Episode 143: Mark Linsenmayer discusses alternative models of education
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Hello and welcome to Elucidations, an unexpected philosophy podcast. I'm Matt Teichman, and with me today is Mark Linsenmeier, creator and lead host of the Partially Examined Life, Nakedly Examined Music, Pretty Much Pop, and Philosophy vs. Improv podcasts, and author of Philosophy for Teens.

He's here to discuss alternative models of education. Mark Linsenmeier, welcome. Thanks for having me, Matt. The phrase alternative models of education seems to suggest like it's alternative to the normal kind of education. So what would normal education be? And then what are some alternatives to it? Well, the main alternative that both of us have this experience with is podcasting. So that is, I've been exploring that in a few different ways with this book, with

tutoring, but the traditional model would just be going to university. You have to have an expert there explaining things to you. You have to have discussion sections where you are held to account, where you are forced to write and

And that's wonderful. I wouldn't be where I was, where I am now, if I had not done that. I got all the way through graduate school. I abandoned it during the dissertation process, as did my partial exam and like co-hosts. And that is the connecting tissue is that the three of us who started it were all in the same class at UTexas Austin.

Yeah, and all of us got out, we're in the real world, and so felt like we missed philosophy. We wanted to have an excuse to talk about some of these texts, reread some of these things. We've now been doing it for over 13 years, about the same length that you've been doing this show. Indeed. I remember when it appeared on iTunes right next to my show. Yes, and it's basically a reading group. We also knew from experience from being TAs and things back in the day that

the best way to learn something is to have to teach it. So to have to not just have a conversation, but have a conversation self-consciously for an audience. And so really the listener, the student, at least to start was...

of secondary interest to us. We didn't talk about who is the target audience? What, how much, I mean, we have ground rules. Like we don't want to just name drop. Like we wanted something that would be truly accessible. But, you know, to start, we were, some of it was that commentary on academia. The fact that we weren't in academia, we're not actually so qualified to talk about academia because we're not academics. We interact with them with some frequency now.

But as time has gone on, of course, we keep thinking about the project. I recall you talking on some past episode, maybe this was about Peter Adamson's podcast, about how you appreciated that he was actually just giving, increasing one's scholarly knowledge. Whereas we, I always found that the explicit aims of scholarship, they put up barriers, right? If the point is don't say anything that is not going to be

correct, that's not going to be, you know, what the scholarly consensus is on this figure, then you don't end up saying anything. So by talking through, by struggling, by being, letting the audience witness us struggle with these texts and

Almost never as experts. Occasionally we'll have an expert come on, but we, I guess I'm leaving it as an open question as to whether the way that I do it or the way that you do it of having experts come in and basically give their spiel, but you're peppering them and making them

clarify and really elucidating. So it's not just as if they were watching a lecture on YouTube or hearing the same spiel that this person has given on the lecture circuit again and again. You know, I've definitely had people, had somebody just on Twitter the other day saying, I think somebody had posted something saying, the way you have to learn is by writing, by being held to account. You don't learn passively. And somebody responded, well, I learned to talk passively.

By listening to the partially examined life. You know, of course, I hope I know what he means that a certain level of discourse, you know, even if you're not chiming in, maybe it's illusory. Maybe you gain, maybe you don't gain the confidence you feel like you have, but at least by encouraging this discourse.

virtual participation, that you're right. We're right there in the ears with you. And we invite guests like you have come on several episodes to participate in that. We even self-consciously would invite on people who knew even less philosophy than we did. You know, we're doing aesthetics. Let's invite on an artist, invite on a rock star. Let's get an actor when we're doing something to do with theater who probably doesn't know that much about

The philosophy we're reading is not going to be lecturing us, but can be a co-learner with us. So that I feel like we still might be unique in the space. There's probably plenty others that do this, but we are not claiming to be experts. We just read the thing. You know, we've, in fact, long past experts.

rereading the things that we did in grad school. We are now firmly, you know, as in five years in at least, into largely new territory for us and really going into as wide a range of philosophy as we can. All political perspectives, all historical eras, certainly not

That would be a never ending project. But, you know, let's splash a little of even something that a lot of people in the field might not consider philosophy or, you know. So that's a lot for you to start with. Where do you want to go from there? Yeah. Let me ask you about something that I found, which is especially when you're trying to invite people in to some field. And this is something I do a lot in my teaching is.

You really want to try to lower the barrier to entry. You want to encourage people who are feeling too insecure to whatever to participate, to just jump in and share whatever's on their mind. And to that end, maybe you kind of make yourself vulnerable and you're like, look, I'm an idiot. I don't even know what's happening in this book. Here, why don't you come help me as a way to just get interest? I found that in many situations, if you do that for long enough, it's hard to still be a non-expert.

So one example of this that I have is I used to have this series of Facebook posts that I wrote when I was first learning how to do some computer nerdy stuff. And I prefaced each one of these Facebook updates of mine with the phrase diary of a noob. It was like diary of a noob. I just learned how to change permissions on a file in Unix today or whatever, something like that. And then about three or four years in.

I'd be like, dire of a noob. And then I'd ask this like kind of in the weeds Unix question. And then eventually everyone started commenting, dude, you're not a noob. All right. These are like advanced questions. I wonder if you've found that happen with philosophy where like after 13 years of, you know, coming at some difficult material from the position of a total naive, you find yourself, you know, kind of like less naive than you were hoping you'd be.

I mean, of course, even when we started it, we had all gone through five years of grad school plus a few undergrad. Yeah, you like to downplay that, but you already pretty initiated into the philosophy profession, right? You know, some of it was because we hadn't then done it between 2000 is when I think we all dropped out pretty much to 2009, I believe is when we started. So we started sort of as old grizzled veterans, right?

Reflecting back on the days and the conclusions, often more summarial than heavily supported by specific things in the text of, you know, just what in general, you know, so we had our first episode on Eastern philosophy and did the Chuang Tzu, which was one of my favorite texts to read as an undergrad. Never had to do as in philosophy. It was like a great books of the Far East, you know, a literature course, but

had not gotten that connective tissue, but I really enjoy a lot of the insights of this book. I enjoyed the reading of it. I would recommend it to everyone. It's a wonderful text and I want it to be connected explicitly to Western philosophical concepts, right? So there's a lot of work that I'm open to be doing, but as a sort of summarial initial take, no, I'm not going to buy into anything

If you can flow like the river, then you'll reach a point of enlightenment or whatever. You know, that's common to a bunch of these Eastern traditions. I find that students like when you're talking about big, fancy, important books by old dead people, especially freshmen, you have to do a lot of work to like, you know, give them the sense that they're allowed to disagree with the book. And I think disagreeing with a book is crucial to really absorbing it.

The analogy I sometimes draw here is, you know, be like if you looked at a musical score and didn't even try to imagine what it would sound like or, you know, nobody ever tried to play it. I mean, in a way, like engaging with a philosophical argument, kind of like taking out a piece of sheet music and playing an instrument is being like, I don't know. Hmm. Does this argument hold water? Let me try some objections out of it. What would the author say? You know, thinking about whether somebody got something right is in a way, you know, I feel like doing like the thing you're supposed to be doing with it.

Well, and you can always go back to a text. So yes, absolutely.

Irreverence was one of our, especially in our first years, was a hallmark of it. You know, I think we got an early iTunes review like, if you want to hear a podcast where they call Socrates an asshole, this podcast is for you. You know, we could probably remove the explicit tag from our podcast at this point. Now it's just, I want to learn new things and I'm open to the text. You know, every text is a well. And what I want listeners to know is that

What's important for your life is what you are able to say about it. If you're just forever in a state of reverence and I don't feel like I can express an opinion about it, and then you don't, you're not really engaging. It's exactly what you said, that even if you're doing it in a semi-ignorant, off-the-cuff way, you can always go back to the well for some more. So as a philosopher, as a perpetual student,

If you corner me and say, well, what's your view? What is your metaethical view? What is your, you know, I could come up with something that's sort of the best, but I do retain a sense of humility of, I'm always happy to go back to the well. Like I'm sure there's something more that Kant has to teach me. I'm sure there's something more that Plato has to teach me, even though I soundly reject his otherworldliness and anything having to do with the theory of forms. But it's so interesting. You know, these things are just,

fun, even if they're purely idea games. And it's so much richer a thing to engage with and grapple with as a life activity than whatever's on TV now. Like I do a podcast about that too. So I'm not dismissing that. I think it's important to examine our intake of junk or, you know, why do we

find this enjoyable. But I really see, you know, I'm so grateful that people preserved all these texts that I can get mostly for free. And, you know, that we just have such a glut of information. It's just, it's a feast that I want to

introduce people to and make them feel like they can get into. So back to your original question, the alternative model of education, I mean, this is not, I'm not saying the university is bad. People shouldn't go to school. Of course, if you're in a position that you can devote a few years of your life to this,

That's great. I don't know at this point, you know, maybe I would have just gotten a computer science degree, you know, for job purposes. It's only been recently that I've been able to sort of make a living through doing this thing, philosophy and related activities. But that's not a realistic goal. And there just needs to be a way for even people who went through. Most of our listeners, I think, are somebody that maybe took a philosophy class in college, right?

And they don't have any outlet for that now. And so going to the podcast world for things like what we do and our contemporaries do here is a way to scratch that itch. And, you know, hopefully we are not doing damage, that we are not, you know, there's sort of a hierarchy of...

what things do you consider intellectual or merely pseudo-intellectual? That, you know, I think as philosophers, that you might think that somebody who just watches a lot of TED Talks, there's two ways to take that. One is, I'm so glad that you're doing something intellectual. I'm so glad...

that you were engaging your mind and keeping it alive. And this world would be so much better if everybody was not just worrying about their jobs. And, you know, if we all had the mental bandwidth and, you know, the privilege to be able to spend time this way at the same time, oh, I wish you could have some actual philosophy in your life so you could be more critical about these things and, you know, even discover this whole world of,

ideas and patience. So it's great that people are getting into that. I think probably insofar as people in the profession actually pay attention to the partial exam in life, they probably have a similar ambivalent contempt for what we do, that we are on the one hand introducing all this stuff to people,

Maybe not teaching it in the same way that if we just got an expert in this, you know, let's get a scholar every single episode to come on and really give, you know, the definitive scholarly consensus on here. You know, it's not as fun for us. We do it time and again. But again, sort of back to would that feel more like watching TV as opposed to being part of a conversation? I'm not sure.

So the idea here seems to be that podcasts are an alternative form of education. I think it's interesting that different podcasters describe what they do in very different ways. Some of them describe what they do as education. Some of them don't. Peter Adamson, I think, is an interesting example. He describes what he does as entertainment as opposed to education, which I don't think a single one of his listeners would. They would all say education.

But he's slummy. He's sort of, you know, he is an academic and he's, you know, has that as his day job and understands that to really teach somebody, you do have to make them write a paper and you have to provide them feedback on it. And so doing this additional stuff is, yeah, for people like us who are philosophy fans, it is entertainment. And that is a distinction that I'm interested in breaking down in some way because educating for what, right?

You know, you hear a lot of justifications of the humanities or, you know, why humanity should continue to get funding is what teaches you critical thinking that can make you a good lawyer. It can make you. But ultimately, people who major in the humanities have high average incomes. Yes. It has to just be a quality of life issue that if I have a problem with the traditional model of education is that it ends there.

is that you do what you're going to do. And so many people, you know, maybe even that got dissertations or something, and then they go on and they work for a computer company, you know, that doesn't, you know, it was like they were just working for a piece of paper.

Another thing that struck me was that you're the first person I've ever heard use the phrase perpetual student, not as pejorative. So every other time I've heard that phrase, it's been like, my daughter's on her seventh year of college. And is she ever going to graduate? Jeez, she's never going to get a job. Oh, my God. It's just a mooch. Whereas it seems like you're sort of reclaiming that phrase. Is that right? Like, you know, do you think that there's a sense in which, you know, all of us want to be perpetual students and that indulging that side to ourselves is an important thing?

I mean, certainly as an empirical matter, it's not true that all of us want to be a perpetual student. But, you know, there's a few different issues here. But one is just this, my favorite social topic to talk about, which is new work. You know, the future of the job system, the fact that our economy is

should be something that exists to serve us, right? To allow us to fulfill our material needs. And then as Marx would say, you know, we can fish during the day and then philosophize the next day. You know, it doesn't even have to just be at night. I'm not getting the Marx quote right. But the having, it is certainly one form, you know, of course I am a

an artist at heart, right? I wanted to be a rock star. That's going to grad school was my day job was my, my money gig was my, I'm doing something while I try to get famous with my music, which of course I knew even at the time, there was not a lot of chance of that happening. Much higher chance of getting a rock star. In fact, well, and I also knew at the time that getting a job after grad school was a

a miserable prospect and was going to lead to me living in some part of the country that I didn't necessarily want to live in and creating problems with my family, you know, my relationships and things. And so it's,

it was not entirely out of principle that I decided not to finish the dissertation. It was, you know, I had a kid and had moved on to other, but it was a long plan of like, I, at this point, I wish I had just gone ahead and written the damn thing so that I could have those letters next to my name and publishers would, would, it would open some doors, you know, be miserable for another six months. And then you have, you know, this thing that you can carry around with you, whether you want to go into academia or not.

but that is certainly not the way I was thinking about at the time. I was, yeah, very much anti-rat race, anti this whole status hierarchy of building yourself up to be somebody that is...

employable for a high wage so that I could be managing something by the time it so happens that my day job, my writing was strong enough that I sort of am in that position anyway, but it's not the kind of managerial thing that would control my life. Like I can do it very few hours a week as a way of balancing. So this, I feel like

is a great model for how you should try to balance your life is, yes, you have to do something that makes money, but also you should pursue your calling, whatever that may be, art, academics, blah, blah, blah. If you can make money off that, so much the better.

And of course, there are a lot of people that are not in a position to be able to do that. And that's a basic unfairness of our society. But whatever you need to do to keep your brain alive and feel like you're doing something actually worthwhile with your time as opposed to merely racking up a bigger bank account. You alluded to the new work movement and Frithjof Bergman is RIP, someone who's been on both of our shows recently.

And at least when he came on to Lucidations, he was really gung-ho for the idea that you should just be like overflowing with joy about the work you do every day. It should be the thing that fulfills you. And I'm inclined to agree. The undeniable fact that you just mentioned...

that not everyone is in a position to make that happen, notwithstanding. I do think that makes sense as an ideal to aim for and that it can sometimes be more within our reach than we think, or at least the opportunity to see the deep significance and interest of our everyday work can be maybe more available than we sometimes think. So I guess what I wanted to ask you is...

Do you see that as anything other than a distant possibility for 0.0001% of the population to have this like sort of tight integration between the various things they're doing? Or do you think that the economic circumstances we live under sort of force this partitioning of like Monday to Friday I do this and then the weekends and the evenings I do that and then I raise my kids. I don't know when exactly, etc., etc.?

And returning to this, I had quite a bit of engagement with Fritjof of the New Work Movement. I think I connected you with him maybe to get him on the show. He was one of my mentors in undergrad at University of Michigan, and I had not had any interest in political philosophy, social philosophy really then.

about that. I was more into high level metaphysics or aesthetics. Fritjof was coming, was a, was a Nietzsche scholar, started as very much against being a scholar, like sort of gave up on philosophy in favor of actually trying to create political change or at least do the ideas part. But he was, though he was active with a lot of, you know, real working populations in a way that I do not have the energy or extroversion to, to, to engage in. He wanted me to do that. Uh,

He had a number of elements to his plan of how things would have to come out. One of this was sort of the high tech self providing, which he thought that the economy would slowly provide for us. And the Internet enables us to do a lot of things for ourselves and fulfill a lot of our needs. He went so far as to, oh, we should all go to our local makerspace and

What would it be to like make your own vacuum cleaner? And right now, yeah, you could, if that is your calling, if that is your hobby, become an electronics tinkerer. But that's not supposed to be the goal. It's supposed to be like a thing that you can use to get to the goal, which is to have all this time for yourself to pursue your passions. And so it really, yes, at this point, it is something that

Not that many people can do, but this whole great quitting, the whole that we've heard about, if, as you say, more people might have this, have some ability to do this. And the thing, of course, that Nietzsche was worried about and that Fritjof was worried about is nihilism, is not finding nihilism.

When the job, the robots take all our jobs, then what are we going to do with ourselves? Most people are so- When they start making podcasts for us. They're so afraid of that happening. Anything to keep unemployment from going up. And Fritjof's big revolutionary thought was-

embrace that and prepare for it. Not just as individuals. This should be a national conversation. And at least now we have things like even the people think that Andrew Yang was a kook,

But that basic freedom dividend, you know, that would enable people not to take the crappiest job that comes along, but to sort of hold out for something. Or maybe if everybody gets it, then work part time at the crappy thing, but then have half of your time to pursue whatever it is you want. Maybe it's an entrepreneurial venture. Maybe it is something that can make money. But so, yes, education is important.

a key attraction, education and making art. And I don't even separate those very much because being, of course, a lot of, well, this is a separate issue, but I would think if you are a sensitive artist of any type, then being a consumer, being a learner about that should be a key part of your being. So,

And these things can even be very indirectly related so that being a songwriter who wants to learn more about philosophy for, among other things, to be able to write deeper lyrics or something, that's a legitimate way of constructing your life, keeping all the different parts of your brain and your personality alive. So yes, you can feel, again, now that I sort of live this life that he has recommended because I'm able to

do my day job and it makes enough per hour and I have family support and things. In other words, my wife has a better, a more traditional job than I do and am successful enough with the podcasting that, you know, between all those things, we can still live comfortably. That's an acceptable thing. So everybody really has to craft their own path, but it's, you know, whatever percentage of that you can scrabble together at this point, I would love at least that to be on people's minds as a

as a goal. And I know that's coming from, again, a position of privilege of being able to have this as a possibility. And one might think, well, instead we, I don't know what the alternative, I should be picking up the slack so that more people can engage in this kind of thing. But at least I feel like what I'm doing is,

in giving back through, you know, making the podcast largely available for free, et cetera, is at least the best way I can see to connect and help people in that way. I can't necessarily relieve their burdens or give them the time to listen to our podcasts, but I can help be one of the things that puts that out there as a lure and a goal.

My brain keeps going back to the cranky person I imitated earlier who was like, oh, these perpetual students, they can't figure out what they want to do with their life. What are they even doing? You know, the person who uses the phrase perpetual student pejoratively. It strikes me that like maybe what you've done is

in the work that you've talked about is answer that person. Because what you've done is kind of taken the activity of being a lifelong learner and, you know, actually you've gone productive with it. Cause like not everybody who's whatever interested in reading books and, and you know, a voracious consumer of this stuff makes a product that they put out there, which may be in some way or other, they actually make an income off of and, you know, built it into a business. So,

So it seems to me that like, maybe you've answered that cranky person by saying, if you're passionate enough about something, like maybe that is itself a form of productivity that you were overlooking. You know, I'm not, I'm torn between forever trying to give justifications of the benefits. Oh, isn't this beneficial to me? Isn't this beneficial to listeners? Shouldn't everyone have a dose of this in your life?

And also feeling like one of the things that philosophy can teach you and the patience of philosophy is not everything has to be practical, just the way we were just talking about how people justifying funding for the humanities have these practical justifications, but...

The way you described your earlier episodes too had that paradoxical feel to it. Like, hey, you're recording it. You're putting it out for an audience. But also we don't really care about the listener. We're just going to have the conversation we want to have. I feel like there's that same element of like by not trying to please anybody, you put out something that actually has a greater likelihood of actually pleasing people. That makes sense. Luckily, it is true that in philosophy, one of the major things you learn, I feel like is that you need to be able to

write something down clearly. In fact, Fritjof explained this. Like, if you can't explain your big theory to a friend of yours who doesn't know philosophy, then you don't know what you're talking about. If you really sit down with somebody and look at a particular sentence of a book together and you read aloud and what do you think it means? Well, what do you think? Like, probably you can come to some sort of agreement that this models a productive way of

That is an alternative to maybe a philosophy podcast that might just come in and we don't have a text. We're just going to talk about a topic. And they might say, well, we have to define our terms. We have to be very specific about our terms. And I think that that is a foolish starting point because, right, coming up with the definitions is,

It's already giving away half the answer, right? You have to – the definitions are often something that has to arise out of the discussion. Now, you don't want to – Previous failed attempts to formulate them. We don't want to misunderstand each other and I mean one thing by soul and you mean something else. Of course, we have to contextually, but that's what reading a sentence out of a book and talking about what it means, that's what that does. Yeah. You know, you're always coming in the middle. It's like reading a comic book. Yeah.

you're not going to start with Spider-Man number one and read through 40, 50 years of Spider-Man. A few people are that crazy. I've started some of those things. So the way that I've tried to counter that is when I started with Partially Examined Life, there was actually an active contempt for questions like, well, what would Descartes think about what Hegel is saying here? Now I find that kind of thing fun. Yeah. But at the same time, I don't want that to be

the thing that we're musing about and turns into a barrier for entry to new people. I'd rather have people like, who cares what they, I want to be, uh, as my cohost, uh, Dylan has said, he would rather be a, a fifth rate Descartes than a first rate Descartes scholar. Um, and all those things dull over time, you know, I was sort of ready. No offense, Descartes scholars, please still come on my show. And the thing that I, I,

Yes, use the tools, learn to speak the languages, but retain an independence and having a sense of vulnerability and being willing to put yourself out there and speak out of ignorance, outside of your comfort zone. Like that is just something that from the very start we had to be comfortable with. And we'd have maybe an academic come on the show and we kind of try to push them to like talk about something. But

Well, I'd have to give that more study. And even now, like the idea of doing a political commentary show or something seems horrifyingly scary to me because, you know, I don't know any more than you guys do. You know, I read the same newspapers you do. I don't want to just be it. But if it was something that I felt like I have a unique enough voice that it needs to get out there, then I would go ahead with that. And I've gotten come to the point with

You know, by taking this in the Pretty Much Pop podcast, which was a spinoff of the Partially Examined Life. We'd done a couple of Partially Examined Life episodes on Philip K. Dick or other vertigo, some films and other pop culture topics of maybe I just need to acknowledge, you know, not just this respectable stuff that I spend my time with, you know, reading Hegel and Descartes. I need to engage, like, why do I imbibe all the crap that I imbibe? And

More so, and this is an area that I remain ambivalent about, why do other people engage in, you know, let's cover reality competition TV shows, something I didn't really have any interest in. But let me try to sort of do a semi-sociological analysis of this, get it from the inside and the outside. What is the appeal of this thing? What human need does it fulfill? Why is it something that people could get really excited about and want to put so much of their time into?

how do we balance our intellectual diet? Is the ideal life as Aristotle thought to engage in the highest level of philosophical conversation in pursuit of virtue, in pursuit of, you know, I clearly have a more playful approach to,

I will play with bad ideas. I will play with these ideas like the very out-of-date stuff of Aristotle's and Plato that I now find fascinating, like old-style biology or something. Something that I would not have wanted to cover in the early days of the show because...

I just, my patience ever grows, you know, that I'm now covering theological thinkers that I wouldn't have had the tolerance for in the early days whatsoever. But now I just find, wow, this is fascinating that these people, you know, built these

monumental metaphysical edifices. And how different is that from the other things people consume in other parts of their lives? So that's been, you know, the guiding thread through these different podcasts is just picking at different parts of the intellectual diet. Yeah, so I'm fully in support of this project of...

Well, varying your intellectual diet and your, let's call it aesthetic diet, that is to say the media you consume. The more variety, the merrier. It's something that's happened to, I think, all of us doing Philosophy Podcast. To you, to me, to Peter Adamson. We start off thinking, all right, this is going to be super broad. It's going to be as broad as possible. We're going to cover all philosophy, blah, blah, blah.

you know, 10 years out, suddenly we're like, oh my God, if I had any idea how broad broad really was 10 years ago, I'd be like quaking in my boots, but it's great. What are some other areas of life besides intellectual pursuits and pop culture that you've seen fit to incorporate into your life? So the most recent podcast that I launched last summer is called Philosophy Versus Improv.

that I had gained a taste for what's called long-form improv by listening to some other podcasts. One called Hello from the Magic Tavern is one that I spent quite a lot of time with. And I...

found this whole new group of Chicago improv people that were all really smart and really fast and really funny. And, you know, being a comedian of some sort was like my original artistic envision. You know, when I was very into Bill Cosby at age six, it's very easy to get a view of the world of stand-up comedy through podcasts. You know, some of the most famous podcasts are comedians talking to comedians. I'd sort of gotten a view of that. And I wanted to

But improv actually seemed something that was more accessible. And long form improv is not gimmicky in the way that the whose line is it anyway thing is, you know, give me a situation, give me a, you know, let's play these comedy sports games. That always kind of repelled me and seemed not funny to me very much at all. But this sort of pure creativity thing,

is something that I wanted to explore further. In fact, I've had a long running, something that I've sort of relaunched this summer. I have a little chicken puppet that I would use with my kids when they were little, who talks like the Queen of England and sets itself up as being a wise person and then just gives nonsensical improvised answers to various questions. So you can look for Ask Chickie on YouTube if you're interested in that. But

You know, I knew I wanted some more... Most links to it. Yes. There's this episode. There's more formal... I wanted more formal training in that. So I found this fellow, Bill Arnett, who's the head of the Chicago Improv Studio. He'd been a frequent guest on Hello from Magic Tavern. And we started this...

format that I devised that's semi-gamified that I come in with a philosophy lesson. He comes in with an improv lesson. We don't know beforehand what they're going to be. And we try to teach them to each other simultaneously. We do not, I mean, it's sort of stabilized very quickly into, we're going to talk a little, then we're going to do a little scene, then we're going to talk some more and we're going to do another scene. And we try to guess by the end what the point was that I'm not just going to teach them right out, right? You know, here's the philosophy lesson.

We started then bringing guests on. So this is actually my way of having academics on that I'm starting to do this, an academic that has just written a book. Usually there's not room for Partially Examine Life to talk about that because we're just talking about Hegel and Descartes and ancient stuff. You know, it has to be a major league philosopher who was already world famous for us to give them the time of day. But here's a new format that I can have them come on. We can also get...

whatever show business people we know to come on as guests. So we have them participate in this game and then somebody wins at the end. You know, which lesson is the thing that you're going to walk away with and we'll make the guest judge or we have some fictional situations to sort of resolve these things to see how well we thought it went. But so that's me rethinking, you know, how to tutor a non-philosopher.

You know, that I'm trying to bring in a whole new audience of people that would be lost by the partial exam in life. I'm trying to kind of start over from scratch and have very modest goals and just try to get them. You know, my co-host is very practical, very suspicious of...

distinctions that don't make a difference, you know, a scientific minded, you know, a very typical, smart, non-philosopher. And so starting that from scratch has been very rewarding. I've been doing some tutoring of non-philosophers. It's the same effect. We also have not talked yet about my book, Philosophy for Teens. Now, this is something that I wrote on commission, right? Somebody had an outline and they contacted me and said, do you want to write this? And I

I said, okay. And it was, you know, so I'm jamming my work into their very limiting format in terms of word count. But it, you know, it's a short book. Nothing could be, I couldn't use any terminology that would not be understandable to a 12 year old. So that's very challenging. I would have to summarize, you know, really get to the nubbin of what somebody's view in a particular area is in writing.

A hundred words. I think you pulled it off really well. The number of philosophical arguments covered per paragraph is just pretty stunning in this book. You know, something like 180 pages, you're able to cover an absolute ton of the canon across every different subject matter. And I got to say, so I was kind of resentful at first or felt very constrained, felt like I can't write the way that I want to write. But I think the result, you know, having a...

a format that was sort of imposed by

I'm sure they knew something about philosophy. I wasn't allowed to talk to the people that came up with the outline. Wow. Very mysterious. It was a weird organizational structure, but I had an editor. Can you talk to them even now? No, I don't know who came up with the outline. I, you know, it was a bot, definitely a bot, but they came in with like, you should mention this whole giant list of philosophers. And here's the chapter titles that it has to go on. Metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, logic, aesthetics, and political philosophy in that order.

As if market research has shown that those kids, they want to hear about metaphysics first. Yeah, these companies are really into like data analytics, right? For marketing, yes. Yes, they determined that there was a gap in the market and this is something that could fill it. And I'm actually, the more feedback that I've gotten about it, the more pleased I am that I went through this process because as undisciplined a person,

a thinker and writer as I am, and so many books that have started and abandoned or, you know, not having the rigors of a publisher parish lifestyle, or even any academic presses that are leaping at me saying, put out your book, having somebody actually say, you're going to do this in this many weeks, and we're going to pay you up front for it. And you're going to have this thing that has your name on it that you get to show around forever. Like it was a great

a very unconventional way for a, a philosopher to put out a book. But I think actually the result is pretty rewarding, hopefully for all concerned. Absolutely. Yeah. I think, um, I highly recommend the book to anyone who would like a taste of a little bit of everything. Um, and I think it goes back to what I was saying earlier about how, you know, um, if you position yourself as a newbie amateur for long enough, eventually, um,

You know, you wake up one day, it doesn't all happen at once, but you're kind of an expert. And I do think you're a good person to write this book, you know, in part because of kind of what we've been talking about this whole episode. The fact you've been doing a podcast for 13 years in which you get to cover whatever you want to cover in many ways puts you in a better position than a lot of philosophy professors to really achieve the level of breadth that you want to cover.

you do here you know philosophy professors are strongly strongly encouraged some would say coerced into you know putting all their time and energy into something very specialized they don't necessarily always have the freedom to teach whatever they want to read whatever they want to do a reading group with Seth and Wes and Dylan on some random thing just because they think it might be cool I think the book kind of showcases you know what you and I have been talking about this

of being the perpetual student and continually opening yourself up to new things. It puts you in a position to write a book that covers many things. Yeah, and even the process of writing it, they were adamant that there had to be

Western and Eastern thinkers covered. I was going to ask you about that. It was cool. In all of the areas. Like, what do I know about Eastern aesthetics? So I just had to do a lot of very quick research. But also you cover that on your show, right? I mean, like, there's not that many graduate level philosophy seminars on the Garjuna, but you had an episode on the Garjuna really early on. And there's tons of examples of that.

Yeah. And of course, Peter Adamson's History Philosophy podcast and his India offshoot were very helpful for getting into that. And some of that I had experience of, you know, in my great books, The Far East Course, that I had done basic Confucianism and Taoism and Buddhism in China. And then, you know, some of the things in India. But that's even been a fairly recent thing. Just in the last year, we had Stephen Phillips on the show and

Actually, that was the first philosophy course I taught or was a TA for at University of Texas was his introduction to philosophy using only non-Western figures. And it turned out it was pretty much the same content that would be in a Western philosophy. Yeah. But it's just like somebody...

in India. I want to know what it is to know stuff. Something like, yes, the Cartesian code, you know, something, the same skeptical doubts and the same. I want to know why do we look at art? Arguments for the existence of God. And yeah,

I've only scratched the surface of the Eastern canon, and I don't even know if our show is the best way to do it. The interest across all of our hosts is not as strong. I think, you know, there's some... They'll sort of let me do one episode on that a year, is what it maxes out at. That's like the analog of the faculty committee that you have to appease at meetings. Yep, yep. Everybody's got their interests and their things that they... Everybody's got their provost they've got to answer to. ...would love to never read anything in this area again. Yeah.

Mark Linson Meyer, thanks so much for flailing in the water with me for an hour here. It's been a delight. Thank you. The Elucidations blog has moved. We are now located at elucidations.now.sh. On the blog, you can find our full back catalog of previous episodes. And if you have any questions, please feel free to reach out on Twitter at elucidationspod. Thanks again for listening.

Thank you.