No Stupid Questions

If you go back, I don't know how many decades, but I think it was Nicholas Lemon's book, The Big Test, which gives you a little history of these Ivy League admissions. Lemon says, you know, there was a time in the history of these elite universities that the way you got in was what your last name was.

So Mike, there's an economist named Robert Frank, and he wrote a book called Success and Luck, Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy. And I would say the through line in a lot of these arguments, including Sandell's, is that when you get into Harvard, you think you earned it.

I was just reading a book called This Tender Land about Native American schools. And there's one child in it who is constantly sent to solitary confinement. This room. And there is a rat there in the room that becomes like his buddy. And I think it's the same idea that we need this psychological connection to something.

Did you ever read that book by Cheryl Strayed? What is it even called? She like goes on the Appalachian Trail. Is it Wild?

I mean, there's this woman and she's having some kind of crisis in her life. It's beautifully written, by the way. I was like, wow, this woman can write. And the premise of it is like she decides to hike the Appalachian Trail as some people do when they are feeling like they really need to reset their life.

Robinson Crusoe is a book written about a man who shipwrecked and his experience in this shipwreck. This sounds like the kind of book I would not want to read.

Robinson Crusoe. So I read this article in Smithsonian magazine about Alexander Selkirk, who is thought to be the guy who is the real Robinson Crusoe.

He wrote a book that I mean to be honest wasn't a great book Most books by CEOs aren't great books, but I know this book. It was like fresh restart.

That sounds about right maybe it was something like hit reset or something there you go that sounds about right.

And in the world of The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up and the world that kind of called forth Marie Kondo to write a book about how we accumulate like so much crap in our lives.

there's this piece in it where she talks about if you don't love a full book, but you just like a chapter, rip that chapter out and throw the rest of the book away.

Oh my gosh, I did read this book and I didn't remember that.

In her 2010 self-help book, The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up, Kondo says that she experimented with this method but that it didn't end up working for her and she instead recommends discarding most books in their entirety.

I didn't spend a day not eating meat after reading Charlotte's Web so I don't know what that makes me like a moral vagrant or something but look I think that Tolstoy and Fern and this Peter Singer argument I actually have to say I think it's right.

Nicolo Machiavelli was an Italian Renaissance diplomat who was infamous for his 1513 book, The Prince, a treatise on how to acquire power and keep it.

You know I've been thinking about this recently for two reasons. One is I've been reading this book by Tolstoy called A Calendar of Days and it is kind of like this daily devotional. So he apparently for the last 15 or more years of his life created this journal where he kept all his favorite quotes from Blaise Pascal and from the Bible and from other sources and I have to say something like a fourth of these quotes are about not eating meat.

Here's a Leo Tolstoy quote his own, a man can live and be healthy without killing animals for food therefore if he eats meat he participates in taking animal life merely for the sake of his appetite and to act so is immoral.

So one reason I've been thinking about vegetarianism is that every day I wake up and I read the new Tolstoy missive and a lot of the time it's about being vegetarian.

Mike probably got this phrase from Brene Brown whose renowned TED Talk on vulnerability he referenced in episode 157 In her 2018 book, Dare to Lead Brown writes that she first heard the phrase clear is kind, unclear is unkind at a 12-step meeting

Did you read Lolita by Nabokov?

You begin the book thinking this is pure evil. And at the end of the book, you're disgusted with yourself because you have spent all this time with Humbert Humbert. In his mind. And you feel some sympathy.

So I think this is a question people, I certainly asked myself when I was reading Lolita. Is there such a thing as evil? What is evil?

So I don't know if you've read her book 'Becoming'

She said it was one of the most pivotal moments in her life because she goes to her college counselor, they're talking about what she wants to do, she says she's going to apply to Princeton and her counselor says you're not Princeton material and she says I'll show you

And, you know, Michelle Obama in her book, The Light We Carry talks a lot about being an only and being a first.

One of the bestselling books if you're feeling depressed or anxious and you don't have a cognitive behavioral therapist that you can go to one-on-one, you could buy Feeling Good by David Burns.

I've heard of Eric Erickson.

I'm not familiar. Well, I'm familiar with stages of life generally, not the ones he's probably defining.

So Erik Erickson was a psychoanalyst. He's no longer alive. I think he did the work that I'm going to talk about in like the 50s.

So Erickson said the first stage and all these stages have a challenge and you have to like successfully meet the challenge to progress to the next stage.

Childhood and Society

Harry Harlow was the mastermind behind these very creative experiments on primates like monkeys.

Now I have to say that in present day harry harlow might have been canceled because He was really interested in The Nature of Love and actually his most famous article is called The Nature of Love And it's not a study of people. It's a study of infant monkeys.

Okay, so what harry harlow did was he raised these infant monkeys in Rooms in isolation of their moms.

And then there was another mom who had nothing to give you in terms of nutrition But was covered with like soft terry cloth And the question was when you observe these infant monkeys, what do they do?

Well, indeed the monkeys go to the wire mom that has the milk, you know They go and like they feed and then they go right back to the comforting mom who has nothing to give you other Their soft quote-unquote embrace and what harry harlow concluded was that we don't just need our basic needs to be met. There is a primitive Instinct for love. We want that tenderness and now we know that it's elemental

The term was popularized by journalist Amanda Ripley in her 2021 book, High Conflict, Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out.