Episode 271: Concept-Con 2023

[00:00:00] Very Bad Wizards is a podcast with a philosopher, my dad, and psychologist Dave 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] I'm not really following, but I also don't want anyone to talk anymore. The Greatest Boss has spoken! Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain! I'm a very good man! Brains that you have! Anybody can have a brain! You're a very bad man!

[00:01:04] I'm a very good man! Just a very bad wizard. Welcome to Very Bad Wizards, I'm Tamler Sommers from the University of Houston. Dave, I know you've been really wanting to get a lot of stuff off your chest about this.

[00:01:19] What do you think about what's going on in Israel and Gaza right now? Okay, I only am laughing to keep from crying. Obviously, terrible. It's a terrible time in history. But Cornell doesn't take too kindly, apparently, to professors speaking about this.

[00:01:41] So, you know, I've never been that shook before. We've talked about bestiality. We've talked about all kinds of things. Child sex dolls. Sex with robots. We've tested our tenure in so many ways. Chimpanzee consent. This is a topic that I'm just going to...

[00:02:01] I'll let the experts discuss this. I don't want to lose my job at Cornell. I'm not really afraid of losing my job. But there has been stuff going on at Cornell. Obviously, there's been a ton of stuff going on at Harvard.

[00:02:16] Right now, I think we're seeing when real cancel culture comes into play. And obviously, this is not the most important thing. But I think a lot of the pro-free speech people are staying pretty quiet about it for the most part.

[00:02:31] Not all of them, but a lot of them. Art forum editor-in-chief David Velasco was fired for just publishing an open letter calling for a ceasefire. Michael Eisen was fired for retweeting an Onion headline. That's crazy. Some science, online science journal, right? Yeah, I don't remember. You're right.

[00:02:52] It's not the most important thing that's going on. But I'm actually disappointed in my own institution. This really is a time where if free speech were a principle, this would be the time to stand up for it.

[00:03:08] It's pretty incredible to see people who normally wave the free speech banner being so comfortable just actually suppressing what some people are saying.

[00:03:18] And I do feel like just because of my personal connection with Israel and also being a Jew that I kind of did want to say a few things. And for people who don't want to hear any of this, we have chapter markers. We'll put a skip.

[00:03:32] The thing that you'll skip to is a concept con. Yeah. We are going to break down four concepts, two of which are mid and cool. The third and fourth are mysteries. We're each going to spring one on. This is real philosophy in real life, essentially. Rigorous conceptual analysis.

[00:03:54] Your concept, your concept, concept con. Yeah. This is the first episode that we've done purely for the title, not for the actual potential of the episode.

[00:04:06] If you want to get my a sense of my views on Israel's policies before October 7th, you can listen to that Overton Windows episode, which is on the main VBW feed. Bob Wright, by the way, is somebody worth listening to on this.

[00:04:21] Just to say right now we're recording on October 28th because things change so fast. So who knows what will happen even just on Tuesday when this drops? This is right after Israel has cut off all Internet and cell phone and phone communications in Gaza.

[00:04:38] And they started a ground invasion as far as we can tell. All I want to do, this is going to be quick. I want to add to the kind of chorus of Jews around the world who are protesting Israel's response to the absolutely horrific Hamas terror attack.

[00:04:56] So, you know, not in any way to underplay how horrible that is. But I think you can still absolutely legitimately protest how Israel is responding to it now and also express deep concern about what's to come. There's been a lot of protests that Jewish people have done.

[00:05:16] There was just one in Grand Central Station yesterday. You know, the general banner is not in our name. And I guess that's the main thing I wanted to say. You can be pro-Jewish without offering unconditional support to Israel and Israeli policies.

[00:05:34] Right. I don't think that has anything to do with how you feel about Jews in general.

[00:05:39] And on the flip side, I think you can be a really harsh critic of Israel, what they're doing in Gaza right now, policies towards Palestinians over the last two decades, over the last whatever, eight decades without being anti-Semitic. You can be anti-Zionist without being anti-Semitic.

[00:05:56] You can join BDS. You can call Israel apartheid. All of that. Now, sure, there are plenty of anti-Semites who hold those positions and may even use them cynically. But just having anyone or however many of those positions and holding them does not make you anti-Semitic.

[00:06:13] Calling for a ceasefire, expressing outrage. Right now, 8000 Palestinians have been killed, 3000 children. I think that's at least a reasonable position. Right. And you shouldn't be censored or fired or demonized or called anti-Semitic for expressing those views.

[00:06:30] We've got to keep anti-Semitic to refer to the real Jew haters like yourself. We're diluting the importance of that term. Well said. Well said.

[00:06:41] And I'll say, you know, the people who there's a professor who got in trouble here at Grinnell for saying in very poor taste saying stuff that was pro-Palestine. He did it very poorly. But like, what are you going to do?

[00:06:54] Like sometimes people say things in an asshole way. Yeah. There's this whole thing. Including some people that I typically like and support did not condemn the Hamas attacks sufficiently. A lot of that was appalling, but I also think that's not the main problem right now.

[00:07:11] Hundreds of people are dying every day right now. Like, I just think we've made enough of that. It's like maybe time to actually think about what we should do now. You know, like what should happen? These are not people with power.

[00:07:25] And the people who do have power, the fact that every U.S. congressman are lining up to support this and to kind of conceal what's happening to some degree, that I find really appalling. Yeah. Well said. All right.

[00:07:42] So that said, let's turn to something maybe I think we deliberately chose something a little more lighthearted. Yeah. We want to be an oasis from some of the troubles of the world.

[00:07:55] And even just for me, because as you know, this has been weighing on me quite a bit. So yeah. You know, and I have a lot of people, you know, I know a lot of people who are glued online.

[00:08:04] And yeah, we want to do something hopefully good for mental health. The doom scrolling thing I've never understood until now. Yeah. Like I've never been a doom scroller until now. I see you doom scrollers. Yeah.

[00:08:20] It's like how I was after Argentina lost to Saudi Arabia in that first game of the World Cup. It was just like, I could not stop reading. I get it. Can we do a little remind people what we've done before? Yes. We have done this theme before.

[00:08:36] We started out doing our conceptual analysis of Corny. Was Corny the first one? I think so. Yeah. And the idea is to apply the methods of analytic philosophy, the rigor to a word. Yeah, we did Corny, we did Cringe, put out calls for concepts.

[00:08:53] This is the first concept con. Yeah. First annual, let's say. Yeah. Should we start with mid? What do you think? Yeah, let's go. Let's do mid. A lot of these have been kind of Gen Z or maybe even to our shame, millennial expressions.

[00:09:11] I like mid because I just, I like these concepts that we didn't quite have a word for. Yeah. Like you said, these are Zoomer terms. So maybe it's cringe for us to be analyzing mid. I think definitely. There's no question. Okay.

[00:09:26] So I take mid to be an expression that something is average, but in a pejorative sense. It's used as an insult to say, oh, this album is actually mid or that movie was mid or whatever.

[00:09:38] What I thought was interesting about the way that I've seen mid used, it's a weirdly more insulting to call something mid, I think, than to call it bad.

[00:09:46] One of the things that people do is they use the term mid to refer to things that other people might think is really good or that where the expectations were high. So like you can say, oh, like that new Kanye album is actually mid.

[00:10:00] And there it's like giving the user a superiority over the aesthetic judgments of everybody else. And it's like, oh, here's something you didn't expect. Margot Robbie is she's actually mid. Or what you're saying is like everybody thinks she's beautiful, but I think she's not that beautiful.

[00:10:17] That's fucking crazy. Margot Robbie is not mid. Margot, if you're listening to this. I think that's right. I think it's deflationary. It is often used to deflate the pretensions of something and actually drag it back. You're just like the rest of this crap.

[00:10:35] You know, like like Marvel movies, obviously, for me, they're a classic example of their mid. You know, they've gone from mid to bad. Yeah, that's right. Exactly. Like you couldn't even call them mid anymore. Now it would almost be a compliment.

[00:10:49] But if you were like back when people thought Ant-Man was good or, you know, Guardians of the Galaxy or whatever. And all those movies, even the ones that people liked are mid. I texted my nephews, Ozzy and Luke. The first one said five out of ten.

[00:11:07] Yeah, five out of ten. One of them said like it's bad or boring or lame, not exciting. And then the other one says like Nate is mid. That's his little brother. You wouldn't I don't think you would just use it if something was just trying to be average.

[00:11:23] It was trying to be like it didn't have any pretensions for being better. Yeah, it's when the expectations might be higher or like you said, when the crowd thinks that it's good.

[00:11:32] There's an I mean, there's an interesting way in which just the concept of average has come to be pejorative. So like the word average and it might be a particularly Western use of the term average where most people being called most people is bad in an individualistic setting.

[00:11:48] Yes, exactly right. So if I said Scorsese is actually a mid director, I'm getting like these I'm trying to get hipster points. Well, I don't think you should be doing that for Martin Scorsese. I don't even think that's funny.

[00:12:03] Yeah, but think about how cool I would be if I could. No, but I don't think like I guess maybe we disagree about I think calling Martin Scorsese mid would be also not the way the word is used.

[00:12:16] I mean, if you had a 40 year track record of putting out like amazing movies, it would be just out of the bounds of you have to come up with something better. You don't like Martin Scorsese. You have to come up with something better than mid.

[00:12:28] I feel like he's clearly not mid. This is just I think that's betraying how strongly you feel positively about Scorsese. But like I'm sure that some people would feel like they're cooler for shitting on like what is universally agreed upon as being great.

[00:12:42] I don't think it's like something like that that has stood the test of time. I feel like I guess you could say like Mozart is mid or something like that. But I feel like that's not the way it's used most commonly.

[00:12:55] What I'm pointing to is only the unexpected nature of the judgment that it goes against the grain. And so maybe you're right that like it's not going to be used for something that that has stood the test of time.

[00:13:08] But but I meant to indicate something that most people think is good. And so with something like a new movie like everything everywhere all at once, there's usually like this trajectory of like hype the hype train.

[00:13:19] And the first people to jump in and say it's actually mid I think get rewarded in this hipster sense. Like me? Yeah. Or what I tried to do with Parasite. Yeah. Right. That's exactly right. You know because Parasite had just come out.

[00:13:36] You could say I completely disagree. I think it's a total masterpiece. But you could say Killers of the Flower Moon is mid. But I don't think you can say that Scorsese is mid. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's that's good.

[00:13:46] Parasite is mid is actually a again I disagree but I kind of get where you're coming from. Yeah. And it would be very different from me saying it's terrible because one of the things that I felt about Parasite was actually out of context.

[00:14:00] It would be very like I would have thought it was extremely good. And my expectations were just so high that that it led me to be like actually it's more middle of the pack than I thought that it would be which is.

[00:14:12] But when the kids are using it I also do think they just use it also to describe something that just kind of is bad. They do. Bad in a kind of like mediocre way like bad in a kind of boring way. You know. Here's a question. Yeah.

[00:14:28] I'd start to wonder like how you distinguish basic from mid. Basic is one of those that I never quite have grokked like I get. Grokk is a good one. I took it to mean like simple in some of the ways that simple is used. But I don't know.

[00:14:49] I can't I don't have a good sense. What do you like. Do you have a distinction?

[00:14:53] I think basic is like a subcategory of mid as much as I was saying that mid typically describes something that people like but that is actually kind of boring and average and maybe a little lame. Like basic is more specific than that.

[00:15:08] It's like you're an archetype of something just. Unoriginal. Unoriginal. Yeah. Yeah. A person who's basic likes all of the things that you might you know someone of our generation who thinks like I don't know you too is great. Right.

[00:15:23] If you liked you too when we were in high school like you were basic a little bit. Yeah. It's interesting how these like the whole concept of going with the crowd is so pejorative but it's totally understandable in an individualistic culture that. Yeah.

[00:15:39] Name your like top five mid academics. Present company exclusion. Yeah. There is this thing that if you're if you are interestingly bad you're not mid. You're not right. Like yeah. If you write whatever sideways music that article isn't me. You know. No.

[00:16:05] No it's more like the people who are just kind of churning out the normal things. It's all kind of competently done. I do feel like there's a kind of competence with mid. It meets a bar. It meets a particular bar. Yeah.

[00:16:16] For some reason the artist that I think is just consistently mid lately is Drake. Like there's a guy who just puts out like music that is now formulaic like the word churn.

[00:16:27] If an artist is churning stuff out that they know is going to satisfy some like percentage of people but not at all be original in the way that they used to be or something then then yeah you get the label mid.

[00:16:43] And I really do want to start using the term basic for academics. What would you use it for their views or just the people themselves. I've thought of basic as being an adjective for people. Yeah.

[00:16:57] So I want to use it as a way to describe an academic who they just tow the party line. They say exactly the thing that they were trained to say.

[00:17:07] You know thinking about basic white girl also makes it sound like it's also somebody who has a level of privilege and comfort and the normality that comes with that. It's basic if you don't do anything interesting with it.

[00:17:21] I'm very glad that I think my daughter is not like that but there were times you know there are times in a child's life where you see them really wanting to buy the stuff that other people have like the kind of fashions and so like.

[00:17:35] But you're right that the notion of privilege in my daughter was never like this thank God but but basic people who go out of their way to consume and purchase all of the things that everybody else is doing.

[00:17:47] It's hard to be basic and not have any of the stuff. The way you get every like Apple product is a little basic. I don't think you are basic but like that's something a basic person might do. Yeah although getting every Windows product is probably more basic.

[00:18:03] Well yeah that might be a klugey not klugey. Chuggy. Chuggy. Is that also like going with the crowd like that kind of. I think it's going with the crowd from like eight years ago is that it's true. Oh yeah that's right. That's right. Yeah. Right.

[00:18:24] It's like when we. Me being like a Windows person is chuggy. You being a Mac person is basic. Right. So catching on to a trend. Is it catching on to a trend late or hanging on to the trend late.

[00:18:36] Yeah we're coming to it late and not even knowing it's over but like still doing it you know. Right. Like perhaps with our use of slang for our daughters. Definitely. Like I remember once we started talking about cringe somebody was saying cringe is over. It's over.

[00:18:52] This is the problem with you know slang used to because the Internet wasn't the thing slang would take a long time to spread and then persist for longer. So when I was a kid for something to be rad like that lasted years.

[00:19:10] There was no turnover this quick turnover. Awesome kind of started with Gen X and it's like we still have it. Yeah. I was asking my daughter for the mystery concept I was asking for suggestions and I was like how about fire.

[00:19:24] She's like oh my God nobody says that anymore. Oh my God. What's wrong with you. It's like when you see nothing gives me the corny chills more than seeing like an old white person still raising the roof. Yeah.

[00:19:38] We've given you just free conceptual analysis on all sorts of. We're tossing all this in. Do you think that we sometimes waste these golden ideas by not publishing them and just talking about them in podcasts where we could be writing. Yeah. No I do.

[00:19:58] We could be churning out articles on this. No look actually yes because look at Harry Frankford. He just takes bullshit and turns it into like millions and millions of dollars. You know.

[00:20:10] So give us our millions or at least some of the money that we'll have lost because of my Israel opinions. All right. We'll be right back to talk about cool interesting and two mystery concepts. Like you're fully aware of what you should do.

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[00:27:28] All right, let's move on in our churning out conceptual analysis. The concept cool. This is a little bit tough because of how new much that word is used to across the board. So we agreed that we were going to just talk about cool

[00:27:46] in the context of referring to a person, which even then is pretty broad. Very broad. Yeah. All right. Do you want to start? All right. So if we're talking about people, right, and we're not in like the 50s or the 60s

[00:28:01] or even the 70s where it just means you get high. I think it's generally positive. You can kind of trust them not to be like a bitch. Like, you know, somebody's cool. Yeah. They have maybe a little self-awareness, a little sense of irony.

[00:28:16] Like I was thinking cringe being on one side of the spectrum. Cool is on the other where a person they may be awkward. But if they but if they're cool, they they have some awareness of their limitations. And so I think those are the kind of baseline things.

[00:28:32] And then all that stuff is necessary but not sufficient. And then you just also need something else, like something more positive that you bring, a sense of humor, like good looks maybe. I don't know, like just a chill attitude about things. I don't think looks.

[00:28:48] Yeah, actually, I take that back. It has nothing to do with looks. Someone could have a cool look, but you would be talking about the look more than the person. Yeah. Right. What they put into it. Yeah. I mean, you're sort of saying what I'm about to say,

[00:29:03] you sort of said in different words, I was going to say somebody who has some confidence, like that they're comfortable in their own skin. And I think that's the opposite, like the opposite of cringe again, where somebody who doesn't try too hard. If you try too hard,

[00:29:20] I think that's very much the opposite of cool. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Try hard is another thing on the other side of the spectrum. Right. Right. There is a sense of cool that I think I use it. So I don't think it would be necessary,

[00:29:34] but there is an unflappability that I think it comes with being cool where they're not going to be too bothered by small things. And I again feel like for me, I use it to refer to somebody who's fairly low maintenance.

[00:29:52] So like you don't need to worry too much about what you say or do around them or like whether, you know. Yeah, exactly. Low maintenance is I think another maybe necessary condition for cool. Yeah. Like somebody could be,

[00:30:06] you could have a good impression of them in other ways. But if you're really worried about like how they'll interpret something or, you know, overreacting to something, then they're just not cool. They can be good in other ways. As academics,

[00:30:21] I feel like we don't often encounter people who are cool in the sense that like. I think it's domain specific. So I think we encounter kind of cool, but they're cool academics. They wouldn't be cool if they were out in LA like trying to break into the business.

[00:30:37] Yeah. And so the way if you, if I said to you, if we were at a conference and I said, you got to meet so-and-so they're really cool. You probably would understand that I didn't mean that like they wore cool

[00:30:49] clothes and the, but rather that they were fun in a way that, that deserves being called out, that they're, they're just an or interesting to talk to somebody who you would enjoy like having lunch with. Like you say, no maintenance. It would be relaxing.

[00:31:07] And I do think like, you know, as many people in academia are cool, if not more than in like finance or something like that, you know, or like, you know, like it does carry with it like a relative to the other people in that field.

[00:31:22] And also kind of relative to what the expectation should be for, for someone like that. The word is so old that it is kind of interesting to me to think about like what cool has meant over the years.

[00:31:37] And I was doing a little bit of research on the origins of the term cool and no surprise here, I think was probably every piece of slang that's popular now. It did come from black people like African-Americans and the sort of jazz tradition and the cool cat.

[00:31:56] And Miles Davis was like the epitome, like paradigm platonic form of cool. Right. And I think that there always has been a white fascination with black coolness where white Americans borrowed a lot from the aesthetic and from the demeanor of. Borrowed slash appropriated.

[00:32:19] And then, then like it's Fonzie. Like then there's like this Fonzie way of being cool, which is just like, I'm not quite sure what that is, but it's definitely confidence and it's like everybody likes them. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:32:35] There's also the kind of Western hero or the like kind of silent stoic kind of cool that under pressure they can handle whatever comes at them. Clint Eastwood in the Man With No Names movies is really cool, you know? Right. Yeah. Definitely unflappable.

[00:32:57] Yeah. There's a way in which a very, very situation specific way in which you use the word cool that sort of has the same connotation of being undisturbed. Think about being at a conference and somebody you're in the bathroom doing

[00:33:13] drugs with somebody and then a new person walks in and you get a little nervous and your friend says, no, no, it's they're cool. Yeah, exactly. It doesn't mean that they're going to do drugs, but it means that they don't give a shit.

[00:33:25] They're not going to hassle you. I think that's what we were kind of both saying at first. It's like you can trust them that they're not going to raise problems unnecessarily. Yeah. Okay. Here's what I wanted to ask you. Were you cool? Like in high school? Well, definitely.

[00:33:45] So the answer is emphatically definitively no and no possibly like senior year. Yeah. That's exactly what I was going to say about myself. Once all the older kids weren't there to serve as a comparison. And also just I needed to get my shit together a little bit more.

[00:34:05] And that doesn't mean I was cool as a senior. It's just that's it's only a conversation once you get to my senior year. And then, you know, I think I was a kind if I was cool,

[00:34:17] I was a kind of combination of cool slash dorky, but fun and up for anything. And a drunk. Yeah. So I would say I was. I think, you know, if you did a poll of my high school at the time, I'm not sure I voted the results.

[00:34:36] But, you know, like you can't trust voting these days anyway. So Silver can tell you whether or not you're cool. Speaking of like someone who's really cool. I think that. So, yeah, my answer is the same.

[00:34:49] And if I think me being cool depended on the definition of cool, like when people matured a bit and they changed their notion of what it meant to be cool, because for a lot of time, at least where I grew up,

[00:35:06] say looks actually did matter for what people thought was cool. And athletic ability was also a big one. And I was definitely had not grown into my self in terms of looks. And so I was nerdy and not athletic.

[00:35:26] And so I always felt like I had no shot of being cool. Like I looked at the cool kids as this like other that I was envious of. And then my senior year, my junior year, maybe a little bit before it,

[00:35:39] personality sort of dictated whether or not you were cool way more than what you wore or whether you did sports or whether you hung out with like other cool people. And then I feel like, OK, now I actually have a shot at being called cool.

[00:35:56] Which also makes me think it is relative to a certain group. I do think there's a kind of relative bias. As long as you meet like certain basic objective positions, you can't be a little bitch and be cool. You know, like you can't try way too hard.

[00:36:16] Yeah, you can't be bothered by everybody around you. I was thinking irony or self-awareness is almost necessary. But like in the sense that the man with no name is cool, like I don't think he has a ton of self-awareness.

[00:36:30] So I do think like that's not a bad thing. So I do think like that's not a necessary condition. Like or maybe just a total unflappability and that kind of stoic unflappability is sufficient. Yeah, yeah, maybe.

[00:36:45] And you have a better shot of seeming cool if you don't talk a lot. Because, you know, the man with no name, maybe once he started really talking, once he got to know you, maybe it turns out that his personality wouldn't be that cool.

[00:36:58] But the fact that he's unflappable and sort of silent makes him seem pretty cool. Yeah, I don't know what like that would be a funny skit or something like that. It turns out to be like a big dork. He's like into model trains.

[00:37:11] All he wants to talk about is your model train. That also makes me think you can be cool, but maybe I also wouldn't like you. You know, like I don't think saying somebody is cool necessarily means that you're pro that person.

[00:37:28] Like you can kind of accept that they're cool, but still think either they're a bad person or just not. So, again, that's not relative. That part isn't relative. I feel that about a lot of bands, you know. Right, right. Yeah, that's good. That's a good example.

[00:37:44] I am a little envious of the generations, like these more recent generations, because I do think that when I was growing up, being nerdy was inconsistent with being cool. It was like conflicted with the notion of cool.

[00:38:01] If you were a geek or a nerd, it meant you weren't cool. The whole thing like where being a geek is a cool thing is just something I did not experience. Like I got picked on for it. I didn't get ever celebrated for it. But I don't know.

[00:38:18] Like I feel like they were right to pick on us, you know. I don't like this new nerd celebration. I feel like there is a... They become like, you know, then they turn into these like Reddit guys that just hassle everybody because they got encouraged.

[00:38:32] You know, those people used to be... Bill Burr had a thing about this. Like in the kind of natural ecosystem, the bullies were like a check on these nerds. And then you took that away. And so now they just get to run wild.

[00:38:47] I don't mind nerds running wild as opposed to bullies. But I do agree with the embracing of whatever nerddom and geekdom means that there are a lot of people who disingenuously adopt geekness, who aren't actually geeks. Like they're not actually the people who are

[00:39:07] whatever obsessive nerds about some niche that you can be a geek about. These people like just being a geek became mainstream in a way that I think has destroyed a lot of just, I don't know, like the Reddit people that you're talking about.

[00:39:25] But I think also, you know, the empowered actual nerds that can get to be toxic. Like the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world. Yeah, exactly. Now they run the fucking world. Yeah, all of the Silicon Valley guys. That's what happens when the nerds are allowed to just roam free.

[00:39:44] You know, it's like if you... So you're saying if Sam Bankman freed he had just been bullied a bit more. Yeah, where were the bullies? You know, there are a lot of bully, like potential bullies that are complicit in his scandal. I agree with this particular take here

[00:40:00] that the bullies would have kept him. And I got bullied and I do feel like this built in a humility to me. Yeah, right. I mean, the irony of proclaiming myself as humble is not lost on me, but you know what I mean. Yes, yeah.

[00:40:14] Kind of forced to recognize that I would have to struggle in this world. Right? That put some hair on our chest getting like our ass kicked and like made fun of. Yeah, and one thing I never have been cool and never will be cool about is fashion.

[00:40:31] So I just learned... I don't disagree with that actually. Like I feel like I aspire after whatever level of coolness you have with fashion. Maybe. Yeah, you have that nerd cool. That's kind of a combination, I think. I try very hard, Tamler.

[00:40:47] Yeah, and I feel like if I'm open about the areas where I'm trying hard, then it takes some of that away. That's the self-awareness and the irony. Self-deprecation, you know. Self-deprecation is a good way to make yourself cool if you are lacking certain...

[00:41:06] If you don't naturally have... exactly. Lacking certain cool attributes, you know. Yeah, totally. All right, are we done with cool? Do we have anything else to say about that? I think we've definitively defined the term. Say, man, you got a joint? Uh, no, not on me, man.

[00:41:26] It'd be a lot cooler if you did. All right, it's time for Bring Your Own Concept. Spring your own concept. Mystery concept. I'm always looking for gimmicks, you know. We need themes. I wanted to do this all mystery concepts, but you wisely said no to that.

[00:41:51] And in fact, you already know this one because I told you, but I wanted to stick with it because I think it's an interesting discussion. So my concept is one-night stand. And so let me just pose you a few questions about a one-night stand.

[00:42:07] So I think we all understand one-night stands as being like a sexual hookup with somebody who you don't know and there's no relationship involved. But it does give rise to some interesting questions about what constitutes a one-night stand and can shed light on

[00:42:28] what the whole purpose of the concept is because I think a lot of people, and probably to be realistic, a lot of women don't like to have a lot of one-night stands. Like there is a stigma associated with like reporting that you are somebody

[00:42:43] who has had a lot of one-night stands. And so I think people sometimes bend the concept. Isn't that still true as much as it used to be? In some, definitely for some, in some communities, yeah. To be fair, there should be no double standard.

[00:42:58] I mean, to be fair, no women should ever do this. They're whores if they do. They should not admit to it. They should keep two books is my advice. Here's my question. Just a series of questions. If you have sex with somebody that you meet that night

[00:43:17] and you go to a hotel room and you have sex and the next morning you part ways and never talk to each other again, I think that's the clear paradigmatic one-night stand. If you have sex with that same person like a year later,

[00:43:34] do you erase that as a one-night stand from your list? No, I don't think so. I think you could marry somebody that you had a one-night stand with initially. Oh, interesting. Like once something is a one-night stand, it's a one-night stand. You know, like the only time

[00:43:52] it would even be a question as if you ended up calling them like three days later, you know? Yeah, well, I was going to ask what if you meet somebody, like you're on vacation and you have sex the one night and then in the morning

[00:44:08] you like have a quickie before parting ways. I think we talked about this before when we were talking about this. You're not compelled by this? I don't think so. I think one night includes the time that you get into the person's house or they get into your house

[00:44:25] to the time that they leave. Oh, so you could have like a fuckfest of like three days of cocaine and like... I do think it has to be within 24 hours, I guess. Because then it's like the one night. Like there can't be two nights, you know?

[00:44:41] So once the sun sets on the day that you had sex the night before and then you're no longer with her. Yes, it's like the Jewish way of determining when Shabbos starts and then like once there's three stars in the sky that one-night stand is over

[00:44:58] and if you are still with her then it's a two-night stand. You're married. You're officially in the eyes of God. You're married. Ironically, if you are trying to avoid being called like a whore you should have sex more with the same person.

[00:45:17] Even if you have like no intention of being in a relationship. I don't think that doesn't make you a whore or whatever. It just makes you not have had a one-night stand with the person. You know, but it might be to your advantage

[00:45:30] because then if a future partner says how many one-night stands have you had you'd be like, oh my God, I've never had a one-night stand. Because... All right, here's my other question. So it seems as if one-night stand requires that there not be an expectation

[00:45:45] that there's a relationship even starting because I feel like if you go out on a date and you really hit it off and you're like, hey, this might be somebody. Right? So here's an example. You go out on a date and you really like somebody

[00:45:57] and the chemistry is such that you just consummated that night but you're like excited because you think this is somebody and then the next day they get in a car accident and die. Have you had a one-night stand? I didn't think we were going in that direction, actually.

[00:46:17] I thought you were taking it... No, I don't think that's a one-night stand if they were both into it, you know? Like if maybe... The question is if only one of them was in. Like one of them thought, all right, that was fun.

[00:46:30] Yeah, in my example they're both... In my example it's like a tragedy because you thought you both were... Then it's a tragedy that they died in the car accident but there's not an additional tragedy of the last thing they did was a one-night stand. Was a one-night stand.

[00:46:45] Okay, so here's an example of having sex one night with a stranger that doesn't qualify as a one-night stand. So we're getting somewhere. That's your Gettier case right there. Really? You know, they were really... They went on a date, they met on Tinder or whatever

[00:47:01] and next 50 years of epistemology they'll just be focused on this. See? This is why I feel like we're wasting it in audio rather than writing a tome of conceptual analysis, important conceptual analysis. I think that's all the questions I have for a one-night stand.

[00:47:21] I thought you were going like this though. So let me pose this question to you which is if somebody goes on a date and they have sex that night and it was great and then from one person's perspective that was it. Like, thanks, nice to meet you.

[00:47:40] But from the other person's perspective they kind of thought this might lead to something. Is that a one-night stand objectively? Is it a one-night stand from just the person who wanted to get out's perspective? Can the same night, can the same event be a one-night stand

[00:47:55] from one person's perspective but not another's? It is a really good question. Thank you for devoting some conceptual analysis to this. Okay, so I think what has happened is you were tricked into having a one-night stand. I think both people had a one-night stand.

[00:48:15] So you really think that there was a connection there and the person ghosts you and you realize that the whole time their intention was just to have a one-night stand. I feel like you have unwittingly been victimized into one-night standiness. But what if you knew going in

[00:48:36] that that was a possibility that the person wouldn't be into continuing it but you did it anyway? So there's no sense in which you were tricked. You knew the risks and you did it anyway. And you wanted it to be more than one night.

[00:48:51] But you wanted it to be more than one and you also went into it thinking hopefully that's where this is going to go. Yeah. I think that's still a one-night stand. Yeah, I'm inclined to say that that's sort of the risk of having sex

[00:49:05] with somebody on the first night. And the way you would talk about it is you would say, yeah, it turned out to be a one-night stand. I didn't want it to be, but it was. Right. Now I assume that one-night stands have to be

[00:49:17] like reach a certain level of sexual contact to qualify. Like a hand job is not a one-night stand, right? Yeah, that's right. I think you have to get to a third base at least. Yeah. All right, my last concept. If this isn't cringe enough already,

[00:49:36] it's about to get as cringe as you could possibly imagine. It's Riz. Do you know that? I don't know what that is. You don't know Riz? No. Okay, so first of all, again, I kind of canvassed with my daughter and she suggested Riz as a good one

[00:49:58] and I said, but what if he doesn't know it? He'll know it. Well, God bless her for thinking so highly of me having my finger on the pulse of culture. Well, so Riz is the first way to just get into it

[00:50:13] is to say that it's just like game. Like if someone has Riz, they have game. They can talk to girls. Again, I'll read you my nephews. One of them says, having good Riz means you're good with girls and you get play. So you can use Riz.

[00:50:30] And this is the way that Riz is a real advance over game, right? Bad Riz means you can't talk to girls for shit. Yeah, I have Riz so I get play. Same. Nate and Liam, they're little brothers, not so much.

[00:50:43] So you can use Riz in like a sentence. So you can call someone so Rizzy. You can say he's the Riz king. He's the Riz-ler. Riz-god. Rizard of Oz. Is it right that I just looked it up and it says that it's short for charisma?

[00:51:01] Yeah, it comes from charisma. And I think like, you know, we don't really have a word that is as flexible and adaptable. So you can focus on one domain. Like when you were single, you had that conference Riz, right? You could... I see.

[00:51:21] Yeah, it can be an adjective about a person. It can be an adjective about like a specific context, you know. But is it always about being attractive? No, it's about... So this is the thing. It's like you can talk to girls. You might not be attractive.

[00:51:37] You might not even like end up like hooking up with them, but you can chat them up, you know. And that way it's like... Okay, but it is about like... It's in the domain of like sex and sexuality. Okay. Is it only to describe guys?

[00:51:52] The answer was basically yes, but maybe, you know, in the gay community or the lesbian community, they will say that somebody has Riz. I guess like it does seem very focused on the object that you have Riz with is girls or women, you know. Okay. Yeah. Right.

[00:52:13] So game is flexible in a different way because you can have game... You can have game for anything where it's like not a domain specific skill. You could say like his... His... His shoe, his sneaker game is on point.

[00:52:28] Right. So and that you wouldn't do that for Riz. Riz is very focused on like... And that way the charisma thing is right. It's like you can just charm them, you know, through whatever means. It could be looks. It could be you make fun of them

[00:52:44] and yourself in just the right way, whatever it is. When you said that this was going to be cringy, I thought you were going to say cap. No cap. No cap. I was going to propose simp, but I think we've talked about that already. Yeah.

[00:53:03] We could do a good... Like we could save that, but we could do a good like full-on conceptual analysis of simp. I feel like there's a lot more to say. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot. We won't do woke though. Stop asking us to do woke.

[00:53:21] I want to do woman. I wanted to do race, but Tamler was like, no, I'm afraid of what people will say about my opinions. That's definitely me. He was like, no. Oh God, no. What if... All right. All right. Is that it?

[00:53:45] I think we have a lot of loyal listeners after three-part episode on Blood Meridian, which is actually very good. And fuck all of you who didn't like it, but still, if you hadn't read it... Were there people? I can't imagine that there were people who...

[00:54:02] Can I say one thing about looking up concepts? When I was trying to do some research on both figuring out what concepts to talk about and then researching the concepts we're going to talk about, there's like all these slang dictionaries and articles about 15 Zoomer words

[00:54:17] that you should know or whatever. And a lot of them are just wrong. It's embarrassingly wrong. So I looked up Stan and there was this article that was definitive sounding. They were like, Stan comes from a combination of the term stalker and fan. And I was like, wait,

[00:54:36] that's just an Eminem song. It's coincidental. I think that Stan actually does come from stalker and fan. But he doesn't come from the song. Unless you mean Eminem made it. Oh, I see. Okay, this is interesting. I think it's like a backronym or whatever you would call it.

[00:54:57] It's true that nobody said Stan before the Eminem song. And I doubt that he picked that name. I mean, maybe he did. I doubt that. Yeah, right. So unless that's what happened, I think, yeah. So maybe he did. Maybe he didn't. I also feel like there was, though,

[00:55:13] a difference between that song and people saying, I stan for this or that. I can point to where it happened. I think that obviously I can never know definitively. But when Nas used the term Stan in his diss of Jay-Z,

[00:55:32] he called him a fake, a pussy, a Stan. That was, I think, the first time that the word Stan had been used in that pejorative sense. And it was such a good diss song. And that was just one of the original things.

[00:55:46] Like, oh shit, you called Jay-Z a Stan. He was basically saying, you copied my style. You always want to be like me. I remember you trying to call me. You're a phony, a fake, a pussy, a Stan. Yeah, that's a good question about like, but here's the thing.

[00:56:02] Let's say for the last thing, bonus content for our listeners. Let's say these things are true. Eminem came up with the song, which is a happy coincidence that stalker and fan make Stan. But then all this time passes. Nobody, what year is the Nas song? 2001.

[00:56:21] I still feel like though people weren't saying Stan in like the mid 2000s. Like maybe he used it in the song, but like I don't feel like people were using it in that. I think you're right, but I do think that Nas coined it to mean that.

[00:56:37] And I think that it took some root and people were saying it. And interestingly, now it's become like something that people will embrace. Like if I say I'm a Stan of MF Doom, it's just saying like I admit that I'm obsessed with MF Doom. Yeah, totally.

[00:56:55] It actually doesn't have the like original connotation, the stalker of it. It just means you're probably a little too into it. Exactly. Like I admit it. Yeah, I think it's lost its pejorative connotations in like actually almost any context these days.

[00:57:17] People don't use it to mean like stalker anymore as much as just you're not just a fan. You know, you stand for that. Yeah, right. So words can change like marriage, anti-Semite, you know. I like to stick to the original meanings.

[00:57:37] I like to be that kind of person who denies that words mean anything other than what they originally meant. Once the meaning is set, that's it. You can't, it'll never change. Exactly. Don't try to change it. Make a new word if that's what you want.

[00:57:54] Like Germans, just make up a new word. Combine random words together for your new concept. Leave the old words alone. All right. Well, that's it from us today. I'm Larry Bird,

[00:58:40] just a very bad wizard.