Episode 250: Metaphors All the Way Down

[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.

[00:00:17] We're philosophical about dumb shit. We're philosophical about shit. We're very thoughtful about shit that means nothing. Welcome to Very Bad Wizards. I'm Tamler Sommers from the University of Houston. Dave, it's our 250th episode.

[00:01:20] Why can't we get our shit together ever and actually do something to mark the occasion? Because then there's just too many occasions to mark. There's no way we could come up with something that interesting or cool.

[00:01:33] We could barely come up with something interesting or cool just for non-round numbers. For the 75th episode, not like 75. That's such a big number. We had six guests come on and we had this whole thing like what did you change your mind about? 100th, we had our daughters.

[00:01:54] 200th was where things started to go downhill. We didn't really do anything. I don't even remember what we did. 10 years? We didn't do anything? The thing is when we were at episode 75, did you ever think like if you thought

[00:02:07] that at some point we'd be at episode 250, we maybe would have made less of a big deal out of it? That might be true. You know the only reason we're celebrating these round number episodes is because of our bodies. We have 10 fingers and 10 toes. Yes.

[00:02:24] Why would you bring that up? Well, Tamler, because in the main segment today we're going to be talking about a classic article. Is this kind of our classic series of articles? Yes. It's been a while, but yes. The contemporary theory of metaphor by George Lakoff from 1993.

[00:02:44] But before that, you have an agenda. You came to me with this agenda. Well, if I'd call it an agenda. But I had an idea that we live in cancel culture apparently. So they say. So my stepmother says.

[00:03:06] You know, like we should at least take advantage of it on the on the canceling side. You know, like we get to cancel people. By the way, no Thanksgiving episode? We didn't record. It just didn't work out for when she was here for Thanksgiving.

[00:03:23] But we're going to I'm going to go there and we're going to do one for the holidays. And yeah, the idea is maybe to do it on that Hillary and Chelsea Clinton series gutsy, which she has been traumatized by just the very existence of it.

[00:03:42] And I'm sure it's terrible, but like you said it's a is that a it's a podcast or like a TV show? I think it's on Apple TV plus. So I'm surprised it's not on your radar because you love all things Apple.

[00:03:54] Well, until they start doing shows with Hillary and Chelsea Clinton. And they start beefing with your hero, Elon Musk. Oh, God. Although apparently that got resolved and civilization is saved for now. You know, thank God. Yeah.

[00:04:12] So I had an idea when we were struggling for opening segments ideas that we would just each get to cancel three things. It can be a person. It can be practice. It can be a phenomenon. It can be whatever you want. We cancel it and it's gone.

[00:04:29] Like it's gone from the public consciousness. Right. We're not killing anyone. No, we're not assassinating anyone. Right. And you know, I believe everybody has the right to do or say whatever they want. I do too. OK, do you want to do you want to start?

[00:04:50] You want me to start? I think so. You'll set the tone. All right. So this is my first one. And this was the one that popped into my mind when I even had this idea because it was right around the time of the election.

[00:05:04] Nate Silver canceled completely just done, done with him, done with the whole thing. You've seen enough. I've seen enough. Exactly. And it's not because he, you know, he played a role in turning politics into a horse race where all the coverage, virtually all the coverage

[00:05:21] is on who's going to win instead of like what would actually happen if they did win, what are their policies? Right. Because he played a part in that, but everybody does that. That's just how it is, whether you do it in the Nate Silver way or not.

[00:05:36] Also not. And this might surprise you, canceling him because he moneyballed politics and killed like the romance and the drama of the political pundit, you know, and their narratives about the various candidates and the voters

[00:05:49] and the demographics and all that because all of that stuff was God awful anyway. And Nate Silver is just a different flavor of God awful in that sense. Right. The reason he's getting canceled is because he fucking

[00:06:02] and this is the only time I like have him unmuted, probably on Twitter was after the around the election time. He fucking winds about every person who doesn't understand probability and like polling to the degree that he finds acceptable. And he will quote tweet literally anyone.

[00:06:19] He will try to dunk on some guy with nine followers who gave him shit about a polling error or something that he didn't foresee or some like, oh, you said it was 70 percent that this person would win

[00:06:31] and they lost and he's like and he's he it's just it's just it's the whining I can't take it. It's like he's one, right? He's turned everything into numbers and algorithms and models. He took whatever tiny little drop of humanity there was in politics

[00:06:46] and just stomped on it, got got rid of it. He's one. You don't have to fucking whine about it. It's like the Marvel people who whine about Martin Scorsese. It's like it's not enough that you like you can't go to a fucking movie

[00:07:00] because it's playing on like seven screens like, you know, the Eternals or Wakanda Forever or whatever. It's like you also have to get Martin Scorsese to admit that this is great art. That it's the whining that I can't take. That's it. Martin Scorsese, who started the whining.

[00:07:17] I feel like that could have easily gone like Martin Scorsese started whining about Marvel. Marvel had a shit to do. He was asked a question. Made Silver was asked a question. He is a very active engager in this stuff. Martin Scorsese doesn't go on Twitter and like quote,

[00:07:35] some like dumbass Marvel fan who's like good fellas and taxi drivers suck and all he does is make movie about gangsters. And like like Martin Scorsese is so above that. That's the thing. Nate Silver, if he was uncancel, uncancelable, like Martin Scorsese,

[00:07:52] he would be above all this bullshit, but he's not above it. He is he's immersed in it. He is under it. So it's his apparent pettiness given his outsize influence that's especially about it. There was something that Joe just triggered me, I don't know,

[00:08:09] like a few days after the election when he was still doing this like bullshit that he's been doing for the last eight years. And it's just like shut the fuck up. We get it, OK? And the people who don't get it aren't going to get it

[00:08:21] because you dunked on them and whined about them. He's going to be really sad when he hears this. Sure. Good. All right. I'm going to pick. I'm going to pick a person as well for my first one.

[00:08:37] Um, there's just no way I could say as much as you've said about Nate Silver because this guy is so fucking dumb that nothing that he does or says is even worth talking about more than five minutes. But DJ Khaled, you know, DJ Khaled.

[00:08:54] I mean, I know the name, but you got it and maybe I'll. OK, he is this fuck who's been putting out hip hop albums that he quote unquote produces for years. But here's what bothers me about him the most.

[00:09:08] He is the most arrogant son of a bitch that you've ever heard. Like he's before Kanye was crazy, full crazy, crazy. The shit that you say about him is crazy. Well, you didn't think the Alec Jones appearance showed like evidence of I've never seen Alex

[00:09:31] Jones step right out of his character so quickly. Well, wait, wait, hold on. Hold on. Wait, what? Also, like, what was he doing in I'm sure this was explained, but what was he doing in that man in the in the Gimp costume?

[00:09:46] Yeah. I was out of saying he doesn't need reasons. I know reasons. Reason is is a slave to his passion. He's done that before. I don't understand it. I just I think if I remember, I'll put a link to DJ Khaled doing an interview with.

[00:10:05] Do you know that YouTube series where people just try really, really hot barbecue sauces? Yeah. OK. The DJ Khaled one. He thinks that he's so good at everything. He refuses to ever like admit any weakness. He'll say like, I'm number one. I'm the best we always win.

[00:10:22] That's constant, constant, constant. Yeah. So much so that like it's like a shitty motivational speaker algorithm. Right. And he's talking about how bad ass he is and how he can take anything. And then he just starts crying because because he can't handle the hotness.

[00:10:39] But like his but he still won't like he can't. You just can't say like, oh, fuck, I underestimated this. Like you can't. He's constantly out there whining when he doesn't get the number one album, claiming that he's like this amazing hip hop producer.

[00:10:54] And he's just he just needs to stop and needs to go away. And I would press the button. You know, that's an interesting type. The person who can just never admit weakness or vulnerability and anything, even when it's the obvious thing that would actually like make them more

[00:11:12] relatable and people would admire him more and all the things that they want, the things that will satisfy their vanity, but they can't do that because they just didn't get to where they were by doing that, you know? Yeah, it's very, it's very, very weird.

[00:11:24] Like a shrimp. Never exactly the Trump. Yeah. Is this shtick, do you think? No, that's the thing that bothers me the most. Like if he was Andy Kaufman, this shit, but like he is so sincerely believed that he's number one. I'll give you an example.

[00:11:43] Tyler, the creator, who's an amazing artist, but like nowhere near like the DJ Khaled puts out albums and it has like Jay Z and not like everybody is a guest on his album. And Tyler creator is a genius who makes

[00:11:57] weird music in his bedroom and and they both debuted their albums on the same day and and Tyler, the creator got the number one spot and DJ Khaled could not let it go. Like he was so angry and like, what would you do if that happened to you?

[00:12:13] You would just say like, hey, good job, other guy. Like, you know, I have the next time. Yeah, no, he could not fucking let it go. He was like Nate Silverman. Stop the steal. This is exactly it was it was that bad. It was that.

[00:12:26] So I'm I'm trying not to body shame him, but I'll show you a picture of two. All right, that was my number one. It's your number two. This is one that maybe only is going to resonate with academics, but footnotes that refer to other footnotes. I've nested.

[00:12:51] Yeah. Well, yeah, you're reading this thing like in a book and it'll be like C note 42 on chapter 23. And now you've got to fucking go to if you want to know like what this footnote is, you have to go and kind of scroll

[00:13:08] through the other the other chapter to see where that note might be. You know, like, oh, there's 38. So I guess it's probably three pages from now. I don't know. And it's just like the dumbest thing. And sometimes it's like, like longer the actual C note 43 chapter five.

[00:13:26] It's just longer than what the actual references. And that's what I think is when like it would have been fewer characters to just give me the reference again, because I didn't because I don't have a photographic fucking memory. And I didn't remember it the first time completely.

[00:13:42] I didn't remember what note 43 was. So I feel like it would be fun to just keep keep like doing referential notes so that you have to like. Right. It'd be like a bore history. It's like you have to have your fingers all through the pages

[00:13:56] like I choose your own adventure when you don't want to make a choice. Yeah. And it just takes you on these different journeys. I have an academic one that's kind of petty like that, too. And I'm guilty of this, but so what?

[00:14:12] The whole cute pun title colon serious title thing. Yeah, like I give it. All right, like give it up. Like it's enough. Just say what your papers about like like and you see this. I hate to like break the heart of grad students who of course

[00:14:29] been thinking about something for so long and have the perfect pun just ready to go for when they write this paper. And I'm just like, but don't just keep it to yourself. Now, let me play devil's advocate. Some some might argue that that's a little rich

[00:14:46] coming from us who do like the anality of evil. Which was kind of seems like we're doing the same thing that they're doing and from the exact same reason, right? Here. So first of all, it's different. It's completely different.

[00:15:05] No, we're constantly searching for puns, but we do podcast. You know, you need a title a week or every other week and we're entertaining ourselves. One of the things that bothers me about the cute title, Colin, serious title format is that the serious title

[00:15:20] all of a sudden gets straight to business. It's like, right, right, right, right, right. They're great. The effects of children's nutrition on, you know, right. And it would be more creative to try to combine blend with you. Like, yeah, one for this.

[00:15:37] And yeah, those are our best titles to that's right. That's right. But I will say that, like the paper that we'll probably do next for our opening segment, I like hot for robots. Yeah. And by the way, anybody who looks up my CV,

[00:15:54] you're going to see just a ton of those papers. Like, I've done like, I don't know if, you know, I don't think this got published, but I've done like how I learned to stop worrying. Like just the worst, just the, you know, the lowest of the low.

[00:16:12] And I probably thought, oh, it's funny. It's like Dr. Strange. Love, you know, like, I, all right, you know, I'll be sad to see it go. I'm glad hot for robots got out before this was canceled because. What is the subtitle of that?

[00:16:28] Sexual arousal increases willingness to have sex with robots. Doesn't sexual arousal increase willingness to have sex with anything? Is that what it is? Yeah. Right. Like, it was like a fucking like kitchen counter. You know, that's like that's just genre porn.

[00:16:50] If you're like, if you have a boner, well, of course. Oh, my God. Cheese, cheese grater looks hot. If you haven't sufficiently strung. That's not funny because we have one of those cheese greater. It's like you go like this, you know, like. Grinders. Yeah, it's like a grind.

[00:17:11] It's like the kids in the Pink Floyd video. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. That's my dick coming out of my cheese. Critter, just a little piece. Is that you? All right. What's my oh, no, your second one. Oh, no, that was your second one. We're on my third one.

[00:17:34] And I think you're going to like this is singing in the rain. Wait, what? This sucks for a lot of people who I know. Like, I think my wife loves this movie. My stepmother definitely does, but it's canceled. It's it's over ever since the Sight and Sound

[00:17:52] pulled came on and it's like wait, 10th best movie of all time, according to like Sight and Sound critics, which is just who are Sight and Sound. This isn't like it's like no, this is a British film. We're very respectable. You know, one of the top film magazines.

[00:18:09] Cinema magazines and they put up every 10 years. They do a poll of all critics, like, you know, defined. I don't know how everyone gives their top 10 and they combine it all. It's actually kind of fun in that

[00:18:25] you get a little slice of how people are thinking about movies. Let me hold Sight and Sound. I'll give you the top 10. So the number one film is Jean Deleman. Van Toak. K.D. address. Yeah, it's an address. Number two is Vertigo Citizen Kane Tokyo Story

[00:18:49] in the mood for love 2001 in Space Odyssey. Nice boat, Levi Mulholland Drive. Awesome man with a movie camera singing in the rain then is number 10. Like ahead of the Godfather, ahead of the rules of the game, ahead of taxi driver, good.

[00:19:06] That's just like, I mean, like it's just a it's just a bizarre thing that everybody loves that. I mean, not for much longer now that it's canceled. But and I would think that you would hate it. I have you ever seen it? I've seen it. Yeah.

[00:19:20] So my hate for musicals comes from the few that I was forced to watch as a child. And and I remember singing in the rain, feeding into that hatred. More than even sound like sound of music. I was like, fine, that's, you know, it's cute.

[00:19:37] What do you expect? I just felt so dumb to me. There's something also very creepy about Jean Kelly. Like it's like sociopathic, you know, like just his voice. But it's about the movie industry and that stuff is good.

[00:19:53] And they're going from silent movies to sound and all of that. And that stuff's fine, but it's just fine. It's not it's not the 10th best movie of all time. All right, it's not better than Persona. No, yeah, it seems rather insane.

[00:20:08] If there were if you had to put a musical in the top ten, what would it be? I guess my fair lady, I love that. Yeah, but it wouldn't be like I wouldn't put it in the top ten. But I think it's really good.

[00:20:20] I think everybody is very good in it. And it's an awesome musical. So yeah, we should do our top 10s, maybe for a bonus episode or something like that. Like just top ten favorite movies.

[00:20:32] It would be hard. Yeah, not like the best movies, but I would be hard. It would be hard for me to hear random French movies that I've never heard of before on your list. And then I come with Back to the Future.

[00:20:44] My number five is Cleo from five to seven Agnes Vita is 1962. A lot. There's a lot of the movies that we've done are very high on the list. Yeah, I am have a true dilemma here as to which one to pick.

[00:21:00] But I think I have to pick this one to be true to myself. But it might get me canceled. OK, but I do want to erase this. The fucking term Latin X. Oh, yeah. Can we stop trying to make it a thing?

[00:21:18] Yeah, just every poll of any like Spanish native Spanish speaker from Latin America. Nobody wants that. It's like a hand select pick of like academics who who want everybody else to start using the term. And look, it's not that I think that that language shouldn't evolve.

[00:21:39] Like I just think it's it feels like a bunch of. It feels like liberal elites. Yeah, dictating to like people. Yes, exactly. Feels like my language is being colonized. And whenever I say shit like that, somebody will say no, the actual

[00:21:58] the first people were like actually a group of scholars from Mexico or whatever. I don't care. They're canceled. They're canceled too. And what sucks is that my fellow like Latin American or Hispanic academics who use it like in their tweets and stuff in like private correspondence. I know.

[00:22:20] I know you can tell they use it through gritted teeth. It seems like you can even like when they like tweet about it or do like you can tell like we don't want to be doing this either.

[00:22:32] But I don't feel like taking a bunch of shit like today, you know? Yeah, it's like the white lady at the DEI office is going to write an email to my department chair. Exactly. Yeah. Well, you can say that though, right?

[00:22:47] Yeah. But then, you know, I'll always make someone mad. There is there's always like Latin Americans who feel like they're more Latin American than other Latin Americans and and don't yeah, they'll let me know. But fuck it. Both of my parents were South American.

[00:23:06] This is my first language. Like fuck you all. You're the uncle Tom, you're like Samuel Jackson and Django. No, I that's one of those. And I think land acknowledgments is in this category too, where it's like people are too dug in to go back on it.

[00:23:29] But like you don't find anybody defending it with any kind of heart. You know, given that it's so well documented that Hispanic and Latin American people don't want it, that like I really do think that now it's also because of trans issues rather than.

[00:23:47] Yeah. But then you have to like, you know, there are just languages that work like that and it's like to change a whole language from the outside like that is just, you know, they're there are just better ways to fight that fight.

[00:24:03] I'm ironically language policing the language police. I understand that. But this is the whole point of our cancelling. This is yeah. Did you have any honorable mentions? I did. I thought they were too sweeping. But one of them was going to be again, a self indictment.

[00:24:20] I think it's time for trolley problem research and psychology to stop. Isn't that like already kind of canceled? You think you'd think so. But the rise of driverless cars or the promise of driverless cars brought it back with full force. But is that still going on?

[00:24:39] We did an episode on that like six years ago with that MIT thing where they're where we, you know, it's like the old lady and the two cats or the bank robber. Yeah, old guy. Like it's just so stupid.

[00:24:54] Yeah. My friend who was part of that during a conference called called me out on all that shit talking I did about his paper. Oh really? Yeah. What they really need to do is figure out a way for them

[00:25:08] to like let you out of the car if it's like on fire. And they don't need to be making fine distinctions. Injection seats. Yeah. And just have it not, yeah, like hit people or explode or whatever. You know? Yeah. Like work on that. Did you have any others?

[00:25:24] You know, speaking of cars that lock up and don't let you out when they're on fire, like the Elon Elon Musk. I mean, it's kind of an obvious one, but man, is he just grating right now? Just like such a pain in the ass.

[00:25:40] Like in some of it's a little different than Nate Silver, but it's the same kind of thing where he like if he was the man that he kind of poses to be, he wouldn't engage in all this stuff. And he there's something especially annoying, like he's not interesting

[00:25:56] or funny or anything like that. Yeah, the best the best move that I made for my own just sanity was I went into my Twitter filters and I I filtered out any mention of Elon Elon Musk, Musk at Elon Musk. That's actually changed my feed.

[00:26:17] It's still some stuff still gets through because people are like constantly sub tweeting him. Right. Sometimes I'm curious and I have to go, but like it does make a difference. I like I actually think cancel just Twitter.

[00:26:28] You know, I was talking to my friend yesterday and he was like, how much would Twitter have to charge you for you just to not do it? And I was like one dollar. If I have to if I have to even throw out a fort.

[00:26:40] Exactly. Like it's definitely I feel like it's probably having a negative effect on my life already. Like if they like just please like give me a reason. This was after a particularly active day on Twitter too for me.

[00:26:53] Yeah, seriously, you're where we're the quality of our show is going to be this is suffer because of our inability to get off of Twitter. You just for no reason picked a fight with me. There was reason behind your vitriolic attack on people who use closed captions.

[00:27:12] It was so not vitriolic. It was just like, look, obviously, like the thing is invented for people who have hearing loss or me or subtitles for people in different languages. If you're not one of those people,

[00:27:24] like just watch the thing as it was intended for you to watch to the best of your ability. Right. But what you had forgotten was that the person who originally tweeted that was referencing a podcast episode where I specifically said the person

[00:27:38] that I watched these things with has hearing loss. And yet you went on an attack on closed captions. And so I had to know my my thing is targeted at every Gen Z person and every except my daughter who's good about this

[00:27:56] and every person who replied to me on Twitter pretty much today who just puts on subtitles because it's like. I think that you really have a blind eye to one people for whom English is not their native language.

[00:28:11] You kind of admitted that, but like you weren't raised in a household where that's the case. So like you can't you can't tell that like obviously it's a tradeoff. Like obviously, aesthetically, it suffers because you have. That's all I wanted people to admit. Right.

[00:28:24] But they just wanted you to admit that. Yeah, it's a tradeoff too. Like I get why you would want like the person who wrote the words. Also, their creator intent was for you to understand the words. The people I'm referring to this should have been obvious

[00:28:38] are the people who just don't have any of that. They're like me. They can understand things as well as I can understand things. Well, the people who are tweeting today may or may not be like you, but few of them certainly weren't

[00:28:54] like one of them did bring up the four language thing. And yeah, and then I was like it's a then in that case. I don't know how good your English is, but it's a borderline case like it was for me.

[00:29:03] When I like I had to make a decision when I lived in France and I could actually speak French fairly well, like do I want subtitles or not? And like what? So what did you choose? Like I think it just depended.

[00:29:14] But as soon as my French dipped, I put subtitles back on. But I like I didn't pretend that like I was some, you know, hero against like ableism or something. No, but it's more of the sort of like the

[00:29:29] the inflexibility of your rule that like if you turn it on, like even if you just are like, I don't know, my baby's sleeping and I kind of don't want the thing to be loud and so I'm going to turn them on.

[00:29:40] Like the feelings that you were expressing were so black and white about like destroying creator intent that. It's Twitter. Like the nuances. I was very unfairly attacked. It was very unfair. People can be let's let people be the judge. And I didn't pick the fight either.

[00:29:59] It was brought to me. I was accused of ableism. You know, like someone thought they owned me by saying, should we not wear glasses when we. OK, somebody told me that you pwned me, which is even worse. I fucking pwned you. I did.

[00:30:14] Well, when we come back, we are going to talk about the deep metaphorical structure of language, except the things that we've canceled because those things are gone. You're no longer. This episode of Very Bad Wizards is brought to you once again by one

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[00:37:57] Thank you. Thank you. All right, let's talk about this 1993 paper called The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor. It was written by George Lekoff who is a linguist. He actually studied with Chomsky and then they had a falling out, I guess.

[00:38:15] But Lekoff in 1980 wrote a book we alluded to in the first segment called Metaphors We Live By. With Mark Johnson, right? Yeah. I feel like he's the Mark Frost of this couple. People don't give him enough credit. Maybe.

[00:38:36] That book sort of set the stage for a new understanding of metaphors and how they work just in terms of like human cognition, like the role that metaphors play. And this paper published whatever 13 years after that book, Lekoff lays out that theory he

[00:38:55] refers to as the contemporary theory of metaphor and contrasts it with the old way of understanding what metaphor was and the role that it played in mind. And what he says here is that the traditional approach to metaphor, it's very simple.

[00:39:10] There is a literal language and then every once in a while people will use metaphors. But for everyday normal life, the kind of language that we use and the only kind of language that we need to use, literal language, metaphor is largely unnecessary. It's a nice flourish.

[00:39:30] It's an exactly like poetry. And also that you can anytime someone uses metaphoric language, you can translate it easily into what it literally means. Right. And it's that whole distinction that he's attacking the literal versus metaphorical. Right. Metaphors shouldn't be understood as these sort of one-off linguistic expressions.

[00:39:52] In fact, the argument that he's making is they're not really linguistic. They're far deeper than that. They're conceptual. So metaphor isn't just about the words that you use to describe something, but it is fundamentally about how we think and reason about the world around us.

[00:40:06] So metaphors and here he uses the term conceptual metaphors to distinguish it from just expressions. Conceptual metaphors are not just figures of speech, but they're like modes of thinking. The language that comes with them is sort of secondary. And for Lekoff, these conceptual metaphors

[00:40:24] guide the way we think about the world. It guides our behavior and it even guides how we understand and make sense of reality around us. Yeah, you know, like I'm starting to think everything is some variation of this, but it is like a Kantian categories kind

[00:40:39] of thing where like it is a lens through which we process the world. Right. These very deeply embedded metaphors in our thought. And it's, we always thought language was first, metaphor came second, but it's really the reverse. It's that metaphors are the fundamental

[00:41:01] thing and language is just various ways of expressing the metaphors that are deep down in the structure of our minds. Yeah, exactly. And there's a few things that I like about this approach. One is like until I started reading stuff like this, even when you're

[00:41:23] reading this article and he's not directly talking about metaphor, all the metaphors start popping out to you. Like the metaphor is that you just rely on and you realize that like, oh yeah, that is metaphorical. You know, it's not as if he is denying

[00:41:38] that there's a difference between literal and metaphorical. Like that wouldn't make any sense because the way that metaphor works is mapping one domain onto another. It's just that he thinks that there is, yeah, there is this sort of low-level domain of sensory physical experience that is literal.

[00:41:56] But to make sense of that, we map on oftentimes other domains. We use the sensory domains as source domains to understand more abstract ideas. So for instance, spatial metaphors can guide the way that we think about time. So you're either your clock is ahead or behind.

[00:42:15] So there is the literal layer. I mean, there is, but it's sometimes not something that we can even describe without metaphors. Yeah, it's hard. It becomes hard as you start trying to talk in any complex way like about any of these experiences, you realize you lapse into metaphor.

[00:42:36] And so here's one of the things that he points out that I should admit, like this was written in 93 and decades of research have been done on this and I don't know how much has been born out or not.

[00:42:46] This is kind of the point of the classic articles. But he says, look, if it were just the case that every once in a while we'll use linguistic flourishes to try to make sense of something on an ad hoc basis, on an ad fucking hoc basis. Then

[00:43:03] you shouldn't see too much similarity in the kinds of metaphors that are used for different domains. So one I think one claim would be that you wouldn't see the same metaphors get used over and over again across culture. And two, you wouldn't see this cluster

[00:43:20] of metaphors by domain a metaphor like arguments are like war. Linguistically, you could just leave it at that and say like that the argument that you and I had on Twitter was like a battle. I had to retreat when I realized I was peeking blinders occasionally with me.

[00:43:40] That's right. I wanted you to surrender and I fought dirty. Very much. And so what you realize is that what you're doing is you are mapping a whole entire conceptual domain and the language that you use to describe in this case arguments is all

[00:44:04] borrowing from that domain. So they're not one-offs. They're not flourishes. They are scaffolds where you really using that domain to understand the other domain. And it's very hard to imagine not using it. So we'll talk about this in a sec but like the love is a journey

[00:44:22] metaphor. It's like really hard to imagine how you would describe a relationship without using that metaphor. I take the insight that he got from this guy ready, a good way of expressing this part of what you're saying the idea of a conduit right? Like where

[00:44:40] you are searching for a metaphor to express what you think you need the metaphor to express the thing that it is that you're trying to express. There's no literal, if it was like what apparently I guess the classical idea was there's just literal language

[00:44:58] and the metaphors are a way of gussing it up a little bit making it more fun maybe even making it more relatable or whatever then you should be able to at least have a literal explanation of what you're trying to say and maybe

[00:45:12] it wouldn't be that interesting or fun but at least you would get across the meaning and like I think the point as I understand it is that no, we have this thing where it's like the only way that I can express this thought is through a metaphor

[00:45:26] and I just can't think of what that is. Right, it's like the basis for thought. And so here it gets into one of the big arguments about how the mind really is deep down fundamentally and the arguments between people like Chomsky who believe that the mind is basically

[00:45:44] symbolic manipulation and this conceptual metaphor approach but there is something appealing to the thought that even perhaps before we had language and we were just thinking about the world around us before we could actually express it with words that we were already relying on concepts that were grounded

[00:46:06] in our physical experience it could be that you were even thinking people before they could say tomorrow is in the distance a year is in the further distance they were thinking that way So should we talk about the love as a journey? Yeah, yeah

[00:46:24] You know not being familiar with any of this stuff I was surprised like this took me by surprise how accurate it seemed. It's like you have these relationships and he maps it on where the love as a journey, the lovers correspond to travelers the love relationship corresponds

[00:46:42] to the vehicle, the lovers common goals correspond to their common destinations on the journey difficulties in the relationship correspond to the impediments of travel. So this is like we're spinning our wheels, we're stuck I feel like we went backwards like all of

[00:47:00] this stuff in terms of trying to describe what's going on in a relationship we do this thing all the time the thing that clicked for me was like trying to figure out, okay what if I didn't use this metaphor and I was trying to explain

[00:47:14] my relationship with somebody I don't know how I would do that What's a possible way of expressing like a relationship that's not progressing or maturing even saying that doesn't get added as much as the vehicle that is stalled or spinning its wheels or whatever Yeah totally and it's

[00:47:36] not as if a human relationship like a romantic bond with another human being is that complicated a concept, right? That's what kind of mind blowing about it is that even with a concept that is so much a part of every human beings life

[00:47:54] it's hard to talk about it without making appeal to even a more physically grounded and a very specific kind where at a crossroads it really is like your arm kind of a road trip or a boat trip look how far we've come it's been a long

[00:48:08] bumpy road we can't turn back we have to go our separate ways our marriage is on the rocks like even something like that which you would think well that's not oh yeah it is that's like a ship right these things are so fundamental to how we talk about

[00:48:24] relationships it is kind of amazing the degree to which that maps on to how we talk about it. Yeah and so you could have a couple of different views about what's going on here and there is one view that I I guess people still have

[00:48:40] but maybe would be attributed to the kind of classic view which is well look these metaphors somebody use them at some point and all of these just became idioms right and those idioms got stored in memory and so now I say our relationship is stuck and I'm not

[00:48:58] using the metaphor in any the I'm not barring the concept of travel and vehicles in any deep way I'm just that is just simply the idiomatic expression that's now been stored in memory but like I've wants to say if that were the case you wouldn't get such cohesion

[00:49:14] in these mappings like you wouldn't be able to create a brand new metaphor that totally made sense. Driving in the fast lane on the free way of love like that makes sense but it shouldn't if you know this was a superficial thing. Yeah

[00:49:30] and so part of what comes out of this that I was leading to before is that cognition is grounded in physical sensory experience in a way that ended up directly leading to a whole approach to human cognition and in cognitive science and psychology that

[00:49:54] we refer to as embodied cognition which was I think a very different way of thinking about psychology and the strongest hypothesis there that I could think of the strongest way to frame the embodiment hypothesis is that we wouldn't even have these concepts like say lover relationship without

[00:50:14] having the more basic concepts. We need to scaffold off of the basic embodied I am a physical body moving around the physical space of the world in order to even have the thought I am in a relationship for instance like that's the hard thesis

[00:50:30] is that we wouldn't be able to have the relationship or we wouldn't be able to talk about it. To talk about it I guess right? Yeah. Or maybe think about it and that's not the but I think it helps to contrast the real stripped down version metaphors

[00:50:46] are nothing but linguistic flourishes to the extreme version which is metaphors are so part of what allows us to even have concepts that without having bodies in this physical space our concepts would be completely different. So somebody who is really into the embodiment

[00:51:04] thing would say like a brain in a vat could have all the computational power that we have but would never be able to get any of these concepts off the ground so to speak because they didn't have this off the ground. There was something very cool

[00:51:20] about reading this where you realize how much of life is metaphorical and way more than I would have thought like by many orders of magnitude. Yeah there was a part where he's talking about quantities more being higher. Yeah.

[00:51:38] And I was like well of course because it's a higher number but then I was like wait. It's a higher number. Yeah right exactly. It's not like the number 25 exists on a plane you know like on the ceiling and number 5 is on the floor. Right.

[00:51:56] So I'm just like no but like when you see a graph like the numbers are higher but that's a result of the metaphor. The reason we were so fooled by this is because it's so embedded in us that we just take that to be literal. Like we take

[00:52:12] more is higher to be literal rather than figurative but you know if we think about it for a second it's like no you could do that same thing but more is lower on a graph rather than higher. You know you could do that it just doesn't make sense

[00:52:28] to us and it would be very weird for us to try to process that. You know I was telling you that one of the things that clicked in terms of this as a theory that explains more than I would have even thought

[00:52:42] once you get the cool love is a journey thing is this idea that there's a hierarchy of metaphors and that something like love is a journey is a special case of a deeper metaphor that life is a journey. That is in itself a special case

[00:53:04] of I guess just the event structure metaphor which maybe we can talk about the kind of fundamental metaphor for describing this kind of phenomena. Changes or movements causes or forces, actions or self-propelled movements, purposes or destinations means or paths, difficulties or impediments to motion the self over time

[00:53:30] or things that happen over time or events the claim is basically like we need this more concrete language to even talk about it. It is central that event structure and so he says what we have found is that various aspects of event structure including

[00:53:48] notions like states changes, processes, actions, causes, purposes and means are characterized cognitively via metaphor in terms of space, motion and force. So to say I'm out of gas I'm not going to leave him or quit pushing me around. She's leading him on she's holding him back

[00:54:06] he's carrying quite a load. It's cool right? It's very cool. It's unbelievable actually it's kind of mind blowing. This episode of Very Bad Wizards is brought to you once again by BetterHelp Online Therapy You know amongst geeks there's a saying RT FM you know what I'm talking about

[00:54:30] read the manual and it's usually given as advice for people who are asking questions without having actually just read the stupid manual about the thing that they're asking questions. Wouldn't it be great if you could do that for life if life actually came with a manual?

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[00:56:40] like when he gets very specific about source domain, target domain like how all that works how the mapping okay we've mentioned target and source domains but just to make clear what he's saying Lakoff is proposing that we map entire conceptual domains onto each other

[00:57:02] and this is what's generating metaphorical expressions that's like the linguistic output of the conceptual mapping and so the target domain arguments or in our case love in our case love you too so it's the structure of the source domain is leveraged for thinking about the target domain and

[00:57:30] then like those metaphors then will influence how people think about the topics how they'll attend to remember and even process the information about that topic so that's one of the things that he ended up like working on later on with his work on politics is he says

[00:57:48] if you adhere to this source domain as a way of understanding the target domain in his case he was talking about the difference between conservatives and liberals where he thought that conservatives adhere to this strict father model of a relationship then like all sorts of other

[00:58:08] things like other ways of thinking about politics and society will come from that metaphor like whether or not that was the part that you were intending so like the richness of the interrelationships from the target domain will affect how you're thinking about the interrelationships in the source domain

[00:58:30] to the target domain so if you have a strict father kind of metaphor that is kind of fundamental for your understanding of like society then that's going to affect your views on criminal justice and like it's going to personal responsibility so his idea which

[00:58:48] and here's where it can start to get seem oversimplified that the liberals have a more nurturing parent metaphor that governs their way of understanding society whereas conservatives have the strict father view but conservatives as I understand his view like they actually understand that and their politics

[00:59:12] takes advantage of that of these mappings whereas liberals because of their obsession with reason and argument and trying to persuade people through evidence and all of that they are bound to fail because that's not how our thought works our thought like takes metaphors that are fundamental for us

[00:59:30] and maps that on to all these other domains yeah that's right one of the funny things is originally he did call it strict father and nurturing mother but I think that he was like yeah right right so the way that these metaphors are influencing us can be

[00:59:48] sneaky I think and one of the things that became controversial about his view later on was that we should start really reframing all of these debates by using the nurturing parent metaphor for government so I forget what his idea was to call like taxes

[01:00:12] calling it a membership fee or something like that you know like he wanted to just like almost new speak the shit out of like the political this is right around 2004 election when liberals were in trouble yeah right right unlike now unlike now

[01:00:28] no and it's very much in line I take it with like Jonathan Haidt and like the Alan Fisk views where reason as a tool of persuasion reason as we understand it like logic and evidence and you know Bayesian priors and all of that like

[01:00:46] that's not going to work for people that's not how it's not even a work for us really it's just for whatever reason we you know like because of our professions maybe we're taught to think that that's how people are persuaded and people make decisions but that's just

[01:01:04] I really do think that he doesn't think it's like that and that you're going to be at a disadvantage if you're deluded about that yeah I guess the question is is it even I think you would think it's not even possible to reason in that sort of pure

[01:01:24] way and that's where you might get some debate still but you can you can see why his his view for instance like take this metaphorical approach to cognition seriously we'd be going about constructing artificial intelligence in the really wrong way that's like we're not even

[01:01:48] close to trying to build agents that experience things physically in order to derive concepts like we are just going the full on symbolic manipulation way like toss cognitive operations as if they're mathematical operations and see what comes out so I would think he'd think it's doomed

[01:02:06] to ever mimic human cognition also that so I don't think we emphasize this enough but he thinks experience is what grounds our kind of fundamental understanding of concepts and the way we conceptualize the world and so you have to actually have those

[01:02:24] experiences you have to be like an embodied person that walks around and goes from one room to the other and goes from their house to their office or to their friends house if you do do that you're not going to think

[01:02:36] the same way as a computer that's just running algorithm so here is actually in the heyday of the embodiment approach where it was the hottest thing in psychology I always thought that this did still seem like a too strong a claim I think you're right his view is

[01:02:54] obviously we're all sort of human beings living in this physical plane and so we're all going to have a set of experiences that are similar but the experience is the nature of that experience is important for how we think so I always wondered whether the people

[01:03:10] who studied who took this strong approach to body cognition would really think that say a person who is congenitally blind would not be able to metaphorically use the concept of vision in their reasoning or somebody who was paraplegic or quadriplegic who didn't have that same level of

[01:03:36] experience whether or not their conceptual schemas would actually turn out to be different and I think that's kind of what you would be forced to say that's why I always thought no like there is some level of pure abstract symbolic stuff that we can learn from

[01:03:52] just thinking and that seems so empirical also like you can just test that but you know like with somebody who's like a paraplegic they're still in wheelchairs they're still moving around the world but someone who's blind and has been blind from birth it seems

[01:04:08] like that's something you could test like is there are there certain concepts that are harder to understand if you're blind and you have nothing to do literally with whether you can see something or not Yeah, right so it turns out that there is at least some literature

[01:04:28] looking at people with for instance spinal cord injuries and whether or not their cognition changed as you would expect I think people really took this and started running so maybe we'll do a follow up episode where we actually have the answer to whether or not this

[01:04:44] is a very good approach bore fruit see using metaphors again bore fruit, yeah like everything this is the best thing about this is that you realize even in trying to talk about it he has this fun thing in the paper where he's like

[01:05:02] there are certain papers that are wars and there are certain papers that are guided tours this is a guided tour paper Yeah, totally That's what I was going to ask you it's always kind of bothered me that people use the argument as war metaphor so much

[01:05:20] it always seemed to me to be more damaging to the process of arriving at truth and wouldn't we be better off trying to adopt other metaphors too but then they sound soft then you just Right I think that sounds like a Chamberlain approach

[01:05:42] Next thing you know I'm singing in the rain Exactly Although he takes a lot of passing shots he definitely snipes at some philosophy of language and stuff like that but really he's just explaining the view here whereas there is a kind of paper where I am

[01:06:02] defending this view the enemy view the opposing view is that view is that you are leveling these objections like cannonballs at them and they have these fortifications I mean it does, it's true that is how a lot of arguments work you go back to Plato

[01:06:20] that's how a lot of the arguments in Plato are put forth and it just seems like that's what we do You know? Yeah A lot of the time we can do it in a nicer way or a bitchier way but it is kind of

[01:06:34] the way we try to convince people and even just the word defend your argument is war like I mean again I didn't even say that thinking Yeah Now I'm just going to spend the rest of my evening trying to think of different metaphors

[01:06:50] to use for whatever I'm talking about Should we take a case study like if you are trying to explain the trajectory but even saying that word trajectory but like the trajectory of our podcast to somebody or just to use a more neutral word the history

[01:07:06] of our podcast like our experience over these 10 years like how could you do that without using the like journey metaphor in our podcast is the vehicle Well so one of the things that I started thinking about when with that whole life as a journey metaphor

[01:07:26] and just time in general is that you would think that time is as grounded a concept as space at least Kant would have us believe so Yeah and that and so that you could just talk directly about time but I think what it reveals is that

[01:07:48] that even though we experience time it is such a more abstract thing it really does there is a lot of variability in the experience of time like as we get older time seems to move faster speeds by that flew by and or when you know

[01:08:08] you're like when your kids summers feel like they took so so like there is something about time that's not we cannot directly experience time and so we cannot directly describe it so anything that involves time it turns out requires something like a spatial metaphor and that

[01:08:28] like honestly it was like that seems like a deep mind blowing we cannot talk about time without using spatial metaphors right you know and I think this happens more or less with all his examples he makes a fuss about causation and that he's going to do

[01:08:48] something with cause like he does with time but I don't totally see it like I do with the time thing which just seems totally right it's true that sort of a paradigmatic cause is one object pushing another object like that doesn't seem that mind blowing

[01:09:02] it's paradigmatic but it's not impossible to think of it without one object putting another like it is kind of impossible to even like what would it look like if I talked about time without using a spatial a spatial language but still like there's you know

[01:09:18] and maybe you know in a different paper you do do that with cause and certainly like I've heard him on a podcast talk about like we think of causation in like Newtonian terms this is what made me think this was kind of Kantian but

[01:09:32] you know like this is why we can't solve climate change because climate change is a system and it's and it's not a you know just billiard balls and so we just have a harder it doesn't land for us in the same way like

[01:09:48] we like we don't believe it's real that seems that seems true of just like the more complex we get with science like and just more generally as a point metaphors enable us to think about all sorts of abstract stuff that we couldn't

[01:10:08] have before but at some point they do start constraining us and so because we don't have the proper source domain to map on to a target domain of like quantum mechanics and causality in that way like there's just it's hard in for a lay thinker to even conceive

[01:10:28] of what's going on there and so we as the world gets more complex as we learn more and more complex things these metaphors will I think stop being so helpful to us and that's why I was and their impediments actually their impediments right so

[01:10:46] I don't know how many times I've read about like the big bang and you try to explain what's going on and people use like a balloon they say imagine that there's a balloon and you draw some little dots on it and then you

[01:11:00] inflate the blue and the dots expand but that's that metaphor is like well the balloons expanding into something like I don't have any scaffolding to tell me what the universe is expanding into same with like space time is exactly like it's like okay

[01:11:16] but what does that mean right the only way to understand that as far as I can tell is by knowing the math and even then you're understanding in a real really non experiential way it's hard to have any intuitions about that stuff but then here's

[01:11:32] my question about this like how did we even get to the point where we could notice that the world worked in ways that we can't conceptualize because the metaphorical structure of our brains is such that it doesn't you know what I mean like how did that happen

[01:11:52] I'm sure he has a story about this but I would like to know what it is. I don't know that he does but that's what always you joke about my rationalism a lot but like I'm always blown away by the fact that we are able to abstract to

[01:12:06] like pure concepts like number and find out relationships between those numbers and have that predict the motion of like galaxies moving away from like that shit blows my mind it's not that I don't believe that we're not fundamentally constrained by our bodies and our brains

[01:12:24] and our experiences it's just weird that there is something in our experience that has allowed us to pop into a level of abstraction that's so abstract that it can help us understand all kinds of other domains in a way that nothing else can. They're like just the concept

[01:12:40] of numbers kind of unlock this. But also it seems this is like a philosophy of science kind of point it also seems like maybe we should be suspicious that we really have done that you know that maybe what we think we know is still influenced by metaphors

[01:13:04] that aren't as obviously transparent to us as the ones well not obviously transparent I didn't know them until a couple days ago but easy to convince that are at the bottom of our how we process experience and phenomenon like why would we think

[01:13:24] that we can go above that this is part of the pragmatist point that you can't. I'm landing somewhere in between like the where I think actually more than before I believe that these constraints are something that is holding us back in such a way that

[01:13:46] even when we're getting to the abstract suppose that as I believe mathematics and logic do allow us to uncover truths about the way the universe works in some way that's to me like be mind blowing it is mind blowing but it's still the case that when we're thinking

[01:14:06] about we cannot help but apply some sort of metaphor to understanding what's going on like there's even if you have a mathematical description of a system I don't even think the brainiest of scientists working on that isn't possibly using a metaphor that's misguiding the whole endeavor

[01:14:30] and what those metaphors are might determine how they're thinking about the problem in a way that leads them to a terrible mistake Yes but where you would pull back from is you wouldn't say that's just inevitable and we can't transcend that we will through the slow

[01:14:50] process of science realize that we were misguided and then progress and maybe we won't get the final solution to use the phrase that you love but we will get ever closer it's stuff like this that makes you at least skeptical about that kind of

[01:15:16] progress model way of thinking which is itself influenced by a kind of spatial metaphor actually I think that there are very key people and moments where we can push through and get some insight that Einstein could completely destroy all intuitions and show something about the world

[01:15:38] is like incredible I say we can do it, I can't do it he could do it and then that Einstein was so resistant to some of the quantum effects because they didn't mesh with his intuitions which I think again are metaphorically probably grounded shows that he probably didn't

[01:15:58] progress as far as he could have had he been able to sort of abandon these and so like it's not that I am such an optimist it's just more that the fact that we every once in a while can push through and learn something that we can't

[01:16:12] that we don't even have the tools to think about at like a basic level is astounding to me like a Schrodinger's cat thing the problem is then we think okay well how do we explain this and we'll come up with like the many universes

[01:16:26] theory and it's just like is that like it makes sense that we would try to do that, that we would try to kind of come up with that as a way of making sense with what we take the data and evidence to be but like do we really

[01:16:38] think that that's what's going on yeah I don't know or like what does it even mean when we say that I am just literally to go back to Marvel Universe I'm literally just porting over some CGI that I've seen of them showing like a bunch of different planets

[01:16:54] like is that what I mean when I'm talking about many universes but also you can't say I'm literally doing that as if that is a distinction between metaphorically doing that because we've done away with that's canceled so okay here's the thing and I have to say I owe

[01:17:12] a lot of my understanding of this paper although like I think it's perfectly well written paper it's a little kind of all over the place guided tour but by a slightly drunk tour guide exactly in this and it's a very it maps on to the paper very well

[01:17:30] they talk about in inheritance hierarchy and it says like the event structure metaphor is the bottom level right and then the level two is a purposeful life is a journey and level three is love is a journey or a career is a journey or something like that so

[01:17:50] each of these things are you know like it's nested exactly you go from something like event structure which is very abstract right that's what you said states are locations changes are movements causes are forces actions are self-propelled movements so this could apply to

[01:18:12] so many different kinds of things so that's a very abstract thing and now we're going to apply it to something still pretty broad like just a life all right well we have goals we have destinations even just that word right destinations and this is going to be

[01:18:28] a special case of the broader event structure thing and then within the light a purposeful life is a journey metaphor comes something like our podcast relationship and the podcast itself is a journey or a love relationship is a journey and they will have the same structure

[01:18:48] you know as but they'll just be a special case of the one that's higher above it right that's right yeah you're building from the experiential base you're building one layer of metaphors that then you can borrow that one into the

[01:19:04] second layer of metaphor and you can sort of build using the basics from that original metaphor it's like fractal patterns like when you like the same structure is there you keep when you move from the broadest to the smallest we're still using the same my day today

[01:19:24] has been quite the journey right yeah and what you don't mean by that is like that you've gone a lot of places even saying like this is such a good example of the time thing that you were saying earlier oh man it's been a long day

[01:19:42] it's the same it's not right the number of hours is the same I know it's weird I know this is there are people who are listening to this who have thought about this probably a lot more but it is as if the scales

[01:19:54] fell from my eyes and I started seeing started seeing that no it's actually not a long it's not long literally right I mean it's actually shorter because we're before December 21st like we're between September you know if you really want to talk about

[01:20:10] the length of it and even just yeah it's amazing that you know I wonder and again I'm sure there's been research on this but you think about teaching your child language and concepts you don't really have to think about teaching them any of this metaphorical

[01:20:28] stuff like that'll just come but they're learning it they're not just learning the words the day is long like they're learning that whole conceptual schema and they're going to apply independently to other things that happen to them and that's all just pure tacit communication like

[01:20:44] weirdly like they share our experience and they share the way we talk but that stuff is just happening because it's so deeply rooted in us like that we don't even know it like in some ways it's like the scales fall from our eyes but like the reason why

[01:21:00] it's so it feels like this kind of epiphany is that we do it so often that we don't even think when you talk about metaphors if you talk about it in a class if you talk about it like when reading a text

[01:21:12] or something like that you talk about it in this way that it got across this idea that you know we wouldn't have fully understood without such a good metaphor and honestly like I'm very proud of myself if I come up with a good funny metaphor

[01:21:28] for something you know else and I feel like oh that punctuated whatever point I'm trying to make but what this points out is that all that's true and you can do all that stuff but it's metaphors all the way down you know like it's just

[01:21:44] even when the thing that you're thinking you're coming up with a good metaphor for is itself metaphorical yeah yeah and again not by just defining everything as metaphor because there still is a distinction between non-metaphor and metaphor it's just far far more dependent on it than yeah like

[01:22:04] he'll go places in life is like you wouldn't think of that as a metaphor no yeah but yeah but it's not literally like if he didn't literally travel to a different destination like he could still go places uh yeah now it's uh this is cool stuff actually

[01:22:22] you know like I think linguistics it's not my field at all and it seems like rich terrain you know you know that a lot of stuff doesn't it does to me until I go to a linguistics talk in that field yeah uh well all right

[01:22:42] are we at a crossroads or are we at the finish line for this episode I think we're at the journey's end but that doesn't mean we're gonna die this is nested five levels we're not dying yet nobody's dying so can I just raise one other question

[01:22:58] yeah when I heard him talking about politics uh which is the one interview that I listened to with him it seemed naive and very oversimplified and like the talk of somebody who was very excited by an incredibly cool theory um but was trying to apply it

[01:23:18] in a domain where it wasn't gonna work as smoothly as he thought it could work even if he was right to criticize the way the status quo right yeah can you use a theory like this to actually bring about change you know like real practical change or

[01:23:40] are we always gonna stumble over the fact that we're you know embedded in the thing that we're trying to transcend so that we can use it properly I'm you know so two things one to what you said earlier about his optimism and his almost naivete

[01:23:58] I had the pleasure of interacting with him at some point in the early 2000s maybe 2010 something like that at a conference on politics and I knew he was and and like respected like like I knew about his book on metaphor from college and I found him

[01:24:18] to be pretty naive too but especially when it came to the brain science like this is when he was hardcore into embodied in body cognition he was thinking that this theory was like vindicated by neuroscience and then also weirdly that it had all this explanatory power

[01:24:36] that was like to me it was already a big enough theory didn't need to all of a sudden explain everything and that the more we understood the brain the more we could like pass like universal health insurance I mean really that's

[01:24:50] he got to that point and so I was a little like saddened by that and so I don't think like I don't think at least in the way that he was understanding it like his link was well the brain is basically a physical process that gives us senses

[01:25:04] and that those senses or what grounds our cognition so understanding the brain is going to help us understand how these metaphors work and the connections that we're making like he thinks like you can't try to make a connection where like they're

[01:25:18] you know the different parts of the brain can't communicate with each other or something like that yeah right yeah he was there's none of that in this paper no no it's before all that shit so to the extent that his optimism was grounded in an unrealistic

[01:25:34] view of the power of of this explanatory power of this theory and the predictive power I think no but I got to believe deep down that the way we talk about these things does matter and that and that the way that we frame conversations of importance

[01:25:54] we've probably even experienced it with our significant others when you just take a moment and reframe something yeah in a more positive way you almost feel physically relieved that you have this other way of thinking about it and like you understand it better or if I'll

[01:26:12] like that happens all the time where we're having some argument and then I figure out a way of expressing my thought through this metaphor you know or vice versa like I get what you're saying now and again like there was no other

[01:26:24] way to say that there was no literal way of conveying that information so like given that that kind of stuff happens all the time it seems like if you were some kind of political not even mastermind but just competent political agent you could understand these structures

[01:26:44] and these hierarchies and the way that people filter everything that we tell them through these structures that you could employ that knowledge in a way that would help people understand or help persuade them that your view is right and but I don't but I feels

[01:27:04] like we would fuck that up more than we would use that properly. I feel like somebody skilled in the art of rhetoric is doing this as second nature unconsciously and advertisements exactly yeah and even like a skilled communicator in relationships just like there's there is I was talking

[01:27:28] to my daughter about her college experience and I was in it this was like a feel good moment for me as a father because I feeling very anxious and I tried to understand the experiences that she was going through which involves a lot of anxiety and

[01:27:42] I did I guess use a little bit of psychology that I knew about thinking of things as challenges instead of threats but I could tell just that the words actually gave her a new way of thinking about it and that is the power of this stuff like

[01:27:56] whether or not we can do it systematically and scientifically I don't know but the words do have power over us in a deep way yeah like you say we do it unconsciously all the time because there's we can't not do it yeah the only real

[01:28:10] question is whether you could take what you've learned from this paper and from this research and use it to like act you know really employ that I'm not going to try to make my daughter feel more relaxed and confident this way I'm going to do it

[01:28:30] that way because like that employs this metaphor that will resonate better you know yeah and maybe having like a better awareness of what follows from any particular metaphor like the unintended the unintended aspects of that metaphor that you might be communicating

[01:28:48] right it means like okay you're riding on a cliff yeah yeah it's really twisty tourney there are no guardrails but you're like you're a good driver right don't worry we pack the parachute yeah alright well this was fun I'm glad we

[01:29:08] talked about this this wasn't on my radar really before the patreon thing yeah good I'm glad I'm glad the what's a good metaphor for our patreon supporters coming through for us they are they're the nurturing parents their nurturing parents did you see that you know when we

[01:29:28] were at our little tiff on twitter today everyone said as they sometimes do mom and dad are fighting yeah did we ever settle who's the mom and who's the dad no I don't mind you can be the strict father I'm gender fluid I'll be the like

[01:29:44] hot nurturing like milf mother I'll be the wire mother alright join us next time on very bad wisdom

[01:30:37] just a very bad wizard