01:22] But it's not a flow activity for me. Yeah, maybe not either. You know, I do I now that I think about it. I do when I when I make beats like I do for this show, I do get into a flow state.

[01:01:33] It's just that as you guys were saying, I have to get myself to the point where I can devote like an afternoon to doing it. And then I can get sucked in. But getting there, just getting yourself to do it sometimes is so aversive.

[01:01:49] And particularly when your days are filled with bullshit, like emails and administrative meetings and then you're just tired. And this is the time when we should be running and maybe doing something pleasurable. But all you want to do is just sit and browse,

[01:02:02] read it on your phone or YouTube or something. I wonder if it's harder now to get to flow states because we're so over stimulated with so many other things and there's always something like we could be doing on our phones or on the computer or whatever.

[01:02:15] Like that wouldn't surprise me if people were. I think definitely. I think boredom used to be a great motivator to get up and do something because otherwise you have to sit still, you know, in the evenings,

[01:02:25] I read books because I'm old enough that I remember a certain time. There was no TV. Well, didn't your family gather around the radio? Then there's the Bible readings. That was important. The burnings of the witches, suspected witches. Yeah.

[01:02:41] You know, there's this quote from the head of Netflix who says, you know, we don't compete against Amazon or Hulu. We compete against sleep. And I think Facebook and Twitter and alike, they don't compete against each other. They compete against life.

[01:02:56] Yeah, they want you there and not not working out, not raising your kids, not doing long term projects. Reading novels. You know, not reading novels. That's right. There is a kind of like pseudo flow that some of these things give you like scrolling through Reddit

[01:03:14] where they've really tapped into one aspect of the flow, which is you sort of lose track of time. But at the end, you've not done anything worth worthwhile. But it's very easy to get yourself into that position. So like at the end of the day, you know,

[01:03:29] you sit on your bed and you're scrolling through your phone and and you bring up this this theory that I actually love that Rob Kurzban paper on the fact that we have the opportunity cost, right? The other activity that we could always be doing is this low effort

[01:03:48] medium reward activity of going to the next video on YouTube or scrolling through more headlines on the front page of Reddit or as the kids do scrolling through the next TikTok videos, like it's just good enough to keep us doing it.

[01:04:03] But it's so easy that it's the first thing that we can easily do at the end of a day. I never thought of it that way before, but it's like flow is always defined as this good, rewarding, powerful thing. But social media gives us shitty flow. Yeah.

[01:04:16] And for me, like, I was like diarrhea. OK, we'll figure out a better name. Unrewarding flow. Yeah. But, you know, I pick up my phone and go on Facebook because I have Twitter off of my phone because otherwise I'd be a goner.

[01:04:30] And and I'm trying to go to sleep, but I pick up my phone and just scroll through Facebook and then they get to the movies part, like open up and click on a little movie and it's a skit from Saturday Night Live or something.

[01:04:39] Then there's a movie trailer. And by now the algorithm knows just what I want. Yeah. And and then I put down the phone and an hour has passed. Yeah. It doesn't feel like an hour has passed.

[01:04:51] And unlike real flow, where you have a feeling of reward and satisfaction and accomplishment, this just gives you shame. Yeah. It's it's flowing that you lose track of time, but it's not pleasurable. Like it doesn't give you that feeling of mastery.

[01:05:06] Yeah, or yeah, or even because I don't think flow necessarily has to be mastery. It just has to be feeling like you're clicking on all cylinders in some way. You're fully engaged, body and mind.

[01:05:19] And it's just not it's not quite that it's more like you're just taking a break from your own thoughts and anxieties and and the things that you're just stressed about, like and it just allows you to to not be in your head about that stuff anymore. That's right.

[01:05:36] It's a way of shutting down the voice inside you. It is not it's not meditation. It's nothing like that. It's just and and in that way, I think, you know, it's not like an addiction.

[01:05:45] It really is an addiction in that a lot of addictions when you when you're fully into it, don't give you any pleasure. They just give you a relief from anxiety. Yeah, that's what this is. Unlike like the good addictions like drugs. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. No, yeah.

[01:06:00] But you know, but that's why I call it sort of pseudo flow because there is some property of it where where you can get lost in it, which is it's different than just like unwinding it. You can like I can get lost in people have

[01:06:13] have talked about this terrible experience of you finally click out of Twitter and your your fingers just go like the next thing they do is open Twitter because yes, because we're so used to doing it. It can it's yeah, it's like the evil.

[01:06:27] It's like the dark side version of a flow and it's I like that pseudo flow. You talk about boredom in the book and we've become, I think, because there's so many ways to just immediately stop being bored that we've become so intolerant of even just a moment

[01:06:46] of boredom where we're and so we like we'll immediately turn to that. And we don't realize that that's just building the habit to the point where we're barely even conscious of, I mean, you know, there are these studies

[01:06:59] of people when they lift up their phone and check their phone, how often they do that? We're aware of doing it. We do it with the intention of doing that like 10 percent of the time that we actually do. Yeah, you know,

[01:07:10] there's an experiment by Dan Gilbert where his colleagues where he gets people to give up their phone and go into a room for like 20 minutes. And and one rule is they can't fall asleep, but they have no reading materials or anything. And people hate that.

[01:07:25] They hate it to get an idea of how much they hate it. In one experiment, people get to try to shock themselves electric shock machine and they agree it's extremely unpleasant. But if the machines in the room, they'll shock themselves just because it's something to do.

[01:07:40] And it's funny. And I wonder if he did the experiments 50 years ago when, you know, whether people would just say 20, 20 minutes of room in a room. Well, I'll just think about my life. I do that all the time. No, it's funny. I'm not like that.

[01:07:54] I love situations where my phone is just non-functional, like if I'm camping or I'm on an airplane or something and I just can't use it. Yeah, I like I treasure it. Like it's amazing.

[01:08:05] I could have that all the time if I wanted to, but I don't do it. But yes, I really love that. And I have these devices on my phone that kind of shut it off and simulate that.

[01:08:17] But going camping or doing something where it's just the phone is no longer part of my life is super rewarding for me. I've always been interested in self-binding, you know, using technologies or other ways to shut off

[01:08:31] opportunities your future self might want, you know, giving your car keys to your friends and they don't give them to me if I'm drunk, you know, fleshing your cigarettes down the toilet and so on. But then there's the other question, which is it's very hard to self-bind. Yeah.

[01:08:44] And you almost need like, I think I think people need like a Leviathan to come. You know, if I could choose, if I could choose my supper in the morning, I would eat a lot healthier. There is an aspect of self-binding.

[01:09:00] I did a project with an undergrad here who is doing her honors thesis on this and it was situations in which self-binding is an option that people avoid because it communicates weakness. Oh, that's interesting. So we were looking at these scenarios where

[01:09:21] self-binding would be viewed as a negative. So imagine a bachelor who is his friends say we're going to be a bachelor part of and we're going to go to a strip club and he says,

[01:09:29] no, I don't want to go to a strip club because I might lose control and do something that would be considered cheating on my soap. So make me promise that you're not going to take me to the strip club. And there it's like, well,

[01:09:43] really like you're admitting that you would be so weak as to lose control in that situation, whereas somebody who says, yeah, I can go like like an alcoholic who says, let's not meet at any place that serves alcohol versus one who says, yeah,

[01:09:58] we can meet anywhere you want and I'll just not drink. There is seems to be some virtue in the ability to exert your will in the moment. And when it has like a moral flavor to it,

[01:10:08] you don't want to say, no, let's not go close to a playground because, you know, I never know what I'm going to do around some kids. You'd be like, well, you really have to think about that. Like in your cool moments, you're thinking about losing control.

[01:10:20] It depends on the thing. Yeah, it depends. Maybe a dieting is somewhat like that when you think that you ought to be able to control yourself in the moment. And it's a shame because the one thing we know about change is that

[01:10:35] just the way to change and the way to become a better person isn't just to try hard and exert self control. It's that you guys talked about William James at so much length and talked about his insights about habit and making things habit,

[01:10:46] which basically involves taking it away from the conscious self. And then the other thing is to orchestrate your environment to do self binding, you know, to not, you know, don't buy to jumbo size M&Ms if you attempt to snack too much.

[01:10:57] And it's a shame that we disapprove of this of people using these techniques because they're the only things that work. Yeah, I am all for self binding and, you know, when I can get myself to do

[01:11:07] it, which I can quite a bit like it works like there's certain ice creams I can't have in the house because I'll just eat it until it's gone. And, you know, it's interesting. I was just thinking, I don't know if this is a mirror of what you were

[01:11:21] just talking about, Dave, but like as someone who likes to drink or especially like the biggest example of this was when I was taking a lot of Vicodin. And so I'd like I'd go out to dinner with my wife and we and I would just pop

[01:11:33] a few Vicodin. Oh, that sounds amazing. She'd be like, and it was a really nice dinner. It was really great and we were going to have wine. So like, why do I need to take Vicodin? I was like, I don't need to take it.

[01:11:43] But you know, it's just be like 15 percent, like better, you know, like on every level, you know, everything will be. But she found that there was something wrong about that. Like it should I should just be like happy without any aid. You were maximizing pleasure.

[01:12:00] Like it's like it's if you can. I remember sorry. I remember when I when I had recently gotten divorced or split up and, you know, as one does, I was exploring my my sexuality with by meeting lots of people.

[01:12:21] And I remember a good friend of mine, this woman says, you know, I think you're just using you're using sex as a way to like, you know, get just distract yourself from the emotional pain that you're having. And I remember saying, well, yeah, I mean, there's two options.

[01:12:36] I could have the emotional pain and not have sex where I could have the emotional pain and have sex. And I don't know in anyone's calculus how it would be. Do you think you guys just start on advice column? Take by getting sex.

[01:12:52] No, but there's something like about the authenticity of what you're doing. I think I don't know. I'm trying to get into this Protestant mindset that my life has. But like something like it should be good without any aids. Meanwhile, she's just drinking like wine and doing all that.

[01:13:09] So it's bullshit. But I don't know, there is I can conceptualize what she's saying. I understand it even. We should just be eating lukewarm Brussels sprouts. Am I not good enough that you need like a ravioli? But it's how do you it's how to construe it.

[01:13:25] So to be fair to her, it's not like you say, well, what if I wrap up my pleasure 20 percent? Who are you to complain? It's more of the sort, you know. Well, I like hanging out with you. I like to be drunk and stoned when I do it.

[01:13:36] Right. Yeah. So in some way, it gets in the way of. But maybe the implication is I need this or else it won't be fun. It's like coping. Right. Yeah. Well, we know how Tamler feels about the very bad Wizards

[01:13:50] audience given how much he drank and ate edibles before we met up with them. Can we talk about some things? I small disagreements that I had with the book. How dare you? Yeah. No. Haven't you read the contract? My public assistance. Tamler, we're in the acknowledgment.

[01:14:11] This is what this is. No, no, no, no, thank you. No, go ahead. I have a disagreement about Sisyphus. Oh, really? Yeah. I don't even think I mentioned it. Do I mention Sisyphus in the book? You do. OK. I actually don't remember it.

[01:14:26] It's in your talk when you talk about goals. Yes. So you write. It's easy to see talking about Sisyphus. You know, my cover, by the way, the wonderful art director just puts Sisyphus in there and I love it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you write.

[01:14:42] It's easy to see why this is such an awful fate. There is no goal he's never finished. When I read that, I thought, well, no, that's not right. There is a goal. The goal is to push the boulder to the top of the mountain.

[01:14:54] And then when he does that, it's finished. And then he has to go back and do it again. So there's just many goals. And I guess the reason like and then, you know, he has to walk down the mountain.

[01:15:05] That's, you know, that's a goal and then push it back up again. The reason I raised this not just as like a terminological thing, but I feel like that's Camus point when he's talking about the myth of Sisyphus is that we're all in some ways like Sisyphus,

[01:15:22] whether it's writing a book or whether it's we have these local goals that we have to come to terms with as being meaningful somehow and fulfilling somehow or at least fulfilling enough for us not to take our own lives.

[01:15:36] So so I think like, you know, to the extent that it works as a metaphor, it is something that is that that has at its core a goal that can be completed. And it just happens to be that it's the same goal over and over again.

[01:15:52] Is this chosen? But it was chosen as a punishment. Maybe you're right. Maybe you just as a sequence of goals. And I was wrong to say it's not a goal, but it was chosen as a punishment because it sucks in a certain interesting way.

[01:16:05] Suppose instead Sisyphus was condemned to build houses of different sizes and shapes and and you know, ranch houses and beach houses as castles and so on. You wouldn't be so tempted to say, what a savage punishment because there's more room for artistry. The goals are more interesting.

[01:16:23] So something about something about this, what you're saying might be right, but you have to sort of then articulate what is it about Sisyphus's fate that makes it so terrible? Well, I think like or at least as I understand what Camus is saying,

[01:16:37] what's terrible about it is that it's just a transparently kind of pointless task, whereas we can trick ourselves into thinking that our tasks are, you know, have some sort of ultimate purpose and you can't. So you're saying metaphysically, we're all Sisyphus. So metaphysically, we're all Sisyphus,

[01:16:54] but we can dilute ourselves more easily than Sisyphus can about it. And so the key to, you know, conquering this is for Sisyphus to find and this would be true of all of us, like to find purpose even in the most

[01:17:11] mundane tasks, you have to find ways for that to be fulfilling. And we don't do that. I take this as the goal of meditation a lot of the time is to find some kind of almost flow like state in the most ordinary kinds of situations imaginable

[01:17:30] because you are appreciating and the experience of being alive and having the experience you're having is enough. Can I ask just a question about the myth? Is it that he's told that he has to get the rock, the boulder to the top of the hill?

[01:17:48] Like, is his goal constantly being thwarted or is he told that his job is to get it to almost the top and it will roll down to get it to almost the top and it will

[01:17:57] roll down? Like, is he constantly failing like to get it over the ledge? Because it feels like that reads differently than if you're just like, you know, time to roll the boulder like that donut sky where that's just like a delineate. Like he's succeed in some ways.

[01:18:15] He's succeeding every time it is task if his only task is to get it to the to right before it rolls down. I'm not sure if it's specified. That's a great question. I thought it was that he just

[01:18:25] passed a push it to the top and then it just rolls down once. Yeah, but pretty soon he'd get the idea here. He'd say, hey, I see why this is a punishment. And I don't even think he says this time it'll be different.

[01:18:40] Like this time it'll just stay up there and they'll let me go. But yeah, and I also don't know what happens to him if he doesn't push it. What if he says like it goes on strike? I don't know what happened then either.

[01:18:50] You know, you can do this as a psychology experiment. You take original sycophus, then you have a modified sycophus where he simply has an infinite number of rocks at the bottom and he has to push them one by one to the top.

[01:19:01] But if I had to choose and at some level, what's the difference? But if I had to choose, I would definitely choose option B because look at the pile. Look how many rocks are up there.

[01:19:10] There is a comic book called The Preacher that they made a TV show out of. And the central sort of conceit of the shows, this guy has what they call the voice of God, it's about the supernatural ability that whenever he says something,

[01:19:24] everybody has to do what he said when he uses this voice of God. And at one point he tells a guy to go count the number of grains of sand on a beach. And the poor guy is for the rest of his life condemned to counting grains

[01:19:38] of sand and this is but at least there's a goal. At least it's an ethos. Yeah. And at some abstract level, sycophus, the sand counter and us are all doing the same. We're all the same thing. But it doesn't feel this way.

[01:19:53] If to preach or commanded a guy, OK, here's what I'm going to do. Raise a family, a big family and take care of them and have a job, a meaningful job, help people. We wouldn't be saying, what an evil curse.

[01:20:05] That's just that's just rolling the boulder with more steps. Yeah. Can I ask a question sort of shifting gears? I have I realize that I have a question that I don't know the answer to. And I don't but I don't know what you think about it, which is

[01:20:21] is there really any sort of deep relationship between pain and suffering? Or is that is it that we have made the mistake of equating two uncomfortable states? Because metaphorically, the way that we can best describe suffering is it's aversive as if you were getting you were in pain.

[01:20:41] But you have all these examples of pain that's not particularly suffering and suffering is not particularly pain. And it seems like maybe we've made a category sort of error here. I assumed as I was writing the book that pain, un-chosen pain and anxiety and stress and emotional pain,

[01:21:02] humiliation, grief all share something. Yeah. And and there is a chance back against. Well, not so much pushing back, but you know, there there has been these attempts to show that like and you talk a little bit

[01:21:15] about this like that's the same brain region involved in physical pain is involved in emotional pain. But if it wasn't the same brain region, I wouldn't care. So right. That's right. That's right. And I actually think those those studies might be in question anyway.

[01:21:29] But it seems to me as as if maybe because pain, physical pain is so often aversive, we are just using this as a metaphor for the kinds of aversive experience that are really suffering for humans. Because, you know, I don't even know.

[01:21:47] There are plenty of times where I feel pain, where it's not particular suffering. Suffering comes from anticipating it, I guess. So some pain could be pleasant or neutral. Flossing, I find that flossing and digging into my gums. Yeah, it's a good pain.

[01:22:04] You know, so yeah, I agree with that. So not all pain is suffering, not all suffering is pain. But I think pain and these other things we're talking about share a certain quality and I think one way to illustrate is what we were talking about before.

[01:22:18] So remember to Twitter poll, would you rather get the silent treatment for two hours or get slapped in the face? That's a good question. You could even see if you have a good question, because it's they both suck.

[01:22:30] And it's the suckiness that I'm talking about and that you could put them on a common scale that makes them think that they're similar. I guess that's what I'm yeah, that's what I meant. That's I think what I've started to doubt, because it's like if pain,

[01:22:43] pain is the pleasure of what suffering is to flourishing. Maybe. But it seems like the temptation to reduce things to a singular scale of pain. And here I'm almost making a tamela point and I feel deeply ashamed.

[01:22:59] But but the the thought that there is a common denominator, you know, you know, whatever, not common denominator, you know, you and I have have in print said that moral disgust is mere metaphor. Yes. But it's mere metaphor not because there's nothing in common between feeling

[01:23:15] disgust and feeling that something was immoral, because there is something common or else it wouldn't be a metaphor. There is this sense that you don't like it. You want to push away from it. You don't want to be around people who do it.

[01:23:26] But it's it's so not discussed that other languages might not make the same comparison between the feeling of disgust and the feeling of moral disapproval. And maybe one way of asking it is if you ask people in, you know, the Foray tribe in the 1960s, you said,

[01:23:43] you you you smash your finger with a with a stone. You lose your child, your child dies. Sort sort these experiences. Would they sort those into the same bucket? Or even, you know, the English word pain can be described for the loss of a loved one

[01:24:03] or for humiliation. You know, that was what you said to me was really painful. Right. You know, people make fun maybe rightfully so of the overextension word violence. Yes. To talk about hurt feelings. Well, you've caused harm and you've caused harm. You've got yes, but it's not crazy.

[01:24:17] I mean, you see that you've caused you've caused harm. It would be really interesting if there are some languages which only restrict the word pain to physical pain and don't extend it. Yeah. That's a great question.

[01:24:30] You know, there's a way to take this is sort of a segue, but this is one of. You're accusing me of sort of bundling everything too much together into one thing of suffering. There was a different objection, which is an objection against

[01:24:42] the moral, the motivational pluralism, which put in different things. And Dan Gilbert didn't say this, but it was sort of sparked by a conversation. Which is there's a certain argument that in the end, it has to be just one thing. Yeah. And it goes like this. Yeah.

[01:24:56] I have to decide whether or not to sit at home and watch Netflix and eat ice cream or visit my sick aunt in the hospital or, you know, read up on astronomy and learn some true things. Because I could make that choice, I have to rank them.

[01:25:10] I have to say this is a seven and this is a six and this is an eight. Yeah. And so at some level, all of these have to come into one scale. Does that make sense? It does, but I don't buy. I don't buy the objection.

[01:25:24] There are versions of it that I might buy in in if you had a fleshed out theory for for why these all boil down to pleasure. And, you know, Nikki is a hedonistic utilitarian. And in fact, some of the work she's doing is trying to argue

[01:25:42] that you don't need the other stuff. You don't need desire satisfaction as a theory because it all boils down to pleasure. But I think you really need a good account of the boiling because I'm not sure I can rank, you know, rocks and elephants by some metric.

[01:25:58] And and you might say, well, that's a metric that doesn't make that much sense to me. And I would say, no, look, they're both gray and this one's more gray. But sure. So sure. But but is it meaningful to that you can rank them?

[01:26:11] So this is the part where I like when I was reading Dan Gilbert's view as you described it, I didn't get why what he was saying wasn't just empty. You know, he's saying when you go help the woman, you're helping them because it's more pleasurable.

[01:26:27] Well, then then you're just defining more pleasurable by the thing that you do or the thing that you want to do or where you rank it. Yeah, it's what Lowenstein said about economists and the preference, the way that they define it. Yeah, it's purely empty. It's tautological.

[01:26:42] So then, you know, if they can say that for, well, just the fact that you decide to, you know, go to the Peace Corps for two years, it just means that that's pleasurable to you. Then then they're not making a substantive claim at that point.

[01:26:56] That seemed to me and I don't know if this is true of Nikki Dave, but that seemed to me the move that Dan Gilbert was making, at least in part. And it's like, well, of course, like if you're just defining it by

[01:27:07] the fact that I rank it higher and you're calling that pleasure. But now, as Dave said, we're not learning anything. It's not meaningful. We're not explaining anything anymore. Yeah, not surprisingly, I find that pretty convincing. There's a simple-minded heathness and this is not Dan.

[01:27:21] Dan gets more sophisticated than that who says, look, everything's pleasure. And you say, well, what about this guy who gives his life to save his comrades? Well, he wouldn't have done it if it didn't make him happy or if he didn't think of making him happy.

[01:27:33] And then there's just no, it's just, you know, it's purely tautological. Why is it any different what he's doing? How is his, how does he avoid that trap? In some way, it's a burden of proof argument where he says, you know, I say, look,

[01:27:48] you might spend 90 percent of your life happy and in pleasure. But if you spend 10 percent of it thinking, oh, you know, this isn't meaningful. Well, you should stop doing it. And the way he says it is, why do we have to assume that the doubts about

[01:28:01] the meaning of life and the desire for meaning is something above and beyond pleasure, why don't we just call him the same thing? You're happy for 90 percent of time and you're unhappy for 10 percent of time. But that just doesn't explain the fact that we will choose to be

[01:28:16] experienced pleasure, even less of the time to pursue some meaningful project or go. But he says we're poor decision makers. Oh, he thinks he thinks that given the opportunity, we would have, we would have chosen because yeah, there is a way in which like I don't.

[01:28:30] This isn't really a criticism of you, Paul. This is a thought that your book made me have because this is a view that, of course, I hold that pain and suffering are cousins, that suffering is just pain plus cognitive, you know. Oh, that's interesting.

[01:28:47] An additive theory like that. Yeah, yeah. But but you're in in in in collapsing the two you made me think. Yeah. For the first time, maybe this is more like a metaphor. I just wanted an umbrella term of sort of bad shit. Yeah.

[01:29:02] Yeah. And I call it suckiness. Suckiness. And you know, as I say early in the book, I use the term suffering and I met somebody who got really mad at me for doing it says, you know, suffering is what my parents went through, you know, under Hitler. Right.

[01:29:15] And I'm saying and I'm using suffering to say, you know, well, sometimes you kind of skip a meal. That sort of objection is insufferable, by the way. Suffering is me having to hear you say that. It's weird with this because, you know,

[01:29:33] philosophy has psychological egoists and hedonists and I find it to the extent that it's explanatory. It just seems obviously false in lots of cases. And when it doesn't, it just becomes trivial. It just becomes defined by the things that we end up doing or want to do

[01:29:54] where there seems to be more substance to the view as you described it is in that thought experiment towards the end where he says, you know, you're in the pool 90 percent of the time, sunning yourself and getting pleasure from that.

[01:30:06] But 10 percent of the time or 5 percent of the time you're saying, God, my life is sucks. It's just pointless. I'm not doing anything. I'm not doing anything with my life. And he's saying, well, we pay too much attention to the 5 percent, not enough to the 95 percent.

[01:30:21] And that's kind of an interesting claim that for some reason we privilege those reflective moments. And to go back to your question, why do we get it wrong? I think what Dan would say is because that 5 percent is to decide

[01:30:37] one who gets to make the decisions and conveniently forgets about the 90 percent. You know, we say Socrates is better than a pig, but a Socrates who we're asking. Right. What puzzles me about the view that that Dan Gilbert seems to defend is

[01:30:55] that there is there is some level of abstraction, like I was saying before, in which I agree that there are there's shit you you enjoy and shit you don't. Right. And so we can we could lump this together and say one's pleasure

[01:31:08] and one's pain and say those things that we seek out are done by pleasure and avoid tautology, but just say, you know, like Dan says, sometimes we make errors. But that if you really want a psychological theory, I think this is the whole point of your book.

[01:31:23] If you want a psychological theory that helps us understand why in some circumstances we're clearly avoiding pleasure, then it seems silly to just say, well, those cases are just more complicated cases of seeking pleasure where I would just say, well, yeah, like fine.

[01:31:43] But they're more complicated in a way that matters. And I am just simply limiting the use of my term pleasure here to mean this very hedonic state. And there's all kinds of cases in which we're not even making errors. Upon reflection, we would choose the pain.

[01:32:00] And and that seems like what the goal of the psychology of it would be. It's like I think I think that's exactly right. I think you take somebody struggling whether to stay home and watch TV and

[01:32:10] relax or take a long trip to help a friend and he doesn't really want to. Who knows it'll be unpleasant. Isn't choosing between isn't at a psychological level choosing between two sorts of pleasures. Right. It is it is wrong to subsume it,

[01:32:22] advocates where somebody has two desserts in front of him and is trying to struggle, which one he'll enjoy more. Right. It's to genuinely different motivations, genuinely different desires, different brain systems. If you want different histories, different individual differences,

[01:32:35] it may be that the right view from a philosophical point of view. And it's kind of like Tamler saying that Sisyphus seems like he's in a terrible state, but at a certain abstract level, he's no different than rest of us.

[01:32:45] It might be from a sort of similar birds eye view. It's all pleasure. But but that philosophical hedonism, does it mean psychological hedonism is correct? I don't even think the philosophical hedonism is correct. It's just you taking a word and deciding that that word covers all sorts of

[01:33:02] different kinds of states. And I don't know what the truth value of that is. If you're not a Platonist about the concept of pleasure, then it's it really just one account allows you to distinguish between different all sorts of different kinds of motivations and mental states

[01:33:21] and emotional states, and one just calls it pleasure. Or it's a different kind of pleasure. You know, so you probably want to do the more complicated one. Suppose there's something that a common currency view, which is that when you make decisions,

[01:33:36] you have to sort of rank everything in the same on a single dimension of, you know, and then take whatever scores highest and you do that. But why would you ever call this dimension pleasure? It doesn't seem to be in any straightforward sense.

[01:33:47] What we associate with pleasure, it's more like, I don't know, feasibility or do ability or value is more like value. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. And if you start calling it value, then some things just don't become deeply puzzling. You don't have to worry so much about why

[01:34:05] BDSM exists. Yes. And and it explains why it's a difficult question to decide whether, I don't know, to go on a one week vacation versus stay home and visit my sick friend because they both have value.

[01:34:19] And when you calculate the value, maybe they come out pretty darn close. But there are different kinds of value that's worth investigating, like how they're different and not just that there are different forms of pleasure that just happened to be close to each other on the scale.

[01:34:34] It's funny because I think one of the sources for why people are tempted to to lump these things together is maybe in sort of a dual process kind of theory is that yeah, at the end of the day, you have to decide whether or not to do something.

[01:34:51] And that's a binary decision. And it much like we've talked about system one and system two, Tamler, where you say sometimes you think deeply and sometimes you think shallowly, I suppose, but you're losing a whole lot of kinds of thinking by doing that.

[01:35:08] And if you want to be like an economist and say, look, I have a reveal preference. Everything that you reveal to me to choose is something that gives you pleasure. I'm just defining it as such.

[01:35:19] It's because there is a way in which we rank all we could be pluralists about value and motivation and we have all these sophisticated things. But at the end, we have to choose whether to go to the zoo with our

[01:35:30] children or sit home and watch Born Hub and maybe assess the temptation. And sometimes it's an uncomfortable choice. I remember when one of my kids was very young, he asked me, I was traveling a lot. And he said, he asked me if I'd be home for his birthday.

[01:35:43] And they said, of course, I'll be home for your birthday. He said, you'd be home for my birthday no matter what, right? And I said, of course. But I remember thinking, no. And I tried to think how much money would they pay me

[01:35:56] before I wouldn't be home for his birthday? And you know, was it was a lot less than a million dollars? Somebody offered me a million dollars, not to be able to say, of course, a million dollars. And what about like twenty, twenty dollars?

[01:36:07] It was that Churchill now that we've now that we've determined your horror. You see, it's the worry of being called a horror that rationality is such a bad name. By the way, I love twenty dollars. I thousand maybe. I did not know about that.

[01:36:27] Yelp or and I study where he asked people how much money they were. And I loved learning about that. It was great. This was a study by this guy who's this behaviorist from way back, way back associated with some very narrow and technical work.

[01:36:40] And he has this crazy ass paper. It's like the 1930s or something. He just says it to me, he says, you know, well, there's a question I'm kind of curious about, which is how much would people pay to avoid certain disutilities?

[01:36:52] This is a survey and the disutilities are things like, you know, eating, eating a worm, spitting on your mother's picture. Sorentyke shows himself as mad of great imagination. It's a porousin study. It's a porousin study, spending the rest of your life in Kansas.

[01:37:07] Never leaving Russia in the book. You said Russia. I don't want to lose my cans in audience. Things like becoming deaf in one ear. Some of them are crazy. Walking down Fifth Avenue in the middle of the day without a hat. The times were different.

[01:37:27] You know, and that's a universal con. That's a universal. I mean, it's one step away from a, you know, Fox game show where you say, well, you stick your penis into a hornet's nest and how much money would have to pay you to do that? It's squid game.

[01:37:40] It's basically squid game. And the cool thing is the numbers are fascinating. My favorite example of this is you ask people how much you have to pay them to pull out one of their teeth with a pair of pliers,

[01:37:52] which is disfiguring and painful versus how much would I have to pay you to kill a cat with your hands? And people want a lot more for the second one. Yeah, which is kind of nice. I would choke the shit out of that cat.

[01:38:06] Yes, somebody I'd pay you to get a chance to kill the cat. Yeah, fuck the cat. If it was a dog, that would be one of the different. I'll pull the two. Yeah, there is. Yeah, the killer puppy. You know, I was back to the pool.

[01:38:22] You know, pleasure example where he says we're making an error because we're only asking the reflective self, the Socrates. What does that mean exactly that we're making an error sometimes when we choose to do the thing that is more uncomfortable?

[01:38:38] Like what would determine whether that's an error or not? Well, take a fan civil case. Suppose 90 percent of the time you're blissfully happy. Ten, ten percent of the time you're miserable. But we just ask you during that 10 percent. That seems like a crappy way to do it.

[01:38:57] Suppose just to make it, suppose you lose your memory of 90 percent or suppose you're muting, that seems unfair. It seems like if you view an individual as a population, you just kind of ask the top one percent, how's your society going? And they say it's going terrific.

[01:39:10] Well, right. But in those cases, the reason it's a mistake or it's a it's the wrong way of measuring it is because they could be asking at all these other times because it's arbitrary. Yeah, and it's arbitrary.

[01:39:23] But in this case, by like as I understand the thought experiment, you can't ask the person while they're experiencing pleasure because as soon as you asked them and they thought about it, they'd be like, oh, my life is pointless and stupid.

[01:39:37] And and so like that doesn't seem like the right analogy there. The thing. Yeah. I agree with you. That's that's how I end it. In fact, at one point I point out like, well, you know, who would want to get advice from a pig?

[01:39:50] Who would want to get advice from something? The thing about Socrates is he's smart. He thinks of a future and a past and thinks about other people too. But I even think it's stronger than that.

[01:39:59] It's by definition, you can't get it from the pig because once you once the pig starts thinking about it, they're no longer a pig. They're there's Socrates. But but that's too strong. Don't you think the pig's pleasure should be taken into account? Yes, absolutely.

[01:40:15] But presumably Socrates is taking the pleasure into account too of his earlier time in the pool. Yeah, that's true. So I it's weird that to talk about these errors sometimes like you see this in like the rationality research will be people will make errors.

[01:40:33] They'll they'll take ten dollars now and not like twenty dollars next week or something like how is that an error? That's just a that's just making a choice. But they look like they call it an error.

[01:40:44] And so I always wonder what the kind of normative assumptions are for like how you determine whether something is an error or not. No, you're right. I mean, you know, if I go to my retirement guy and I say I've decided

[01:40:55] not to put any money aside for retirement and just enjoy it now. He'd scream at me and say, you're an idiot. You're going to really regret this, you know, many years from now. And I'm saying why are you taking the side of my future self?

[01:41:06] Don't you know I'm a Parfidian? That's right. I'm twenty five years like this, but like the world is going to be on fire. Yeah. Well, shall we end with that pleasing note? The world on fire. Paul, this was I really enjoyed reading this book.

[01:41:24] I strongly urge our listeners to grab them while they're still available. Yes. For the only printed out three hundred copies and three electrical ones. So. Do you have any NFTs? Oh, I should get an NFT. Yes. Yes, that's where the real money for books comes in.

[01:41:45] Yeah, thanks, Paul. This is really good. Oh, thanks. This has been tons of fun. Really appreciate it. Join us next time on Very Bad Wizard.