Against Habit: Recent Episodes

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Ludwik Zamenhof was born in 1859 in a small city in Poland. His family was Jewish, and the area he grew up in also had factions of Germans, Russians, and Poles, all of whom mutually distrusted one another. During his childhood, Zamenhof developed a theory: these groups would never get along without a common, neutral language to communicate with people in the other groups. Zamenhof considered the possibility of using existing languages for this purpose—such as Latin and Greek—but decided that the cost to learn them was too high. So he invented his own.

Esperanto, as Zamenhof’s language came to be known, sought to take familiar Indo-European root words and cast them in a language without verb conjugations, cases, gender, or any of the elements which make a language like German or Russian so difficult to learn. He was nineteen when he first unveiled the language to the public. Zamenhof’s goal was not just to create a language that was easy to learn, but to create a language that would put the different peoples of Europe on a footing of mutual disadvantage—and therefore, he hoped, equality.

As far as invented languages go, Esperanto has enjoyed more success than most. You can study it on Duolingo. It’s a staple of popular culture; for example, I recently saw in an episode of the TV show Billions, where it is being learned by the character Michael Wagner. But mostly, this success has been on the linguistic front. People find the language interesting. But it hasn’t been especially useful as a basis for utopia.

In a way, Zamenhof’s Esperanto is a microcosm of the system of values more generally known as “humanism.” There are many shades of humanism, but at their core lies a belief that understanding, connection, and even mutual admiration among different kinds of people is not only possible but paramount to a meaningful life. If we could all converse with one another, understand one another—then maybe we’d stand a chance of constructing the kind of society we all want to live in.

But while Esperanto embodies the aspirations of humanism, it also is emblematic of its tensions. In theory, getting people to celebrate the many ways of being human is an ideal worth striving for. In practice, it is a difficult one to achieve. When it comes to the ways of being humans, what all humans have in common is that they prefer their own.

The fundamental impulse of humanism is to grapple with this tension, and it is the subject of the latest book by author Sarah Bakewell. In it, she surveys 700 years of humanist thought—with each thinker bringing a personal perspective to the shared problem of what it means to value human life and society in an abstract sense. The experience of reading Bakewell’s book is to hear the echoing conversation of the ages. One of the ways of reading humanism is to see it as a means of participating in this conversation. It’s a notion I think is rather beautiful.

Her book is Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Enquiry and Hope. It’s available now.

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The Person and the Situation is a book by social psychologists Lee Ross and Richard Nisbett, originally published in 1991. The argument made by Ross and Nisbett was that context matters. Human beings don’t behave in a vacuum, unaffected by the circumstances of society, history, and culture. The job of the social psychologist is to understand both the person and the situation. Without a proper appreciation of the larger context, it’s impossible to know what to make of any given observation about human behavior.

But a limitation of the project set out by Ross and Nisbett is that social psychology has always had a limited ability to study “situations.” It is, after all, psychology—not anthropology. Psychologists tend not to study humans in their natural situations; they try to recreate paired down versions of them in the lab. It’s not the same thing.

This is something Ross and Nisbett, I think, appreciated. Nisbett went on to publish a book called The Geography of Thought, about how people from the West think differently from people in Asia. But another way to approach this problem is not from the psychology side, at least not directly—to start not with the person, but the situation itself. This is what I like about really good travel writing.

The job of a travel writer is similar to the job of the anthropologist. It is to go to a place and get a feel for what people are up to there. Then to come back and report to the rest of us what it is you observed. But the problem with ethnographies by anthropologists is that they’re usually not that fun to read, obsessed as they are with kinship structures and long-standing epistemological debates within their field. Good travel writing has the same incisive edge as an informal ethnography—and has the benefit of being much more engaging. Good travel writing is an exploration of the person via the situation.

For my money, the best author doing this kind of travel writing today is Erika Fatland. Erika is the author of three travel books, including Sovietistan, about the post-Soviet states of central Asia; The Border, about the countries bordering Russia from North Korea and Mongolia to Finland and Norway; and High, about the countries of the Himalayas. She speaks six languages, including Russian, and is currently adding more. She also trained as a social anthropologist for her master’s degree, which probably goes a ways toward explaining where that incisive edge came from.

Erika’s approach to travel writing incorporates her own travel experiences with deep readings of a country’s historical, cultural, and economic circumstances. More than other travel writers I’ve read, she relies on her conversations with people she meets in the places she goes—usually finding at least one common tongue between them—and uses these interview as a foundation for her own observations. In this conversation, we talk about the point of travel, Erika’s formative experiences and how she became a travel writer, her approach to writing, how her relationship with Russia has changed through the years, and some of her favorite (and least favorite) countries she’s visited.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit codykommers.substack.com/subscribe

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Denis Dutton was a philosopher of art and media. He was born in the US but moved to New Zealand when he was 40, where he became interested in Oceanic Art. This interest led him to spend time in the village of Yentchenmangua on Papua New Guinea. Over the course of his ethnographic work, he began to get to know the locals.

One day, Dutton noticed that his friends in the village seemed down. He asked why. They explained that the tourist numbers had dropped, and they were trying to figure out ways to get more people to visit. Dutton was asked if he had any ideas.

He sort of shrugged, then off the cuff suggested fire-walking. The villagers had no idea what that was. Dutton explained. They asked him if he would teach them.

Dutton had never done a fire-walk of his own before, but he understood the principle from his friends in New Zealand. Coal is a poor conductor of heat. So, in theory, one can scuttle across a bed of hot coals without getting burned if one moves with sufficient haste. The never day he gave it a shot. And it worked. The villagers soon adopted it as their own local ritual, even taking measures to jealously guard it from neighboring tribes.

Dutton later asked them, “So what if some anthropologist visits your village in the future, inquiring about the origin of the fire-walking ritual? What are you going to say?” One of them responded: “We’ll say that we’ve always done it this way. Our fathers did it, and their fathers before them, and ultimately our ancestors learned how to do it from a white god.”

This story is from Ritual, the recent book by Dimitris Xygalatas. And I think it illustrates something crucial about the way we’re used to thinking about rituals—that they’re a kind of cultural excess: there for arbitrary reasons, not serving any specific purpose. Aren’t all rituals like the one the villagers got from Dutton? At some point, someone just made them up, right? Rituals can seem antiquated, and us more-informed moderns are better off leaving them in the rearview mirror.

But Dimitris’s work shows this isn’t the case. Rituals are useful for at least three separate reasons. In this conversation, we cover how research—including Dimitris’s own—shows that rituals reduce anxiety, are crucial for social cohesion, and are an important source of meaning.

Unlike most behavior, rituals aren’t a means to an end. They aren’t about achieving a goal or desired outcome. We do them for their own sake—because that’s how things are done, how our forebears did them. And it is precisely this lack of immediate utility that makes them integral to meaning and identity. They separate our way of doing things from everyone else’s. And, as Dimitris argues, we’re probably worse off in the modern world for our willingness to shave off the trappings of life’s rituals in our relentless pursuit of increased efficiency.

[This interview has been edited and condensed. Full conversation available via the podcast.]

So to start off with: What is a ritual? Why do they matter?

If you ask 100 anthropologists, you might get 100 different definitions of ritual. As far as I’m concerned, a key aspect of ritual is that it’s either gold-demoted [that is, we don’t know why someone does it after it’s already happened] or it is causally-opaque. And what that means is that when people perform their rituals, even the most meaningful rituals, when you ask them why, very often they don’t have a ready explanation for you. They’ll say, “oh, well, we just do them.”*

But even when they do offer some reason for doing those rituals—let’s say we perform this ritual for healing purposes—there is no causal connection between the actions undertaken and the purported outcome. So if I try to heal somebody by chanting, we don’t see any physical causality between the movements of my mouth and what’s going on in that person’s body. So that is a key characteristic of ritual.

An additional characteristic is that rituals create special spaces and special events. They sort of create the domain of the sacred. And this is what differentiates ritual, for example, from habits. So habits might be the flip side of a ritual. I take my coffee every morning, I brush my teeth twice a day, and some say this is my morning ritual when I brush my teeth. But I would say no, because this has a specific purpose to clean your teeth, and the actions you undertake are connected to that outcome. But if you were to just wave your toothbrush in the air with the belief that it will cleanse your teeth, or no belief at all, now that would be a ritual.

At first glance, rituals by definition seem utterly pointless. But the fact that they are found in every human society we’ve ever known, and the fact that so many people around the world find them deeply meaningful, I would dare say all people find them deeply meaningful. Even if they don’t realize it, if they think of religious rituals. But then when we get into other things like your wedding or your birthday celebration or a funeral you attend, all of us find meaning in ritual. So this for me was the big puzzle. When you say the word “ritual,” sometimes it feels, I don’t know, maybe “antiquated” is not quite the right term—but something a primitive society would engage in. But us modern urbanites, you know, we sort of moved beyond that. We do things because they have real effects. How do you think about what it means to perform a ritual in daily life in the modern world? And perhaps what are some of the examples of rituals that you study that your average person would connect with?I think it would be tempting but misguided to think that we no longer have as many rituals as people used to have because we live in an era of technological progress and secularization.

The misconception stems from the fact that because ritual has been such a successful mental and social tool for religion—to the extent that we come to think of those two things as synonymous, but they’re not. Ritual predates religion and it extends far beyond religion. And I would argue that our lives today are just as ritualized as they’ve ever been. We have to be careful with our definitions here—but based on my definition, ritual is everywhere.

In the modern world, we engage in handshakes, and we raise our glasses to attend birthday parties, and we have college graduations, and in many parts of the world we have military parades, and in our militaries we have marching and the raising of the flag and so on and so forth. There are countless examples if we look at how people behave in sports stadiums or in political rallies or at rock concerts or in their everyday life our lives are in ritual, from birth to death.

So the way I see it, there’s a human need for ritual. Rituals provide comfort for us, they help us soothe our anxieties, they help us connect with other people, and this need is a constant. What changes are the forms. And in fact, what you see is that the more organized religion retreats in the West perhaps today, the more people seek it in other domains, and they come up with other kinds of rituals—perhaps of the kind that you find in Burning Man or other festivals or in the area of sports or other organized institutions, even the workspace.

“Those things are important in a ritual context precisely because those actions are arbitrary and have no inherent meaning. It allows them to take whatever meaning we wish.”

Let’s get into the mechanism here. What is it that makes ritual meaningful? What is going on there that takes this ostensibly useless activity and gives it this really fundamental sense of how we create meaning in our lives?This is a complicated answer, because the reason rituals are so successful is that they’re able to trigger a whole host of psychological mechanisms.

One of the ways in which rituals do things for us is that they help us soothe anxiety. And this is a very old idea that anthropologists have proposed over a century ago. For a very long time, this was simply either taken for granted or at least it went untested. But now we have evidence for it. We know, for example, from studies—including my own studies—that when we put people in a room and we stress them out, their behaviors become more ritualistic; they become more repetitive. And then when we look at what happens when they perform these behaviors, even in a decontextualized setting, when we have them engage in repetitive movements, we see that anxiety levels drop. We can see this both in their minds (their anxiety levels as being lower, they feel less stressed) and in their bodies. Their electrodermal activity decreases, their heart rate variability increases, and so on and so forth, their cortisol levels drop.

We also see it in real life rituals. We’ve done studies in Mauritius where we measured people’s stress levels as they performed rituals in a religious temple, a Hindu temple, compared to a control group, and we see that after performing those rituals, they have lower anxiety levels, both psychological and biological.

How do the rituals do that? What is the mechanism?

We have proposed that this is related to the way our brain works and the way our brain constantly seeks patterns in the world. Our brain makes predictions all of the time. Before I finish a sentence, you have a certain prediction in your mind about what my next sentence is going to be. When we drive, we make predictions about where every other car in our own car will be in a few seconds from now and so on and so forth. It’s a very efficient cognitive architecture that I think will inevitably evolve given evolutionary potential. That’s where advanced intelligence will move towards. And if we ever have true artificial intelligence, it would have to work in the same way. A byproduct of this architecture is that when we don’t have the capacity, when our environment does not allow us to make successful predictions, we get very stressed. The thing we experience as stress, perhaps more than anything else, is uncertainty. And this is why you see that those domains of life that have high stakes and high uncertainty are full of virtualization. If you go to a casino, you will see that gamblers are notorious for their superstitions rituals. If you go to a sports stadium you see the same. If you go to a war zone again you see the same. And ritual provides structure, it is predictability. When I do a ritual, because I’ve always done it the same way. I know exactly what will happen—when and how it will happen.

This gives you a sense of control of the situation. And of course this control may be illusory, but it doesn’t matter. We know that it works. We know that it helps you reduce your anxiety. So this is one piece of the puzzle. Ritualization comes naturally to us and it feels good.

Another related mechanisms is what we call “effort justification.” This idea refers to a whole host of different related theories, but they all make the same observation that our brain makes inferences about the value of things. And one of the cues it uses to make those inferences is how costly they are.

I spent some time living with a group of people called the Anastenaria in northern Greece, and they performed fire-walking rituals. What I realized there was that the meaning for their participation in those rituals was produced through participation itself. What I mean by this is when I asked the youngsters “Why do you do this ritual?” most of them will just look at me and they say they would say things like “I felt this urge to do it” or “That’s what people do around here.” When you invest so much effort into an activity, it automatically feels more meaningful. This is a fair assumption to make. Some of the best things in life come at a cost, right? You get what you pay for—in building things and so on and so forth. So our brain automatically infers value from effort. And this is why some of the things that seemingly don’t have any inherent value, things like running marathons or climbing Mount Everest or performing very painful rituals or investing a lot of time week after week after week, thousands of hours—let’s say memorizing the Torah or attending church—those things too create meaning for us.

The first time anybody goes to a temple for the vast majority of individuals as children, it’s because their parents take them. It’s not because they had some kind of an epiphany. But do this long enough and it begins to become very meaningful.

One last thing I will stress here is the ability of ritual to forge social connections. So that’s very important to us. It creates a sense of collective identity, a sense of belonging, a sense of bonding. How does it do that? Again, through multiple mechanisms.

One of those is related to what we call “phenotypic matching.” Other animals do this as well, but we also do it a lot. We make assumptions about human connections and kinship based on a variety of cues. One of those cues is similarity. We know that phenotype and genotype are closely track one another, for the most part. So people who look more like me, the more they look like me the more likely they are to be related to me. And rituals are very good at doing this. They align people’s appearances. Perhaps we wear the same clothes, the same makeup. They align people’s movements. We all march together. We chant together. They align people’s emotional responses. We have evidence from various rituals that when people perform collective rituals, even their heart rates begin to synchronize. So they feel like one. And by doing all of those things, people feel closer to each other. It is no accident that in so many ritual contexts, participants call each other their brethren. And we talk about things like fraternities and sororities and all those things invariably have in common are ritualized behaviors. So they have a rituals recruit a host of different mechanisms to provide meaningful experiences for people.

I want to talk more about effort justification. Another way of putting that is that rituals derive their meaningfulness from friction. It’s the fact that they don’t accomplish anything of themselves. They’re not instrumental. They’re not actually the thing that is getting you whatever the further reward or end that you want is.

What I like about that thesis is that it’s at odds, in many ways, with the way we typically think about meaning. I think a lot of us intuitively believe that there is such thing as “intrinsic meaning.” This was actually something I was talking about with Paul Bloom in one of my recent episodes. When we talk about things that we find meaningful, a lot of the time it’s this small list of having kids, rewarding careers—these things that have very clear goal orientation where it’s clear why you’re doing them. And instead, you’re kind of saying, “Hey, look, here’s something that by its very nature is inane in a way.” And yet this is this crucial thing that we are taking to construct our meaningful engagement with the world. Does that sound like a fair characterization of your position?Yeah, and in fact, when you think about it, some of the things that both are the most meaningful to us and are also the very things that make us human, that really distinguish us from other animals, are precisely those kinds of things that have no inherent, no intrinsic meaning. There are things like art and music and dancing and ritual and group membership. There are things like sports fandom. It’s all of those things. Those things are important in a ritual context precisely because those actions are arbitrary and have no inherent meaning. It allows them to take whatever meaning we wish.

Whatever the ideology of the group is, these rituals are a very good way of reinforcing that ideology. Whatever the group itself is, those arbitrary actions allow us to distinguish this group from what other people do. Because there’s an infinite array of things we could be doing in the context of a ritual. If I want to clean my hands as a utilitarian action, there are only a few ways of doing this. I can use water and soap or an antiseptic and so on and so forth. But if I conduct a purification ritual, then I can do any number of things. I can use blue paint, or I can use ashes, or I can use blood, or I can use dirt or water, and so on and so forth, or just symbolic gestures. And that means that we can choose an action that will be specific and unique to our own group. And that makes it special for us. It creates those associations with the most salient part of our identity, our group membership.I’ve been thinking about this a lot in the context of efficiency. A lot of times in modern life, what we’re striving for is increased efficiency. And when I hear theories like yours describing, “okay, let’s look at this specific instance and try and understand how we make meaning from it,” it seems like a core component of what we’re doing when we find something meaningful is that we’re identifying something inefficient about it. And it’s almost through a kind of cognitive dissonance of saying, “well, I’m not doing this because it’s the most direct way to achieve a goal. Otherwise, I would do this other thing.”

It seems to me like that impulse to streamline and to make life of an increasingly efficient nature actually takes away from a lot of the fabric of meaning that you’re describing in things like ritual, social connection, the ability of ritual to create, as you said earlier on, space, all those sort of things. Does that sound right to you?Well, one way to respond to this would be to flip it on its head and to say that in fact just because ritual don’t have direct utility does not mean that they’re less efficient. In fact sometimes they might be seen as mental shortcuts. So imagine a situation—let’s take two examples, the individual level and the collective level.

At the individual level, imagine that you’re very stressed. You’re facing a major threat, perhaps you’re concerned about illness, there are things you can do to reduce your stress. You can start working on the psychological processes, perhaps you can talk to someone, you can go out for a walk, there’s any number of things you can try to do. But if a ritual works, that might be the easiest way of dealing with this. If what is familiar already works, then it doesn’t really matter if it’s an arbitrary action as long as it works for you.

In the collective context, now think of a group that is facing very high stakes. So we know from historical evidence that groups that face higher stakes—for example, the tribes that are under constant threat of warfare—they have more painful initiation rituals. Now the problem that this group needs to solve is the problem of cooperation and trust. When you’re going out to war or hunting or any kind of high-stake activity, you want to have a very cohesive team made up of very trustworthy individuals who are really committed to this, to their group membership. Now the best way to find out, perhaps the best utilitarian way, is to go to war and who is a good, who is brave and who will defect and run away. But there’s also another way of doing this. Some high intensity initiation rituals precisely simulate those conditions in a safe space. So what they do is that they get people to pay a high price in advance and that functions as a test of their loyalty, as a test of their commitment.. If I’m willing to go through hell week and suffer for an entire week, then I’m truly committed. If I’m willing to endure a brutal beating in order to join a gang or a fraternity, then I’m truly committed to this.

And since you mentioned Paul Bloom, I’ll get to an example that he gave in his previous book. He says that he described this election for a fraternity president, and there were three candidates. So the first candidate steps up in front of the fraternity and says, if I’m elected, I’ll do X, Y, and Z. And the second candidate steps up and says, if I’m elected, I’ll do A, B, and C. And the third one steps up, takes a piece of paper with the fraternity’s insignia, and staples it to his chest.

Now this is an act that has no direct function and is completely arbitrary, but by doing this—there was no better signal of loyalty and commitment and willingness and desire to be the leader of that group. And he was elected. So that’s the kind of thing that rituals do. The more direct way might also be in the long run more effortful. So you could put in years of work or you could go out to war and then we can test your bravery. But there are ways of taking shortcuts and in this sense, perhaps rituals are not as wasteful as they seem.

So what should we do with this information? Is the implication here that we would all be slightly better off in particular on the come up with new rituals? Is that the takeaway for you on the pragmatic front from having studied all this?Yes, I think the main takeaway from this is that the things that might appear to be irrational, if they seem to work for so many people, then they’re worth investigating, exploring, and of course adopting and incorporating into our lives. It’s no accident that every human society has had rituals. Now for many of us, our lives are radically different than those of our ancestors. We’re more mobile. We have fluid social networks, so we’re not bound by tradition as much as our ancestors were. And this can sometimes create a gap in meaning. And we see levels of depression and suicide, there are spiking around the world—anxiety levels. So these kinds of practices, if they’ve worked for so long, I think it’s worth considering the possibility that they might work for us as well. In fact, as a researcher, I know that they do.

I do see myself as a very rational person. I don’t have any supernatural commitments. But I tend to see ritual as, as I said at the beginning—I see it as both predating religion and extending far beyond religion. It is not about something supernatural. If you’re willing to concede that things like art and music are deeply meaningful, too, then I don’t see why you wouldn’t concede that the rituals too are also deeply meaningful and are also not just useful but they’re a core part of leading a good and a meaningful life.

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Recently, I’ve been workshopping an idea. Basically, I don’t believe there is such thing as an activity that is intrinsically meaningful.

Sure, there are activities which people consistently endorse as meaningful pursuits: having kids, productive careers, learning a language, that sort of thing. And while there is an empirical fact about what sort of activities members of our culture consider meaningful, this is not because these activities are meaningful in some fundamental way. Rather, what this empirical fact captures is that there is a limited set of readily available cultural stories about where meaning comes from. We tend to say that’s where we, personally, derive meaning from, because that’s the default story about meaning our culture prescribes. In fact, anything that can be construed as meaningful—if you tell the story right.

Most recently I argued this point in a piece called meaning is post-hoc, where my claim was that we can’t predict ahead of time what will be meaningful and what won’t. This is because stories are always told retrospectively—and meaning depends entirely on the stories we tell. In particular, I’m skeptical of the traditional psychological narrative about meaning (“here is the set of activities people tend to derive meaning from”) because whenever academics describe someone who is engaged in canonically meaningful activities, it sounds an awful lot like an abstract version of what a university professor does. I think that really underestimates the diversity of how people conceive of meaning and how devoted they are to finding it. Anthropology and sociology are full of examples along the lines of “Here’s some society that we think of as very different from elite western society and yet here they are spending all this time developing sophisticated theories about their place in the world.” One of my personal favorites is The Dignity of Working Men by Michèle Lamont. In short, I believe—at least at present—that there are no intrinsically meaningful activities because you can look back on any activity and come up with a way of construing it as meaningful.

In this conversation, I had the privilege of honing this idea against one of the sharpest minds in the field. Paul Bloom is a professor of psychology at Toronto, previously based at Yale. Between these institutions and his online course, he has taught introductory psychology to millions of bright young students. This course laid the foundation for his latest book, Psych: The Story of the Human Mind.

Paul has thought a lot about the problem of meaning, both in this book and in his previous book, The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning. We approach the topic via entry points from his latest book (particularly Freud), and eventually I get around to pitching him my latest ideas. By no means do I immediately bring him around to my view. A lot of what we disagree on, I think, depends on what goes beyond the purview of psychology and what doesn’t. Sometimes it’s hard to know where the draw those lines.

A conversation with Paul is always enlightening, and at least from my own perspective I think this conversation strikes a nice balance between drawing out some of the highlights of Paul’s broad base of thinking with some of the problems I’ve most directly been grappling with in my own thought.

Paul’s latest book is Psych: The Story of the Human Mind. It’s available now.

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We pay a lot of attention to our romantic relationships. Whether it’s selecting a mate or maintaining one’s relationship with them. Apps make millions of dollars promising to streamline this process. Hundreds of books are published every year telling us how to do it better. And don’t get me wrong: long-term romantic partnerships are hard, no doubt. But that difficulty is not lost on us. Multiple industries are designed around giving us tools to help overcome it. It’s something we spend a lot of effort on trying to do better.

But what about friendship? We also know it’s important, sure. But we don’t give friendships the same treatment as our romantic relationships. There are no holidays meant to carve out time to express appreciation toward our friends. A few books are written each year about Platonic friendship, but far fewer than those about romantic relationships. And yet friendship is one of the most important aspects of our lives. In some ways, it’s even more important than the handful of long-term romantic partners we’ll have in our lifetime.

This, at least, is the claim made in a recent book by my guest today, Robin Dunbar. Robin is a legendary figure within social and evolutionary psychology. He is perhaps best known for the idea of Dunbar’s number: the number of stable, close relationships an individual can maintain is reliably right around 150. But from the broadest level, the major question of Robin’s work asks, “What do our circles of friendships look like? What should they look like?”

The way that I’ve come to think about the core of Robin’s research is that we all face the same fundamental problem: limited resources. Specifically, limited time. Each of us has to choose how we’re going to allocate our limited time to work, family, hobbies, exercise, friendships, and all the other activities and pursuits which we’d like to do. Often when our temporal resources become scarce, the first thing to get cut are our friendships. Friendships don’t come with urgent deadlines. We know our friends—our true ones at least—will forgive us if we don’t see them as often as we’d like. After all, we’ve both got a lot going on. What all this adds up to is that the disintegration of friendships over the course of adult life feels all but inevitable.

And yet—most of what is known scientifically about friendships is not generally discussed. For example, you have probably heard of Dunbar’s 150 figure. But that’s not the only important number. There are layers here. Essentially, Dunbar’s research shows there are concentric circles of friendships, beginning with your five most intimate friendships, then fifteen close friends, fifty good friends, 150 general friends, then 500 acquaintances, 1500 known names, and 5000 known faces. There’s a mountain of evidence showing that these numbers are consistent across cultures—even with the advent of social media.

In other words, there’s a connection between the quantity of friends we have at any given level and the quality of relationship we should have with them. Maintaining this balancing act has huge consequences for us across all aspects of our well-being.

Personally, I believe the acquisition and maintaining of friendships is one of the greatest challenges of adult life. It’s especially difficult in a post-pandemic world, where we’re less tied down to living in a single place and more free to work in other locations. The cost of this flexibility is increased loneliness. We find ourselves adrift from the usual social rhythms of life which we humans are used to. But unfortunately, the problem of solid friendships is one we spend almost no time trying to solve.

Robin’s book is Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships. It’s out now.

[This interview has been edited and condensed. Full conversation available via the podcast.]

In the beginning of your book, you present your thesis on why friendship matters. A lot of the evidence you marshal has to do with some pretty convincing studies. Could you say a little bit about what those studies show, and present that argument for why friendship matters so much?

One of the big surprises of the last 15, maybe 20, years has been the absolute deluge of studies—some of them short-term cross-sectional, many of them long-term studies— showing that the single best predictor of your mental health and well-being, your physical health and well-being, and even how long you live into the future is determined by one factor and one factor alone. And that’s the number and quality of close friendships you have.

So typically, this number would be about five people. In collaboration with a bunch of people in Denmark, we did a big study across 13 European countries. We looked at the likelihood that somebody would develop symptoms of depression in the future, and asked what factors predicted that development. What seemed to preserve you from falling prey to depression in the future was having about five close friends and family. So if you had fewer than that, you’re more likely to develop symptoms of depression. And if you have more than that, you are more likely to develop symptoms of depression.

But there was an alternative. And that was volunteering in a social context, or helping out in a charity shop, or being involved with helping running the scouts, or helping with flowers at your local church, or being involved with a political party—any of those kinds of things that were essentially social activities. So if you had about three of those that was as good as having about five friends, and they were kind of interchangeable. But you couldn’t add them together. You couldn’t have five friends and three voluntary activities, and hope to live forever—because you wouldn’t.

And the reason is very simple. It’s the reason why having more than about five or six friends isn’t really very good for you. It’s that you spread yourself too thinly among these people involved in the social environments. So having a smaller number where you can really get to know the people and be engaged with them—that’s what’s beneficial. If you try and spread yourself too thinly, you don’t create relationships of the quality that’s necessary to buffer you against things like depression.

One of your core ideas has to do with what you call the seven pillars of friendship. These are: having the same language, growing up in the same location, having the same educational and career experiences, having the same hobbies and interests, having the same worldview, the same sense of humor, and the same musical tastes. It’s clear how these can play out in face-to-face interactions. But what does this mean for remote friendships—the kind of modern friendships we try to maintain digitally across distance?

Okay, so the evidence is both good and bad. Because there’s no such thing as Nirvana in the world, everything has a benefit and a drawback. The upside is that, from our work, it seems that different media of interaction—ranging from face-to-face, Zoom video calls, telephone, texts, or emails—are kind of substitutable in terms of how many friendships they allow you to maintain. Because we see exactly the same layers, with exactly the same frequencies of contact, in data from all of these environments, suggesting that they all work pretty much in the same way, and are subject to the same limitations.

In other words, just because you use Facebook doesn’t create the opportunity to have 1000s of friends—true friends. In your social network, yes, you can be connected to 1000s of people on Facebook. But you’re connected to 1000s of people in the everyday world. Some of them we call them friends and family. Some of them we call acquaintances. Some of them we call just people we know—we don’t know much about them, but they’re part of our social environment. For people who have a very large number of friends on Facebook, a lot of those are in that category.

But it seems that there’s still something missing in terms of our satisfaction of relationships in those kinds of environments—like Facebook or Zoom—compared to those we have face-to-face. And that seems to be primarily because what’s missing is touch. And we use touch constantly with our close friends and family, perhaps out to the 50-person layer of our social network. We don’t go around hugging strangers usually, or anything like that. We’re very circumspect in who we do it with. But for those, whom we regard as good friends, intimate friends, we do an awful lot of very casual—what’s generally referred to now as soft taps and hugs, strokes, pats on the knee, perhaps around the shoulder, all these kinds of things goes on constantly if you just watch people in an informal social environment. And that seems to be very important in creating this sense of relationship quality.

I sometimes say, if you want to know how somebody really feels about you, then see the way they touch you—stroke, pat, hug, whatever. This gives you a better sense of what they mean, or what you mean to them, than 1000 words that they might say to you. And that’s because words are slippery things. We’re very good at saying what we don’t mean and making it sound extremely plausible. But it’s very difficult to lie in the way you touch somebody, perhaps because it’s so, so intimate. So there are those kind of drawbacks, which clearly Zoom and Facebook and anything else you can think of are never quite going to overcome. I just don’t see how they can do it.

You recently co-authored a paper in Nature Human Behaviour on social isolation and the brain in the pandemic era. Certainly, there was something anomalous with social life during the COVID years. But with the post-pandemic switch to remote work and outsourcing more and more of one’s social interactions to online—all the drawbacks, such as lack of touch—what do you think the role of loneliness is in modern life? And how does that play out for us today?

John Cacioppo, the late neuroscientist, pointed out that the feeling of loneliness act as an alarm bell. The alarm means you’re not meeting enough people: get out and do something, or go find a friend. It’s not very good for you to experience loneliness, because it exposes you to the risk of increasing downward spiral of depression. And that has knock-on consequences for physical illnesses, as well as mental health and well-being. So it really is kind of the signal or reminder to for you to try and do something to restore your social environment.

The problem is, of course, that’s not easy to do. We’ve suffered from a pandemic of loneliness, particularly in the 20-somethings age cohort, for the better part of 30 years now. It’s really surfaced in the big cities in terms of people having their first job after leaving university. Your whole life up to that point has basically been cocooned in a ready-made social environment at school. You had a bunch of people who would make perfectly decent friends. You’re used to having potential friends on demand all the time. You go to university and live in student halls or something like that—it’s kind of bumpy to begin with, while you just get your feet under the table. But very quickly, you build up friendship circles, because they’re there 24/7 and you’re seeing a lot of them.

Then suddenly you graduate. You get a job in London, New York, or Los Angeles—wherever. And you don’t even know where to go to meet people. All the people at work who are the only people you meet regularly already have their sexual lives sewn up. Some of them have families, and they want to get back at five o’clock. Even the ones that don’t have families, they’ve already got their friends and circles and the things they do on an evening with them.

So we’ve had this tendency for the newcomers in businesses or government departments or whatever to be thrown in completely at the deep end with nowhere to go, and it’s caused this pandemic of loneliness. It’s not good for employees. And it’s not good for employers. Everybody’s been looking at this going, “We’ve got a problem. What are we going to do?”

One solution is to make the work environment a social environment, which is what they used to be. Until perhaps 50 years ago, when new management practices came in, most big companies had their own social clubs, their tennis clubs, theatre clubs, football clubs, where people hung out after work. And that created this sense of belonging, and a sense of community. And of course, when you came new to that company, or, or business or whatever, you were thrown straight into this social environment where it was safe, everybody knew everybody else, everybody was on the same page. They all shared a lot of their seven pillars of friendship in common simply by being employees in that same environment. And it was a good place to make friends. Some Silicon Valley companies have done that in an encouraging way. But it’s not the norm. We can’t let it continue, this widespread loneliness. Because it’s not good for business. And it’s not good for individuals.

I’d like to ask you about the difference between a strong romantic relationship and a strong friendship relationship. What does a romantic relationship require that friendship does not?

Not a lot. In terms of emotional content, they seem to be very similar. Obviously, romantic relationships tend to have a sexual component to them—which is, by and large, absent in Platonic friendships.

But there are important gender differences here, particularly with our closest friends. What you find is that women, in particular, commonly have a” best friend forever,” who’s another woman, as well as the romantic partner. Occasionally, about 15% of the time, there’ll be another male—a male rather than a female—but most of them typically have a best friend who is a female. The opposite is the case for guys. They will tend to have a male best friend, sometimes a female best friend. But the quality of those relationships is very, very different to the quality of best friends that you find with female “best friends forever.” They’re much more casual, and they tend to have been around a lot longer. They tend to date back to kind of high school or college period. If you look at people in their mid 40s, they’ll say, “Yes, I’ve known him since we were at school together, that’s my best friend.”

In contrast to these kind of best friends, Platonic friends tend to be much more recent. Best friends are more stable than both Platonic friendships and romantic partners—which tend to have a lot more turnover. So female best friendships and romantic partners, they’re very fragile in that sense. They’re based on deep trust, and therefore you tolerate infringements of that trust. Until it happens once too often, you’ve had enough and then that’s it. And then you have catastrophic breakdown. Whereas in general, other kinds of friends and men’s best friends tend to just drift apart.

One final question. What are three books that have most influenced the way you think?

Actually, I’m going to point in a slightly different direction in terms of what influenced me and offer up the following three.

One is a Victorian spoof. Not too many people know about it. It’s called Flatland. And it was written by a couple of guy masquerading under the pseudonym “A Square.” It is a kind of spoof on hierarchies in society. So it imagine the world consists of different kinds of dimensions. So you’re a two dimensional person, and you enter into this world where one dimensional people are dots and three dimensional people are cubes—and you’re trying to negotiate this strange social world. It’s a reminder that your particular viewpoint or your particular culture is not necessarily the ultimate good thing. You should take other cultures at face value and enjoy them, get to know them and understand them—in the sense of how the square would have to understand the cube world or the one dimensional world.

As a second book, I’m going to pick T.S. Eliot’s poetry. I actually studied Eliot in high school for my high school final exams (A Levels as we call them here). I think he’s just the most amazing poet who ever came our way. In many ways: mentally complex, and extremely well read, and immensely deep.

As the last choice, I’m actually going to pick something I’m sure nobody’s ever heard of. It’s the Irish writer Brendan Behan’s semi-autobiographical book called Hold Your Hour and Have Another. It just has that Irish flow and fun—that sense of fun and “life is a gas,” as the as the saying goes. It’s just wonderfully well-written little vignettes on his experiences in life. Great guy: he died very young, at the age of 41. Same age actually as the other greatest poet ever, Dylan Thomas, the Welsh poet, who I might otherwise have included, because his sense of observation is absolutely extraordinary. T.S. Eliot is more internal and intellectualizing and looking at himself. Dylan Thomas’s observations on the foibles of other people is just unbelievable in his way with words. It’s just beautiful. It’s absolutely fantastic stuff. So you get four for the price of one.

Robin Dunbar, thank you so much for taking the time to talk today.

You’re very welcome. It’s been great fun.

[I hope you find something good for your next read. If you happen to find it through the above links, I get a referral fee. Thanks!]

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One of the central themes of this show is the importance of the stories we tell about ourselves. But in focusing on the egocentric stakes of storytelling, one of the things we overlook—I certainly do—is the importance of the stories we tell about others.

We make sense of life in the terms of our own experience. We conceptualize the world in a way that corresponds to what we’ve seen and what we understand. This allows us to tell our own story in a pretty nuanced way. But it limits us in the kind of stories we can tell about others—particularly others who, for political or cultural or social reasons, might be very different from us. We put other people into a box: and not the box that would best fit them, but rather one of the ones we have lying around which we’ve previously used to make sense of our own world.

This is a topic I’ve thought about a lot in my writing, my previous choice of podcast guests, and in my academic research—but what I love about my guest today is that she, more than anyone else I know, has actually lived it. Mónica Guzmán is a journalist and Director of Storytelling at Braver Angels, America’s largest grassroots organization dedicated to political depolarization. Her new book is I Never Thought of It That Way, in which she explores her own experience trying to connect people across political and social divides.

In this conversation, Mónica and I cover so much: from the importance of stories in movies and TV, to our relationships with our families, to Mónica’s specific tactics for understanding others. But one of the things that stood out to me is this great line she gives later in the conversation about modern life being “tired, scared, and busy.” It reminded me of the famous characterization of pre-modern life by Thomas Hobbes: nasty, brutish, and short.

I think it speaks to something, it’s so easy to forget: Each of us is living out our own complicated human experience. There is no one who has everything figured out, no one who has reached the point of quiescence. It’s easy to see other people—particularly those with different beliefs from our own—as emblematic of some nefarious other way of life. But, when it comes down to it, there’s no simple way through existence. Everyone is dealing with their own struggle. We’re better off as human beings the more we can come to appreciate the process of that struggle, rather than judge its results.

Mónica’s book is I Never Thought of It That Way: How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times. It’s out now.

Monica’s choices for three books that have most influenced her:

• The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

• Self-Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson

• Midnight in Paris (the movie)

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I collect concise definitions of the good life. There’s something I really like about the idea of having a one sentence mission statement. It’s a kind of mantra to check in with from time to time to make sure you’re making decisions based on what really matters and not the more immediate, but also more fleeting, worries of the day. My personal favorite, which I recently referenced in a post on meaning and context, comes from the philosopher Bertrand Russell: “The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.”

One of the things that I think makes for a useful good-life definition is that it puts the focus beyond oneself. One of my first Meaning Lab posts was about an idea which I called the Off-Policy Theory of Happiness, with the claim being that the most efficient way to become unhappy is to spend a lot of time really concerned with your own happiness. You need to aim at something else, something bigger. Your personal well-being—in terms of general satisfaction, at least; maybe joy, rather than happiness—will come as a by-product. And I think that element is present, perhaps in a subtle way, in the two-word definition of the good life given by my guest today. It is: “Find awe.”

Dacher Keltner is a Professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. His research has spanned questions about which emotions we have, why we have them, and what we do with them. His latest book is Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life. And in the introduction to it, he proposes that awe might be at the center of a life well lived.

At first, I thought this might be taking things a bit too far. I mean, awe: I could certainly see it as being an interesting target of psychological study, but as epicentral to the good life? Really? As I got further into Dacher’s argument, I realized there’s a lot more subtlety and a lot more complexity here than I initially gave it credit for.

As Dacher argues in his book, and in this conversation, awe is so important because it is the emotional component of meaning. It is what we feel when we engage in meaningful behavior. That’s not to say that it’s the only thing we feel, or that there’s a one-to-one mapping. But they’re intrinsically related.

Specifically awe is a recognition of one’s own smallness is the context of something much larger and more profound. As I argue in the meaning and context post referenced above, meaning can only be found by considering something—an activity, an experience, a pursuit, an object, a book, a word—in the appropriate context. It is a figure against a ground, and without proper recognition of that ground the meaning evaporates. The feeling of awe is an emotional signal that we’ve made that connection. I found a lot to consider in this conversation, because I tend to think about meaning not in terms of emotion but in terms of, well, thoughts. I think for anyone who is interested in meaning, there should also be an interest in Dacher’s argument about awe.

Dacher’s new book is Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life. It’s out now.

At the end of each episode, I ask my guest about three books that have most influenced their thinking. Here are Dacher’s picks:

• The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animalsby Charles Darwin (1872)Before Dacher Keltner, before Paul Ekman—there was Charlie Darwin.

• The Wind Up Bird Chronicleby Haruki Murakami (1994)Given without explanation… but maybe Murakami needs no introduction?

• The Invention of Natureby Andrea Wulf (2015)Alexander von Humboldt is an underrated figure in intellectual history. Just as Romanticism is an underrated period in intellectual history.

(I hope you find something good for your next read. If you happen to find it through the above links, I get a referral fee. Thanks!)

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For many of us, life is a process of minimizing uncertainty. We spend our days trying to eliminate uncertainty from our lives. Find the right career path, the right partner, buy a house, or at least find a sense of long-term settledness. Raise a family and put our kids on track to get into the right college, so they can start the process over again finding the right career, the right partner, and so on. The implicit idea in this is that there’s a point in life where we reach quiescence, where all the big problems are figured out. But here’s the thing. Life doesn’t work like that.

Life is not a problem to solve. It cannot be terminally fixed. Something can always go wrong. There’s always the next thing. And so if you’re living your life, even tacitly, under the assumption that it’s possible to reach this point, you are operating according to the wrong model of the world.

These are themes that I’ve long been grappling with in my own life, and they’re resonant in the work of my guest today, the author and philosopher John Kaag. Kaag is a professor of philosophy at U Mass Lowell, but he has that rare quality of someone who makes his living as academic philosopher: he lives his life as a classical philosopher. To him, ideas aren’t just for arguing about it. If you’re getting them right, they should tell you something—hopefully something important—about living.

He’s a student of the work of William James, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Henry David Thoreau. His books include American Philosophy: a love story, Hiking with Nietzsche, and Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James can save your life. A theme that runs through the work of these thinkers, and by extension John’s own, is how uncertainty is crucial to meaning-making. In a way, once something has become certain in our own life, it gets taken for granted. I think if we’re being honest with ourselves, we can readily identify this effect: whether in a complacent relationship, or in the pursuit of material comfort, or whatever it may be. Once it’s all shored up, it no longer seems something so worth striving after that you can build your life around it. It’s sort of like artificial intelligence. Whatever milestone AI successfully achieves, Gary Marcus will tell you that, well, that’s not what AI really is.

I think there’s important in the idea that uncertainty is something to embrace, not just because it’s a fundamental and inescapable part of life. But because it can also itself be a source of great meaning. If that’s something you’re interested in being more closely in tune with, I think you’ll get a lot out of this conversation.

At the end of each episode, I ask my guest about three books that have most influenced their thinking. Here are John’s picks:

• Waldenby Henry David Thoreau (1854)One American Transcendentalist’s attempt to wring meaning from everyday life.

• Thus Spoke Zarathustraby Friedrich Nietzsche (1883)Nietzsche’s keystone… novel? meditation? confession? about an individual who is struggling to become who he is.

• Man’s Search for Meaningby Viktor Frankl (1946)The most recommended book on this show. The classics are classic for a reason.

• Existential Psychotherapy (Honorable mention)by Irvin Yalom (1980)The 700 page version of Man’s Search for Meaning. (Never heard of it myself, but it looks really good!)

Books by John:

• 2020: Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life

• 2018: Hiking with Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are

• 2016: American Philosophy: A Love Story

(I hope you find something good for your next read. If you happen to find it through the above links, I get a referral fee. Thanks!)

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The month before I began my PhD, in October 2019, I sat down with an idea. The concept was to reach out to people I admired—mostly academics and authors—and ask them about the decisions they made when they were in my position. What did they do when they were grad students that set them up for success later on? Sure, I wanted to know about their success, in some sort of career-prestige sense. But I also wanted to understand how they thought about what it means to make a substantive contribution to their field, whatever that may have looked like to them. I envisioned it as a podcast, which I called Cognitive Revolution.

I produced about 90 episodes of Cognitive Revolution. Toward the end, I began to feel like I’d learned what I wanted to from that line of questioning. It took me a while to figure out what I wanted to do with a podcast that represented the dimension of growth I would pursue in my next phase. But eventually I came up with Meaning Lab: a cognitive science perspective on the mechanisms of meaning in work, life, and relationships. I’ve done about ten Meaning Lab episodes now. I feel like I’m starting to get the hang of it.

But to mark my 100th podcast episode, I wanted to do a retrospective on what I learned interviewing scientists about the “personal side of their intellectual journey”—as I framed the tagline of the show. I got to talk to so many of my heroes. I got to talk to people who were great scientists, but not well known outside of their immediate discipline. I got to talk to people who were both accomplished scholars and well-known to a broader audience. I tried to talk to different people from different backgrounds, and to explore stories told by everyone from established tenured professors who came from academic families, to first gen college students from an array of backgrounds who more or less stumbled into research and found they were good at it. People were incredibly generous with their time. And I’m honored to have had the pleasure to talk with them and learn from their experience.

Overall, what stands out to me is that there’s no one path to success. Not in academia. Not in writing. Not in making a living from ideas. Not in, as far as I can tell, any aspect of life. For everyone I talked to who said doing X worked for them, there was another person who said they got to where they are by doing not-X. Sure, there were trends and consistencies—and I try to get at some of them in the lessons below. But the overarching point is that you have to figure out what works for you. You can’t take a strategy from a successful person you look up to and apply it blindly. You’re a unique individual with your own strengths and weaknesses. Your success as a scholar depends, in large part, on learning to use them to your advantage.

Another point was how just about every single person I talked to—especially the big-name scholars who seem to have everything all figured out—admitted to feelings of uncertainty early on in their career. The vast, vast majority went through significant patches of their journey where they weren’t sure if they were going to make it. But they stuck with it, and eventually they got to the other side. Personally, I identify with these kind of doubts more than I do the concept of “imposter syndrome.” To be honest, I don’t really care if I belong right now, right here, in this room. Maybe I do. Maybe I don’t. Whatever. I’m more concerned about whether what I’m doing is going to end up being worthwhile in the long run. Am I continuing to grow and get better? I can survive being bad at something now, if I know I’ll be good at it later on. It meant a lot to know that when I’m feeling that burden of doubt, pretty much everyone I look up to felt some version of it when they were in my shoes.

Thanks to everyone who took the time to come on my show. I learned something from every one of you. What follows are some of my favorite clips from scientists I talked to. It doesn’t include segments from some of my favorite conversations in general—mostly with people who were authors than scientists. And instead of short, snappy sound bites, I opted for longer clips, so you could hear a bit more of the context and story behind the lesson. I hope you find something in here to help you on your own journey, whatever that may look like. If you’re anything like me, I think you will.

Here are my 12 lessons I learned from interviewing 90+ scientists about the personal side of their intellectual journey:

12. There’s no one right way to be productive; do what works for you. (from Paul Bloom)

11. Sometimes your biggest setbacks become your most significant accomplishments. (from Chantel Prat)

10. Being a good grad student is not the same thing as being a good professor. (from Nancy Kanwisher)

9. Everyone has a CV of failures; but they only show you the one with the successes.(from Bradley Voytek)

8. Write for an audience of smart, interested undergrads; anyone older than that is too set in their ways to truly be shaped by your work... Oh, and write from an outline.(from Michael Tomasello)

7. Listening is one of the most undervalued skills in academia (and probably beyond); if you can master that, it’ll take you far. (from Susan Goldin-Meadow)

6. Even the most successful scholars were uncertain early on. (from Steven Pinker)

5. Some of the most influential papers of all time were rejected in their first submission—rework and resubmit. (from Mark Granovetter)

4. For some researchers the best part of their career will be their PhD and postdoc (because they want to get their hands dirty with the work); for some, they just need to survive that phase until they get a faculty job (because what they really want to do is run a lab). (from Weiji Ma)

3. You don’t need a grand plan; make the best decision you can at every juncture, and you’ll get somewhere worth going. (from Linda B. Smith)

2. You can be a traditional academic... or you can be an entrepreneur of knowledge.(from Wade Davis)

1. Someone says you can’t do it? Fk ‘em. There’s no one path to success.** (from Mahzarin Banaji)

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For many of us, there are moments of realization we’ve had where we can’t look at our lives, or what we do in them, the same way ever again. I’ve had many. As a cognitive scientist, one of those moments came from the realization that cognitive science—and psychology, and neuroscience—don’t tell us anything about individual human lives. They tell us about humans on average. The problem is that no one lives a life on average; they live a specific one.

We often hear about studies making claims like this is how people misjudge political opponents or this is how people respond to the suffering of others. Framed this way, it sounds like the scientists got people to line up, presented them with the task at hand, and they all more or less reacted to it in the way described by the headline. But that’s not the case. Not even close.

Those “findings” are statistical averages. Either the participants did what’s being described a little bit—not so much that you’d notice it in the individual but you can find the slight trend among many people. Or a handful of the participants did what’s being described enough to drown out the effect of whatever everyone else is doing. Think of it this way: If I say people, on average, are going north, then one way to support that finding is to have 50% of people go northeast and 50% of people go northwest. On average, that’s what people are doing: going north. But it’s not representative of the behavior of any single individual.

Another way to think about this is to ask who really takes the experience of individuals seriously: and the answer (the one I give, anyway) is novelists. Those are the people who are asking questions about what would happen if we follow the consequences of one particular person’s decisions really closely over the course of some significant portion of their life. Think about all the detail that’s included in even the simplest novel. In any given instance, a psychology or neuroscience experiment can only examine the smallest sliver of that.

As a consequence, we’ve been taught to think of the brain, the mind, behavior, intelligence—all these things—as a kind of monolith. There’s the Platonic mind with an IQ of 500, and one day artificial intelligence will realize that kind of perfection. But in the meantime we’re stuck here living our lives as imperfect approximations of that ideal. As it turns out, that’s just not the case.

And one of the ways we know that’s not the case is through the neuroscientific work of people like my guest today, Chantel Prat. Chantel is a professor of psychology at the University of Washington. She was one of the first guests I had on this podcast, and it remains one of my favorite episodes I’ve ever done. In that conversation, we talk about Chantel’s incredibly powerful story—with an unplanned pregnancy in grad school that changed her life for the better. The occasion for this episode is that she recently published a book, based on the work of her and her peers, called The Neuroscience of You.

In it, she makes a really important argument. We’ve been taught to think of there being one canonical brain, one wiring diagram, one set of processes known as the human mind. But there’s not. Just like there’s not one human genome. While in aggregate we can look at commonalities across our species, each of us has a unique genetic fingerprint. The brain works in the same way.

The big implication here is that all too often we look at our own behavior and wonder why we’re not more like someone else—why we can’t be as good, or as focused, or as kind, or as competent. It’s easy to overlook the simplest answer: we’re just different. Chantel’s work shows us that these differences are fundamental. Not in a way that’s unbridgeable and keeps us apart, but in a way that shows we have to appreciate others—and ourselves—for the specific things that make us us.

Chantel’s book is The Neuroscience of You: How Every Brain Is Different and How to Understand Yours. It’s out now.

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And a minor resolution about friendship.

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My guest today is Nick Chater, a Professor of Behavioural Science at Warwick Business School. Nick is an influential cognitive scientist with a wide-range of interests, which these days often tend toward public policy. But in 2018, he published a book, trying to draw some culminating insights from the disparate pieces of his own work in cognitive science as well as the field more broadly. He came to the conclusion that we have dramatically misunderstood important aspects about what the overall picture of the mind looks like. He called the book The Mind Is Flat.

And by ‘we’ Nick means essentially... everyone. His argument is that the notion of the unconscious we’ve grown accustomed to over the last century or so is fundamentally flawed. We attribute all sorts of hidden ‘beliefs’ and ‘desires’ and other psychological motivations to the murky depths of the subconscious mind. But according to Chater, they aren’t really there. They’re fictions. There is no such thing as a ‘desire’ you don’t know about. According to Chater, what you see of the mind is what you get.

It’s a strange argument. Particularly because pretty much every modern theory in psychology and cognitive science presupposes there is some sort of cognitive infrastructure supporting beliefs, goals, and intentions below the surface of conscious thought. So what evidence does he have there are no such things as hidden beliefs? It’s a good question. But another way to frame it is: what evidence do we have that makes us so confident that are minds are a kind of mental iceberg of which we can only see the very tip?

That’s not to say that there’s no structure to the mind. But we’ve never seen a belief — how can we be so sure of what one would look like? I think there’s a certain story about the depths of the unconscious mind that we’ve started to take for granted. I think it’s worth taking some time to rethink that.

Nick’s alternative is that the mind is continuously improvising, deploying behavior to maintain consistency with an on-going narrative. Instead of simple psychological causes (“She believed x and wanted y, so she did z”), we are acting in a way to stay ‘in-character’ within our own story. We are like fiction authors, not constructing behavior based on firm psychological truths, but rather seeking consistency, continuinity, and growth in the arc of our character’s development. According to Nick, to say that the rest of us are acting based on some engimatic psychological depths is no more true than to say a fictional character is doing so. The story is all there is.

Here’s Nick’s alternative model, in his own words:

An improvising mind, unmoored from stable beliefs and desires, might seem to be a recipe for mental chaos. I shall argue that the opposite is true: the very task of our improvising mind is to make our thoughts and behaviour as coherent as possible — to stay ‘in character’ as well as we are able. To do so, our brains must strive continually to think and act in the current moment in a way that aligns as well as possible with our prior thoughts and actions. We are like judges deciding each new legal case by refering to, and reinterpreting, an ever-growing body of previous cases. So the secret of our minds lies not in supposed hidden depths, but in our remarkable ability to creatively improvise our present, on the theme of our past.

Nick introduces the concept of a mental tradition as the infrastructure of the mind. We get into it a little later on in our conversation. To be honest, I’m not entirely sure what he means by the term; but I like it. It takes a well-worn concept (“habit”) and articulates it with a fresh conceptual edge. At one point, I press Nick and ask him point blank whether he thinks habits exist. He says he doesn’t. I couldn’t tell you the exact difference between a habit and a mental tradition. But Nick’s position, as I’ve understood it, is that typically we believe we act according to ‘preferences’. I like coffee, so I get it first thing in the morning. No, he says. In fact, you’re acting according to a mental tradition.

In preparation for this conversation, I found myself thinking through Nick’s improvising metaphor with my own understanding of the concept — through my training as a jazz musician. If you were to ask an improvising musician about why they chose to play a specific note, they’d be able to construct a story, supported by music theory, about why that note works in the way it does. But that’s just a post-hoc story. It doesn’t describe in any meaningful sense for why that particular note was produced in the first place, as opposed to any other note which could have a music theoretical justification.

Yet that’s not to say there’s no depth. The underlying harmony does cause the note to come about in a very real sense. The musician is responding to structure. They’re not acting alone. They’re collaborating with the structure: the structure of the music, as well as the other musicians. That strikes me as a kind of depth, and one that has not just significance in the metaphor itself but also in our concept of the structure of the mind.

So what are the stakes here? Suppose this theory is true, as Nick presents it, what might the implications be? Here’s one idea:

If there are no psychological depths to be found, the only psychological "truths" are the stories we tell about ourselves and others. They are "true" by virtue of the fact that we’re telling them, in the same way there are truths about Anna Karenina simply because that’s how Tolstoy told the story. There’s something liberating about this. We’re no longer committed to defending the ‘why’ of our actions, at least from the perspective of a single motivating psychological variable. This is often what we reach for when trying to hold others to account. That may be necessary in the courtroom. But I think it’s the source of a lot of tension in our interpersonal relationships — the need to specify what caused someone to behave in a certain way. Rather, we get to look at through a different lens. We get to say okay, this is what I’ve done. How does it fit into the overall story? The theory actually gives us an explanation for why the question "why did you do that?" can be the source of so much emotional violence in a relationship. There is really no answer. Therefore any answer is necessarily wrong and inadequate. And any expectation of an adequate answer is inevitably let down.

At any rate, this argument by Nick makes me think of something said in a recent episode with Sam Gershman. The point of a model is not to be right. The point is to articulate the space of possibilities. I do think Nick is right that psychology—with the exception of 20th century Behaviorism—has for a long time taken for granted that there are some sort of depths to the mind. His argument is useful because it attempts to paint a clear and compelling version of the alternative. Whether or not he’s onto something, I’ll leave up to you.

But I think part of the exercise of thinking through his position is about gaining a better understanding of what we take for granted in the conventional ways we talk about our own mental lives. Perhaps the mind isn’t exactly flat, as Nick says, but I think it’s say to safe that we’re inclined to ascribe more depth to our minds than is merited—telling more than we can know, as Richard Nisbett called it.

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I believe when someone writes a perfect book, it deserves to sell a gazillion copies.

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One of my favorite psychology papers of all time is called “Telling More than We Can Know” by Richard Nisbett and Timothy Wilson. The argument of the paper is that humans don’t actually know why they do what they do. But they’re more than happy to give you an explanation nonetheless.

This the reason why we need a science of human behavior. If we could all just intuit the correct answers automatically, there’d be no need for researchers to figure them out. This provides a kind of template for how psychological research works: I got the human do something, and now I’m going to tell you why they did it.

And cognitive science in particular is traditionally obsessed with explaining “why” in terms of one main concept: rationality. The human did the thing because it’s a reasonable thing to do, once you take into account all the right information. And if the story is not so straightforward, then the deviation from rationality cries out for explanation. It is an account of human behavior that prioritizes practical function: we have the mental apparatus we have because it helps us succeed in the situations we’re most likely to find ourselves.

While this may be a useful explanation for behavior in the laboratory, things get more complicated once you start observing humans in the wild. What about all the stuff that isn’t explainable by mere rational utility?

Why, for instance, do I prefer some clothes over others? Why do I have a little piece of leather on my keychain when it neither holds keys nor opens doors? Why did I listen to the Men in Blazers soccer podcast religiously for two years, then suddenly forsake it entirely? Why do I insist, simply our of principle, on never drinking French wine?

In other words: what’s the “why” behind culture?

This question is the impetus for the recent book by my guest today, W David Marx. David has lived in Japan for 19 years. His first book was Ametora: How Japan Saved American Style. For most of his career he has followed and written about Japanese culture and its influence on the West. His latest book, Status and Culture, is his effort to explain the mechanisms of cultural change: why we do what we do, when we don’t need to do it.

He calls this the “Grand Mystery of Culture”: Why do humans collectively prefer certain practices, and then, years later, move on to alternatives for no practical reason?

This is where status comes in. David argues that it’s the conceptual glue that holds together the parts of human behavior that aren’t explained by rationality. How exactly it does that is the subject of our conversation.

But the thing about status is that you can always have more of it. If, as David argues, we’re all constantly chasing after status in one way or another, when does it stop? Is anyone ever satisfied with their status? Is the biggest fish in the pond happy? Or does she just want to find a bigger pond? Does status ever give us a sense of purpose or meaning? Or is it just empty calories? We get into a lot of this throughout the conversation. Yet, for me, reading David’s book raised as many questions as it answered.

Status and Culture is an entry in the genre of Epic Theory. It seeks to explain everything. Doing so requires that one leaves out quite a bit, especially when the book weighs in at a svelte 275 pages of full text. But there’s something about David’s book which makes me really love it: It is an academic book that isn’t written by an academic.

Reading it, one gets the feeling that the reader is hearing from someone who has actually been out there in the world and lived a little bit. David reads. (A lot.) But it doesn’t feel like he spends his days cooped up in a library. When he talks about culture, you know you’re hearing from someone who has participated in it—not just theorized about it. He’s not trying to explain why those other people over there are into one fashion trend and not another; he’s trying to explain the fashion trends which he’s seen in his own social circles.

Ultimately, perhaps David, like all of us, is guilty of telling more than he can know. Do the mechanics of status really explain all of culture? I don’t know. Maybe it is all about status. Maybe it’s not. But I’ll keep that little piece of leather on my keychain, just in case.

David’s new book is Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change. It’s out now.

At the end of each episode, I ask my guest about three books that have most influenced their thinking. Here are David’s picks:

• One for All: The Logic of Group Conflictby Russell Hardin (1995)Little known but mind blowing; the theory also explains fashions really well.

• The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetryby Harold Bloom (1973)Art as a process of being influenced by and attempting to influence. A classic.

• For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Signby Jean Baudrillard (1972)Incisive investigation into the reason why things are valued. The denser French theory precursor to David’s Status and Culture.

Books by David:

• 2022: Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change

• 2015: Ametora: How Japan Saved American Style

(I hope you find something good for your next read. If you happen to find it through the above links, I get a referral fee. Thanks!)

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Two competing theories of inspiration: the 9am-ers and the lions.

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Language—who can use it, and how well—has been in the news recently. If you haven’t heard, a recent AI language model was released for public use. It’s a chatbot from the company OpenAI called ChatGPT. And its capabilities are, to use a technical term, astounding.

It can draft essays at an advanced undergraduate level on just about any topic. It can write a scene for a movie script along any premise you specify. It can plan a set of meals for you this week, provide the recipes, compile a shopping list, and tell you how what you’re eating will affect your overall health and fitness goals. And in terms of grammar and sentence construction, it makes no mistakes. Literally none. This isn’t your grandmother’s chatbot.

This episode is not about how ChatGPT works; it is about our current understanding of how language works. With advances in AI allowing us to create more sophisticated programs for using language, that understanding may change in the near future. But even with all the recent advances, the underlying logic behind how these kinds of programs work and what they can teach us about human language goes back decades in research on cognitive science and artificial intelligence. It seems like there’s something about ChatGPT that understands the words it’s using. The truth is we don’t know yet. It’s too soon to tell.

What we do know is that we humans understand the words we use, and why we’re capable of doing that is one of the great and fantastic puzzles of our species. My guest today, Gary Lupyan, is one of my favorite sources of insights about that puzzle. Gary is a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He studies language, particularly semantics, from a cognitive science perspective.

This conversation is about Gary’s point of view on language, words, and how we use them to both construct an understanding of the world and convey it to those around us. It’s not necessarily about endorsing a big sweeping theory. But to put together some of the pieces of what we know, what we don’t know, and what we may have misunderstood about language.

For example, take the famous Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. This is the idea that language determines thought—that if you were to speak a language other than the one(s) already you do, it could potentially lead to an entirely different way of seeing the world. And really, the big picture of Sapir-Whorf has been settled. The truth, honestly, is not that exciting. Language does determine thought—but only a little, and not in any ways that can’t be worked around. As Gary describes it, language is a system of categories. The language we speak can orient us toward different delineations of those categories with the world. But no language prevents us from seeing or comprehending any category outright. What’s really fascinating here is not the broadest aspects of the overarching theory, but the implications for specific cases. There are versions of this that we touch on a lot throughout this conversation.

But in terms of grand theories, a general theme emerged in our conversation of describing ideas about language on a spectrum: from Chomsky to Tomasello. Noam Chomsky you’ve probably heard of. He’s one of the most prolific scholars of the second half of the twentieth century. He was a founding father of cognitive science, and to a large degree single-handedly determined the trajectory of linguistics for a period of almost thirty years. His most famous construction is "colorless green ideas sleep furiously." It’s a totally legitimate English sentence, but one that expresses an illegitimate concept. It is representative of Chomsky’s focus on structure: he didn’t care about whether or not anyone had ever used that sentence; he just cared that it was possible to do so.

Michael Tomasello, on the other hand, takes a usage-based approach to language. Mike has been a guest on this show and is another cognitive scientist who has had a big impact on my own thinking. He believes the way to make sense of language is as a tool, one that allows us to communicate with the other members of our species. Structure is important. But how language is used in real-life social settings is more important. Spoiler alert: both Gary and I are much more sympathetic to Tomasello’s characterization of language than we are to Chomsky’s. Nonetheless, both theoretical approaches offer important insights about language and the way we humans use it.

The way I approached this conversation was essentially to ask Gary the biggest questions I could come up with about language: What’s it for? How do words get their meanings? What was protolanguage like? What parts of language are determined by critical periods? Then just see where he takes it from there.

Overall, this conversation was really a joy to have. We cover a lot of my favorite topics in cognitive science. Language is something I can get really worked up about, and it was fun to be able to talk about it with someone who is so much more knowledgeable than I am. For anyone who has ever used words or had words used on them, I think you’ll find something to enjoy in this conversation.

At the end of each episode, I ask my guest about three books that have most influenced their thinking. Here are Gary’s picks:

• Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychologyby Valentino Braitenberg (1984)A cult classic: the perfect book for thinking about thinking.

• Consciousness Explainedby Daniel Dennett (1991)It’s not about getting all the details right; it’s about inspiring further thinking.

• 4 3 2 1: A Novelby Paul Auster (2017)The most ambitious effort by a novelist at the top of his game. For students of the epic conceptual masterpiece.

Honorable mention: My favorite book on Language, by Michael Tomasello, if you’re interested in the technical details of what we talked about:

• Constructing a Language: A Usage-Based Theory of Language Acquisition

(I hope you find something good for your next read. If you happen to find it through the above links, I get a referral fee. Thanks!)

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Why the metrics we use to evaluate decisions are not the ones we should use to make them.

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Right now, over the course of the next couple weeks, somewhere in the neighborhood of one billion people will tune in to the same event.

This event is not a geopolitical one. Governmental regimes will not be decided based on its outcome. It is not an economic one. The winner will be financially compensated, but not in any way that will meaningfully affect the people of that country. National boundaries will not be redrawn as a result of this conflict. Ultimately, it comes down to twenty-two men, a ball, and who can put it put it in the opponents net the most times. It is the World Cup.

I don’t say this as someone who thinks the World Cup isn’t important. I think it’s fantastically important, and I count down to it every four years starting approximately three days after the final match. But many people believe that because it’s a game, because it doesn’t have overt real-world implications, that the World Cup doesn’t matter. Some people believe that because it’s a certain kind of game—one in which Europeans are usually dominant, not Americans—that it doesn’t matter.

But it does matter. And the reason it matters is that there’s no other event in the world that quite so many people from quite so many walks of life get worked up about. An election, a TV show, the publication of a book, a Nobel Prize—none of these things can compete with the sheer volume of interest generated by the World Cup. It may be a fiction. But it is one that a large proportion of the planet has bought into.

I think this dynamic is useful to pay attention to because this is also the way games work more generally. The points aren’t real in any sense but the number on the scoreboard. Yet people live and die by whether their team’s number is bigger than their opponent’s. They dedicate a large portion of their leisure time to following the accumulation of these points. Arguably, these kind of games are what humanity, in aggregate, cares about most.

This makes for a paradox of sorts. Even though they don’t have meaningful stakes outside the arena, games are designed to elicit concentrated doses of meaningful engagement. When you’re into a game, nothing feels like it matters quite as much as the outcome of that match. A defensible definition of a “game” is an event or set of actions which is fundamentally meaningless to which we have assigned meaning.

More specifically, this is the process of gamification, and the downsides of gamification is the topic of a recent book by my guest today. Adrian Hon is a game developer, and CEO of gaming company Six to Start. Adrian’s best known game is Zombies, Run! an app which incites runners to move faster by overlaying a plot of apocalyptic escape on their movements in the real-world. It has been downloaded over ten million times. Adrian’s an expert on the power of gamification, and his book is all about taking a skeptical look at how gamification has infiltrated our lives.

At the heart of Adrian’s observations is a tension. I think of it as the double-edged sword of gamification. By assigning points to vocab learning, or tracking the number of steps you’ve taken every day, gamification is able to take trivial, mundane actions, which we want to engage in but don’t find particularly appealing, and imbue them with meaning. This in turns gives us the motivation to accomplish those actions at a more efficient rate than we otherwise would.

Where this goes wrong is when the game itself—the points system, the badges, the leaderboard—becomes more meaningful than the original reason for wanting to perform this action. When we care more about the fictional story in a way that starts taking away from the real things we actually care about, that’s when gamification becomes a problem.

The thrust of Adrian’s book is that more and more companies are using the powerful techniques of gamification to get us to engage in their products far longer and in different ways than we might initially intend to. In other words, it’s commonplace for products and apps to be designed to exploit the most vulnerable aspects of our psychology. The psychological dynamics of games are increasingly becoming a part of our every day life, and we need people like Adrian Hon to help us get a handle on how they work.

Adrian’s new book is You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All. It’s out now.

And if you still aren’t convinced that games matter, just look at the World Cup. Qatar spent 220 billion dollars (they could’ve bought Twitter five times over!) to host it. Why? Not because they’re going to recoup that money. Because it puts them right in the crosshairs of the world’s attention. From Ecuador, to Japan, to Germany, to Cameroon, to Serbia, to Brazil, to even a large part of the United States—everyone will be watching. And when that many people buy into the stakes of a game, there’s bound to be real-world consequences.

At the end of each episode, I ask my guest about three books that have most influenced their thinking. Here are Adrian’s picks:

• Life: A User’s Manualby Georges Perec (1978)Astonishingly good: a lesson in how to use rules to produce interesting art.

• Weavers, Scribes, and Kings: A New History of the Ancient Near Eastby Amanda Podany (2022)A look at the past not from the “big” events, but from the lives of everyday people. Stories reconstructed from ancient cuneiform texts.

• The Futurological Congress by Stanislaw Lem (1971)The funniest of the sci-fi writers; this book is the most insightful look at what virtual reality will ultimately look like—which is to say, crazy.

Books by Adrian:

• 2022: You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All

• 2020: A New History of the Future in 100 Objects: A Fiction

(I hope you find something good for your next read. If you happen to find it through the above links, I get a referral fee. Thanks!)

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In a way, coming to the end of one’s PhD almost feels inappropriate. The pursuit of this degree gives a kind of structure to adult life—my life, anyway—as something on the horizon to aim for but never actually reach. I’ve always known that getting this degree is not the final goal, just one milestone of many. But nevertheless finishing it doesn’t feel like something I’m supposed to do. It is, for me, an unprecedented situation.

But nonetheless here we are. Last month, I defended my dissertation.

And so now I’m in the somewhat startling position of having done what I set out to do. I find myself faced with a familiar question, but one whose answer feels a lot less straightforward than it used to be.

Now what?

The month before I began my PhD, in October 2019, I sat down with an idea. The concept was to reach out to people I admired—mostly academics and authors—and ask them about the decisions they made when they were in my position. What did they do when they were grad students that set them up for success later on? Sure, I wanted to know about their success, in some sort of career-prestige sense. But I also wanted to understand how they thought about what it means to make a substantive contribution to their field, whatever that may have looked like to them. I envisioned it as a podcast, which I called Cognitive Revolution.

People, I was surprised to learn, were incredibly generous with their time. The project didn’t always go as well as I hoped. There’s a lot that I could’ve done better, and the pandemic actually stifled my show when it seemed to bolster this kind of project for so many others. But I got to talk to many of my heroes, a lot of whom were the ones who inspired me to pursue cognitive science and social psychology in the first place.

I started the project with the vague idea that it would be a useful exercise in “audience building.” It seemed like the kind of thing that was done by other authors who had taken a path like the one I envisioned for myself. It was clear to me since I was an undergrad that I cared at least as much about telling stories about research findings than actually doing the research itself. And I’ve always known that I wanted to write non-fiction pop-psych books as a part of my career. But I also knew that going directly into writing wasn’t the right move, either. I wanted to have something to say. And I felt that developing actual expertise in a field I cared about would give me that.

The Cognitive Revolution podcast allowed me the opportunity to explore the different versions of what that can look like, and how different people have constructed something resembling a coherent career from the disparate pieces of whatever they’ve found, in retrospect, that they’d managed to accomplish. What I thought was going to a means of building an audience was more like adding a second major to my degree. I got a lot out of it. But it was only incidental whether anyone else did as well.

Somewhere along the line, though, I began to feel I was reaching a point of diminishing returns on that project. It’s not that there was nothing left for me to learn. But it seemed like I had gotten all the information that I was going to get out of asking people how they went about doing whatever it was they did. I still am drawn to people’s personal stories, absolutely. But the original concept of Cognitive Revolution no longer represents the dimension of growth that I see myself moving along. It’s time to do something else.

And so I’m starting a new project. It’s a podcast; it’s a blog. It’s the Substack you’re reading now. I call it Meaning Lab.

In Meaning Lab, I’ll take a cognitive science perspective on the pursuit of meaning in work, life, and relationships. Each week, I’ll publish a podcast interview with an author, scientist, or academic about how their work has uncovered some interesting or unexpected aspect of meaning—where it comes from, how it works, what exactly it means to find more of it in one’s daily activities. I’ll also publish a weekly piece from my own perspective delving into what psychological research tells us about the mechanisms underlying how we make sense of the world and our place in it.

There are, above all, two reasons I want to talk about meaning.

First, I just think it’s the coolest concept in all of cognitive science. The enterprise of meaning-making is the single most interesting thing that minds can do. To take one example, we humans can take arbitrary sequences of squiggles and lines and dots and use those to represent our entire experience of the world. Human language is amazing. It’s something I’ve been interested in for a long time (for instance, my undergrad thesis was on “Computational models of jazz improvisation inspired by language”). But another example of meaning is how we reflect on our own experiences to create stories about what we’ve done, who we’ve done it with, and why it was worth doing. And meaning isn’t just important for esoteric things, like the study of linguistic semantics, or more practical things, like what research says about how to get more fulfillment out of your work—but the full range of human experience, from music, to art, to ideas, to the basic infrastructure of cognition, to what brings us all together in organized society. In a very real sense, our minds are designed for meaning-making.

The second reason is that I think the idea of meaning is able to give us a more nuanced vocabulary for talking about our experience of the world. This, in my estimation, is something we really need. I’m skeptical of the way we normally talk about some of the routine psychological concepts of work and life.

For instance, happiness. The concept just seems very flimsy to me. As if the best of all possible lives is one in which you attain a permanent state of placid appeasement. Ice cream for every meal. It’s a one-dimensional definition of what it means to be human. Feelings like heartache and profound sadness may not be especially gratifying in the moment. But they’re at least as important in giving texture to the experience of a human life. The concept that reflects that much more directly, in my opinion, is not “happiness,” but meaning.

Which leads me to another of the usual constructs that I think we’ve misunderstood: habit. So much of our discourse about work, and how to be better at it, has to do with developing an optimal habitual routine. The reason for this is that the promise of good habits is frictionless productivity. In the best case scenario, we’d be able to do the right thing without ever having to think about what exactly it is. The problem is that reliance on habit puts us on autopilot. That might be fine when you’re flying a simple route. But when life requires flexibility, contemplation, or creativity, our habits—good or bad—work against us rather than for us.

These are kinds of arguments and ideas I want to explore on this Substack. Eventually, I’ll really be trying to do this blog/podcast as a premium product. Looking forward, I think at some point I’ll do most of my posts paywalled, with the podcasts (or at least, like, the first 60 minutes of them) free. So, in the future I will be asking you to shell out some dough to support my work. For now, I want to focus on making sure the work is as high-quality as possible, as well as growing my free subscriber base before dialing in the paid content. That said, if you do want to support up front, I’d really appreciate it! This is the move I’m trying to make post-PhD, so your contribution will help me be able to solidify doing this kind of thing full-time. Even signing up for a month of paid, then cancelling makes a big difference! There’s a button below, which I believe says “subscribe now” for non-subscribers and “upgrade to paid” for free subscribers—so please do feel free to use such a button however you see fit, including leaving it completely untouched.

At any rate, I’m glad to have you here. I think it’s gonna be a lot of fun. I’m excited. New episodes of the Meaning Lab podcast will begin next week.

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Anxiety. It is the only emotion my body believes is truly necessary for me to experience at three o’clock in the morning. To be sure I’d rather be sleeping. Usually how I respond to this experience is by listening to audiobooks or podcasts until I fall back asleep. I may get through more audiobooks that way, but it’s hard for me to look at that and imagine anxiety as anything other than a burden. I’ve recently been rethinking that relationship with anxiety.

And in particular, one book has helped me start to change some of my beliefs about how anxiety works and what a healthy relationship to it might look like. That book is called Future Tense by my guest today, Tracy Dennis-Tiwary.

Tracy is a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Hunter College, where she directs the Emotion Regulation Lab. She’s spent the last couple decades as a psychologist studying anxiety, particularly in clinical populations and children. In her book, Tracy argues that though anxiety is unpleasant it actually plays a crucial role in our daily lives.

What exactly is the benefit of anxiety? Well, here’s how I’d put it:

The majority of our emotional lives is concerned with the present moment. Our brains are designed to get what we want right now, not to delay gratification until some unknown future date. The tension here is that while our emotions tend to orient us toward the moment, so much of our progress as individuals—as a civilization—depends on doing hard work now so our future selves or generations can enjoy its benefits.

Anxiety is the emotional bridge between our present selves and our future outcomes.

It is the emotion that makes us care about what rewards or punishments will receive in the future and motivates us to take action now, in order to put ourselves in the best position for success later on. Without that emotional bridge, it’s a lot easier to disregard what’s going to happen in the future. Anxiety is the only part of our present selves that has a true emotional investment in how our future selves will feel.

With this in mind, the appropriate relationship to have with anxiety is not to eliminate it, but to channel it. Anxiety can be incredibly motivating. And at a certain level, it’s healthy.

Throughout this conversation, we talk about the give and take of anxiety—but we also talk about how this fits into a larger conversation about how we’re so often taught in modern life that what we should do is eliminate bad things. We should take the presence of bad things as a negative signal. We should be able to remove inefficiency, unhappiness, and all sorts of negative outcomes and emotions from our lives. (In my essay on Heart of Darkness, I call refer to this as “Being loyal to the nightmare of your choosing.”)

But this is based on false model, an inaccurate story about how life works and what it means to be human. This is the story of anxiety that we cover in this conversation. Engaging with it and not running from it is part of the larger story of what Tracy called the “hard work of being human.”

Tracy’s book is “Future Tense: Why anxiety is good for you, even though it feels bad.” It is out now.

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My episode last week featured a conversation with author David McCraney about what it takes to change someone’s mind on a big, important topic like religion, or abortion, or guns. And the overriding conclusion of McRaney’s research on the topic was that facts alone don’t change minds. From emotions and feelings to social dynamics, beliefs are embedded in a complex web of factors that rationality alone can do little to unwind. But that doesn’t mean we can’t try.

My guest this week is a two time world champion of debate. He’s coached debate for Harvard, as well as the Australian national team, and he’s currently a law student at Harvard. His name is Bo Seo, and his new book is called Good Arguments.

In the book, Bo tells the story of his own trajectory through the debate world and what he’s learned about the structure of successful debate along the way. And I wanted to talk to Bo about this because debate is a kind of idealized battle of beliefs. One side gives their perspective. The other side makes the opposing case. Whichever side’s argument is more convincing is declared the winner. And it’s this kind of idealized form of debate that many of us, Bo included, envision as this core principle of a working democracy. You let two opposing sides each present the best version of their case. Then the rest of us get to decide which one to believe. But it feels less and less like these kind of good arguments are happening in our society. Sometimes they don’t even feel possible anymore.

So in this conversation, I wanted to explore the mechanisms of formal debate. Why does competitive debate work the way it does? What happens if you change the formula? What might we be overlooking by trying to over-generalize the competitive debate format to the rest of society? And is debate the right model to use if our ultimate goal is changing minds? These questions are all especially worth asking to contrast with the decidedly non-debate models of mind-changing David McCraney and I had discussed last week.

Bo’s book, Good Arguments, is out. Now you can find him on Twitter @HelloBoSeo or on his website helloboseo.com. If you enjoy this episode and want to stay up to date with the rest of my work, please consider subscribing to my Substack newsletter at againsthabit.com.

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I often say that the second best thing to happen to me was deciding to become a Christian. And the first best thing was deciding not to be a Christian.

I didn’t exactly grow up Christian, but I became a believer around age 12. I went to Christian school. Overall I took my religious beliefs really seriously. And to me, they felt like my own. A core part of my identity as a Christian was that I was explicit about my beliefs. I didn’t inherit them from my parents, nor did they feel like I was required to put them on for public appearances, like some sort of mandatory uniform.

Since my school was religious, Christian doctrine was taught in the classroom. These students were all more or less believers as well, even if they were the mandatory uniform kind. We even had a teacher who taught us that evolution was not “just a theory” as one sometimes hears the Creationist argument framed, but a totally ludicrous idea that makes little rational sense when subjected to true unindoctrinated scrutiny.

Then in college, I started to modify some beliefs, all of which traditionally are not held by Christians, but all of which I felt were compatible with a biblical world view.

The first was evolution. This one was easy. Even if you believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible, if God hasn’t created the sun in the moon yet, then who’s to say that a day is only 24 hours long? These seven days of creation in Genesis could have taken place over billions of years, guided by the hand of God. So evolution was fairly easy to add into my worldview.

The second was determinism. This one is also pretty easily squared with Christianity, maybe even a more conservative interpretation of the Bible. In theology, the debate is often presented as Calvinism versus Arminianism. Calvinists believe in predestination. God, being all-knowing, knows ahead of time, who is going to heaven and who isn’t. He’s God. He can’t not know. The Arminianists, by contrast, believe in free will. God, being all loving, can’t create some people just to send them to hell and therefore shields his otherwise all-knowingness from whether or not a person’s heart will turn toward him. Arminianism sounds nice, but… come on. Calvinism is clearly the more defensible theological position. So when I came to believe that free will is an illusion, it didn’t pose any issue to my faith.

The third and most difficult to square was physicalism. This is the philosophical position that all physical events have physical causes. In other words, there’s nothing in the physical universe that needs some outside force to explain it. In particular, there is no immaterial soul that explains the essence of human behavior.

Whenever I told Christians about this belief, they were usually taken aback. But what about resurrection? How would that work without an immaterial soul — if we were all just atoms, cells, and chemistry? To which I would usually reply that the logistics of resurrection were indeed mysterious under physicalist assumptions, but it was no less mysterious than dualistic assumptions. Just less familiar. For instance, how does an immaterial soul for which there is no evidence of interaction with the human brain and is not necessary for a complete explanation of human behavior, contain the essence of a person in any meaningful way? How for that matter would such a soul migrate from our own physical universe into some alternate universe of heaven, or hell, while still retaining some resemblance to the essence of its original host? It may have been a nonstandard belief, but I didn’t view it as one that created new problems, just reframed old ones.

And so for a while, I held onto these three additional beliefs, as well as my belief in the core tenets of biblical Christianity about Jesus being our savior. The change in beliefs themselves was not enough for me to disregard Christianity as a whole. There was another piece that was necessary.

I’d always been a part of Christian groups, and throughout high school that association was pretty strong. But in college, the Christian group I joined never quite seemed to click for me. I spent a lot of time with the people in the group. I even lived on an apartment floor where everyone was a member of this group, but I always felt like I was on the outside. In fact, on a one on one level, I felt much more connected to my friends who weren’t believers.

The main exception was my girlfriend at the time who was herself close to everyone in that inner circle. Then one day she broke up with me. The reason cited was insufficient Jesus-mindedness, which really offended me at the time, because I considered myself very Jesus-minded. But it was my first major breakup and it hit me really hard. I found it difficult to let go. On two separate occasions I asked her to take me back (and I doubt her version of the story employs the verb ‘ask’ in quite the same manner). But eventually it became clear we were not getting back together.

That was January 21st, 2013. I remember that date because it was the day I decided I would no longer be a Christian.

I officially disbelieved in the Jesus narrative that I’d held as a defining core belief for so many years. At the time I figured that even if I was going to be a Christian in the long run, I’d be a more effective one knowing what it was truly like to live life as an unbeliever. Either way, it was time to take these new philosophical perspectives I had adopted as my central beliefs, rather than the teachings of the Bible.

The thing that stands out to me about that story looking back was that it wasn’t the intellectual change that ultimately flipped my religious belief. It was the social change. Most people I grew up with who remained Christian — their friends are all Christian, their parents and siblings are Christian. There’s a huge social cost to altering that belief. But after my breakup, I found myself no longer having to face that social cost. I had removed the social barriers, and I could make the decision based on my own intellectual conclusions. From this experience, I learned that, in general, people don’t form their beliefs for intellectual reasons. They form them for social reasons.

And that is one of the central themes of the latest book from my guest today, David McRaney. It is called How Minds Change. In it, David looks at the cutting scientific edge in the field of psychology as it relates to belief change. He follows some stories of belief change much more dramatic than my own. For example, ex members of the Westboro Baptist church and formerly prominent conspiracy theorists.

The book was a ton of fun to read and I highly recommend checking it out. Even as someone who reads quite a bit of non-fiction on cognitive and social psychology, there was a lot in there that I hadn’t encountered before and a handful of reframings which really put old subjects into new light for me.

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Earlier this week, my colleague Adam Mastroianni published an essay on what he called "cultural oligopoly." An increasingly smaller number of artists create an increasingly larger percentage of what we watch, read, and listen to. Mastroianni presents data showing that through the year 2000 only about twenty-five percent of a single year's highest grossing movies were spinoffs, franchises, or sequels. Now it's somewhere in the neighborhood of 75%. He has similar data for hit TV shows, books, and music. Why is this happening?

My guest today is Nick Seaver, who is a cultural anthropologist at Tufts University. And for the last decade or so, Nick has studied the social processes underlying the creation of music recommender systems, which form the algorithmic basis for companies like Spotify and Pandora. I've admired Nick's work for a long time. And as an anthropologist, he is interested not necessarily in the nitty gritty details of how these algorithms are constructed, but rather in who is constructing them and what these people believe they are doing when they make decisions about how the algorithms ought to work.

The core of Nick's work centers around taste, and how these companies and their algorithms subtly shape not only what we consume, but what we like. When Nick started this line of work in the early 2010s, it really wasn't clear how big of an impact these recommender systems would have on our society. Now, his expertise gives an evermore incisive look at the central themes of many large societal conversations around the content we consume and our everyday digital existence. But I came into this conversation with Mastroianni's question at the top of my mind, and I think Nick's research can give a crucial insight, at least into one piece of the puzzle.

One of Nick's papers relates an ethnographic study of music recommender system engineers. In the interest of protecting the identity of his informants, he gives the company a fictional name, but it bears conspicuous resemblance to Spotify. As a naive observer, one might think that the way these engineers think about their audience is in terms of demography: this kind of person likes this kind of music. If they can figure out the kind of person you are, they can recommend music that you'll probably like. But that turns out not to be the dimension of largest variance.

Instead, Nick introduces the concept of “avidity.” Essentially, how much effort is a listener willing to put in to find new music? This turns out to be the first distinction that these engineers make between listeners. And it forms a pyramid. On the bottom you have what one of his informants called the “musically indifferent.” This makes up the majority of listeners. Their ideal listening experience is “lean-back.” They want to press play, then leave the whole thing alone. It is a passive listening experience — no skipping songs, no wondering what other tracks might be on the album. From there, it goes from “casual” and “engaged” listeners to the top of the pyramid, which is “musical savant.” These are “lean-in” listeners who are taking an active role in discovering new and different kinds of music.

“The challenge,” Nick writes, “is that all of these listeners wanted different things out of a recommender system.” Quoting one of his informants, codename Peter, he says: “in any of these four sectors, it's a different ball game in how you want to engage them.” As Nick summarizes it: “what worked for one group might fail for another.”

Nick continues here: "as Peter explained to me, lean-back listeners represented the bulk of the potential market for music recommendation in spite of their relatively low status in the pyramid. There were more of them. They were more in need of the kind of assistance recommenders could offer and successfully capturing them could make 'the big bucks' for a company."

Nick relates the slightly more forthcoming perspective of another engineer, codename Oliver: "it's hard to recommend shitty music to people who want shitty music," he said, expressing the burden of a music recommendation developer caught between two competing evaluative schemes: his own idea about what makes good music and what he recognizes as the proper criteria for evaluating a recommender system.

In the course of our conversation, Nick and I cover not only his studies of music recommender systems, but also his more recent studies taking an anthropological approach to attention.

We tend to think of attention as this highly individualized process. For example, of gazing into the screen of your phone or turning your head to identify the source of an unexpected noise. But attention is also a social and cultural process. We attend collectively to certain stories, certain memes, certain ideas. What exactly the connection is between these two forms of attention is not obvious. And Nick's current line of work is an attempt to draw it out.

But the larger theme here is that music recommender systems are one battle in the larger war for our collective attention. What Spotify, Netflix, and Twitter all have in common is that their success is proportional to the extent to which they can dominate our attention. This is known in Silicon Valley as the idea of "persuasive technology." And one way to begin to understand the origins of cultural oligopolies starts with Nick's observation about avidity. The vast majority of listeners or viewers tend to go with the default option with which they're presented. Another way of putting it is that their preferred mode is habitual autopilot.

While recommender systems make up just one part of this content ecosystem. This principle remains stable across its many different layers. The more we go with our habitual default options, the more control these platforms have over us. The more we rely on these companies to define our tastes for us, the more homogenous our tastes will become.

Nick's forthcoming book is “Computing Taste.” It comes out in December 2022. Keep an eye out for it.

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This is Cognitive Revolution, my show about the personal side of the intellectual journey. Each week, I interview an eminent scientist, writer, or academic about the experiences that shaped their ideas. The show is available wherever you listen to podcasts.

Stephen Kosslyn is a foundational figure in the field of cognitive science. It is only fitting that he is the final guest in my Cognitive Revolution interview series, before I transition into a new line of content which I’m calling “Against Habit.” I remember in my introduction to my introduction to cognitive science course—which helped set me on the track I’m on today—learning about the mental imagery debate between Stephen Kosslyn and Zenon Pylyshyn. Kosslyn argued that the mental images we can conjure in our minds are indeed pictorial. Pylyshyn argued they merely felt that way; in fact, they’re closer to linguistic descriptions. It was fun to talk to Professor Kosslyn about his experience in cognitive science, how he’s used his cognitive scientific experience to do more applied work in recent years, and how cognitive scientists should think about novels and fictional rendering of human behavior. Stephen is currently president of Active Learning Sciences, Inc. and has served as chief academic officer for cutting edge educational institutions such as Foundry College and Minerva Schools. He was previously the John Lindsley Professor of Psychology in Memory of William James and Dean of Social Science at Harvard University.

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This is Cognitive Revolution, my show about the personal side of the intellectual journey. Each week, I interview an eminent scientist, writer, or academic about the experiences that shaped their ideas. The show is available wherever you listen to podcasts.

Tom Griffiths is Professor Psychology and Computation Science at Princeton University, where he directs the Computational Cognitive Science Lab. Tom uses algorithms from AI to inform his work as a psychologist—testing the ways in which hims align with or deviate from the standards set by the AI models. He’s a central figure in this field, and in this episode we go deep on how it first occurred to Tom to use computers to study the mind—as well as where this work has taken him over the years. Tom recently released a podcast series through Audible, co-hosted with Brian Christian, called Algorithms at Work. I finished it recently and can confidently say it’s one of the best podcast series I’ll listen to all year!

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This is Cognitive Revolution, my show about the personal side of the intellectual journey. Each week, I interview an eminent scientist, writer, or academic about the experiences that shaped their ideas. The show is available wherever you listen to podcasts.

Leyla Isik is Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor of Cognitive Science at Johns Hopkins University. She did her PhD at MIT with Nancy Kanwisher and Tommy Poggio. Leyla’s research uses state-of-the-art techniques in neuroimaging and computational modeling to study how people interpret real scenes. For instance, her studies have scanned the people of participants as they watch scenes from the TV show Sherlock. This is a crucial frontier of neuroscientific research, as it takes our most incisive tools for understanding the brain and liberates them from the confines of contrived experiments. Leyla and her research lab well-positioned to introduce fundamental insights about brain and behavior in the coming decades.

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This is Cognitive Revolution, my show about the personal side of the intellectual journey. Each week, I interview an eminent scientist, writer, or academic about the experiences that shaped their ideas. The show is available wherever you listen to podcasts.

Antonio Damasio is an eminent neuroscientist and author. Damasio is originally from Portugal. He is the David Dornsife Chair in Neuroscience, as well as Professor of Psychology, Philosophy, and Neurology, at USC. His books include Descartes’ Error and Self Comes to Mind. His latest book is Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain. In this conversation, we trace the trajectory of his life and work from his early experiences to his most recent text.

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I’d love to know what you thought of this episode! Just reply to this email or send a note directly to my inbox. Feel free to tweet me @CodyKommers. You can also leave a rating for the show on iTunes (or another platform). This is super helpful, as high ratings are one of the biggest factors platforms look at in their recommender system algorithms. The better the ratings, the more they present the show to new potential listeners.

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It’s officially spring now: time to reflect on what I’ve read (and watched) over winter. Overall, in the past few months I’ve found myself with little inclination to read works of psychology, or even much non-fiction generally.

Maybe that’s because I’m in the final stages of finishing my PhD, and so I find myself restlessly trying to cover non-psychological territory. But I don’t think that’s it. The real reason—or the story that I’ve come up with at any rate—has to do with how I’m growing as a person. It has to do with the fundamental complicatedness of life. I’m trying to embrace it. Not escape it.

The driving force in psychological research is simplification. The research takes a seemingly complicated dynamic in human behavior and subjugate it into some conceptually understandable (usually dichotomous) box. How does reasoning and decision-making work? Well, it’s complicated. But you can start by dividing things into System 1 and System 2. The first one is fast, relies on heuristics, and prone to bias. The second one is slow, deliberate, and based in logical processing. That’s an example. It’s the essence of Daniel Kahneman’s famous Thinking, Fast and Slow.

And this kind of dichotomizing and conceptual simplification is something I’m drawn to. I find it compelling. It’s standard-operating-procedure for anyone interested in writing about psychology, and I hope to do a lot of it in my own work as a writer. But I also feel that in coming up on ten years of studying psychology and cognitive science, I’m starting to wonder about other approaches to studying the human mind.

What if, instead of taking the complicated aspects of behavior and trying to simplify them, we leaned into the complicatedness of human life in its full convoluted glory? What would that look like? Well, it would look like a novel.

And up until recently—let’s say a couple years ago—I didn’t know what to do with that. As I wrote in my essay on the Hungarian masterpiece Journey by Moonlight, I always felt like I was waiting for someone to come along and explain what was happening to me while reading the book. Then I became frustrated when no conceptually simplified dichotomy was forthcoming.

Having exhausted the simplifying approach via psychology (or at the very least, gone a long way with where that will take me) I find myself ready to encounter some new territory, some ground that requires new and different tools for me to grow something in it. So like I said. I’m working on trying to lean into the complexity of life, rather than subjugate it. It’s okay if I don’t understand everything. The set of things I can engage with if I don’t expect to “understand” them is much larger than what I could otherwise deal with. That seems to me like a big benefit. I also feel there are aspects of life—relationships with partners and family especially come to mind—that really lend themselves to investigating through literary rather than scientific means.

So here I am. I’ve read a few novels in the opening months of this year. I’ve also watched quite a bit of TV. But that has less to do with growing as a person. It’s more that English winters are the perfect inspiration for shrugging off responsibilities and settling in on the couch.

If you ask me, that sounds way better than working on my dissertation.

Books

“End of the End of the World” by Jonathan Franzen.

I’ve been going through a bit of a Franzen-phase. I’d never read him before. But I counted his novel Freedom as my second favorite book I read in 2021. This is his most recent collection of essays. It was… mostly about birds? Like, it’s a book about climate change, but it turns out that the only reason J Franz really cares about climate change is because it’s going to kill off a bunch of bird species. The whole consequences-for-humans aspect of the whole thing seems to be an auxiliary consideration. Anyway. I was just happy to read something that gives me a bit more direct insight into the mind of someone whose novel I loved. This just happened to be the one that popped up first at the used book store, but I’m looking forward to reading his other collections of non-fiction.

“The Three Body Problem” by Cixin Liu

One of the questions I always ask my guests on Cognitive Revolution is which three books have most influenced them. The three most common answers are: “Gödel, Escher, Bach” by Douglas Hofstadter; “Man’s Search for Meaning” by Viktor Frankl; and this one. It’s a work of science fiction by a Chinese author. I don’t read much science fiction. It’s just not really my thing. But I figured in this case I’d like to give it a go. And while I enjoyed reading this one, I wouldn’t say I’m in a rush to finish the trilogy. Part of me felt like the reason a bunch of scientists recommended this book is that all of the main characters are scientists and all of the key plot points are scientific. So scientists are just happy to see themselves represented in what is undoubtedly a great, creative, and ambitious work of literature.

“Think Again” by Adam Grant

I got into this in early February, but I haven’t finished yet. Adam Grant is Exhibit A of the simplifying process of psychology I described in the intro. And part of me means that in a really good way; he’s the state-of-the-art in making complicated ideas as comprehensive as possible while still retaining their incisive edge. But I also can’t escape the feeling of kitsch—that when he’s explaining an idea he’s really Doing A Thing. Like, he understands how explaining works and so now he’s applying the tried-and-tested formula. It’s a great formula. But it’s just that—a formula. And so I find myself less drawn to that kind of work than I maybe would have five years ago.

Still, it’s a thesis that I find myself in deep sympathy with: that we need always to be reevaluating our closely held assumptions, habits, and beliefs. So it’s still a worthwhile read, and an archetypal example of why Adam Grant is at the top of the bringing-psych-research-to-a-broader-audience game.

“Spring” by David Szalay

This rounds out a trio of books I’ve read over the past year by this British-Hungarian author. By far the best was his “All that Man Is,” which I ranked fourth in my books from last year. This early offering is definitely a less refined work than that one. It’s a novel of manners, with the social milieu under consideration essentially being the millennial dating-scene of London. It’s got great London vibes and great romantically frustrated millennial vibes. I’d recommended it for anyone for whom that sounds appealing.

“Outline” by Rachel Cusk

This will definitely make my year-end book list. I had never heard of Rachel Cusk before. But I can see why she’s so well-regarded. I’m looking forward to getting into the rest of her works—this one is actually the first installment in a trilogy, so those other two books are high on my list.

I was actually recommended this book by Sam Gershman. In citing his most influential books, he mentioned “Three Body Problem,” which I’d definitely gotten from a number of guests already. But he also mentioned Rachel Cusk. At first, I forgot about it in the moment, then when I revisited the episode I became intrigued. I’m super glad I found her.

Essentially, this novel takes place across ten different conversations. The narrator is a writer who travels from London to Greece to give a writing seminar. So there’s not really any conventional plot, at least in terms of there being rising action and a driving narrative thread throughout the story. Instead, what you get are encounters with people from different walks of life—a London billionaire, a Greek taxi driver, an aspiring writer—each of whom gives the narrator an insight into their worldview. The conceit of the book is that each of one of these people is hyper-articulate about their own views and perspectives. It’s sort of like Aaron Sorkin-style dialogue, where any one of the characters has the verbal skills to destroy an interlocutor in a formal debate. These are the “outlines” of people’s lives that we get a glimpse into. And, as ever, by understanding more about how others see the world, we’re getting closer to understanding the hidden and unexpected nuances within our own perspective.

“Heart of Darkness” by Joseph Conrad

The classic. Extended essay forthcoming…

“It is written that I should be loyal to the nightmare of my choice.”

“A Gentleman in Moscow” by Amor Towles

I read this book hoping that the theme of “being trapped at home” will never again be as salient for me as it has been over the past two years. So I went in expecting a book that was moody and dark (i.e., Russian) and about a dude who was essentially isolated by himself in a room for a long period of time. Turns out, that’s not at all what the book is about. It is, above all, about fun. I think of the book less like a novel that’s driven by an overarching plot, but more like a TV show—where each episode features a distinct, encapsulated story line. There are a few threads running throughout. But it’s more that each chapter is a Seinfeldian stand-alone vignette, where something fairly inane but nevertheless entertaining and mildly hilarious transpires. Even so, I still hope the “trapped at home” theme never quite resonates in the way it has over the past two years…

“Normal People” by Sally Rooney

This book is a phenomenon. And whenever something sells a gazillion copies I’m always interested to see what resonated so deeply with people. I read Matt Haig’s “Midnight Library” last year, which falls into the same category (it wasn’t for me). I liked Sally Rooney a lot more. I’d already watched the BBC TV show based on the book, and it turns out that the series is a really high-fidelity adaptation. I’d even say that Paul Mescal in the series is way more Connelly than Connell is in the book.

At any rate, the book didn’t blow my mind or anything. But it resonates with a larger theme I’ve been thinking about recently, which is: What constitutes a “normal” relationship? As in, what is the baseline expectation about how a relationship (between two romantic partners) should be functioning? The answer is somewhere between “totally perfect all the time” and “totally catastrophic always”. But I think even trying to say which end of the spectrum a normal relationship lands on according to business as usual is even really tough to say!

This is one of the big themes of “complicatedness” that I’ve been leaning into recently. Relationships are complicated. Sally Rooney definitely thinks so. Marianne and Connell’s relationship is definitely on the “totally catastrophic always” side of the spectrum—punctuated with brief spells of bliss—and that says a lot if they’re the “normal people” in the title. But maybe “normal” is instead aspirational, and they just want to be normal like everyone else and not so fucked up. Maybe we all wanted to be less fucked up and more normal like everyone else.

Another novelist who is fascinated by this question is Jonathan Franzen. Have I mentioned him before?

“The Corrections” by Jonathan Franzen

The approximately 14,000 pages between Franzen’s “Freedom” and “The Corrections” have totally changed the way I think about life. That’s not an exaggeration. They’ve done more to reorient my thinking than anything else I’ve engaged with in recent memory.

The basic theme shared between the books is about what to do with a fucked-up family. Both books deal with five characters. And in each chapter, we see things from the perspective of one of the characters (it’s essentially a third-person narrator who at any one time has privileged vantage into a single character’s view). The way I describe reading one of his novels is that it is like looking into one of those 10x mirrors that you find in hotel bathrooms. You see everything in excruciating detail. Much closer up than you really want to. And because there are these rotating perspectives and you’re seeing people’s individual take on shared events, as well as the nuances of their dyadic relationship with every other individual, the overall effect is this holistic psychological portrait of this family dynamic.

The reason that this is useful is that because, speaking personally, I have only ever seen one family close up in anything like that kind of resolution. That is my own. And because I don’t have anything to compare them to, I don’t know what’s fucked up in a way that’s fucked up for everyone and therefore is inevitable, or what’s fucked up in a way that’s unique to my family and therefore is not inevitable. Franzen’s massive novels make it feel like I’ve finally gotten close enough to another family unit to scrutinize what’s happening.

And what’s my conclusion? Well, it’s worth providing the caveat that these books are super long for a reason—and any summary of their “insights” necessarily glosses over all that critical detail. If that detail wasn’t necessary, then J Franz could’ve just tweeted the insight then moved on with life. But at any rate, my summary is this: in these stories, there is nothing any of the characters can do at any point to unfuck their own situation. There is no decision they can make that will lead them to a not fucked up relationship. Their choices are only ever between Fucked-Up-A and Fucked-Up-B. It’s not really a happy notion (in the essay collection mentioned above, Franzen self-identifies as a “pessimistic realist”). But in accepting—or at least appreciating—that the choice is between two suboptimal paths, it frees you from the tyranny of the optimal.

So if you really want to get into the theme of romantically frustrated millennials, here’s the real issue! Because we’re given so much power to “optimize” our own lives (e.g., through sourcing potential mates via Tinder), we’re constantly put under pressure to end up on a path that feels optimal. If it feels like we’re not getting the best case scenario, then we say f**k that path and look for another. So it matters a lot what we think the “best” option is. If it’s “totally perfect all the time” then we’re going to inadvertently cause ourself to end up in the “totally fucked up always” camp by seeking something that doesn’t exist and asking of our loved ones something they cannot give.

Anyway. I really enjoyed these Franzen novels. I’m going to read his “Twenty-Seventh City” next, though I’m in no particular hurry. Also, “Crossroads” when it comes out in paperback.

Television

Newsroom

A three-season show starring Jeff Daniels written by Aaron Sorkin, mentioned above, who wrote The West Wing. I’ve heard some people say it’s better than West Wing, which is probably incorrect because even if it’s pound-for-pound as good The West Wing maintained that excellence for 10+ seasons. Whereas The West Wing is a show about the political process in the White House (particularly its interaction with the press room), the Newsroom looks at a foil of that process—the production and dissemination of network cable news critiquing the political process from an external perspective. In a way, the show was prescient in the themes it deals with: Who decides on the facts? Who chooses what gets air time? How do you balance differing perspectives on the same underlying issue? These are the questions of our age. And though we’re used to dealing with them in the context of Trump & Twitter et al, Newsroom looks at a time that goes up until moments before all that, the cusp of the social media era.

My only note here is be careful. The show is so watchable. I couldn’t stop once I started. I was powerless to watch all three seasons.

But I have no self control. Maybe you do.

30 Rock

Never watched. Now I have. It was fun!

After Life, Season 3 (Netflix)

I’d describe Season 1 and 2 of After Life as a perfect show, at least for what it was trying to be. Season 3 is definitely solid, but probably it’s best that the show wraps up here. Part of the magic of this show is that its scope is so small. One English dude. Sad little English town. Lost his wife to cancer. Wants to kill himself. Doesn’t, just to see what happens. His strategy for dealing with the darkness: laughter. And because the scope so well-constrained, I think Gervais really nails it.

The show also accords with this theory I have about comedy. Essentially, the reason why comedy is hard as a comedian is that you’re telling people that you’re about to be funny. They expect to laugh, because laughter is the promise. Therefore, you have to overcome this expectation to earn their laughter. Laughter in this situation is costly.

But in daily life, laughter is cheap! We laugh all the time, often at pretty much nothing. The difference is in expectation. So a comedian or a comedy show has to be really, really good in order to come off as funny. But shows or performances which are supposed to be for some other non-comedic purpose, any comedy that gets incorporated is much more likely to land. The expectations are lower.

This theory suggests that the best (or at least the easiest) way to be funny is to come to people on non-comedic grounds. Gervais does this in After Life by starting from the insanely, heart-wrenchingly tragic premise of losing his wife, the only person he really loved and who gave his life meaning. Now his life is devoid of love and meaning and happiness, and he and everyone around him knows it. That’s the least funny premise of all time. Which just makes the show all that funnier, once he begins to uncover genuinely hilarious material.

Ozark, Season 4 (Netflix)

The thing I love about Ozark is that it was most popular circa Spring 2020, during the beginning of the pandemic. It was sufficiently dark and gruesome to resonate with our collective sensibilities at the time. It’s like Tiger King in that way. It was a lens onto the society’s consciousness. But it’s not like Tiger King in that under no circumstances should they have made a second season. This season of Ozark is still great.

Reacher (Amazon Prime)

I love Tom Cruise movies. But I’d argue that his three worst movies of all time were: Jack Reacher 1, Jack Reacher 2, and Knight & Day. Maybe honorary mention to the third M:I. He was a terrible Jack Reacher! Why? It’s simple. Tom Cruise is like four-foot-eight. And Jack Reacher is supposed to be a six-foot-eleven brick shithouse. Also, Tom Cruise is a talker. Jacker Reacher is not a talker!! This new guy, Alan Ritchson, is the two things Tom Cruise could never be: large and terse.

So the show is worth watching just because this guy is so fascinatingly shaped. But more than that, the show rectified the sins of Tom Cruise. Is it the best of all possible action shows? No, it is not. But it very well may be the best of all possible adaptions of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher. And that’s a lot more than Tom Cruise can say.

Jeen-Yuhs (Netflix)

Highly recommend. This isn’t a normal documentary. Basically, there was this dude who quit his job to start following Kanye around with a camera before he was famous. The guy was basically like “I know this Kanye guy is going places” and so became a part of his entourage and so where was there for all these crazy moments early in Kanye’s career. And so it’s a rare opportunity to see the process of one of the most creative artists of our generation (it’s an accurate label, whatever else you want to say about the guy) before he was acknowledged as such.

Inventing Anna (Netflix)

I put off watching this for a long time. I thought it looked super annoying. I was totally wrong! It was astonishingly good. Like, so good that you find yourself wondering throughout how someone created something that’s this compelling. Definitely watch it if you’re looking for a great binge.

Movies

The Alpinist

I won’t say anything about this other than it was really good. I went into it with no expectations other than that (thanks to my mate Tristan for the recommendation) and was heavily rewarded. Enjoy!

Apocalypse Now

FF Coppola’s cinematic adaption of Heart of Darkness set in war-torn Vietnam. Extended essay coming soon.

“Everyone gets everything he wants. I wanted a mission, and for my sins, they gave me one.”

Unforgiven

This film is considered the “directorial masterpiece” of Clint Eastwood. At least that’s what Amazon Prime’s blurb tells me. But I think it’s accurate! If you know me, you know that I love Westerns (particularly Western novels; I’ll watch / read anything with a cowboy). And this is one of the highest quality ones I’ve come across. The narrative structure is pristine. The central motif of the movie of is how hard it is to actually pull the trigger of a gun to kill someone. All of which builds to a point where that is the crucial consideration at stake. This is another instance where no character’s choice is between the outcomes of “good” and “bad”. Every possible outcome is a bad one, even when they’re all just trying to do the right thing. But by the end, they only thing they achieved are different levels of bad.

Taylor Tomlinson’s “Look at You” special

I’d peg her as my choice for the comedic voice of my specific stratum of millennial-hood (she was born in 1993, which is an important year for humanity because it was the one I was born in). Her new special is out. If you want to talk about themes of “Fucked Up A” versus “Fucked Up B” she’s got you covered—and with a higher density of laughs than other content mentioned here.

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This is Cognitive Revolution, my show about the personal side of the intellectual journey. Each week, I interview an eminent scientist, writer, or academic about the experiences that shaped their ideas. The show is available wherever you listen to podcasts.

Tom Pettigrew is professor emeritus in the psychology department at UC Santa Cruz. He is best known as the main proponent of one of social psychology’s most prominent ideas: intergroup contact theory. In this episode, we talk about how Tom was expelled from Jr High school for standing up to a racist teacher, the formative experiences that sparked his insights into intergroup contact, the mentorship of Gordon Allport, his extended trip to apartheid South Africa, how Allport's four factors for positive intergroup contact really came from Tom himself, how Tom's thinking about intergroup contact has changed over the years, and the role of social psychological in large-scale political and societal change.

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I’d love to know what you thought of this episode! Just reply to this email or send a note directly to my inbox. Feel free to tweet me @CodyKommers. You can also leave a rating for the show on iTunes (or another platform). This is super helpful, as high ratings are one of the biggest factors platforms look at in their recommender system algorithms. The better the ratings, the more they present the show to new potential listeners.

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At the height of the company’s expansion, in the mid-2000s, Starbucks had a problem. By 2007, they were opening, on average, seven new stores per day. These stores required employees, and the company was hiring up to fifteen-hundred new ones each week.

For lots of these new workers, Starbucks was their first job. Many of them were fresh from a high school classroom. It’s a tough transition. An eight hour shift serving hot drinks to over-caffeinated consumers is not a uniformly gratifying experience. There were certain skills they needed to learn. Most of them had to do with the graceful reception of verbal abuse from angry customers.

As a solution, Starbucks developed a series of employee training programs. Under this new regiment, employees would spend up to fifty hours in Starbucks classrooms during their first year alone. They would complete take-home exercises, filling out page after page of a company-wide workbook.

What did they learn? Strategies like the LATTE method. When a customer presents an issue to an employee, the appropriate response is to: Listen, Acknowledge, Take action, Thank the customer for identifying the problem, and Explain why it occurred in the first place. The exercises were designed to cultivate self-discipline, the ability to keep cool under pressure. The training served the same purpose for baristas behind the bar that Rocky Balboa’s did in the boxing ring. They know they’re going to take a pummeling; it’s all about having a plan for what to do in response.

Starbucks had on their hands a tricky problem of alignment. The company’s goal was that a customer should be able to enter any one of their tens of thousands of stores around the world and have approximately the same quality of experience. They needed to align this high-end homogeneity with the messy heterogeneity of human behavior. And there’s only one way to make that happen. Habit.

This is the argument made by Charles Duhigg in Chapter 5 of his best-selling book, The Power of Habit. Duhigg looks at this anecdote and sees a story about how far habit can take you or your company. Starbucks, he writes, “spent millions of dollars developing curriculums to train employees on self-discipline. Executives wrote workbooks that, in effect, serve as guides to how to make willpower a habit in workers’ lives. Those curriculums are, in part, why Starbucks has grown from a sleepy Seattle company into a behemoth with more than seventeen thousand stores and revenues of more than $10 billion a year.” What the whole case study boils down to is, in Duhigg’s words, that “Starbucks taught their employees how to handle moments of adversity by giving them willpower habit loops.”

The overall thrust of Duhigg’s book is that “there’s nothing you can’t do if you get the habits right.” He is by no means the first or only one to make this claim. In his blockbuster Atomic Habits, James Clear writes that “Success is the product of daily habits—not once-in-a-lifetime transformations.” For Clear, the habitual mode is something to be celebrated, an occasion for giddy exultation. “The only way to become excellent,” he writes, “is to be endlessly fascinated by doing the same thing over and over. You have to fall in love with boredom.” Operating from a similar premise, Cal Newport, in Deep Work, views the culmination of his enterprise as “transforming your work habits” to reflect the principles outlined in his book. Don’t even get me started on Stephen Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. The name says it all, as if “effective people” were mere bundles of habitually executed actions. Together, millions of copies of these books are sold each year. If we are what we repeatedly do, then writers of self-help books are a promise to improve one’s habits.

But these authors aren’t the only ones who are smitten with habit. William James, the father of experimental psychology, came to this conclusion long before the modern self-helpers, writing in 1887 that “we must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can, and guard against the growing into ways that are likely to be disadvantageous to us, as we should guard against the plague.”

Pop quiz: Which James—William or Clear—wrote that “the quality of our lives often depends on the quality of our habits”? The line was penned by the latter. But the former would probably have agreed.

Our culture venerates habit. And in an important sense, people like Charles Duhigg are right. There is power in habit. It’s absolutely true that the most efficient way to accomplish any particular task is to consolidate optimal actions into habits. This is what makes habit so seductive. Ideal habits imply frictionless productivity. It is the cultivation of a mental environment in which thinking about what you are doing never gets in the way of actually doing it. There is no doubt that habits are important, and that good ones get you further than bad ones.

But also there’s something off about this argument. It seems strange: the idea that, as Duhigg and his contemporaries argue, success is a simple function of our habits. After all, the ultimate habitual agent is not a human. It’s a machine. It would take as input those tasks it needs to do. Then it would neatly, without contemplation or complaint, execute the most efficient set of actions. A machine like that could churn out caramel macchiatos all day, no questions asked.

C’mon, Mr Duhigg. Does that sound like success to you?

In general, psychologists divide personality into five categories: conscientiousness, neuroticism, openness to experience, extraversion, and agreeableness. These are known as the “Big Five” inventory of traits. Together, these traits make for a rough description of an individual’s personality. In general, the Big Five inventory is considered by psychologists to be a useful and legitimate construct—as opposed to, say, the Myers-Briggs test, which is totally meaningless.

The most thoroughly studied of all these traits is conscientiousness. Here’s the definition of conscientiousness on Wikipedia. I think it sums it up pretty well. Conscientiousness is:

the personality trait of being careful, or diligent. Conscientiousness implies a desire to do a task well, and to take obligations to others seriously. Conscientious people tend to be efficient and organized as opposed to easy-going and disorderly. They exhibit planned rather than spontaneous behavior; and they are generally dependable. It is manifested in characteristic behaviors such as being neat, and systematic; also including such elements as carefulness, thoroughness, and deliberation (the tendency to think before acting).

Study after study suggests that this dimension of personality is a key predictor of important personal outcomes. For example, a recent meta-analysis of studies across one hundred years showed that conscientiousness is the most powerful non-cognitive predictor—as opposed to cognitive predictors, such as IQ—of positive outcomes in the workplace.

This meta-analysis combined the results of over 2,500 individual studies, which together included 1.1 million participants. And what did the authors of this study find? In the 175 work-performance categories they looked at, they found that higher conscientiousness scores predicted better job performance outcomes 98% of the time. They spend the majority of their paper breaking down the different aspects of job performance that conscientiousness affects. But the overall point is clear. Conscientiousness is key.

Now, this is precisely in line with Charles Duhigg’s argument. Did you notice the first category on the left-hand column of the figure? Study habits. It’s also the strongest correlation of all those categories (besides whatever “commendable behavior” is, shown at the bottom). Conscientiousness is effectively the personality trait that measures our ability to form and stick with good habits.

Following that line of reasoning, Starbucks’ program to develop the “habit of self-discipline” is an exercise in conscientiousness. Diligent? Efficient and organized? Planned rather than spontaneous behavior? Replace “conscientiousness” with “an ideal barista” in the Wikipedia definition and the paragraph still makes sense. These are exactly the muscles of conscientiousness which that program is trying to strengthen.

Okay, then. Score one for the ‘higg. That’s the #PowerOfHabit. Right?

Here’s the part of the story Charles Duhigg doesn’t tell.

In 1983, before the global proliferation of Starbucks, one of their employees took a trip. Starbucks was then a small regional coffee roaster, with four locations in the Seattle area. The company’s big plans for expansion topped out at opening a few stores in nearby Portland, Oregon. In the early eighties, you couldn’t go into Starbucks and order a cup of coffee. They only sold the beans.

This employee had been tasked by one of the founders with attending a coffee trade show in Milan, as a representative of the company. As he recalls: “That’s when I was walking the streets of Milan and every twenty, thirty yards you are intercepted, literally, with an Italian coffee bar.”

“I walked in to all of these places and kept seeing the theatre, the romance, and the nectar of the gods which is espresso... What really struck me was the sense of community. I started going to these stores almost the same time every day and I would start seeing the same people. I started realizing this was a third place between home and work. But the beverage was the draw.”

The lesson this employee drew from the experience was that “Starbucks was in the coffee business but perhaps the wrong part of the business.”

That employee? Starbucks CEO and visionary Howard Schultz. When he returned to Seattle, Schultz told the founders that Starbucks should begin making espresso drinks, like they do in Italy. The founders demurred. They didn’t buy Schultz’s vision. It wasn’t what they had in mind for the company. Their trajectory at the time was totally out of alignment with what Schultz was proposing. Besides, espresso machines were expensive. It seemed unlikely that they’d be able to make back their initial up-front investment on the margins of a few cups of coffee. In short, they wanted to continue doing things the way they’d been doing them. They wanted to stick with habit.

But for more than a year, Schultz kept on insisting and eventually the founders relented.

“I think they just said, ‘Okay, get this kid out of our face. We’re opening a new store on the corner of 4th and Spring,’ in 1985. It was fifteen-hundred square feet, and they said, ‘We’ll give you five hundred feet of the fifteen-hundred to open up an Italian coffee bar in the store.’ And that was it. I mean, we opened the 4th and Spring Starbucks store with our first coffee bar. Overnight, we had hundreds of customers every day. And we introduced caffè latte to the city of Seattle, basically.”

The coffee bar was so successful that it soon superseded the income from Starbuck’s whole-bean sales. But the results of the experiment failed to move the founders. It wasn’t how they envisioned their company being run. It was such a stark departure from their current mode of operation. And so they told Schultz, “We don’t want to repeat this.” Schultz was taken aback. “I was devastated. I almost didn’t believe it at first. Like, really. Are you serious?”

Schultz decided to quit Starbucks. He informed the founders of his decision to leave and start his own coffee bar. To their credit, the founders said, “Well, if you do that, we’d like to invest.” The deal was, of course, that he had to use Starbucks-roasted beans in his coffee bar. Schultz named it Il Giornale, after the Milanese newspaper.

After opening his first coffee bar, in Seattle’s Columbia Tower in 1986, Schultz went back to Italy. Over the next five years, he toured the country, visiting by his own estimation over 500 espresso bars. When in the late 80s Howard Schultz bought Starbucks and took over as CEO, he built the company on his concept of the “third place”—beyond home and work—inspired by the coffee bars of Milan. It was only then that Starbucks began to expand into the ubiquitous coffee retailer as we know it today.

So, was habit important for Starbucks going from nine-thousand stores to ten, or fourteen-thousand to fifteen? Absolutely. But if habit reigned supreme, the company would never have gotten to that point. If habits had won out, Starbucks would still be a half dozen shops in the Pacific Northwest. They would’ve never even begun selling cups of coffee.

How do we square this with our findings about conscientiousness? Isn’t conscientiousness the most important non-cognitive predictor of work-place success? Yes, but there’s an exception. I pulled a Duhigg on you. I left out an important part of the story.

There was a further layer to the findings from the meta-analysis of conscientiousness. The exception to the rule had to do with the complexity of the problems faced in the workplace. Conscientiousness is the single most powerful non-cognitive predictor in the workplace—but only in low-complexity environments. In high-complexity jobs, conscientiousness matters far less.

Here’s what that figure looks like:

This was one of the key distinctions the authors drew in the paper. They argued that the reason conscientiousness is such a strong predictor of success has to do with things like: a preference for a stable environment, the ability to persevere in the face of difficulty, a well-developed muscle of self-restraint to avoid distractions, and the motivation to achieve conventional goals. They boil all these considerations down to the low- versus high-complexity distinction.

Working in a job that is “high-complexity” is neither a good thing nor a bad thing. “Low-complexity” does not mean that it’s not difficult or doesn’t require intelligence. It simply means that the rules don’t change. In some jobs the kinds of problems that you have to solve are similar from day-to-day, while in others the structure of those problems can be drawn from a much larger range. Making coffee is, under this rubric, a “low-complexity” job. That’s not to say that the job isn’t exhausting or demanding or even different every day. It totally is. But the kinds of problems that you face occur over and over again. That’s the environment in which conscientiousness matters most, and in which habit is king.

Another example of a “low-complexity” job is professional athlete. This makes sense. The rules of a game or competition are stable, so almost by definition the problems faced by athletes are repetitive. The hoop doesn’t move, and the goal never gets any bigger or smaller. So we would expect to see that professional athletes score high in conscientiousness.

In a 2019 study, a group of Australian researchers conducted a large-scale analysis of Twitter data. They used people’s tweets to predict their personality scores on the Big Five inventory. Then they matched those scores with the occupations listed in their bio. As we’d expect, they found that professional athletes, like good baristas, score high on conscientiousness. Meanwhile, software engineers were, by comparison, much lower on conscientiousness. They showed a similar trend on a number of personality traits, with software engineers also being low in agreeableness and extraversion. The only personality trait on which the trend flipped was openness to experience.

In general, athletes were extremely low on openness. This also makes sense. In order to be good at what they do, they have to abide by the same strict training regiment, day after day, week after week. You don’t want a swimmer to take a month off from training to wonder what life might be like as a tennis player. You want them to stay the course.

But while the software developers scored near the bottom on the other personality dimensions, they scored near the top of the chart on openness. Why? It’s hard to say for sure from these data. But as a software developer, the nature of the problems you face varies dramatically. To import a metaphor from a different problem-solving domain, one day you could be doing sudoku, another day you might be faced with a crossword, and on yet another you might find yourself unscrambling anagrams. It’s a high-complexity job. And in high-complexity environments the key is not to be maximally self-disciplined and to cultivate the ultimate habitual routine. You need to be open to new things, new ideas, and ready for whatever comes your way in the moment. After all, isn’t that the trait Schultz was relying on when he brought back his experiences from Italy? It definitely wasn’t his propensity to stay within prescribed bounds and stay the current course. It was his openness to the ideas he was encountering abroad.

Whether conscientiousness or openness is more important to your job depends entirely on what you do.

In our effort to cultivate optimally efficient habits, I think we’ve begun to overlook some of its downsides. There is a price to be paid for habit’s seductive promise of frictionless productivity. Habit can also be a prison. We get locked in the same way of doing things, the same way of thinking about others, the same beliefs about the way things ought to work and the way they in fact do. The price of eliminating friction is that we become inflexible. We can’t change course. It becomes hard to escape from the habits of our daily routine. As efficient as it is to rely on habit, the opposite mode is also necessary.

In my work on this Substack, I will argue that we get just as much out of this radically unhabitual mode as we do from the frictionless habitual mode. I will also argue that many of the issues that come up in the course of everyday existence are due to entrenchment in habit. Habit is in many ways the enemy of creativity—a demon on our shoulder whispering to us that the best way to do things is the way we did them yesterday. It encourages us to rely on habits of mind in prejudging others, in our beliefs about the world, and in the stories we tell about ourselves and others. Most of all, habit is antithetical to meaning. Pure habitual routine is not the realm of the human, but the mechanical. Habits allow us to go through life without actually appreciating it.

Mr Duhigg is correct that habits are powerful. But they are only powerful in situations where the problems are well-defined—where you know what you want, and it’s fairly straightforward how to achieve it. But that hardly suggests that “there’s nothing you can’t do if you get the habits right.” Not all jobs ask you do something for which optimal habits are the answer. Even less so is that the case in other areas of life.

To me, the larger point here is that modern society tells us that in order to be successful, we need to form optimal habits. In most cases, we’re given some sort of socially-accepted story about what “success” looks like and what sort of habits are required to obtain it. Rarely are we given the space to re-evaluate the validity of the instructions we’ve received. We just go along with it. What other option do we have?

Perhaps what we need isn’t a more efficient route to success. Perhaps what we need is a better definition of what it means to succeed.

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I started my podcast two months before I began my PhD. That was August 2019: two and a half years ago. When I started it, I knew that I wanted to have a career in ideas. The motivation behind the show was to talk to people I looked up to about the decisions they made back when they were in my position. I wanted to know the things they were doing at my age that led them to where they are today. I’ve since done more than 85 episodes and had the opportunity to talk to many of my academic and intellectual heroes. It’s been a blast.

But now my PhD is almost done, and I’m looking toward the future. I don’t want to say I know everything about how to succeed as an academic or author. But to some extent, I did what I set out to do. I learned from the people I look up to most. I got to ask them about the choices they made during graduate school. Have I been able to uniformly apply these principles and insights? Not really. None of the people, for instance, had to deal with a worldwide pandemic during their PhD. Also, the academic career pipeline today is just different than it was twenty years ago, and wayyy different than it was fifty years ago.

Nonetheless, I feel like I got what I was going to get out of that project. It’s not that I’m uninterested in the personal stories of scientists and intellectuals now. I still believe that ideas are inextricable from the personal experiences of the people who have them. That’s one of the reasons why Cognitive Revolution was about the “personal side of the intellectual journey”. But going forward, this no longer feels like the dimension of greatest growth for me.

Partly, I’ve exhausted my list of heroes that I wanted to talk to. Sure, I can always find more, but eventually it’s like, okay, what’s the point?

Mostly, it’s just that I’m at a different stage now than I was when I started the podcast. It was a great vehicle of growth for me throughout the pandemic. In a way, it gave me the kind of academic advising I always wanted from my mentors but could never seem to get. At the highest points it made me feel connected to the wider academic community. At the lower points it served as evidence for why the whole academic endeavor isn’t worthwhile. Now I feel like I’ve grown as much as I’m going to from this approach.

If I’m going to continue doing this kind of work—podcasting, writing, that sort of thing—I need an approach that can grow with me from where I am now into where I want to be in the future.

And so I’m doing a complete overhaul of my podcasting and writing. In short, the goal is to establish the next level of clarity and specificity on the kind of topics I want to cover, and to distribute my writing and interviews in a way that reach the largest number of people interested in that topic. Call it a rebrand, fine. But it’s more than that. To me, it’s a signal of the intention to take my work to the next level; a rite of passage, like a graduation, to say that I’ve reached an important milestone and now it’s time to push myself to improve beyond where I’m currently at. My podcast until this point has been called Cognitive Revolution. It’s explored “the personal side of the intellectual journey.” My newsletter has been The New Kommers, and it’s explored whatever the f**k it occurs to me to talk about on any given week. Both of these will now be going by a new name.

I call it “Against Habit.”

The idea of being “against habit” is less a conclusion and more an approach. Our mainstream productivity wisdom tells us that the road to success is paved with optimal habits. If we can just instill our daily routines with good habits and divest ourselves of bad ones, then we’ll be happy, successful, and productive. I’m skeptical of this project. I think in our pursuit of frictionless productivity, we’ve missed some of the most important aspects of life. It’s this line of received wisdom that I want to push back on.

In my writing, I will be exploring what cognitive science research has to say about what habits are good for—and what they are not. The main thing here is that in the common discourse, there’s not really a concept for the opposite of a “habit.” Therefore, we’re able to talk about habits as if they’re this holy grail of efficient behavior without having a clear image of what to compare them to. In cognitive science, such a concept exists. I’ll be covering it at length in future posts. I think it can bring a lot more depth to the way we conceptualize the role of habits in our everyday life.

In my podcast, I will be talking to guests who can help me rethink my own entrenched habits—the good and the bad. These will be people who make me question the standard-operating-procedure of some aspect of my own life: whether it’s in work, romantic relationships, the pursuit of meaningful activity, listening to music, or even what I wear. I hope to talk to a lot of the same kinds of people I’ve been talking to for Cognitive Revolution; but I want to get into a whole different kind of subject matter.

One of my driving principles in life is that the set of things I could potentially like is much larger than the set of things I currently do. So I’m constantly trying to find ways to make my experience of the world wider and deeper. To me, this is a fundamental aspect of what it means to be against habit: to think about our behavior not in terms of continuing to do what we’ve already done, but to find new ways of connecting with everything the world has to offer.

This is the dimension on which I want to grow going forward. I think “Against Habit” is the right premise to help me do it from.

So you can expect plenty of developments from me in the near future. Not just a new logo and that kind of stuff. But also a new approach to the material I’m producing. It’s not going to be a cut and dry swap. It’s not going to change overnight. There will be a transition between my current Cognitive Revolution content and the new stuff in line with Against Habit. I’m excited to share it with you. As always, thanks for your support. Stay tuned.

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This is Cognitive Revolution, my show about the personal side of the intellectual journey. Each week, I interview an eminent scientist, writer, or academic about the experiences that shaped their ideas. The show is available wherever you listen to podcasts.

This week’s guest is Alan Fiske. Alan is a professor of anthropology at UCLA, who is known for his unique brand of mixing approaches from psychology and anthropology. He is the brother of Susan Fiske, a famous social psychologist and one of my first guests on this show. In this episode, we talk about growing up in an academic family, Alan joining the peace core to avoid the Vietnam draft, helping to eradicate smallpox in Congo, how travel and experiences abroad influenced decision to become an anthropologist, the tension between doing good in the work (embodied by his moither) and working with ideas (his father’s purview), how indentifying the commonalities Weber, Piaget, & Ricouer led to the development of Alan’s most influential theory, and the relationship between the fields of psychology and anthropology throughout Alan’s career.

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This is Cognitive Revolution, my show about the personal side of the intellectual journey. Each week, I interview an eminent scientist, writer, or academic about the experiences that shaped their ideas. The show is available wherever you listen to podcasts.

My guest this week is Elizabeth Loftus. She is generally considered to be the most highly cited female psychologist of all time. She is also a controversial figure within the field. Her research has looked at the unreliability of eye witness metaphor and the nature of false memories. She’s used this compelling line of research to testify as an expert witness in court. Though she’s testified on behalf of a range of defendants, the most publicized cases she’s participated in have been high-profile men, such as Harvey Weinstein. She was the subject of a recent New Yorker profile, which delved into the legacy of this work—as well as providing detailed speculation on the root causes of why Beth is so drawn to the topic of false memories and why she’s dedicated so much of her career to bringing these topics to light in legal proceedings.

In this conversation, we talked about Beth being the only woman in her mathematical psychology PhD program at Stanford; being voted least likely to succeed as a psychologist; finding a topic she actually cared about; finding a way to apply it; her first case applying psychology to legal proceedings. I also get Beth’s take on the NYer piece about her life, the controversy that’s followed her work, and whether there are limits to role that abstract knowledge can play in societal events.

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This is Cognitive Revolution, my show about the personal side of the intellectual journey. Each week, I interview an eminent scientist, writer, or academic about the experiences that shaped their ideas. The show is available wherever you listen to podcasts.

This week’s guest is George Lakoff. George is one of the most highly cited cognitive scientists of all time, with his book Metaphors We Live By (co-authored with Mark Johnson) having been referenced in over 75,000 other scientific papers. George is best known for his work on how metaphor provides the structure of cognition, generally known as the “conceptual metaphors” framework, as well as his foundational ideas about the embodied mind. In last week’s episode, I talked with Annie Murphy Paul about her recent book, The Extended Mind, which draws heavily on the program of research of which Lakoff is a cornerstone. Lakoff is also politically very active, though we venture much into those topics in this conversation. In this episode our discussion mainly centers around George’s formative experiences—particularly in his childhood and adolescence; notable among them is the time he lived with a murder—as well as the genesis of his most famous ideas in cognitive science and linguistics (the latter starts around minute 40:00).

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This is Cognitive Revolution, my show about the personal side of the intellectual journey. Each week, I interview an eminent scientist, writer, or academic about the experiences that shaped their ideas. The show is available wherever you listen to podcasts.

My guest today is Annie Murphy Paul. Annie is a science journalist, and she has a new book out. It’s getting a lot of press. She’s made the rounds on all the Big Idea podcasts. I listened to a bunch of them in prep for this episode. Three of my favorites were her talks with Adam Grant, Ezra Klein, and Scott Barry Kaufman (fun fact: AMP was actually SBK's very first guest on his podcast). They’re all great discussions, and so I tried to broach some new territory with Annie in our talk here.

The basic argument of her book is about fundamentally rethinking the way we talk about the mind. Her book is called The Extended Mind, and its starting point is a paper of the same title by two philosophers, Andy Clark and David Chalmers. The basic line of argument is that we tend to think of the mind as a fundamentally bounded entity, where the bounds of thought are essentially between one’s ears. These philosophers, Annie, and the relevant academic literature, are saying: No, actually when you start to scrutinize the assumptions of that idea, the position doesn’t hold up very well. Actually our minds are inextricable from the world around us. Annie’s book is all about diving into why this is the case, and how it should change the way we interact with our surroundings.

In preparation for this discussion, I revisited that original Clark and Chalmers paper from 1998. The point of the paper, as they see it, is an argument against semantic externalism. This is a philosophical position about whether the “meaning” of a word resides in our heads, or in the world. Philosophers like Hilary Putnam and Tyler Burge advanced this externalist position, with the key soundbite being Putnam’s quote: “Cut the pie any way you like, meaning just ain’t in the head.” In particular, Putnam has this famous thought experiment, called Twin Earth, which him and his contemporaries use as an argument that internalism is false and externalism is true (meaning just ain’t in the head). Clark and Chalmers are kind of saying: Look, it’s not just meaning that isn’t in the head. It’s all of cognition. They call this position active externalism.

There’s a quote from the paper I really love. This is Clark and Chalmers talking about the details of Twin Earth:

“When I believe that water is wet and my twin believes that twin water is wet, the external features responsible for the difference in our beliefs are distal and historical, at the other end of a lengthy causal chain. Features of the present are not relevant: if I happen to be surrounded by XYZ right now (maybe I have teleported to Twin Earth), my beliefs still concern standard water, because of my history.”

I have only a modest notion of what the hell they’re talking about. But I just love how the more sophisticated a philosophical argument is, the deeper it gets into the finer points of just how wet water on twin earth is, and if you were doused in it would it feel equivalently wet to substance XYZ, and how do you know whether it’s really you or twin-you who feels this wetness.

At any rate, what Clark and Chalmers are saying is that our relationship to the people, objects, and tool in our external environment is not passive. We are actively thinking through the environment, as we much as are thinking through our own neurons. They give the example of Tetris and how you’re actually rotating the shapes on screen, then seeing if they fit—rather than thinking about how they might fit and then rotating accordingly.

That’s a brief primer on the philosophical origins of this concept. In my conversation with Annie, we also talk about how our minds extend into our social surroundings, why writing is a form of memory, the important ideas about the extended mind that people tend to gloss over, how this concept should affect American education, and how this concept changes the way we think about other people. We also battle it out over whether a dual monitor computer set up actually works like a second brain. It was a fun conversation, and I hope you enjoy it.

Annie’s Three Books:

Andy Clark: Natural-Born Cyborgs

Alva Noë: Out of Our Heads

Mark Epistein: The Zen of Therapy

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This is Cognitive Revolution, my show about the personal side of the intellectual journey. Each week, I interview an eminent scientist, writer, or academic about the experiences that shaped their ideas. The show is available wherever you listen to podcasts.

This is a conversation I’ve been wanting to have for a long time. I met Kevin several years ago, and it was a big moment for me. This was the first time I’d ever met a real author. Of course I said something foolish. Of course he has no recollection of such foolish statements. I’m a huge admirer of his first book, The Most Dangerous Book, which tells the story behind Ulysses—one of the most controversial manuscripts of all time. It’s got an incredible cast of characters from James Joyce to Hemingway to Ezra Pound to Sylvia Beach. That book really drew me into to Kevin’s style of writing and the way he’s able to bring social analysis to bear on literary and intellectual themes.

Kevin Birmingham has a PhD in English from Harvard. He actually studied under Louis Menand, whom I’ve also had on the show and is one of my all-time favorite authors. In this conversation, I definitely ask Kevin about Menand’s influence—a bit toward the end. Kevin has won numerous awards including the PEN New England Award and the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism. The occasion for our conversation today is the publication of his new book, which came out in November 2021. It’s called The Sinner and the Saint, and it tells the story of the creative process behind Dostoevsky’s masterpiece Crime and Punishment. Since it’s a Russian novel, the creative process entails a great deal of suffering. The book also ties in the true story of how Dostoevsky’s thriller was inspired by the real life crimes of a Frenchman, Pierre François Lacenaire. (I’d like to imagine that all French criminal masterminds are named Pierre François.)

Of course I’m a cognitive scientist by training, so I don’t have a lot of background in literary analysis. That’s one of the reasons why I’ve enjoyed Kevin’s books so much, helping me, as a layman, to understand books—at least aspects of books anyway—that I wouldn’t otherwise have the tools to grasp. There’s a passage I especially love from Kevin’s recent book: “One measure of Dostoevsky’s talent is that he could make something as small as a wink turn all the gears in a complex relationship. Porfiry’s tiniest movement is either an involuntary twitch or a cunning signal. Either it means nothing or it spells out Raskolnikov’s doom. He doesn’t know how to read it, and he can’t even tell if it happened. Raskolnikov wonders if all of his blinks look like winks, if the inspector’s eyes always gleam on a horizon between empty sky and unsounded fathoms. He begins to scrutinize every detail: the way the inspector positions his body, the tone of his voice, the way he emphasized the word she. In Dostoevsky’s murder story, the detective is the mystery.”

At any rate, talking to Kevin is like having a private seminar with your favorite professor. He’s able to spin some really great answers. It was a fun conversation, and I’m really looking forward to sharing it with you!

Kevin’s Three Books:

James Baldwin: Notes of a Native Son

James Joyce: Ulysses

Fyodor Dostoevsky: Crime and Punishment

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I’d love to know what you thought of this episode! Just reply to this email or send a note directly to my inbox. Feel free to tweet me @CodyKommers. You can also leave a rating for the show on iTunes (or another platform). This is super helpful, as high ratings are one of the biggest factors platforms look at in their recommender system algorithms. The better the ratings, the more they present the show to new potential listeners.

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This is Cognitive Revolution, my show about the personal side of the intellectual journey. Each week, I interview an eminent scientist, writer, or academic about the experiences that shaped their ideas. The show is available wherever you listen to podcasts.

My guest today is someone very special. I worked in his lab for two years, and he did a lot to form my relationship with cognitive science. It started back when I was an undergrad, and I went to the Cognitive Science Society conference in Berlin. There was this professor there, and I was totally arrested by his approach to studying the mind. He was using sophisticated computational models informed by AI to understand the cognitive processes underlying human thought. His name was Josh Tenenbaum. I became obsessed with his work.

The following year I went back to the Cognitive Science Society conference, this time in Montreal. My express purpose was to insinuate myself in Josh’s inner circle. I approached him on the first morning of the conference, and he said he had 15 minutes for us to chat. Mostly that chat consisted of his expounding upon his ideas about how the mind is structured and how this structure develops through childhood. But then at the end as we were wrapping up he paused for a moment and said: “I have this post-doc. He’s really good. He just applied to faculty jobs at Berkeley, Harvard, and Columbia and got offers at all three. He’ll be starting a lab at Harvard next fall. His name is Sam Gershman.”

From then on I made it my mission to end up in Sam’s lab. The story has a lot of twists and turns but suffice to say that I pestered Sam for two straight years, reminding him of my existence via email and inquiring if he had any available research opportunities. For two years, nothing happened. Then one day while I was living in Belgium, I was sitting in my underwear watching Old Country for No Men. I got an email. It was from Sam. The subject line: “Still looking for a job?” His lab manager had unexpectedly quit. He was looking for someone to fill the role in short order. He knew I was the kind of individual who was infrequently employed enough to be available.

And so I started working in Sam’s lab in spring 2016. I experienced a lot of ups and downs in those two years I worked for him. I learned a lot about what I liked and didn’t like about research, about what I wanted to do and didn’t want to do, what I needed from a work environment and what I could live without. But his general program of research combining Bayesian models and reinforcement learning to understand the neural and computational basis of behavior has influenced me more than any other single researcher. He also gave me a chance, one that’s done a lot to get me where I am today. For that, I owe him an awful lot.

Anyone who has spent any time around Sam (or taken a peak at his Google scholar page) can attest that he is likely the single most prolific individual in all of psychology. In his peak years of productivity at Harvard, it felt like he would publish the number of papers in a year other researchers could expect to publish in a decade. In this conversation, this is one of the things I wanted to press him on. He’s always been a little coy about this line of inquiry, preferring instead to keep discussions on the finer points of statistical distributions and inference problems. I pushed a bit more to talk about his process and the way he thinks about producing his work.

We also talked about cognitive science in general. Despite his pretty well-defined lane for formal research, he has uncommon breadth as a scholar. He is interested in a lot, and he’s worked on many different kinds of projects (including, as I allude to in the conversation, a series of video shorts which are—shall we say?—rather avant-garde in taste). So we went into a bit of cognitive science history (including Sam's favorite historical cognitive scientist), and what the enterprise of cogsci should look like in general.

Finally, Sam recently published a book. It’s called What Makes Us Smart: The Computational Logic of Human Cognition. We cover the overarching thesis of the book, about the two organizing principles of human cognition. We explore the potential counterarguments to that thesis, and I ask him about what people who are already familiar with the work (as well as those who aren’t) can get expect to get out of it.

Sam’s Three Books:

John Cage: Silence

Thomas Kuhn: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Liu Cixin: The Three Body Problem

Papers we mentioned:

The molecular memory code and synaptic plasticity

Like this episode? Here’s another one to check out:

In my conversation with Sam, we also mention the work of Randy Gallistel:

I’d love to know what you thought of this episode! Just reply to this email or send a note directly to my inbox. Feel free to tweet me @CodyKommers. You can also leave a rating for the show on iTunes (or another platform). This is super helpful, as high ratings are one of the biggest factors platforms look at in their recommender system algorithms. The better the ratings, the more they present the show to new potential listeners.

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This is Cognitive Revolution, my show about the personal side of the intellectual journey. Each week, I interview an eminent scientist, writer, or academic about the experiences that shaped their ideas. The show is available wherever you listen to podcasts.

This is the second part of my conversation with Randy Gallistel. In the first part, we talk about his ideas around why the neuroscience of memory is completely inadequate to the task of understanding… memory. In this episode, we get into the backstory on those ideas, as well as Randy’s major influences. We talk about the influence of foundational experiments by Tony Deutsch, why neuroscientists “squirm” when you bring up the problem of representation, which of Randy’s research projects didn't work out the way he thought, how his academic mentor introduced him to his future wife, and what a good theory should not look like.

Randy’s Three Books:

The Eighth Day of Creation, Horace Freeland Judson

The Logic of Life, Francois Jacob

Spikes: Exploring the Neural Code, Rieka et al

Honorary mention: Endless Forms Most Beautiful, Sean B Carroll

Books we talked about:

Randy’s Memory and the Computational Brain

The Structural Basis of Behavior, J. Anthony Deutsch

Papers we talked about:

Randy’s recent paper on the Physical Basis of Memory

Like this episode? Here’s another one to check out:

I’d love to know what you thought of this episode! Just reply to this email or send a note directly to my inbox. Feel free to tweet me @CodyKommers. You can also leave a rating for the show on iTunes (or another platform). This is super helpful, as high ratings are one of the biggest factors platforms look at in their recommender system algorithms. The better the ratings, the more they present the show to new potential listeners.

Also: If you’d like to unsubscribe from these weekly podcast emails, you can do so while still remaining on the email list that features my weekly writing. Thanks for following my work!

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This is Cognitive Revolution, my show about the personal side of the intellectual journey. Each week, I interview an eminent scientist, writer, or academic about the experiences that shaped their ideas. The show is available wherever you listen to podcasts.

Randy Gallistel has made a career (at least partly) out of making the neuroscientific community angry. He’s made broad, sweeping claims that cut to the core of the neuroscience of learning and memory. The problem with his claims is not that they’re broad and sweeping. The problem is that they might be right. In particular, he’s taking aim at neuroscience for not grappling with the symbolic nature of cognition. The neuroscience of memory, he argues, doesn’t even acknowledge the basis existence of “facts.” That is, there’s no neural theory of what a fact is, or how the brain might store it. In this episode, we talk about Randy’s claims in this space of topics. This was the second half of a much longer conversation. In a follow-up episode, I’ll publish the first half—which goes into the backstory of how Randy developed these ideas and the major figures who influenced him.

Randy’s Three Books:

The Eighth Day of Creation, Horace Freeland Judson

The Logic of Life, Francois Jacob

Spikes: Exploring the Neural Code, Rieka et al

Honorary mention: Endless Forms Most Beautiful, Sean B Carroll

Books we talked about:

Randy’s Memory and the Computational Brain

The Structural Basis of Behavior, J. Anthony Deutsch

Papers we talked about:

Randy’s recent paper on the Physical Basis of Memory

Like this episode? Here’s another one to check out:

I’d love to know what you thought of this episode! Just reply to this email or send a note directly to my inbox. Feel free to tweet me @CodyKommers. You can also leave a rating for the show on iTunes (or another platform). This is super helpful, as high ratings are one of the biggest factors platforms look at in their recommender system algorithms. The better the ratings, the more they present the show to new potential listeners.

Also: If you’d like to unsubscribe from these weekly podcast emails, you can do so while still remaining on the email list that features my weekly writing. Thanks for following my work!

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit codykommers.substack.com/subscribe

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This is Cognitive Revolution, my show about the personal side of the intellectual journey. Each week, I interview an eminent scientist, writer, or academic about the experiences that shaped their ideas. The show is available wherever you listen to podcasts.

Philip Johnson-Laird is professor emeritus at Princeton University. He is one of the most influential cognitive scientists of all time, best known for developing the idea of “mental models.” Though if you really want to get a sense of how eminent he is, you have to look no further than his email address. You can find him at Phil at Princeton. That’s right. He is the Phil at Princeton University. It was a huge honor to talk to him for this conversation, as he’s long been one of my favorite cognitive scientists. My favorite paper of his is a lesser known article from 2002 called How Jazz Musicians Improvise. It’s part of a long-standing interest of his in understanding how our minds create complex, meaningful sequences—in this case, strings of notes—on the go.

Phil didn’t start off planning to become an academic (he left school at age 15), and before he got on the academic track he worked as a jazz pianist. In this conversation we go deep into Phil’s background as a musician, and how that influenced his ideas about the mind. We also talk about his background working miscellaneous jobs for 10 years before starting university, marching in protests led by Bertrand Russell, the mentorship of Peter Wason, Phil’s first encounters with cognitive science, his relationship with the great George A. Miller, the genesis of the idea of mental models, how Phil’s understand of mental models has changed over the past forty years, and what the question of how jazz musicians improvise can tell us about how the mind works.

Phil’s Three Books:

Bertrand Russell’s Problems of Philosophy

Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures

Miller, Galanter, & Pribram’s Plans and the Structure of Behavior

Books we talked about:

George Miller’s Psychology: The Science of Mental Life

Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy

Wason & Johnson-Laird’s Thinking and Reasoning

Papers we talked about:

Phil’s paper on Musical dissonance

Phil’s 1980 paper on Mental Models in Cognitive Science, from the first meeting of the cognitive science society

Phil’s paper on How jazz musicians improvise

Like this episode? Here’s another one to check out:

I’d love to know what you thought of this episode! Just reply to this email or send a note directly to my inbox. Feel free to tweet me @CodyKommers. You can also leave a rating for the show on iTunes (or another platform). This is super helpful, as high ratings are one of the biggest factors platforms look at in their recommender system algorithms. The better the ratings, the more they present the show to new potential listeners.

Also: If you’d like to unsubscribe from these weekly podcast emails, you can do so while still remaining on the email list that features my weekly writing. Thanks for following my work!

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit codykommers.substack.com/subscribe

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This is Cognitive Revolution, my show about the personal side of the intellectual journey. Each week, I interview an eminent scientist, writer, or academic about the experiences that shaped their ideas. The show is available wherever you listen to podcasts.

I am excited to introduce my first return guest on the show, Brian Christian. I knew from the very first time we talked that I wanted to do a part two with him. This wasn’t through any great feat of perspicacity. It was primarily because we didn’t even get the opportunity to talk about his latest book, The Alignment Problem. In the first conversation, we talked about Brian’s background in poetry and computer science. We talked at length about how he became a writer and the process behind his first book, The Most Human Human. Now in this conversation we go deep on The Alignment Problem. The book’s been out for more than a year now, and it’s gotten some pretty good coverage. One of my favorite interviews Brian did was with Ezra Klein, which is definitely worth checking out as well. I tried to get aspects of Brian’s work that haven’t been covered as much in previous discussions. Overall, the book is about the development of artificial intelligence, and throughout each chapter we see AI become increasingly capable of accomplishing more nuanced tasks—and, importantly, tasks which become increasingly embedded into the fabric of our society. Whereas a lot of my interviews on Cognitive Revolution go deep on an author’s backstory, this one is very much focused on content.

And make sure to check out Brian’s new audiobook—Algorithms to Work By, available via Audible—when it comes out in February!

Brian’s Books:

The Alignment Problem

Algorithms to Live By

The Most Human Human

Books we talked about:

Michael Tomasello’s Cultural Origins of Human Cognition

Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence (well, by implication… when we mentioned AI safety books that “hit you over the head” with their thesis)

Like this episode? Here’s another one to check out:

As well as my original conversation with Brian:

I’d love to know what you thought of this episode! Just reply to this email or send a note directly to my inbox. Feel free to tweet the show @CogRevPod or me @CodyKommers. You can also leave a rating for the show on iTunes (or another platform). This is super helpful, as high ratings are one of the biggest factors platforms look at in their recommender system algorithms. The better the ratings, the more they present the show to new potential listeners.

Also: If you’d like to unsubscribe from these weekly podcast emails, you can do so while still remaining on the email list that features my weekly writing. Thanks for following my work!

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit codykommers.substack.com/subscribe

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This is Cognitive Revolution, my show about the personal side of the intellectual journey. Each week, I interview an eminent scientist, writer, or academic about the experiences that shaped their ideas. The show is available wherever you listen to podcasts.

I first learned of Charles' work when I saw a notice for his most recent book—Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century. I saw this, and I was like: a general audience book about the history of anthropology—sign me up! I preordered it straight away. As listeners of the show will know, even though I'm a psychologist by training I have a not so secret obsession with anthropologists. And as hoped, it turned out to be a great book. It tells a story about Franz Boaz, the father of American cultural anthropology—and his group of students that changed the face of anthropology in the first half of the twentieth century. This includes: Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Zora Neale Hurston, Gregory Bateson, and a whole host of others. Charles is not a trained anthropologist. He's a professor of international affairs and government at Georgetown. But his wife is an anthropologist, and that's how he got turned on to this story. His initial interests were in former soviet states. In particular, one of his previous books was on the history of the Caucasus. And as some of you may also know, I spent the entire second year of my PhD taking Georgian language, and my partner and I often throw elaborate Georgian feasts serving Georgian wine and preparing a great deal of Georgian food. At any rate, it was clear to me that this was a guy I really wanted to meet and talk to. I really enjoyed our conversation, as I've certainly come to look up to Charles and his work in more ways than one.

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I've been a fan of Susanna for a long time following her on her social media. She's one of my favorite personalities in science communication, and it's been impressive and inspiring to watch her grow her platform over the last few years. She just recently graduated with her PhD in microbiology from University of North Carolina. During her time in grad school, she founded PhD Balance, which seeks to raise awareness about the prevalence of mental health issues in graduate school by sharing stories and building communities. She is currently manager of engagement and communications at Xontogeny, which is a bio-tech accelerator—taking seed-stage biotech startups and helping them to grow. In this conversation, we talk finishing up one's grad school work and making sense of how to take the next step. We start off talking about Susanna's recent move across the US, and her experience graduating during March 2020. It's at this point that I ask Susanna a rather subversive question, and from there we talk about growing as a person during grad school, Susanna's own story of mental health in grad school which motivated her to found PhD balance, and her strategies for productivity: from hanging out with her dogs, to organizing her to-do list. It was a conversation I really enjoyed!

You can find Susanna at susannalharris.com and on Twitter/Instagram @susannalharris.

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I've been following Nicole's work for a long time, and I'm a big fan. She's developed a platform for her writing as well as a presence on social media. It's been cool to watch her do it. Nicole has a PhD from Oakland University in psychology with a specialization in evolution and human development. Most of her recent work focuses that expertise on the area of education. She's also a prolific reader. It's something she takes seriously as a part of her identity, and she wears it really well. I've been following her book reviews for a long time in other venues, but she just recently started a new forum for them at bookmarkedreads.substack.com/. In this conversation, we talked about Nicole's experiences excelling in academia then transcending it, her approach to picking new books (it always starts with the cover), as well as strategies for getting one's work and ideas out to a broader audience. She's a really cool individual, and I'm excited to see where her work takes her in the future!

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This is Cognitive Revolution, my show about the personal side of the intellectual journey. Each week, I interview an eminent scientist, writer, or academic about the experiences that shaped their ideas. The show is available wherever you listen to podcasts.

Tara Thiagarajan is the Founder and Chief Scientist of Sapien Labs. Based in Washington, DC, Sapien Labs is a non-profit organization whose mission is to take brain diversity seriously. Most research in psychology and neuroscience treats the brain as a kind of monolithic entity, as if every brain were the same. But we know that's not true: there are important differences in the brain not only between individuals, but within the same individual from day-to-day. We also know that psychology and neuroscience have historically focused on a skewed sample of mostly white, mostly American, mostly undergraduate participants. Tara's goal with Sapien Labs is to truly account for what it means to look at differences in brains among all people on the planet. One of their in-progress projects is the Human Brain Diversity Project. Over the next five years, this project will "build an open database of 40,000 individuals across 4 countries and continents consisting of EEG recordings along with extensive information about demographics, lifestyle, technology use, diet and cognitive and mental health aspects." One of their papers, published this year in Nature Scientific Reports, showed the effect of "stimulus poverty" on brain physiology. They showed that the different stimuli people encounter on an average day—from phone use, to travel, to reading, and beyond—correlate with different physiological signatures in the brain, as measured by EEG. I found Tara's projects, as well as her overall story, very fascinating. I'm excited to see how those projects continue to develop in the coming years.

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This is Cognitive Revolution, my show about the personal side of the intellectual journey. Each week, I interview an eminent scientist, writer, or academic about the experiences that shaped their ideas. The show is available wherever you listen to podcasts.

Andy Luttrell is the kingpin of a content empire. His work spans from podcasts (Opinion Science) to YouTube (catchy summaries of key psych topics) to online courses (which have been taken tens of thousands of times on platforms such as Udemy) to all sorts of other stuff. He is also—and I suppose this is technically his day job—an Assistant Professor of Psychological Science at Ball State University. His academic work centers on how people form and change their opinions, and he's a lot of fun to talk to. In this episode I ask him how he's able to create such a large amount of really high quality content so consistently while ALSO being a professor while ALSO being a new father. We talk about magic, and how a love of performance still pervades Andy's work today. And also we go down several tangents discussing tricks of the trades in podcasting and other common areas of interest. I really enjoyed talking to Andy and found myself impressed by how well he carries himself in front of a microphone. I hope you'll feel the same!

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I’d love to know what you thought of this episode! Just reply to this email or send a note directly to my inbox. Feel free to tweet me @CodyKommers. You can also leave a rating for the show on iTunes (or another platform). This is super helpful, as high ratings are one of the biggest factors platforms look at in their recommender system algorithms. The better the ratings, the more they present the show to new potential listeners.

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David Edmonds did his degrees in philosophy. Then he did something unexpected. He made money. I don't know how much. But, as far as I can tell, enough to reasonably call what has had so far a "career." He was a long-time broadcaster doing features at the BBC World Service. He also hosts and produces a number of popular podcasts, including Philosophy Bites, Philosophy 24/7, and (my personal favorite) Social Science Bites. He's also written a number of books—most notably Wittgenstein's Poker, which builds on his expertise in philosophy. I admire Dave's work because he's been able to find ways to turn his interests and ideas into opportunities and content. It's the kind of thing I'd like to do, so I asked him about how he went about doing it. He's a fun guy, and I know you'll enjoy the conversation.

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Salma Mousa is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yale. She recently took that position after a post-doc in Stanford's Center for Democracy, Development, and Rule of Law, and the Immigration Policy Lab. She is a rising star in the field of political science and has published some of the field's highest profile papers in recent years. Her work centers around questions of how people build social cohesion after conflict. What drew me to her work is that it addresses some of our most significant social questions—about how reduce prejudice and violence, about how to make a society that works for everyone—in ways that are both theoretically motivated and have a grounding in the real world. Her work breathes new life into established theories, such as intergroup contact theory—the idea that the most effective way to reduce prejudice between groups is positive social contact. She recently published a solo-author paper in Science on "Building social cohesion between Christians and Muslims through soccer in Post-ISIS Iraq" which we discuss at length toward the end of the conversation. She is also an author on a paper about "The Mo Salah Effect" which showed genuine reductions in anti-Muslim prejudice in Liverpool after Mohamed Salah joined the city's football team. It's an awesome study, the details and backstory of which we also get into. One thing that stood out to me about Salma's work is that she does a smaller number of big, important project really well, rather than a bunch of smaller projects that aren't as meaningful. I so often feel that science (especially in psychology) rewards quantity over quality, and so it is incredibly inspiring to see someone who invests in big projects which will lead to actually important advancements in our understanding of human behavior. She was a pleasure to talk to, and I know you'll enjoy this conversation.

More info: codykommers.com/post/70-salma-mousa

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Coltan Scrivner: you may not know the name, but you will. Coltan is a first-gen college student, and one of the most impressive PhD students I've come across. His family is from Slaughterville, Oklahoma, and did his undergrad and masters in Oklahoma before beginning his PhD at the University of Chicago's Department of Comparative Human Development. He's carved out for himself a fascinating area of specialization: morbid curiosity. It's really cool to see him conceive of an academic niche and to position himself as the unequivocal world expert. He's under contract for Penguin Random House to write a trade book on morbid curiosity, which is how I found him originally. But what I didn't know before our interview is that he also has a TV series in the works. As a PhD student! Wow. In this conversation, I talked to him about his story of developing his interests and expertise, how he was able to be so productive so early in his career, and what his research has uncovered about why we're fascinated with death, horror, and violence. Coltan is definitely going places. Also, I watched The Autopsy of Jane Doe later that night on Coltan's recommendation. Let's just say... it lives up to Coltan's billing.

His website: https://www.coltanscrivner.com/
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Alexandra Chesterfield is co-author of the book Poles Apart: Why People Turn Against Each Other, and How to Bring Them Together. It's a look at political polarization in our society, how we've gotten to this point, and what we can do about it. Jonathan Haidt called it "A fascinating read, which will help anyone who wants to step out of the polarization cycle and become part of the solution." Alex has a masters degree in Cognitive and Decision Science, and she's been using that background to apply insights from behavioral science in real world settings. She was also an elected Councillor in Guildford for the Conservative Party. Her co-authors are Laura Osborne, a professional communicator, and Alison Goldsworthy, who helped to create the first depolarization course at Stanford. Together they host the Changed My Mind podcast, in which they interview eminent thinkers about topics on which they've changed their mind. This conversation has two parts. In the first, we talk about Alex's background—primarily being a person with conservative-leaning principles in predominantly liberal environments. This sets the stage for a discussion of the work Alex and her co-authors present in Poles Apart. I also ask her about the limits of what psychology can teach us about effective de-polarization. You can find the link to the paper we discussed here: https://gershmanlab.com/pubs/HowToNeverBeWrong.pdf.

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I have been a big fan of Rebecca and her work for a long time. She is the John W. Jarve (1978) Professor in Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT. She is a co-author on a handful of my all-time favorite papers in my own area of research interest, called "theory of mind" — the process by which we come to understand the minds of others. There's so much that I enjoyed about this conversation, but the overall theme that stands out to me has to do with the pure joy Rebecca takes (and, by extension, spreads) in her appreciation of the mind. She loves digging deep in the recesses of her own thoughts and feelings, as well as trying to inhabit the thoughts and feelings of others. Whether in formal theory of mind research or in a good novel, she seems constantly to be sensitive to the beauty of the mind in all its facets. It is one of the features of her scholarly career which has made her work so influential among her colleagues and her mentorship so impactful among her students.

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Gordon Allport was one of the most influential psychologists of the twentieth century. He was the progenitor of the modern forms of both social and personality psychology. His 1954 book, The Nature of Prejudice, is one of the most cited works in the whole field. He also happens to be one of my favorite thinkers of all time.

Allport's core drive as a psychologist was to leverage experimental rigor in service of broad humanistic understanding. He wanted reliable experiments that gave legitimate results. But he also wanted those results to tell us something profound about what it means to be human. Not just in an abstract, for-people-on-average kind of way. But as it pertains to the life of an individual, their lived experience, and the idiosyncrasies in the way they perceive the world. Allport was one of the first cognitivists. Though we don't associate him with the Cognitive Revolution, many of the early leaders of cognitive science were his students (e.g., Jerome Bruner, George Miller). Allport also had an abiding appreciation for the fact that a person is not just the contents of their mind, but is a product of their social context. Considered in totality, Allport embodied many of the most important insights and perspectives in 20th century psychology.

In this biographical essay, I sketch a portrait of Gordon Allport, his work, and the social and intellectual context in which that work was produced. I tell of how Gordon struggled in graduate school, and how he also lost his 'spark' while studying at Harvard; how a trip to Constantinople, and later Germany, reignited that spark; how the two dominate paradigms in social science of the first half of the twentieth century (Behaviorism and Freudianism) led to Allport's modern psychology; and how the scientific study of prejudice in the 1950s led to some of psychology's most important impacts on society. I go deep on Allport's most well known work, The Nature of Prejudice, as well the book that was his ultimate life goal but he could never get right: Letters from Jenny. There's so much in his story that I resonate with and that I think contemporary psychology can learn from and aspire to. I hope you'll feel the same.

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I really enjoyed this conversation with Elizabeth Ricker; it was one of those conversations where I felt as though I'd found a kindred spirit, someone who goes about life in approximately the same way as myself. Elizabeth did her undergraduate in Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT and her master's in Mind, Brain, and Education at Harvard. She is a creature of enthusiasm: she is driven by what strikes her as interesting, and she has no time for anything that doesn't. This made for a fun conversation. We covered a lot of ground: moving through her own story to uncover how she developed the ideas presented in her new book, Smarter Tomorrow. At first, I was a bit skeptical of her concept of "Neurohacking" — whether, as her book's subtitle claims, 15 minutes of neurohacking a day can help you work better, think faster, and get more done. But Elizabeth convinced me. Her work runs really deep. And at it's core it's driven by a philosophy of radical individualization: that what is most important in finding the "right" process is finding the process that works for you. This isn't something we fully appreciate in our productivity cultures, which often prescribes to everyone the approaches that have worked only for a few successful individuals. As Elizabeth presents it, neurohacking is all about finding the productivity niche that is idiosyncratically yours.

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Azeem Azhar is a technologist and investor with a background in technology journalism. His newsletter, Exponential View, is enjoyed by ~200,000 readers per week. The occasion for our discussion was Azeem's new book: The Exponential Age; or in the UK: Exponential. It is about the discrepancy between the rate of technology's change—which is exponential—and the rate of change in the rest of society, in our cultural practices, and in the way we think (which is slower). This is the exponential gap, and it is where many of our society's most pressing problems lay. In this episode, Azeem and I talk about some of the key arguments in his book and their extrapolations to other topics of interest. We also talk about his background: starting when he was a boy living in Zambia, encountering computers for the first time. You can dig further into Azeem's work in his book or through his newsletter, both available here: https://www.exponentialview.co/.

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Jay Van Bavel is the closest thing social psychology has to a rock star. His official title is Associate Professor of Psychology and Neural Science at New York University, and both he and his work are much beloved by young psychologists everywhere. His lab studies intergroup neuroscience, and I've found much of his research incredibly inspiring throughout the years. He's popular on Twitter, where you can follow him @JayVanBavel. In an effort to bless the world with more stellar social psychological content, Jay has published a book. It is called THE POWER OF US, and it's officially available for the reading public! Co-authored with his colleague and friend, Dominic Packer of Lehigh University, it's a perfect book for anyone who would like a state of the union on what we know about intergroup psychology and how we can leverage those insights to improve society. You can also follow Jay and Dominic on their Substack newsletter: powerofus.substack.com. Between the book, Twitter, and the newsletter, you'll FINALLY be receiving the daily recommended dose of JVB that your doctor has been hounding you about for so long.

Also — if you'd like to follow along with more of my own work, you can check out the links below.
Cognitive Revolution: codykommers.com/podcast
My writing:
codykommers.substack.com

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Ted Slingerland is a professor at the University of British Columbia, where his interests and affiliations include East Asian studies, psychology, philosophy, and religious history. He is also unconscionably good looking. His latest book is "Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization." It's a fun take on the functional role alcohol and other intoxicants played in the development of human society. In this conversation we talk about Ted's experience dropping out of Princeton to move to California, discovering Chinese philosophy, choosing the humanities over the sciences, being a scholar of China who isn't especially fond of china, the civilizational functions of alcohol (an insight that grew out of Ted's work on China), the individual functions of alcohol (including how it makes you more effective at work), raising children in northern vs southern drinking cultures, and alcohol as a cultural symbol.

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Wow. Scott Atran. What a guy. What a career. I'd be willing to bet that Scott has had the highest density of near-death encounters during his research than anyone else in the history of the social sciences. He details a number of them over the course of this conversation. He holds various academic appointments in Paris, Michigan, and Oxford. Scott is also author of a book called "Talking to the Enemy" which gives insights in his field work getting people from different religious and political factions to resolve their conflicts peacefully rather than with violence. He's full of amazing stories and tremendous insights, and I know you're going to like this conversation a lot. Enjoy!

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Wade Davis makes his living being interesting. He is a cultural anthropologist and ethnobotanist by trade, and holds a position as the BC Leadership Chair in Cultures and Ecosystems at Risk at the University of British Columbia. In August 2020, he wrote an essay that became the most viral piece ever published on Rolling Stone's website (link below). He was first put on the map by his 1986 book on Haitian zombies, "The Serpent and the Rainbow." From there he's developed an incredible career as an author, TV host, and photographer. He's made an inspiring non-traditional path for himself, following what's of greatest interest to him rather than pandering to the academic job market. I find it incredibly inspiring, and in this conversation we get into all the details about what that track as an "entrepreneur of knowledge" has look liked for Wade.

Viral essay on the "End of the American Era": https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/covid-19-end-of-american-era-wade-davis-1038206/

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Chris Bail is a professor of sociology and public policy at Duke and directs the Polarization Lab. He's done a lot of great research in the last half decade or so on how social media affects political polarization in our society. He's written a great book summarizing this research, called Breaking the Social Media Prism. It's out now, and it's a crucial read for understanding one of the defining topics of our age. In this conversation, Chris and I talk about Chris's experience moving to the Congo as a kid, figuring out how best to make an impact, the role of good mentorship, riding the wave of computational social science, and rethinking the mainstream narrative of what's going on with social media.

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Jeff Hawkins is one of my favorite neuroscientists ever. He does the kind of big, ambitious projects I love to see people going after. The driving question of his research is no less than "How does the neocortex work?" He wants to solve intelligence, and he wants to do it the way the brain does. Jeff is an innovative in mobile computing and is widely known as the founder of Palm and the creator of the Palm Pilot. He saw the big picture in that space before anyone else did, and the smart money says that the same goes for his theory of the brain. I read Jeff's 2004 book, "On Intelligence," and it made a big impact on me. His latest book, "A Thousand Brains: A new theory of intelligence" is out now, and details his latest progress on figuring out how the brain really works. In this conversation, we talk about Jeff's early experience, particularly balancing his success in business with his love for neuroscience, as well as the origin of the ideas he lays out in A Thousand Brains. Our conversation gets a bit heated toward the end. But I think it's a healthy difference of opinion, as I am a great admirer of Jeff and his team's work.

Book list:

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Nancy Kanwisher is a much beloved cognitive neuroscientist at MIT. She has published some of the most influential papers in her field (for example, the discovery of the Fusiform Face Area). And it often seems that most other influential findings in cognitive neuroscience which were not made directly by Nancy herself were made by one of her students. In this episode, we talk about Nancy's experiences growing up with a love of science, struggling to get traction in graduate school, deciding between science and journalism, the early days of fMRI, and her approaches to mentorship. She is a brilliant scientist and compelling human, and I'm very excited to share this interview!

Book list:

Coverage of Nancy on Buzzfeed: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/natashaumer/this-badass-scientist-shaved-off-her-hair-to-teach-students
The original FFA paper: https://www.jneurosci.org/content/jneuro/17/11/4302.full.pdf

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Louis Menand is the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of English at Harvard University. He has been a staff writer at the New Yorker since 1995. He is also my favorite non-fiction writer. His latest book, The Free World, is perfect. His book, The Metaphysical Club, won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for history. They are two of the greatest things I've ever read. In 2016, he won the National Humanities Medal. What else is there to say?

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Brian Christian probably has a better handle of the human aspects of artificial intelligence than any other writer today. He recently published The Alignment Problem, his third book on this theme. His first was The Most Human Human, an exploration of what AI can tell us about what makes us human, and his second was Algorithms to Live By (co-authored with cognitive scientist Tom Griffiths), an exploration of what AI can tell us about how to be better humans. Brian's latest installment explores how humans can make better AI. That is, better not in the algorithmic sense, but in the societal sense. At any rate, I loved talking to him. We have lots of overlapping interests, as my academic training has mostly been in computational cognitive science and my interests mostly skewing towards the more humanistic aspects of it. Brian also has an MFA in poetry. Which I think is super badass.

(Part 2 to follow at an undisclosed point in the future...)

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I first became familiar with Pedro's work through his 2015 book, The Master Algorithm. But as it turns out, his existence extends prior to my familiarity with him—which is what the bulk of what we explore in this conversation. Pedro is a professor at the University of Washington and a venerable AI researcher. He has a great quote about how as fields grow, their textbooks become larger. Then, as they mature, the textbooks become smaller again. I don't know if that's true. But it's a nice line, coming from a guy who wrote a book about getting AI down to a single master algorithm.

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Liz is a world-renown science communicator. She is founder and CEO of Liminal, a very exciting project which we get into in this conversation. We also talk about Liz's experience leaving graduate school to pursue a non-academic path, choosing uncertainty over the linear path, what it means to tell good stories about science, creating new webs of meanings throughout life, and the business model of storytelling. Enjoy!

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Ben Moser is the pulitzer prize winning author of the recent biography of Susan Sontag, innovatively entitled "Sontag." This is one of the most fun and wide ranging conversation I'd had on the show. I stewed over whether or not to release the whole two hour conversation. But I loved how so many of the themes that we began early in the conversation—which sounded inconsequential in the moment—came full circle later on. If you want to skip straight to Ben's story, the meat of that begins the around the 30 minute mark. If, instead, you're interested in the full scope of nominal determinism, powerful women, gay men, whether Ben is good looking, whether Cody is good looking, and beginning things before you're good at them, then this conversation will definitely have something to offer. You will also enjoy this conversation if, like me, you want to be like Ben Moser when you grow up.

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Damon Centola is a professor in the Annenberg School for Communication, the School of Arts and Sciences, and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is Director of the Network Dynamics Group and Senior Fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics. His latest book is Change: How to Make Big Things Happen. In this episode we talk about
Damon's childhood growing up in an intentional community, the influence of his undergraduate curriculum in classics, how Heidegger changed his life, transitioning from philosophy and sociology, getting into network science at the perfect time, and building the academic ideas that became Change.

Book list: https://bookshop.org/lists/the-damon-centola-social-change-reading-list/

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Ethan Kross is a Professor of Psychology and Management at the University of Michigan. His new book is "Chatter: the voice in our head, why it matters, and how to harness it." In this episode, we talk about Ethan's early connection with meditation and other forms of inspecting inner life, his personal mantra, the influence of his father, how he got into psychology, the books that have had the greatest impact on him, and where his most influential ideas came from.

INTERVIEW BEGINS—6:38

Reading list: https://bookshop.org/lists/top-picks-ethan-kross/

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Joseph Henrich is Professor and Chair of the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. He is the co-author of one of the most influential social science papers of the previous decade. That paper described "WEIRD" people—those who are from a Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic culture—and how overgeneralization based on WEIRD samples has skewed social science research. He recently published a book expanding on this idea and shedding further light on why WEIRD psychology is so peculiar, called "The WEIRDest People in the World." In this conversation, we talk about where these ideas came from, who really came up with with the acronym WEIRD, how Joe's early trajectory wound through aerospace engineering and anthropology, and much more. The resonating theme of this interview is that history matters. It matters for understanding the psychological make up of our own culture. It matters for how Joe developed his most influential ideas, based on his own unique educational history. Furthermore, psychology as a field has mostly done a poor judge of accounting for the history of people and cultures. Joe is co-author on a recent paper making an argument that this needs to change: see his recent "Psychology as a Historical Science" for more details.

INTERVIEW BEGINS—8:55.

Joe's website: https://henrich.fas.harvard.edu/

Cody's website:
https://www.codykommers.com/
Cody's twitter: https://twitter.com/codykommers

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Sir Simon Baron-Cohen is professor of developmental psychopathology at the University of Cambridge, where he is Director of the Autism Research Centre and a Fellow of Trinity College. Simon's work has been foundational in research into Theory of Mind (how we understand the contents of others' thoughts) and Autism. His most recent book is The Pattern Seekers—which connects his years of theorizing about the nature of Autism with how humans have developed over the course of our species' history. In this conversation, we go deep into the genesis of his most influential ideas. I've been a student of Simon's work for many years, and it was a great pleasure to hear more about the personal side of his work.

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William Labov is professor emeritus of linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania and founder of the field of sociolinguistics. In other words, he was the first person to build a modern study of linguistics based on what people actually say, rather than artificial sentences made up by researchers (yes, I'm talking about you, Chomsky). Bill recently won the Talcott Parsons Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, which is given out every four years to a single scholar throughout all of the social sciences. I interviewed Bill in late 2020, and this episode is a bit different than anything I've done previously. Instead of releasing the entire conversation, I've recorded some thoughts about what initially drew me to Bill and his work, and interspersed his own words throughout. Bill (and his partner Gillian Sankoff) were also kind enough to send some of the original tapes from Bill's field interviews, including the one from Bill's most famous paper. Bill has really had a special career as a scholar—and it's not over yet. He's got a book in the works, reflecting on the thousands of linguistic interviews he's conducted throughout his career. Keep an eye out for it!

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To say Nicholas Christakis has mastered a few skills throughout his career would almost certainly be underselling it. Nicholas is the Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science at Yale. He has an MD from Harvard, a PhD in sociology from Penn, and a masters in public health from Harvard. Throughout the pandemic, he's been working tirelessly to bring reliable information to the public sphere. He's made numerous appearance as an expert on up-to-the-minute pandemic info on Sam Harris' podcast, and also managed to churn out an entirely new book contextualizing the current pandemic in our species' social history. This conversation puts all that in the bigger picture of his overarching career -- which spans everything from abstract analyses of social networks to hands-on care as a Hospice physician. We get into many different topics, mainly about how he brings together all these different perspectives to develop a holistic understanding of human social behavior as it plays out in the unfolding of historical events. You check out his new book, Apollo's Arrow.

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Tanya Luhrmann is the Watkins University Professor in the Stanford Anthropology Department. Much of her work has taken an anthropological perspective on psychological topics. For example, her most recent book: How God Becomes Real. It takes an ethnographic approach to understanding how individuals and cultures maintain belief in divine powers. Another of her book that's of special interest to me is Of Two Minds, an award-winning ethnographical perspective on American psychiatry. And it's not just her work that's compelling, so is she. She's essentially my new platonic ideal of an anthropology professor. I really enjoyed this conversation, and I hope you do too.

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Anil Seth is a Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex, where he is also Co-Director of the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science. His TED talk has over 10 million views, and he's been featured on many big-name podcasts such as Making Sense with Sam Harris and BBC's Life Scientific. Anil comes to the study of consciousness with the perspective of physics and the natural sciences. In this episode, we talk about his personal experiences, the influence of one-of-a-kind thinkers like Oliver Sacks and Gerald Edelman, and how to bring together perspectives from many disciplines to solve large problems. Anil has a new book coming out at the end of this year called "Being You: A New Science of Consciousness." Keep an eye out for it!

Anil's website: https://www.anilseth.com/
Anil's twitter: https://twitter.com/anilkseth
Anil's newsletter: https://www.anilseth.com/mailing-list

Cody's website: https://codykommers.com
Cody's Twitter: https://twitter.com/codykommers

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Denise Sekaquaptewa is the University Diversity and Social Transformation Professor of Psychology at the University of Michigan. She did her PhD at the Ohio State University, and her research has focused on stereotype threat, implicit bias, and prejudice. In this conversation we talk about her family's heritage, her experience in community college, deciding between continuing in the service industry and becoming a psychologist, books she has loved, the changes she would like to make to help academic departments become places where lots of kinds of people can succeed, and why she believes becoming a good person comes before becoming a good scholar.

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Richard Nisbett is the Theodore M. Newcomb Distinguished Professor of social psychology and co-director of the Culture and Cognition program at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. He is also the co-author of one of my favorite psychology papers of all time: "Telling More than We Can Know." In this conversation, Richard self-reports on what got him into psychology, the books that most impacted him, the influence of his mentor Stanley Schachter, and his best practices for collaboration and mentorship. Those self reports sure seem accurate, though I'm not sure either of us is in an especially good position to judge. We also digress a fair bit into psychological history, particularly about Freud, Gordon Allport, and Kurt Lewin. Another fun fact about Richard: he's Malcolm Gladwell's favorite psychologist.

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Michael McCullough is a professor of psychology at University of California, San Diego, where he runs the Evolution and Human Behavior Lab. Mike and I had a chat about his new book, "The Kindness of Strangers." The title for that book as originally conceived was "Why We Give a Damn" -- and even prior to that "Why We Don't Give a Damn." I happen to like those titles, though I can understand why the publisher didn't, and so I thought I'd trot them out to have a modest life of their own. In this conversation, we talk about Mike's first inspiration to study psychology, the influence of Christianity on his personal development and later his study of religion, his approach to mentorship, where he thought the conversation surrounding the biological basis of altruism went wrong, and rethinking the parable of the Good Samaritan.

More info: codykommers.com/podcast

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A couple of weeks ago, Mickey Inzlicht and Yoel Inbar, of the excellent podcast Two Psychologists Four Beers, released a discussion of theirs called 'Against Academia?' The motivation for the discussion was that Mickey had noticed several occasions on which people -- one of them being himself -- were called out for expressing positive takes on life in academia. The mainstream position to hold on academic life is a negative one: it's a biased system, a pyramid scheme, a travesty for mental health, etc. They break down a number of considerations on both sides, digging into where some of these claims are identifying something real and important and other areas where they are exaggerations. Both Mickey and Yoel are tenured professors at an excellent university, and they acknowledge that their view is one of the better ones you can get in an academic appointment. It's a really useful conversation that brings up a lot of worthwhile, well-considered points. I'd like to add to it by responding to it from my own perspective: as someone currently doing a PhD who does not plan to pursue an academic career.

Full transcript: https://www.codykommers.com/post/actually-against-academia

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Howard Gardner is the John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Research Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He's best known as the developer of the theory of multiple intelligences, the idea that being smart is more complex than just an IQ score. That theory was introduced in his 1983 book Frames of Mind. In this conversation we talk about his interdisciplinary education, his non-traditional path in academia, the principles of the "synthesizing mind," when to break the rules and when to follow them, and how to connect with one's deeper humanity. Howard's latest book, A Synthesizing Mind, is out now.

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In Buddhist countries, the general rubric for appearances is that modest is hottest. I knew they wouldn't let me into Yangon's famous Shwedagon pagoda with my knees showing. Frankly, I'm surprised they let me into the country with my suitcase full of short-shorts. Officials could have scanned my baggage upon arrival and confiscated them with a disapproving look that said "You aren't planning on traipsing around our country in that skimpy outfit, are you?" And so on my way to the main temple, I decided to pick up one of the sarongs that the rest of the male population here seems to be so keen on. It seemed likely I'd get a better deal on the streets than right outside the gates. I approached a vendor and pointed at an article from a stack of skirts with a pattern that caught my eye. It was a light blue gingham, the very same pattern that one hundred percent of white office-going males have in their closet as a button-up shirt. I presented the man with a wad of cash, and with a huge grin he outfitted me in my longyi. I didn't know it at the time, but the acquisition of this article of clothing would be a game-changer for me in Myanmar.

A modest crowd began to gather as the transaction took place. A number of men wandered over to see what was up, in the way that men do when, say, they hear a neighbor engaged in a project employing power tools. Evident from their peering in, they were curious about the minor details of the enterprise: Which pattern did I choose? How much did I pay? Would I actually wear it? I have little expertise in sarongs, but I sort of figured that the standard model would fit like a bath towel wrapped around one's waist. Instead, the longyi is one circular piece of fabric, like one of those self-drying fabric hand-towels on an infinite loop. Fully unfurled, it reaches to just below belly-button height. Given that it was essentially like swimming in a skirt large enough to fit Shrek's wife, it wasn't immediately obvious to me how I was supposed to wear it. Identifying my confusion, this hefty Burmese man, in a ritual that would be repeated many times over the next couple of weeks, positioned himself at my backside and reached around to grab the fabric covering my frontside. "It's very easy," he said, and in a series of deft motions tied me up so tight I felt like I was wearing a corset. I gave a once around, as if modeling for a mirror. The lady sitting behind me hit me with a thumbs up.

"Wait," I said, pausing for a moment. I asked him to demonstrate once more. "It's very easy," he repeated as if that made the process self-evident. He went slower this time, undoing the knot at my waist and grabbing me by the cloth at my haunches. He settled himself into a position of strength at my backside. "Oneee," he said, deliberately folding the cloth in his right hand across toward my left. "Twoooo," in an act of symmetry, folding the left side toward the right. "Three!" And in a flourish of prestidigitation he transformed the two unruly clumps in his fists into a handsome but inscrutable knot perched right below my belly button. I gave him a look that communicated my befuddlement. Undoing his handiwork and sighing, he said "Pay attention this time," as if my drifting gaze had prevented me from taking in the previous demonstrations. Now the crowd joined in. They counted together, "Oneeee... Twoo..." involving the same deliberate folding, and punctuated by an ecstatic "Three!!" which brought on another electron cloud of hand motions. I offered my tailor a look somewhere in the ballpark of "Eurka!" and with that took my leave of my applauding admirers, shaking hands and waving grandly as a I went, strutting off in my longyi toward the pagoda.

The road leading up to Yangon's Shwedagon pagoda resembles a sort of Buddhist version of the Las Vegas strip. It is shiny, extravagant, ostentatious. Each chunk of real estate on either side of the street is taken up with a gleaming temple rising out of a lush courtyard. Each temple has a Buddha statue in the center. But it wouldn't feel entirely out of a place if instead at its pulsing heart was a slot machine. Unlike Vegas, it isn't populated with American tourists spilling out of their tank tops like pudding squeezed from a plastic cup. It is populated mostly with no one. There may have been a lot of action playing out on the spiritual plane of existence. But my senses were only availed of the physical one, and there wasn't a whole lot going on there.

Which is a truly startling sight. These are the kind of attraction tourists flock to. These pagodas are stunning, and they aren't even the main event. They are the opening act, culminating in the glorious peak of the Shwedagon. Like the muscular V of an underwear model, these minor temples are a tantalizing allusion to what lies just out of sight. But they still retain a certain grandeur in their own right. If these structures had been erected in Thailand, they'd be crawling in westerners. Here it was me, and one guy languishing out front of his convenience store, slumped over until rousted by an errant customer.

The Shwedagon pagoda is the religious epicenter of Myanmar. Today it stands as a magnificent golden bell, like what God would pick up and ring if it were time for the chillun to come in for supper. Every Myanmartian will, at some point in their lives, make the pilgrimage to see it. Purportedly, the original pagoda was installed on this site more than twenty-five hundred years ago. The temple has been built up over many years. According to contemporary accounts, two brothers named Trapusa and Bahalika became the first disciples of the Buddha drawn from the lay population. In a surge of inspiration these two enterprising merchants snipped eight strands -- a religiously significant number -- of the Buddha's hair and journeyed to Burma. With the help of the local ruler, one mister King Okkalapa of Dagon, they installed these hairs as the centerpiece of a magnificent temple. What exactly they said to persuade King Okkalapa of the religious merit of these eight strands of hair, history has failed to record.

Anywhere else in the world, a major temple like this would be infested with tourists. The be-camera'd tourist to actual buddhist ratio would be, like, 100:1. There would be a cacophony of children whose command over the English language is just sufficient to explain to you how your refusal to part ways with your money in exchange for their trinkets results in their not being able to afford dinner. People would be crawling over the temples like monkeys swinging between trees. Queues of people would assemble to snap a photo -- just the right photo -- in front of the most prestigious institutional ornament. This is, for example, what it's like to visit one of the bigger temples in Thailand.

But crossing the street onto the premises of the Shwedagon, one could be forgiven for not realizing you are on the cusp of Myanmar's most significant religious attraction. It was quiet. The only person there to greet me was a lone child, offering a plastic bag in which to put my shoes. It almost felt as if he were offering it in a spirit of community service rather than opportunistic capitalism. He asked twice just to make sure I understood the value-add of his wares. Then he disappeared.

There is a grand prelude of a staircase that ascends through a small mountainside of stalls. I removed my sandals before ascending. It was a stark contrast, coming in from the insistent Burmese sun into a dark, covered hall. The stalls lining the staircase sold mostly buddhist paraphernalia. Little statues, books in Burmese, shirts. No one approaches you to inform you of a "good deal for you, my friend." They simply leave you to go about your business. Even here I noticed some glances, and the shopkeepers seemed rather impressed by my longyi. The whole scene is modest, unobtrusive, clean but not overly kempt. There was no fee until the very top of the hall, right before the plateau, the holy of holies.

Upon reaching the top of the hall, there is an outpost of security personnel. They ushered me through a metal detector. Then they asked to peak inside my skirt. In a series of routine movements, the guard undid me, took a quick look, then zipped me back up. Although slightly disturbed, I was also somewhat thankful about this since I had been futzing with the knot, trying without success to reverse engineer it for the last twenty-five minutes or so. Having been vetted by security, I was asked to sign in on a tourist sheet. I counted exactly twenty other visitors on the sign-in sheet that day from seven in the morning until noon. This one was of four entrances. None of the other visitors were from the United States.

I emerged from the dark corridor to find an ascendant gold bell power-posing in front of me. It was surrounded by a white lake of marble tile. All was bright and glimmering. The white marble connected a complex of smaller pagodas, hundreds of them, each with an intricate gold-fringed verandas, a unique Buddha visage, and a cohort of meditators in various forms of repose. There were so few people as to make one almost feel out to sea. Entire sections were unpeopled. It would be possible for one to become rather well acquainted with every other western visitor on the terrace. The Buddhist to tourist ratio was flipped, maybe fifty people who are there for religious purposes to every one person, like me, who was just there to have a look around. Modest though they are, there's no doubt that Buddhists harbor a certain appreciation for icy flair that could rival a hip hop artist. Every possible surface that can be is ornamented. Everything was decked out in tufts of gold leaf inlays, as if the design on a Victorian tea cup had sprung into three dimensions and rolled around in precious material. The bell itself exerted a sort of attentional gravity. It stands in the center with all subsidiary dioramas in orbit. It constantly draws your attention and admiration back. Part of the spectacle is that judging from everyone's behavior, there is no spectacle. People are just going about their daily business. They are, in turns, texting, meditating, wandering with purpose, ambling about. I'm one of the few standing there trying to drink in the surroundings. The majority hold themselves with reverence, but don't gawk. It makes the entire scene seem more surreal, more heavenly. I imagine this is a kind of inverse of what visiting Disneyland would be like as a Buddhist monk, standing in awe of how mundane that level garishness seems to be for everyone else.

I exited down the western escalator, headed in a different direction than the one I came. It felt slightly perilous taking the escalator in bare feet. Like I might get a toe snipped off. Back on the street, each local I passed gave me a once-over, admiring my longyi. I was the target of innumerably many thumbs up and nods.

Admittedly, I've made quite a bit about how Yangon feels different than other places in South East Asia. Especially the low density of tourists. But it really does make a difference. It changes your whole relationships to the people who are from there. In a city or region that depends economically on tourism, your relationship to its people is transactive. To the people sitting in stalls as you walk through the market, you are a walking bag of money. Whether or not they can feed their kids today depends on whether they're able to up-sell you for a product you don't need or want. In order to keep the wheels turning they need to sell things to tourists, and they need to sell them at a markup. So as nice or welcoming as that person behind the stall might be -- and you know they probably are, because everyone you've met in the country on different terms is -- your relationship is defined in purely economic terms. You have money. They need it. The whole dance is a transaction.

But that changes in a place where the majority of economic activity does not depend on tourism. In a market in Yangon, sure, a guy wouldn't mind up-selling to a white person. Who says no to a few extra bucks? But his economic livelihood doesn't depend on it. He's going to have a steady stream of regular customers to form the base of his income stream. The implication is that he doesn't have to go all-in on the hard-sell. He'll give you the white person mark-up -- hell, you probably deserve it -- but if it doesn't take, then oh well. Because they have yet to establish a tourist economy to compete with Thailand or Vietnam, the people of Myanmar don't have to have the same transactive relationship with foreigners.

This means that instead of being treated like a dollar sign with legs, you're treated as something closer to an honored guest. You're interesting -- in the way that all people who are clearly not from around here are interesting. That's the 'guest' part. The 'honored' part has a couple different factors at play. For one thing, the Myanmar people are, simply put, are really f*g nice. And they deserve credit for that. But for another thing, they appreciate the political and economic opportunities represented by the West. There is an appreciation that they've got the short end of the stick in terms of government policy for the past half century or so. Good or bad, they want a piece of the action that's going on the in rest of the world. As an immediately identifiable westerner, you are a symbol of action beginning to take place. At any rate, what I'm trying to say is that it is remarkably refreshing to find oneself in an Asian city that has the developed infrastructure of a prominent metropolitan area but without the over-developed tourist economy. It allows you to connect with the people less on economic terms, and more on human ones.

Walking home through the city from the temple, I passed a row of fruit stalls. I saw a guy selling pineapples. He'd take the skin off with a machete and present the fruit on a skewer. That sounded like the kind of thing I could go for at the moment. I walked up and told him I'd like one. He looked me in the eye. "1,000," he said. About 80 cents.

Then he looked down, saw my longyi, and gave a relenting shrug. Unbidden, he made a new offer. "500."

I've never been so thrilled about a forty cent discount in my entire life.

Toward the end of my stay in Yangon, I went to go make arrangements for transportation to my next destination. It was still a couple days before Christmas, and I wanted to make my way over to Bagan before Christmas Eve. My hope -- what seemed at the time like a well-fortified plan, really -- had been that I'd strut into the train station in my longyi and acquire a ticket for the next day's passage to Bagan in the sleeper class. Maybe prebook a meal and have them put a bottle of pinot grigio on ice for me. That isn't exactly how it happened.

Presenting myself at the entrance to the station a man from the taxi queue called for my attention with a line to the effect of "Hey bro, nice longyi." I replied in thanks. He informed me that I'd tied it wrong. This is the equivalent in this country to having something in your teeth. Everyone will notice, but few will say anything. Without my having to acknowledge this fact, he saddled up behind me and gave me what I'd come to think of as a good old fashioned Rangoon reach-around. He was even kind enough to provide me with instructions. "Oneee," he said, as he folded the clothe in his right hand to the clothe in his left. "Twoooo," doing the same with his left hand. On "Three!" -- his hands whirring like a jar of fire flies -- he knotted a tight little bun at my waist. "Now you try," he told me.

"One..." I started. "Two..."

"Very good," he encouraged.

When I announced my attempt at "three" my bun fell apart in a lifeless poof, leaving me holding my skirt up with my hands.

"Hmm... That's not quite it," he allowed.

Having gamely given instruction a shot, he tied me up without counting this time. Thanking him for the sartorial assistance, I started into the station. He came with me.

"Where are you from?" he asked. This is the question de rigueur no matter where one is in the world. Whether in Zimbabwe, the Philippines, or anywhere that English is spoken but not necessarily the native language, it's what people ask you. I imagine the English textbooks in these countries feature the same templated conversations that the Spanish and French ones do in America. "Where are you from?" "The weather is warm." "The window in the café is open."

Having explicated this theory to him, I informed him I was from the United States. He asked me about my itinerary, and I told him I planned to get a ticket to Bagan.

"Ah," he said. "You will not be able to get a ticket to Bagan."

The first reason, he explained to me, is that one doesn't buy train tickets at the train station. You buy them at the place where they sell train tickets, which, apparently, is across the highway. He encouraged me to go into the station and ask for a ticket. I wouldn't be able to do it. I walked over to what appeared to be a sign board with the names of destinations and a ticket-seller below. No dice.

"It's okay," he said. "I'll walk you there."

"Really?" I said. "You don't have to do that."

As we made our way together across the highway overpass, he explained the second reason why I wouldn't be able to get a ticket. It was the holiday season, and all the trains would likely already be full up.

"Oh," I said.

"Yes," he said, and continued to explain how in the weeks around Christmas and New Year the entire country criss crosses in an attempt to return to one's family and native lands. So much for escaping the holidays.

When we got to the ticket purchasing station, the man and I walked up to a gentleman standing outside the area designated for the queue. This was where, in retrospect, a little sleight of hand may have occurred. My friend and his colleague -- potentially a representative of the train company; potentially a confederate --exchanged a few words, which evidently supplied my friend with the intelligence that there were no available spots on a train to Bagan for the next ten days. This left me somewhat surprised. But never having dealt with cross-country transportation in Myanmar before, I was simply thankful to have a liaison to hold my hand while I navigated through it. For as soon as I began to worry, my liaison told me that I could probably still snag a spot on a night bus. He knew just the place.

And again we set off to yet another location. Only a few blocks down a side street, he escorted me into a travel agency. They informed me that I had come just in time. There were still a few open spots on night buses over the coming weeks, but they were filling fast. I should book my entire trip now. Hardly being able to believe my good fortune at coming across the opportunity to make my entire slate of arrangements in a timely manner -- just imagine if I had waited another week to book the rest of them! -- I conjured up an itinerary on the spot. Happily, they pointed me in the direction of the nearest ATM so I could withdraw several briefcases full of cash to remunerate them for their assistance. My liaison remained by my side the entire time, just to make sure I was well taken care of. I parted from the scene with a series of grand waves, expressions of gratitude, thanking each of them for their help as well as their friendship, and shaking each hand heartily. Then I set off back into the city, feeling secure in the promise of future movement, and flush with the extra cash I'd withdrawn wadded up in my pockets.

After wandering for a bit I stopped in at a coffee shop to celebrate my good fortune with a latte. I was in the part of town with the highest density of white people. Evidently, this was the central expat district. It's not always easy to get a decent espresso drink in most parts of Yangon -- there are no Starbucks in the country, which in most cities has proved something of a gateway drug to more boutique coffee shops -- and so I figured I'd take this opportunity to indulge.

Having sat for a while reading a book of essays by Aung Sang Suu Kyi, I got up to pay. It was while I was settling up that a man entered the café and made a bee-line for the register. Midway through unfurling my wad of cash, the man looked me in the eyes.

"Hey," he said. "Do you want to come pick up trash for an hour? It's part of a competition. I need people."

I stared at him for a few seconds, searching my entire mental repository for the faintest hint of a reason why the answer wouldn't automatically be "no." I sought to clarify the proposition.

"Let me get this straight," I said. "You're asking me to come with you to pick up trash?"

"Yes," he said.

"For the next hour?" I said.

"Yes," he said.

"And we'd be doing it as part of some competition?"

"Yes," he said, waiting on my answer. I shrugged.

"Okay."

What the hell else have I got to do?

Setting aside any further interrogatives, I followed him out of the café. He took me across the street to his restaurant, which served Japanese fare. Then I realized I had heard of this place before.

"Hey," I asked. "Do you guys have jazz here on Friday nights?"

"Yeah," he said. "How did you know?"

I told him about Yuki, the jazz singer I had met the other night at the rooftop bar. She had mentioned this place. She's been sitting in on their Friday sessions for quite some time. With the acquaintance of this man, I believe I had successfully infiltrated the ranks of the entire Myanmar-Japanese jazz circuit.

Next thing I knew it was me and a crew of the restaurant's employees. Apparently, the man's recruitment strategy hadn't proved especially effective -- though evidently effective enough to achieve quorum. Disposable gloves were handed out, as were trash bags. Our cohort set off down the street, like an amoeba picking up whatever it came across in the course of locomotion.

"So," I asked, "what exactly is this competition?"

"It's a cocktail competition," he said.

A discussion ensued. He had filed an entry in a world-wide competition, sponsored by Bacardi, and as part of the submission each entrant was required to do a certain amount of service in their community. As it turned out, this guy was the head bartender of the premier craft cocktail establishment in the city. He would be going to Puerto Rico the following month to visit the Bacardi headquarters and compete in the finals, preparing his cocktail for a panel of esteemed cocktail aficionados. I asked him about his submission. He called it the "Kalay pop." He had grown up in a region of Myanmar, on the western border, called Kalay. One of his fondest memories as a child was a man who went around with a cart that held a stash of frozen banana pops, ringing a bell to alert everyone of his presence. Essentially the rural Myanmar version of the ice cream man. He sought to reconstitute this childhood pleasure in cocktail form in a take on the classic banana daiquiri: a base of white rum, lime, fresh banana syrup, with an herbally dash of Benedictine liqueur and rounded out with a touch of sesame oil. Just like the ice cream man used to make 'em.

As a result of our endeavor, I can say from experience that the only thing more amusing than a white guy walking down the street in a longyi is a white guy walking down the street in a longyi picking up trash as the intriguingly ugly, conspicuously taller duckling in a brood of locals. I was the subject of quite a few iPhone portraits. Whether or not I was the subject of an equal number of Instagram stories that day, I was unable to ascertain.

Finished with our community service, we returned to the restaurant. Our crew was rewarded for the work with a round of the competition-winning cocktail. Not one to let a good seat at the bar go to waste, I made reference to the other competition cocktails we had talked about on our walk. He made me a few rounds of his greatest hits. He also comped me a couple dishes off the menu. I continued reading my book while I consumed my gratis fare. Good God, I don't think I've ever loved a country more than Myanmar in that moment. Sated, I bid him adieu, told him I'd be back, and trundled out of the restaurant, sufficiently liquored up for the rest of my afternoon.

My next stop for the day, and the final destination on my list for Yangon, was Dala, the rural village on the other side of the river from the main city. There is a ferry ride that travels between the downtown area and Dala. As far as ferry rides go, it was not the world's most exquisite. I wouldn't go as far as to say the Yangon River is putrid, but it errs more on the side of sludge than sparkle. Whereas the port on the Yangon side is situated in a dense cosmopolitan area, the port on the Dala side immediate recedes into rural obscurity. I contemplated this observation as I alighted from the ferry. My plan was to walk around. Just to see what was over there. As ever, I didn't really know where I was going, what I could expect to see, nor the best means of either going or seeing. In the flood of humanity coming off the boat, everyone jetted off in particular directions, toward wherever it was they were going. I idled. An obvious target, I was accosted by any number of men offering services, tours, trinkets, this and that. I declined all, having spent my store of credulous generosity for the day.

But soon shortly after making my way down the obvious path of the main street I realized I was walking into nothing in particular. Not only was there not an obvious next path, but there didn't even really seem to be any paths at all. There were just roads, awash in waves of motor bikes, tuk tuks, and bicycles. Further on, another man on a bicycle peddled up next to me. He had a passenger car attached to his bike, like a sideways rickshaw.

"I take you around," he said, moving along next to me.

"No thanks," I said, instinctively.

"Where you going?" he said. "Village very far."

"How far?" I asked.

"Very far," he said. I had no counter-evidence with which to dispute the accuracy of this assessment.

"How much?" I said.

He quoted me a price somewhere in the neighborhood of five bucks American for two hours. Then I acquiesced. At this price point, I'm worth it.

And so the man and I puttered around the several villages of Dala. There was the fishing village. There was the bamboo village. The names didn't describe the content of the villages, evidently, so much as the villager's occupations. Each was a tight collection of single-room huts, mostly stilted above the estuary that ran through them. No electricity. No running water. The commode consisted of a platform with a hole in it positioned over the river. Trash everywhere. Trash for products they didn't even appear to consume. It was like the community version of the room inhabited by Danny DeVito and Charlie Day in the TV show It's Always Sunny. The perfect distillation of filth and squalor. That's not to say it was offensively shabby. But it was undeniably in disrepair.

At one of the houses he pointed, "My babies." This was where his family lived.

Another one of the places he indicated was a coffee shop. It was the building in the village with the greatest investment in infrastructure. It was an open air terrace. There was a sink, a concrete floor. There were advertisements for energy drinks and for the local Myanmar beer.

"This is my coffee shop," he said.

"This is where you go for coffee?" I said. "Can we stop?"

"You want to stop?" He said. I don't think any of his customers had ever suggested this.

And so the bike halted, and we stepped off to take a seat at one of the plastic chairs. It was empty except for one other table, with a father and son sitting together and quietly eying us as we walked in. The garçon came over to take our order. I told my guide to get us two coffees; I'd pay. The boy came back with a small carafe of hot water. Two cups of questionable cleanliness with a packet of Nestlé instant coffee. Sip for sip, it was undoubtedly the worse cup of coffee I've ever had. We sat for a few minutes of sipping interspersed with conversation -- both of us contemplating, from separate perspectives, what exactly would have possessed me to want to hop off the bike and drink this swill. I asked how much, covered his coffee for this time and the next, and then we took leave of the café, nodding to the father and son as we went.

The good news, I suppose, is that we passed several modern buildings, which would not be out of place in a more affluent area. The first he pointed out as "my babies' school." It looked like a normal school yard that one would see in any other rural community. A single large building, covered in murals drawn by little hands, and a fenced off playground. Maybe the school building is a signal that Dala will look very different for the next generation, having received an education that their parents didn't.

The second building was a tavern of sorts. While we didn't go inside, the tavern intrigued me. It boasted a huge canvas advertisement for an energy drink featuring the visages of several notable players from Manchester United. It's kind of astounding to think about. In an area with minimal access to running water or capable sewage, the faces of these athletes still meant something significant to the people here. Even watching from England or the United States, one gets a sense of the reach of world football. A number of teams present TV-visible ads not only in the languages of obviously major markets of Asia, like Chinese or Korean, but also in the more linguistically niche markets of Vietnamese, Thai, and -- get this -- even the looping curlicues of the Myanmar language. Seeing this banner, I asked my guide if he supported a particular football club.

"Oh, yes," he said. "Big fan of Man U."

At length, we rolled up back to the ferry terminal. It was time for me to retire for the evening. It was also about time for me to take leave of Yangon. I had seen the cosmopolitan hub of the country, the colonial and cultural capital. I had loved it. Now it was time branch out. It was time to check out something new. My next step would be the sprawling, spiritual oasis of ancient temples, rivaling Cambodia's Angkor Wat in its grandeur, built between the 9th and 13th century: Bagan. And as it stood, the only thing between me and Bagan was a ride on the night bus.

Epilogue.

This is one of the things I love about the sport of soccer. World football is one of the few subjects you can bring up anywhere on earth and reliably elicit some sort of meaningful conversation. Either there will be a connection on a topic that is truly significant to the other person. Or there will be a story about how their father was a big fan, but they could never really seemed to get into it themselves. The discrepancy in privilege between me and my guide in Dala is about as big as it can get. The discrepancy between our love for the game is much smaller. Whether in a village in Myanmar, a brewery in Zimbabwe, an alleyway in St Petersburg, or a tram in Istanbul, there are few things in this world that are that big of a deal to that many people, independent of their background.

Common ground is hard to come by nowadays. Wealth inequality is greater than ever. Political divisions prevent people from engaging in civil discourse. In this respect, travel is a way of countering this trend. To have been to a place is to be connected with it. The people are no longer abstract entities, only the digits of a figure. When hundreds of people died in Myanmar in the collapse of a jade mine, as they did several months after I visited, that meant something to me that it wouldn't have otherwise. The world would certainly be a better place if we could all get to that point of caring, of vested interest without having to forge that tangible connection. To just treat people as people, regardless of whether we feel personally connected to them. But that's not how it works. It's just not in our psychological makeup. "If I'm an advocate for anything," wrote Anthony Bourdain, "it's to move. As far as you can, as much as you can. Across the ocean, or simply across the river. The extent to which you can walk in someone else's shoes or at least eat their food, it's a plus for everybody."

Over the next couple weeks I would move across the country of Myanmar. Christmas eve in Bagan. The strange and exotic world of Myanmar's night buses. A hike from Kalaw to Inle Lake. How I lost a shoe on New Year's Eve. The suboptimal and unappealing cityscape of Mandalay. But I won't get into those stories here. Maybe they'll come up another time. That's the thing about travel. There's always more to do. There's always more to see. And it's hard to communicate what's been done and what's been seen to those who were not there when it happened. It's just about impossible to not be underwhelmed by the stories you friends bring back after having been on holiday. Having to sit through those kind of stories is sincerely excruciating. Yet there is some magic to communicate there. They felt it at the time. You've felt it before in your own travels. I'm not sure I got it right here. But I'd like to think I will someday.

After Myanmar, I'd meet back up with Haily in Vietnam. Soon after that, we were hoping to get what had been our chaotic and discordant lives back on track in England. Then the virus hit. Nothing was on track. By the time you're reading this, I hope that will have changed. I hope we're back together. I hope we're able to get back out into the world.

Thanks for checking out Season 1 of Notes from the Field. If you enjoyed it, please consider becoming a premium subscriber. I’m trying to do more of this kind of travel writing in the future. But as you can imagine, it’s hard to have these kinds of experiences while also holding down a job. Your subscription goes a long way toward helping me to do that. Use the link below, and you’ll get 50% off an annual subscription. Thanks!

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Yael Niv is a professor in Princeton department of psychology and the Princeton Neuroscience Institute. She is also a discernibly high-quality human being. I have been an admirer of her and her work for many years now. But she's been in the fore of my mind of late because of a couple papers she recently published: on "The Primacy of Behavioral Research in Understanding the Brain" and "The Case Against Economic Values in the Brain" (co-authored with Benjamin Hayden). In this interview, we mostly talk about her background as a psychologically-oriented computational neuroscientist, which has been impressively focused from relatively early on. It's clear how a lot of the ideas that are gaining wide-spread attention (even outside the usual circles of computational neuroscience) having been circling in the heads of Yael and her colleagues for a long time. We talk about the origins of her behavioral primacy paper, as well as the best advice on mentoring she learned from Peter Dayan. It's a fun conversation, and I hope you enjoy!

More info: codykommers.com/podcast

Subscribe at codykommers.substack.com

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit codykommers.substack.com/subscribe

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What one expects when landing at an airport in South East Asia -- or for that matter, a developing country anywhere in the world -- is madness. Pure madness. A throng of taxi drivers will clamor in a bid for your attention, like a frenzied Wall Street trading floor. A stream of cars will weave through the terminal, disgorging passengers at full speed. To exit the terminal requires picking your way to the street through of an array of stalls offering everything from an arresting waft of the local fare to SIM cards from unknown carriers to offers to exchange currency at rate that only sounds fair while the local money still seems like a collection of meaningless pieces of paper. It is always an order of magnitude hotter and stickier than wherever you came from. This is what one might reasonably expect when stepping off the plane in Myanmar. But no such madness exists at Yangon International airport.

The Yangon airport is something much closer to a buddhist monastery situated in some rural outpost like Montana or Kansas. Instead of madness, there is tranquility. A couple guys in sarongs will approach you and gently inquire if you'd be interested in commissioning a taxi. When you shake your head, they shrug their shoulders mildly and wander off. There are hardly any cars in the terminal. And unlike the other capitals of South East Asia, there are no motorbikes. Instead, when you step outside there is only a helpful taxi attendant and a docile queue of cabs. After the passenger drop-off lane, there are five further lanes, like at LAX, though unlike LAX only one of these lanes at any time is likely to have a vehicle in it. The most intrusive noise is the birds.

When I stepped out of the terminal, I turned to my right to survey the open road in front of me. It stretched out into a dusk of palm trees lining the smoothly paved highway. I had planned to take the bus into the city, and since there weren't that many vehicles around I didn't have a hard time tracking down the right one. Stepping aboard, I presented the driver with a wad of cash. The written Myanmar language uses a different set of numerals than the standard Arabic ones, so I wasn't sure what I was looking at when it came to picking out the appropriate bill. It probably wouldn't have mattered even if I did, as I didn't know what the bus fare was. The driver shuffled through my available currency and selected a choice note. He beckoned me to go sit down. I took the seat nearest to the door. Then a few minutes later when the next passenger arrived, he negotiated with her to hand her fare over to me. In my serene naiveté, I had evidently paid twice the going rate. The driver had contrived a way to make me whole.

After waiting for the bus to be mostly full, we set off on the road in the direction of the ripe sunset. For most of the way, we sailed straight through toward the city, save for a couple congested intersections. There was an astonishing display of cordiality on the roads. Our driver, for instance, actually appeared to stop for people who waved him down on the side of the road, even if they weren't yet at a legitimate bus stop. I didn't hear him use the horn once. Come it to think of it, I didn't hear any horns save for a couple flagrant violations of traffic decency. The roads felt new, though the bus didn't.

On the way into the city, I sat with my backpack on my lap as the bus began to fill up. I took some time to study the map of the bus route in front of me. It wasn't an especially helpful chart. For one thing, it was mostly occluded by the passengers sitting in front of it. The only information it offered was the names of the stops on this line, which wasn't all that enlightening given that it was all in Myanmar's unique local script. Even among non-western scripts, the Myanmar writing system is particularly engaging to behold. What mostly it appears to have going on is a series of interlocking circles and squiggles, which are periodically marked off by larger boxes. It's got the buoyant aesthetic sensibility of the kind of script a three year old would come up with when she's imitating adult handwriting. All looping circles and entangled boxes, it is positively delightful.

When I exited the bus at my downtown stop, I took a moment to gather my bearings. Then I slung my backpack over my shoulder and made my way down the street. The sidewalks featured the characteristically treacherous cracks of other cities in South East Asia, but with the difference that they were almost totally clean. There was no trash. The only debris was maybe 0.3 cigarette butts per square meter. The city center of Yangon has long, skinny Manhattan blocks. Walking north-south, one needs to take provisions as if undertaking a week long crossing of an expanse of desert. Walking east-west, there's room for maybe one and half store fronts before tumbling into the next intersection. At length, I presented myself at my hostel and checked in. I was officially on the ground in Myanmar.

It was December, about a week until Christmas. My plan was to spend the holidays on my own here in this country. My life in England had been complicated over the last few months. My existence felt heavy. I wanted to feel unencumbered again. I wanted to be out there in the world. I wanted to be somewhere untethered from life's responsibilities. I wanted to have the breathing room to do a little soul searching. Myanmar had been a place I had wanted to come for a long time. The country's borders had opened up over the last half decade, after having been more or less shuttered for the past two generations -- since around the time George Orwell was posted in Burma on colonial duty. Of the ten countries in South East Asia, Myanmar has by far the largest land mass. Yet its tourist numbers are on par with Laos, one of the smallest. There are fewer tourists per capita here than anywhere else in this part of the world. But there's no guarantee that will continue. Perhaps it will develop into a tourist mecca, like Thailand or Vietnam. Perhaps it will close down again and slink back to the shadows. Either way, it's a nation in rapid change, and I wanted to see it while still in its blossoming, spring-time phase.

I also liked the idea of spending Christmas in one of the most devoutly Buddhist countries on the planet. The official religion of Myanmar, which is practiced by the majority of the population, is Theravada Buddhism. It is generally considered to be the most conservative form of the religion. While everyone back home would be cutting down trees, putting up reindeer, and singing songs of joy and peace (or whatever else one is supposed to do during Christmas), I'd be wandering the exotic alleyways of this Christ-bereft stronghold of Buddhist tradition and stumbling upon the hidden mysteries of its grand and ancient pagodas. Sounded great to me.

I had a rough itinerary sketched out. I had my plane tickets in and out of Yangon, the largest city and formerly known as the British colonial headquarters of Rangoon. I had booked most of my hostels in advance for each part of the country. But how I was going to get from place to place or what I was going to do when I got there was all to be determined. Life had felt stiflingly regimented back home. All I had with me now was a backpack. Not the travel-savvy, larger-than-the-girl-lugging-it kind of backpack, but my school backpack. It was filled mostly with books on the country. I wanted to get to know this place. Not just to see it, but to really learn about it, to talk to the people who actually lived here, and to read the words of people who have a deep connection with this land. I was ready to immerse myself. I was also ready for some moment-to-moment, take-it-as-it-comes living. This felt like a country built for just that.

On my first morning in country, I set off from my hostel onto the streets. I was in search of nothing in particular. And in this first walkabout that was precisely what I found. The most arresting observation the tourist combing through downtown Yangon makes is one of demography: there are pretty much no white people here. There are many places in the world where this observation would hold. But few of them are cities that feel as developed, as accommodating, as unsullied as Yangon. In a way, it felt like coming to South East Asia for the first time again.

When one first starts coming to this part of the world, what stands out is how fantastically different it is. It is a society based on fundamentally different principles than the West. In many ways, the apotheosis of Western culture is the shopping mall: everything is standardized. Each store offers the same things of the same quality and aesthetic of what that store offers anywhere else in the world. The point of a Starbucks Frappuchino is that you can go to practically any country on earth and order essentially the same drink. A shopping mall is laid out so that nothing is obscured, nothing is going to take you by surprise. The organizing principle of a shopping mall is homogeneity.

If you're anything like me, you grew up in a culture, a city, a society that has increasingly come to resemble a shopping mall. So when you first come to South East Asia, you see that it's possible to have a society for which every impulse goes in the opposite direction. In many ways it is the antithesis of a shopping mall: nothing is standardized. Everything is unique. There are gapping, inexplicable holes in the infrastructure -- spots where something should exist but nothing does. Surprises abound. You take an action and there is little guarantee of what the subsequent reaction will be. It is completely and totally beguiling.

But then after a little more time in this area, you start to see the spoilage. It is the infiltration of shopping mall culture into this otherwise gloriously haphazard vision of society. It is McDonalds and Burger King and KFC and Starbucks. It is the government's prioritization of the needs of tourists over the needs of locals. It is the overwhelming presence of white people. And once you've identified these spoilages, it's tough to recapture that initial sensibility of having uncovered a society of such immensely foreign awesomeness. One of the unfortunate facts of globalization is that so many of the best spots to be a tourist have been all but ruined by the presence of so many tourists. Being in Yangon felt exactly like recapturing that innocent, unspoiled joy of finding oneself in an exotic land of mystery and surprise.

Every square inch of sidewalk in Yangon seems to be taken up with informal vendors. They appear to be organized into patches. For two blocks, it will be fruit vendors. Then the next block will feature grimy power tools. Then comes a swathe of clothes and textiles, followed by a sector proffering refurbished iPhones. Each is pocked with its own food stalls catering to adjacent vendors. At no point does one see anything on offer that would be of interest to anyone other than locals. The supply and demand here is clearly geared toward the indigenous population, and not hoards of foreigners swooping in to pay exorbitant sums for trinkets, goodies, or knick knacks.

Most of the action takes place on the main drags, which run along the short sides of the blocks. The long sides are residential streets. They are quiet, filled mostly with stretches of worn but not dilapidated apartments atop modest restaurants and other small businesses. It is an immediate contrast. The sidewalks on the arterials bustle with vendors and foot traffic while the residential asides snooze.

My first stop was at an ATM. Historically, Myanmar is famous for not having cash machines. This is something you'll hear frequently from people who've been there. It's no longer true. There are ATMs on almost every block. It's easy to get money. The problem, though, is that you have to cart around a lot of currency to have any meaningful amount of dough. Getting a couple hundred dollars worth of Kyat, which would last me for a couple weeks, required a mafioso-style briefcase in which to store all my local currency.

That being said, Myanmar isn't exactly a place where a tourist feels exposed on the street. It is difficult not to feel safe in a city where half the population is walking around in skirts, and the other half are women. The tradition garb for a Myanmartian male is type of sarong, known as a Longyi. It gives the local population a certain way of ambling: at once sort of floppy, sort of shuffling, hands behind the back in leisured confidence. One's sandals make way from under the skirt with each shuffle. Everything is flowy and nonchalant. My initial suspicion was that these people wouldn't commit a petty crime if their life depended on it. This suspicion was increasingly strengthened the longer I staid in country. The women, for their part, are marked by Thanaka. It is de rigueur for women to smear Thanaka on their cheeks before leaving the house in the morning. A canonical symbol of Myanmar culture, it is a cosmetic paste ground from the bark of an indigenous tree. In other words, a mud mask that is appropriate, even lauded, to be worn in public. At first, it's a strange sight -- like when a female character in a movie emerges from her quarters in an avocado mask with cucumbers over her eyes. But one gets used to it, and eventually it comes to hold its own intrigue and attractiveness.

As I made my way through the downtown area, I came upon an especially crowded intersection, where two big arterials criss-crossed. It was the kind of street that is not so much crossed as negotiated. In an interesting little piece of theatre, our numbers built up to a critical pedestrian mass before bursting out into the street, essentially bullying the steady stream of cars into realizing they couldn't possible run this many people over. Cross walks aren't really a thing here. Sure, there are some zebra crossing patterns painting onto the street. But they do not contribute to reality in any meaningful way.

At length I found myself close to the center of the downtown area at the Bogyoke Aung San Market. I knew I was somewhere of central interest, because it was outfitted in the way that the core of all central business districts are during the holidays: with Christmas decorations. I was a bit taken aback. The most conspicuous display of Christmas spirit was a sign that proudly read "Yangon Christmas Festival" on the street running across the entrance to the market. Other strung up ornaments included white cutouts of Christmas trees and snowflakes, as if coniferous evergreens and fresh snowfall were indigenous to the area. It was more than a week before Christmas, but Yangon was already bubbling over with holiday spirit.

The Bogyoke Aung San market is named for the man who essentially wrested control of Burma from the colonial British. He is the Myanmar nation's George Washington: the military-leader-cum-first-head-of-state, revered as the Father of the Nation. Bogyoke is an affectionate honorific meaning "major general." Aung San founded the country's military, which has been a central fixture in Myanmar's modern history -- though not always in a good way. Nonetheless, he is looked upon with widespread fondness to this day by the people of his nation, as befits an icon such as George Washington. Where his legacy begins to diverge from Ol' George's is that while Washington was afforded the opportunity to lead his young nation in its earliest and most vulnerable years, Aung San was assassinated six months into his reign. It was a plot by one of his political adversaries, whereby his men basically stormed into an important cabinet meeting and murdered the country's top seven political officials. Somewhat inexplicably, the architect of the assassination, U Saw, believed this would leave the country with no choice but to install him as head of state. In these designs U Saw turned out to be slightly over-optimistic and instead of being asked to lead, he was hanged. In the intervening seventy years since its independence, Myanmar has often entertained much criticism for how little democratic progress it has made.

To this point, I think it's worth mentioning that seventy years into America's democracy, the Civil War hadn't even been fought -- meaning that the United States wasn't even yet on the verge of its states uniting in the way we think of them today. And that's without having the Founding Fathers summarily murdered by a political adversary. It takes time to build a functioning democracy -- if that's still a designation you'd like to bestow upon the U.S. -- from the ground up. The main impetus for this democratic building up has been Bogyoke's Nobel Peace Prize winning daughter, Aung San Suu Kyi.

At any rate, the market. It was a great open air complex, like a converted airplane hangar with a white roof and white tile housing a brightly lit matrix of stalls. It's designation in the tourist guides -- a "lively bazaar in a multistory colonial building, with vendors selling antiques, jewelry, art & food" -- could describe the rudiments of almost any big market in the world, such as Ben Thanh Market in Saigon, or the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul. But there is one major exception. There were no white people here. I saw two, maybe three, foreigners the entire time. This is an almost unimaginable feature of this sort of market, if you've been to comparable ones throughout the world. Before wandering in here, I had always assumed that surely these sort of structures were built for people just like me -- to give tourists a center of gravity, a point around which to orient themselves in the city. Apparently not.

The consequences of this absence of foreigners is tremendous. No one hassles you. No one approaches you in the aisles and tries to foist their s**t upon you. A guy wandering down the aisle asked me something. "No thank you," I mumbled habitually and shook my head. I assumed he had been selling something when he repeated himself. I saw he wasn't carrying anything to sell and realized that he was simply asking me if I needed help finding anything.

One peculiar feature of the market were herds of unattended children wandering among the patrons and vendors. Each child had a shaved head with pink monk robes featuring an orange sash across their body. They roamed from stall to stall, whereupon they would half-heartedly chant some two line incantation. Without looking up from her phone, the store owner would stick a small pile of cash into the children's bucket. There were hundreds of these little troops, all around the city. It was like watching a conspiracy of non-Halloween trick-or-treating in progress. At the time, I imagined that this was some sort of mafia, run by eight year old Buddhist of especially feminine fashion sensibilities. I later learned they were nuns.

I surveyed the wares at the market. I spied some passionfruit and dragonfruit, among my favorites in this part of the world. Other fruits included the usual suspects: jack fruit, pomelo, little mandarins, apples, pomegranates, and grapes. I had hoped to find the crowned prince of all South East Asian fruits, the Mangosteen, but none availed themselves of me. There was a meat market. It featured chickens in close quartered cages, crabs that might at any moment reach out and snag a passerby, a wriggling catfish that threatened a flailing slap across the face, and black bags fidgeting with unidentified detainees. That sort of stuff makes me feel kind of itchy. But for whatever reason, what inspired the most interest from me were the mandarin oranges. I went to a stall and pointed. The lady began to load up a small plastic bag. When after a moment I told her, "Oh, that's plenty, thanks," she took this a cue to keep piling them into the bag. I didn't really have a use for enough oranges to feed a family of seven for the next week, and I tried to communicate this to her by presenting her with my intended budget, 200 kyat. She took offense to this, as she felt this was a dramatic underestimate of the value of the bag full of oranges. Her counter offer was 1000 kyat. I tried further to explicate my position for her. "No, please just give me enough for two hundred." She stared at me. I handed her a thousand Kyat note and walked off with an arm load of mandarin oranges.

Leaving the market, I headed back toward the streets. Without having gotten very far, a store front caught my eye, called J'Donuts. It appeared to be a Burmese version of Dunkin Donuts, a place where surely my money would be better spent than at the orange vendor. Indeed, the pastry case would not have been out of place in a Dunkin or a Tim Horton's, except for the overtly tropical flavors, with fillings such as lychee or choco-coconut. On the wall was a television with what appeared to be a twenty-four hour loop of a commercials in advertisement of J'Donut's products. The commercial was based, evidently, on the twin themes of Christmas and pedophilia. It featured cartoon children in costumes dressed as donuts, provocatively squirting chocolate syrup and festooning one another with sprinkles. These events, it was later revealed, were actually featured in the collective dreams of a small cohort of live action children, alongside the donuts dancing round their heads. Then a series of elves, in some sort of pervert Santa's helper gambit, entered the scene, stage left. I couldn't discern their function in the plot beyond adding a distinct element of seediness. At any rate, all of this was delivered in support of the thesis of J'Donut's cunning marketing slogan: "every day... tasty and fresh." As I sat there, not necessarily savoring but certainly consuming my cloying lychee donut and coffee-flavored sugar milk, an entire Harry Belafonte album -- though not necessarily a Christmasy one -- played all the way through in the background.

Perhaps unsurprisingly when I exited J'Donuts I found myself crossing over into what appeared to be the primary expat community of the city. Every store front was either a coffee shop or a restaurant. It seemed the entire population consisted of pairs of white dudes with Asian chicks. The establishments boasted creatively western names like "Toasted Melt" (sells toasted melts), "Minister Cheese" (sells ice cream), "O'thentic Brasserie" (sells... Irish inflected French cuisine?), and "Pizza Heaven" (sells 'slices of heaven'). With the discovery of this enclave, it occurred to me that I had reached a point of diminishing returns and elected to repair to my hostel to doze off for the rest of the afternoon.

In the evening I headed back to a side street that I had stumbled upon in my earlier wanderings. Only a couple blocks over from my hostel, it was called 19th Street. It turned out to be one of the more prominent culinary attractions in the city. Anthony Bourdain ate here when he filmed in Yangon. It is an entire block (a long-ways one) strewn with the glorious green and red short stools indigenous to South East Asia. I have attained a sort of Pavlovian conditioning where upon sitting down at one of these bad boys, I know I'm about to be served up something streaming and delicious, ideally spicy, and most likely resulting in some abdominal tumult until my body acclimates. The whole street was a series of food stations, each with their own packed seating area. Everywhere looked good. Everywhere looked fresh. Everywhere looked like they'd be willing to deep fry pretty much substance, foodstuff or otherwise, and present it on a stick for my gustatory contemplation. I picked the place with the best available seating. (Yeah, it was full to the point of having a tough go finding a seat.)

I chose a dish for which the English translation was deep fried spicy pork. Because I'm white, the lady double checked about the spicy part -- imploring me to reconsider with a searching confirmation of "spicy?" in conjunction with a raise of the eye brow and the finger-thumb circle with splayed fingers, the universal sign for "Are you sure you can handle this, white boy?" Just try me.

I also ordered a beer. When the lady reappeared with my beverage, she popped the tab, pealed off some label underneath and gave me a look that could only mean "Oh wow, you've just come into some money." She asked me if I'd like to exchange the tab. I said sure. She took the cap and came back a couple minutes later with some cash money and handed it to me. God, I've never felt so favorably disposed to a country before. I mean, getting cash back on your beer -- could it get any better? I settled in with my beer, and eventually my pork, and waded into a collection of writings by Aung San Suu Kyi.

When not so long thereafter I was too tipsy not to get distracted by my surroundings, I put down the book and picked my head up to survey what was going on. I was alone at my table, and as I was enjoying my evening. Apparently, my solitude was noticed by the men at the table sitting next to me. They invited me to sit with them. So I paid my tab with the lady and moved next door, taking the fourth seat among my three new buddies. As is customary in many parts of the world, they made sure I was sufficiently plied with alcohol and cigarettes before we dug into any personal details. We got another round of beers. I accepted a cigarette, even though I don't smoke them. In fact, I can't. As a long-time cigar smoker, I have a hard time actually performing the act of inhaling smoke, as one is supposed to do with cigarette. I just hold the smoke in my mouth briefly, then let it go. The men I was sitting with noticed that I was doing it wrong. They gave me sidelong looks of moderate confusion. Then, apparently, they let the matter go, probably just chalking it up as an American thing.

One of the guys was more comfortable in English than the other two, and he did most of the talking. One of the quiet ones owned a small business. The other two were students, studying something to do with tourism. The gregarious one was especially fascinated with my being American. To him, this was an accomplishment that merited some serious digging into. Attempting to curtail this line of inquiry, I managed to turn the conversation back to Myanmar. They noticed the face of Aung San Suu Kyi on my book. I asked them what they thought of her. Their position was, in essence, decidedly favorable. They felt like she had the country's back. It was the same enthusiasm for a leader that my Indian friends mustered for Narendra Modi when he first took over the country, or the ovation Michelle Obama would receive if she decided to run for president. I asked them what had changed over the last five years, since the country had become more open. Overall, they were a fan of the developments. Over the next five years, they hoped to see a greater separation between the country's military and its government.

As well loved as Aung San Suu Kyi may be, she is often accused of being little more than a puppet of Myanmar's authoritarian and decidedly over-enthusiastic military regime. Instead of independent branches of executive, legislative, and judicial powers, the Myanmar government is much more of a highly interdependent morass of military and political interests. This is at the core of the recent claims that the Myanmar government, led by Suu, is supporting a genocide of the Rohingya people on the Bangladesh border. As much good work as she has done, the country's military is a powerful and often malevolent force. Her relationship to this regime is complicated. On the one hand, they are responsible for many atrocities that the Myanmar government perpetrated against its own citizens during the half-century after independence. They also locked Suu up for more than a decade. In 1990, Myanmar had its first democratic elections, and Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy party won. Instead of stepping aside to let her take the reins of the country, the military ignored the results and placed Suu under arrest. She was a political prisoner -- placing her in the company of the other architects of non-violent, world-shifting activism in the twentieth century, such as Mohandas Gandhi and Nelson Mandela -- for fifteen years. Which, I suppose, is quite a lot to put in the one hand.

But on the other hand, it is, at its heart, still her father's military. For better or worse, it is her family's legacy. And as with all family legacies, it is simultaneously an embarrassment and a treasure. Also, what country isn't proud of their military, if they've got one? Anyway, this is why the country is so volatile. Overall, the current seems to be drifting toward the good. But at any moment the military junta could reassert itself. It is, to say the least, a complicated situation.

Which, at this point in the evening, we made tragically little progress in solving. After pretending to have smoked a handful of cigarettes and having actually consumed enough beers to fill my quadrant of the table, I wasn't necessarily in a cognitive state conducive for nuanced political discourse. I bid my new friends adieu, and with that toppled my way back to the hostel.

I'm not going to lie to you. Life was pretty good in Myanmar. I'd wake up at my leisure and wander downstairs for my first coffee of the day. Each morning I would put in a three hour of shift, with a bit of work, a bit of writing, and a bit of journaling -- a.k.a., three different modes of writing. During this time I'd pound down five or six cups of coffee, since it was free and unlimited in every hostel I staid at. I'd sit in the common area, and take my breakfast when it was ready. People would come and go. Travelers would commune with one another, carrying on the same inane conversations over and over again. "Have you been to the third tree on the east-most corner of Lake Mwandishi? No? Well, you really should. If you don't see that, you haven't really seen the country." I'd put in my headphones and get lost in my own world of curling streams of letters in my notebook or clack away on my keyboard for paragraph upon paragraph. Then I'd spend my afternoons out and about in the city.

On this morning I was greeted with a new development at the hostel. The staff was painting Christmas designs onto the front doors of the hostel. Taking inspiration from the marketing team at J'Donuts, they inscribed a red and green nativity of Santa and his elves. Though there were no children depicted in this scene, I assume the elves would've taken more than a passing interest in them had there been. Even more egregiously, the staff all wore Christmas hats. This is when it started to become clear to me that I had come to the wrong country to escape Christmas festivities. The Christmas Spirit is even more fervent here than it is in the U.S., which has been mostly relegated to the more inclusive greetings of "Happy Holidays." I had successfully escaped the Jesusy aspects of Christmas, but that's not really what the holiday is about is it? It's about festivities, conducting oneself in a spirit of celebration and good will, and, above anything else, a fresh haul of new loot. In other words, capitalism -- which is a language that everyone speaks, regardless of religion. With more than a week until Christmas Day, the intrusions of unbidden and overwhelmingly kitsch holiday spirit would get worse before they got better.

Only slightly daunted by the saccharine visage of Santa and his helpers, I set off back into town. One thing that I'd like to mention, which isn't my favorite topic to broach, but I sincerely think is worth bringing up, is the women of Yangon. They are easily the best looking population of females I've yet to come across in my travels. Now, pretty much every culture likes to say this of their own women. Especially, for some reason, Russians and Eastern Europeans. But they can't all be correct. As a third party judge, I have to give the award to Myanmar, specifically Yangon. I have a theory about this. Actually, two theories. The first has to do with the 136 indigenous ethnic groups of Myanmar. They are distributed geographically across the country, and Yangon, being the primary metropolitan area, is where all of the ones who are inclined to leave their ancestoral village and mate with someone further afield head to. As I'm sure is an uncontroversial point, mating across ethnic boundaries tends to lead to extremely beautiful offspring. While such mixing is subtle, that seems to be happening here. This is a personal theory of mine, and feel free to adopt it as your own or to reject it. The second theory, which is a more commonly held position is that it has to do with Thanaka. It's a blessing of a relatively high caliber to have baked into one's culture a penchant for excellent skin care. It would be as if Californians took a fancy to smearing avocado on their face when they left the house. After years of ardent commitment to skin care, you get a population of people with nice skin. So, like I said, it's a theory, and you're free to make of it what you will.

Another curious and slightly less sexist thing that one begins to notice on the streets of Yangon is that the cars in this country are almost exclusively Japanese. Practically every vehicle is either a Suzuki, Honda, Toyota, Nissan, or, if it's a truck, a Mitsubishi. There isn't a Kia or a Hyundai in sight, let alone a Chevy or an Audi. One reason for this is that Aung San Suu Kyi has always harbored a great deal of admiration for the Japanese, and so there has always been a big-sister, little-sister sort of relationship between the countries. I'm sure there's also a specific economic reason, but I wasn't able to ascertain it throughout further research. At any rate, I'm sure this trend will change as the country continues to avail itself of the world economy.

After starting this particular walkabout with no destination in mind, I oriented myself in the direction of the Zoological Gardens, which were enticingly marked on the map just north of the downtown area. Arriving at its gates, or at least, where on the map it appeared that the gates might be, I strolled through an open entrance. Then I heard someone call out "Hello!" The direct translation of this interjection to English would be something like "Hey!! Just where do you think you're going?" A man came from out of my peripheral vision to usher me toward a ticket booth, preventing me from entering the park illicitly.

Upon entering the grounds, it was not clear whether what I was entering was a traditional zoo or some sort of nature reserve. All I could see was fauna. There didn't appear to be other people. And there didn't appear to be exhibits. A sign read that there were 133 species. It failed to disclose whether they were held in cages or just wandering about. Making one's way through the paths in this zoo was like rolling up into a ghost town in a Western flick. The protagonist surveys the otherwise desolate street, and as a tumble weed rolls through, remarks that it appears everyone else has been run out of town. The first exhibit I came upon was a cage of monkeys. The fence around the animals' enclosure was about as far from sidewalk where I stood as an extended monkey arm. The monkeys, I noticed, could just about stick their entire bodies through the screen save for their area of greatest circumference. There were no witnesses around in case one of them escaped, murdered me, and snuck back in. There were large patches of unfinished construction projects throughout the grounds, and for all I knew any of them could have been filled with the inert bodies of unsuspecting tourists. I backed away slowly and turned to have a look at what else was around.

At length I did start to see other people. Again, I was astounded by the fact that not a single one appeared to be a tourist. I wandered the zoo for almost two hours, and never once saw another westerner. In my uniqueness, this made me an object of interest to the other patrons at the zoo, especially in the presence of some of the more lackluster animals.

Certainly one of the reasons there were few tourists was that the Yangon zoo is not among the world's most spectacular zoological habitats. That said, it was quite relaxing to wander in a park where both the animals and the patrons had such generous proportions of Lebensraum. The potential danger posed by the observation that the fortifications keeping the animals from the humans didn't exactly inspire confidence, gave the excursion an added dimension of excitement not usually expected from a trip to the zoo.

Making my way north again toward another site of interest on the map, I came upon a sprawling park laid out around a shimmeringly gorgeous azure lake. It was dusk now, and the setting sun was the same color as the sound of a bell marking the start of a meditation. The lake was ringed not only by a verdant lapel of grass, but also by a walking path, hovering over the edge of the water like a halo. Everyone I passed was a local. Each of them gave me a pleasant smile and nod. They seemed like they were just happy to see me enjoying myself in their city. I'd been wearing sandals all day, and my legs had the same gradient of dark clay to airy lightness as the sunset. At length, I came to a point where the walkway suddenly stopped. It's not that the loop had ended, but that there was a blockade in front of a ten yard stretch where there were no boards in the boardwalk -- a hole in the infrastructure, if you will -- and I could go no further.

After a brief respite back at the hostel, I repaired in the evening to what appeared to be Yangon's premiere rooftop bar. I had noted they had a jazz band on that night, and I was curious what heights could be attained in this country when it came to the lush life of jazz and cocktails. On top of a hotel in an otherwise residential area, the seating are was exceptionally loungeable, with a corridor of reservable and cushioned alcoves. These mostly appeared to be occupied by European business men, who were out for some shared plates and a bottle or six of wine. They were among colleagues and friends, evidently operating in a celebratory mode. There were also a few groups of mostly upscale Burmese. I snagged a spot at the bar. The roof offered a three-sixty degree view of the city, with the main visual attraction being the Shwedagon Pagoda glowing in the distance like a hovering UFO. Viewed from this vantage, it really becomes clear that Myanmar truly is a kind of dark spot on the map. Situated between the well-lighted civilizations of India, China, and Thailand, the plot of land centered on the Irrawaddy delta is dark when viewed from space, or even just a tall building. Even in the city, most of the land is shaded from urban glow. Between me and the imposing Shwedagon, which is the visual centerpiece of the city, there was nothing but an inscrutable blackness. It is as if showing a laser pointer into a moonless, starless sky. What you see is not so much a view but simply an unlit expanse, like the visual field behind closed eyes.

My first order of business was to obtain a drink. I was delighted to find their menu included barrel-aged negronis. I waved in the direction of the glowing panel of alcoholic goodness that was the bar and flagged down one of the bartenders. Normally, in these situations, I'd give the local flavors a shot and order something closer to an indigenous concoction than a tried classic. But this bar didn't have anything like that on offer. Plus the thought of gin, Campari, and vermouth marinating in oak over the course of a few weeks made me all tingly and excited in a way that's difficult to ignore. My cocktail was served with a flair of teak-wood smoke introduced into a glass enclosure around the drink, which upon lifting the enclosure released a fog, like a special effect at a rock concert. It was a little much for my taste. But it was also served with dehydrated orange slices, and I liked that. I sipped my cocktail, and read from my copy of George Orwell's Burmese Days by the under-light of the counter in front of me. Periodically, I'd looked up to survey the patrons of this illuminated fastness situated in the otherwise steely darkness of the landscape around us. I consumed these elegant $5 negronis with a certain ardent liberalism while smoking the Burmese cigars I'd bought, 10 for 50 cents. Soon the band began to play. Mostly it was from the oeuvre of Antônio Carlos Jobim. For the sake of propriety, I won't disclose the exact number of negronis I managed, nor the number of cigars I sucked down. But it's safe to that it was, in a scientific sense, a large enough sample to achieve statistical significance.

Then the night took a left turn. I saw a couple of guys hanging out by a table next to mine. They were clearly vibing with the music and looked like locals. I approached them. We got to talking. After the first set was over, the jazz singer who had been on stage came to our table, and introduced herself as a friend as the gentlemen I was sitting with. She was from Japan, propelled by the twin dreams of living in Myanmar and being a jazz singer. The two guys were entrepreneurs. I asked them what business they were in. "Import-export," they told me. As anyone familiar with the espionage genre will infer, they were spies. One of them claimed to be especially fond of America, having made several extended trips to Nebraska. If anyone has ever uttered a statement which more directly implicated them in some sort of covert affair of counterintelligence, I have not heard it.

Once the music had wrapped up and the European business men had begun to pack it in out of respect for tomorrow's workday, the two guys asked what I was doing next. "Nothing," I told them. It is at this point that the scene cuts to a drug-addled montage of rave music and altered consciousness, zooming around the city from one neon-lit palace of debauchery to another consuming substances of a dubious and enlivening nature. Or at least as close to that sort of thing as I come in my life.

The first stop on our itinerary was the kind of place that one might imagine America is full of if one had never actually been to America: a nifty establishment called the "Beer Pong Bar." This title rather concisely captures the institution's mission statement. Conceptually, it is a bar which dedicates the major of its real estate to arraying cups of beer across a table and enjoining participants on both sides to sink ping pong balls into one another's cups. Beer pong is one of America's most celebrated cultural exports, like the hamburger or the iPad, much loved the world over. As with all of America' greatest innovations, it provides a highly bastardizable palate on which other nations can construct their own cultural inventions. That is how the hamburger differs from, say, classical French cuisine. If you don't cook French food the way they do it in Paris, you're doing it wrong. But anyone can take the basic canvas of the burger, do whatever the hell they want to it, and find themselves in the presence of a creation that is at once delicious and entirely legitimate. Beer pong has been similarly appropriated to great effect in other milieus. The premise of this establishment was to set up in what was essentially an empty, unlit warehouse, a football field's worth of regulation beer pong tables illuminated by the synthetic LEDs of an air hockey table or a laser tag course. The operation's feng shui was so effective that it had evidently attracted the presence of every adolescent in the province to gather with their friends, perch a Gatorade-sized vat of beer on their table, and engage in bouts of competitive drinking until long after peak performance had been achieved. Being an American, I felt a certain patriotic duty to represent my country well. I did what I could.

Having reached a point of diminishing marginal returns on any activities which depended on the use of fine motor skills, we took off to the next spot. Upon leaving the beer pong bar, I discovered that our entourage had increased in number. Instead of requiring a single taxi, our crew now required a small fleet of vehicles. I had no real idea who any of these people were. But I was friends with all of them.

When I next came to, there was wailing. Or not wailing, but rather singing. Then I immediately ascertained that we were in the plush and intimate confines of a karaoke room. Now, the western and eastern conceptions of karaoke are rather different. In the west, the essential framework for karaoke is to consume enough alcohol to demolish all sense of self-consciousness or social liability in the service of aurally making a fool of oneself in front of a group of total strangers. By contrast, the eastern framework for karaoke is to consume enough alcohol to demolish all sense of self-consciousness or social liability in service of aurally making a fool of oneself in front of a group of one's close friends. Instead of taking place on a stage for any casual observer to judge, it takes place in a private room. It is an infinitely preferable format over the western version. It is, however, still awful. The only way to make karaoke an even slightly palatable activity is to have it catch you completely by surprise. It has to develop organically, on the spur of the moment. It is in this respect like other acts of vulgar semi-public behavior, such as skinny dipping. You don't set a calendar event for your next skinny dipping session. The spirit must take you. At least that's what I imagine to be the case for skinny dipping. No one has ever invited me to go. At any rate, that same conceptual model holds true for karaoke.

Having satisfactorily expressed ourselves in song, we ended the evening with a bite to eat -- whatever the Myanmartian equivalent to greasy three-AM kebab is. I ate my fill, then a good deal more, then I regretfully informed my companions that it was time for me to turn in. Without having taken the time to develop an especially solid game plan, I got up to leave. And I found myself walking in no direction in particular toward nothing much. It was 4:30 in the morning, and there were no cars on the road. I did not have internet on my phone. I knew the name of my hostel. I knew that it was somewhere south of where I was currently at. I didn't know which way south was. At the moment I was beginning to draw conclusions about my predicament based on these observations, a taxi pulled into the adjacent intersection. I flagged the driver down and hopped in.

I told the driver the name of my hostel. Then he embarked on a protracted exposition in a language I didn't speak. I deduced from the fact that he was explaining instead of driving that I had been unsuccessful in describing the port of call at which I hoped to disembark. More words came from my mouth. I can recall them now probably just about as accurately as he could understand them then. I managed to communicate that I was going somewhere toward the city center, as we were pretty far outside of town at this point, and this satisfied him enough to put the car in gear. At length, we pulled over on the side of a desolate road. He rolled down the window and shouted something. A man emerged from the darkness into the din of nearby street lamp. There was a brief exchange, which I imagined was chiefly about where to dump my body. Then the man leaned into the window and asked me where I wanted to go. I gave him the street number closest to my destination, which he relayed to his colleague in what seemed like more verbiage that was strictly necessary. The man disappeared into the shadows, and we set off toward my place of residence and/or the body drop site. When the car came to a stop I recognized the familiar acrylic visage of Santa and his elves. I had made it home. I was alive, albeit somewhat cognitively impaired. Filled with gratitude, beer, Christmas cheer, patriotic pride, and the unassuageable desire to retire, I turned in for the night.

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Barry Wellman was instrumental in developing the modern understanding of social networks. Barry co-founded the International Network for Social Network Analysis in 1977, with Bev Wellman. The original ideas surrounding social networks began with sociologists -- especially Harrison White, of Harvard, with whom Barry studied -- who were changing the understanding of how people related in society. Barry continued to develop these ideas throughout his long career at Toronto. In many ways, this strain of sociological research is crucial for understanding our modern conception of social networks, such as Twitter and Facebook. Barry is the author or editor of several books, including “Networked: The New Social Operating System” co-authored with Lee Rainie. Keep an eye out for his new book, on academic writing, which is due out in 2021.

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It was on this particular day, in an Airbnb near to the Johannesburg airport, it occurred to me that I might be a strong contender for the title of world's preeminent dumbass. I woke up, bags packed, ready to head out when I was struck by a realization: I had failed to secure a visa for Vietnam, my intended destination. Without that visa, I wouldn't be able to enter the country.

As an American, I'm somewhat accustomed to presenting myself at the gates of a country and announcing, "I'm ready to come in now." A boy is then sent to collect my baggage, and I'm received in celebration as a hero of capitalist tourist bucks. I can show up pretty much anywhere on the globe and expect this sort of treatment. Vietnam is not one of those places. And while some countries will process an online visa application in a matter of minutes -- I once obtained an Australian visa between the time of my arrival at my airport of embarkation, having only then discovered one would be required, and the departure of my plane -- the one for Vietnam takes a least a couple days to process. Between the breathtaking heights of my smugness and my profound inability to accomplish even very simple tasks, I think my girlfriend, Haily, was pretty impressed.

Working within the available parameters, a plan was formulated posthaste. I would go to the airport, as originally intended, and smile real big at the airport attendant checking my papers. Perhaps I'd be able to pull off the subterfuge of slipping onto the plane without proper documentation. If I made it that far, I'd be able to deviate from my stated itinerary by stealing away during my layover into a country that would allow me in sans visa.

Owing both to the ingenuity of the strategy as well as my aptitude for covert action, the plan worked. I was on my way to Hong Kong.

And what a truly delightful thing it was to find myself on a flight to Asia. For in performance of my usual ritual at the outset of a flight of any significant length -- to scroll though every available in-flight movie, consider the potential merits of each at length, and mark the ones with promise for potential viewing over the next twelve hours -- I discovered a cinematic work that aroused in me a great deal of interest. It was a Chinese movie -- clearly a rip off of the lucrative Todd Phillips flick, the Hangover -- called "Girls versus Gangsters."

The film details the initiatives of three protagonists -- Xiwen, Jialan, and Kimmy -- young women from northern China of approximately marrying age, whom, having between intimates of long-standing though not always amicable relation, set off together to celebrate the impending nuptials of their friend, Jinjin. As is the standard motif in the genre, the action begins when, after a night of especially vigorous carousing, the trio awaken to discover that they have failed to maintain an account of the whereabouts of their compatriot. This sets (as they say in the script-writing business) a clock. For their misplaced friend is to be married in a matter of hours. The objective of the trio is to set off into the Vietnamese jungle -- the treacherous environs in which our heroes now find themselves -- in order to locate Jinjin and ensure her safe and timely return for the ceremony.

In the scene of crucial plot-thickening, the trio wake up on a beach. They are naked, though they remain semi-modestly buried under the sand. "Semi-modestly" because the sand around each of them has been sculpted to resemble a nude and voluptuous female form. Jialan and Kimmy -- whom we've learned are, if not quite full-on nemeses then engaged in rivalry -- are hand-cuffed to a heavy box, one on each handle. A familiar train of dialogue (though with the novelty of transpiring in Mandarin Chinese) follows.

"What happened last night?" asks Jialan.

"Where's Jinjin?" asks Xiwen. Having failed to provide an answer, she exclaims, "I lost Jinjin!"

"Xiwen," says Kimmys, "When did you get a tattoo?"

Covering themselves in banana leaves, à la Adam and Eve, the trio teeter through the jungle. At length, they come upon what is evidently a Korean café. Why there is a Korean café in the middle of the Vietnamese jungle is a question no one poses.

"Maybe there's a handsome Korean guy inside," says Kimmy, optimistically.

Then the audience is treated to a moment of pure movie magic. The girls hear a series of thunderous stomps. The camera pans from the ground up in slow motion. There are Jurassic Park style rumbles with each step. A nearby glass of water trembles. Eventually the camera reveals who has emerged in such dramatic flair from the Korean café. It's Mike Tyson. Shirtless.

Romantic music plays. Jialan stares at Mike, mouth agape. Mike bites his finger provocatively. He bites his lower lip. The jungle gets even steamier.

Abruptly, Kimmy interrupts the fantasy. In English, she says, "Excuse me, do you have any clothes you can lend?" In a clever turn of conversational redirection, Mike Tyson responds, "What happened to you?"

"We just woke up on the beach like this," says Kimmy.

"Listen," Mike relates sagely, "trust me. S**t Happens. And I know too well. Man, alcohol's hard to resist, right?"

Right, Mike.

"Hey, just come to my room with me," he offers. "I'll see what I can find for you girls to wear."

They enter Mike's room-slash-hut-slash-café. On the wall are pictures of Mike slugging people in the face. Also his belts.

Jialan: "You have got so many championships."

MT: "You like watching boxing? I'm half American, half Korean, and I won most of my fights in the US and Korea."

Jialan: "You are mixed?!"

MT: "Yes." (He isn't.)

"Do you speak Korean?" Jialan asks.

Mike replies, in Korean, "My name is Dragon. You're so cute."

"Thank you Dragon oppa," says Jialan, also in Korean.

Mike goes to peruse what sartorial options he might be able to offer the girls. There is, of course, a tiger in Mike Tyson's closet. The tiger's name, also of course, is Tony. MT dismisses Tony and the jungle cat never makes a reappearance.

As it turns out, Mike Tyson only stocks boxing trunks. No tops of any kind. Which he elucidates in the deft line "Nowhere. There's no top. I'm the topless king." The girls, having no other recourse, each hike up a pair of trunks to their chest, in a kind of MMA-fantasy romper.

"Wow, good looking ladies," remarks Mike, conveying a sentiment that is semantically, if not syntactically, clear. "Looking really good."

Then Mike turns to the problem of the box and chain. He can't break the chains, because his hands are weak after so much fighting. He mentions a friend who is a locksmith. We never meet this friend.

Remembering their mission, the girls take leave of Mike Tyson.

Jialan: "I'll be back soon."

MT: "Please. Please come back. Come back. I love you so."

At this point the movie begins to lose the thread of the plot. Or at least I didn't have the exegetic tools to keep up with what was going on. What I can tell you is, at length, and for reasons I failed to ascertain, Mike reenters the plot. While Jialan is otherwise occupied, he engages in a heartfelt conversation with Xiwen.

"You find your friend yet?" asks Mike. The answer is obviously no, as she isn't with them. Xiwen points this out. "Ah," he offers in consolation, "don't worry she'll be fine."

Mike hands her a bottle of green tea.

"Want a soda?" he asks. Mike evidently doesn't know what green tea is, despite being the proprietor of a Korean café in the middle of the Vietnamese jungle. Xiwen nods assent.

Mike tries to open it. He can't. Weak hands.

Then in a bid of romantic endeavor, Mike asks Xiwen about Jialan's interests. The main thing is Korean dramas. A show called "Descendants of the Sun," in particular.

"She watched it four times," says Xiwen.

"I watched it five times," he says.

"Wow," says Xiwen. "Why?"

Then Mike Tyson spots Xiwen's tattoo and on that basis makes a diagnosis: "Vietnamese fiancé?" Xiwen is surprised at Mike's powers of inference, to have derived this fact on the basis of such scant evidence. He indicates toward the tattoo. "Now, though I'm not that good at my Vietnamese" -- why in Vietnam then, Mike? -- "it does appear to be Vietnamese."

Later on, the climax of the film begins when the girls find themselves critically imperiled, yet on the verge of reuniting with Jinjin. Heroically, MT emerges onto the scene. He is wearing military fatigues, in what is evidently an homage to a Korean drama, probably, I imagine, Descendants. There is a car chase scene. Then a Mike-Tyson-bursts-out-of-his-clothes-like-the-Hulk scene. Then a boat chase scene. Ultimately, Mike proves victorious over the nefarious forces that be (the "Gangsters" of the title, as it were). He sees the girls off as they make their way back for Jinjin's ceremony.

"Oh!" calls Mike to Jialan at the last second. "Can I have your WeChat number?"

In the denouement, we learn that (spoiler alert) Jialan breaks up with her boyfriend -- whom no one really liked anyway -- and ends up with Mike Tyson. It was with this perplexing and strangely enticing series of images seared into my mind that I found myself arriving on a new continent.

I would soon be landing in glorious, glorious Asia.

To arrive somewhere with fresh eyes is a special thing. It is enthralling to find oneself in a place one has never been. A sort of virginity, it is a moment that cannot be reclaimed. But there is also something about having been somewhere, left it, and finding oneself returning to the place one has been. It is to be received as an old friend. A recognition that, yes, some things are just as I left them. Yet some have changed, and I am unlikely to encounter them restored to their previous state in any medium save for memory. To return is to have an established relationship with a place, and to feel that relationship -- as is the nature of every relationship -- evolve with time's restless shifting.

It was this sense of returning that I felt upon landing in Hong Kong. It is a place I have found myself drawn back to over the years. The city -- the island, the culture, the harbor, the Chinese Special Administrative Region, whatever it may most accurately be called -- holds special meaning for me. In my first trip as a solo traveler to Asia, as a fresh college graduate, this was my first port of call. To me it will always symbolize a sort of gateway to this continent, which for the rest of my life will call me back to savor experiences new and old, to unexpected enlightenments and familiar joys. Not entirely unlike Istanbul on the opposite end, it is a juncture of East and West. It is a place I knew. It is also a place that, impressed somewhere deep within its eternal memory, knew me.

My first call was at my hostel. I had booked a single night there, confirming the transaction and shutting my laptop just as I was about to hop on the plane. Hostels in Hong Kong aren't as appealing as they tend to be elsewhere in Asia. In most Asian cities, hostels are a kind of minor resort for tourists, with ample room for beer pong, late night dance parties, and then, for the professionals, another round of beer pong. In Hong Kong, they are essentially just apartments with decently large square footage. A couple barracks rooms and a couple bathrooms. Several stories up. A check in counter maybe.

I had gotten into the airport around seven in the morning. I arrived at my hostel well before check-in. I made it nonetheless into my building, and when I finagled my way into the apartment door of the hostel I spied on the desk a number provided for early or late arrivals. I texted it, and a few minutes later a sleepy figure emerged through the doorway and reluctantly but mercifully set me up with a bed. The place seemed good enough, spare though it was. I liked the location, in the heart of Kowloon. Most crucially of all, it had solid air conditioning. I booked a spot there for my remaining nights.

Coated in the grime of long distance travel, I was eager to take a shower. This provided another reminder that I was now in Asia, though a slightly less welcomed one. Germane to these tightly packed Hong Kong hostels are the cramped showers. They are undifferentiated from the bathroom area as a whole. In space of about three skinny Chinese chaps, there is a toilet, a shower head, and a sink. Whatever business you intended to do, it can be done here -- though not always with an overabundance of grace. Almost immediately, I succeeded in getting myself wet, along with everything else in the restroom. I tried to spare the toilet paper, but to no avail.

Freshly laundered and eager to engage the city, I took leave of the hostel. It had been winter when I left Africa, having come from the southern hemisphere. Now I found myself in the sweltering Asian summer. It took me all of about thirty seconds after leaving the hostel to become comprehensively sticky in a coat of sweat. It took me another thirty seconds to become thoroughly confused by the sights and sounds of Hong Kong. (Actually not even that: a delivery guy had to help me negotiate the building's exit, as it required I pressed a button before leaving; it'd been a while since I'd been confronted with that technology.) Kowloon is intensely Chinese, in the overwhelming way that all Chinese things are intense to one unaccustomed to encountering them. Many of the city's façades are covered in bamboo labyrinths, which act as scaffolding for the not insignificant number of buildings under construction. Piled high, story upon story, are signs, banners, and advertisements, contending for attention. The mass of them are so aggressively seeking one's notice as to be almost indecipherable -- presumably, even if you speak the language -- like so many beggars hassling tourists in an urban corridor. I had become acclimated to the mellow pace of Africa. Being in Asia made me feel like Will Ferrell's elf in Time Square.

Time to get down to business. 10:30 in the morning. Five different breakfast establishments on my street. Each one of them full of patrons. All with pictures in the window of dishes I wouldn't normally associate with breakfast. The furthest one had a small queue, only one couple, and I took the wait to be a good sign. I saw they had pineapple buns, which is what I'd been hoping for. Then I spied an attractive dim sum stall across the street, where I could get my food for takeaway. I took a moment to contemplate the tantalizing prospect of dim sum. But then when I took another look at the queue for the other place I saw it had grown to a half dozen parties of Hong Kongers. I wasn't about to give up my spot.

At length I earned a seat in the restaurant. With Hong Kongers always having one eye on efficiency, I was seated at an otherwise full table top with three other mostly silent eaters. My first round was a p-bun and a cup of coffee. Contrary to its name, the traditional Hong Konger pineapple bun has no pineapple in it, but is basically just crusty white bread sprinkled with sugar. The top is dimpled in a manner resembling a pineapple, if one is willing to look at it with a certain level of generous imagination. It comes with a pat of butter, several times overgenerous. The coffee is what we typically think of in the West as Vietnamese coffee, which is basically coffee-flavored condensed milk. My serving was delivered to me approximately three and a half seconds after I ordered it. Promptly, I drank my coffee -- which proceeds from the cup at the rate of molasses -- and distributed p-bun detritus on my lap and the table before me. I ordered another round, and enjoyed my bun and coffee as the morning transitioned to midday. The restaurant was a flurry of constant activity. People waving over waiters. Parties coming and going. The bussing of plates. Even the lobsters seemed industrious. My colleagues-in-consumption stared fixedly at their phones. I stared at them. I was officially in Hong Kong.

As I had only really ingested sugar so far, I did go across the street for dim sum. I looked up at the cashier and contemplated my options. The cashier gave me a look that said, "For f**k's actual sake, please order something so we can get on with it." I picked something, then handed the cashier a fifty. I reached down to jingle around in my pocket for coins, but she had already produced my change before I could even retrieve the currency from my pocket. I took a seat on a nearby stoop to dive into my steam-emitting box of treats. It was only while biting into the first pan-friend dumpling of scalding broth and meaty goodness that I seriously injured myself. I consumed the second one unharmed, which I think implies that I'm something of a quick learner. As I enjoyed my dim sum, several questions occurred to me. How, for instance, did I manage to cover myself in sticky dumpling residue so quickly? The observation that I had somehow contrived to spread it all the way down to my ankle aroused in me a certain scientific curiosity. And why put the soup in the dumpling? Why not just put it in the bottom of the box where it invariably ends up anyway? Biting into one of those little suckers is like biting into an over-inflated balloon: it requires a level of pressure slightly beyond what you'd like to give, which you must achieve experimentally. Eventually, and always unexpectedly, it explodes in your face in dramatic fashion. It's lack gnawing on a frag grenade, but tastier.

I sat on the steps of a bank on Kowloon's main drag, Nathan Street, and watched Hong Kong go by. It occurred to me that I was the only person in the city who didn't have an urgent need to be somewhere. So when I finished my dumplings, I strided off, pretending that an important person in a high-up office somewhere was tapping their watch and expecting to receive the quarterly Wellington financials from me, like, yesterday. My striding, blessedly, took me to that beloved old haunt of mine. Nowhere in particular.

One of the enigmatic thrills of Hong Kong is that is one is dripped on by innumerable urban waterfalls fed by unseen tributaries. In a city of high rises rarely outfitted with central air conditioning, there are a practically infinite number of AC units to rain condensation on the heads of passersby. Chinese banyans line the urban thoroughfare of Nathan Street. These trees consist of many constituent tines, which seem to vie democratically for the direction in which the tree as a whole will grow. Further down past the banyans, the sidewalk is dotted with Indian gentlemen, who, upon identifying a white guy in their midst, thrust a business card in his direction, promising bespoke suits and shirts at a "very good price for you, my friend." An industrious segment of them quietly offer intelligence about where to purchase weed -- more likely oregano -- from undisclosed suppliers. The jewelry shops are innumerable. Every single person seems to be wheeling around a suitcase. Where they're all going, I have no idea. I thought about making my way down to the waterfront to the harbor, which is the best part of urban Hong Kong, maybe the best part of the urban world. But I decided to wait to savor it until sundown. It is after nightfall that one see's the true glory of the fragrant harbor from which Hong Kong takes its name.

Given that my circadian rhythm was still on Africa time, I was ready for a respite in the AC. Maybe also to grab my suitcase before I head out again. I retired to my hostel and settled in for a world class Africa-Asia nap.

In the evening, I entered the metro station at Tsim Sha Tsui. Of a sudden, I was engulfed in a squall of Hong Kongers, more being pushed and pulled by human current than coherently moving in any direction. (One doesn't necessarily walk the streets of Hong Kong so much as negotiate them.) I was fortunate to find a break in the current long enough to swim my way over to an "Add Value Machine," so I could re-up on transport funds. Experimentally, I put my Octopus card in the slot and began to work my way through the labyrinth of available options. Though I had been the only one at the machine moments ago, I was now the lead of a queue. Then a voice came from behind me.

"What are you doing?" said the woman.

Oh, I wondered, am I not doing it right? I retrieved my card from the machine and inquired as to what course of action I might otherwise take. She grabbed my card, shoved it back in the slot, and tapped away on the screen.

"See?" she said.

Having elucidated this gambit, she proceeded to snatch a fifty from my money clip and feed it into the machine. That wasn't necessarily what I had intended to do. It wasn't necessarily against my wishes either. I just hadn't planned that far ahead yet. I withdrew my money clip before she could donate more of my cash to my Octopus fund.

"That's great," I said. "Thanks." She handed me my card back, and I immersed myself once again in the convective swirl of human activity, praying that it swept me toward the appropriate subway line. Whereas Kowloon is a world built on the capital of traditional China, Hong Kong Island is devoted to the monetary capital of the Chinese nouveau riche. On opposite sides of the harbor, these are the two main hustle-and-bustle areas of Hong Kong. They provide a compelling juxtaposition. It's not that one is devoid of tradition and the other is not. But while Kowloon holds up its aging buildings with massive latticeworks of bamboo, the Island side's central district has no need for such erections, with its rows of Gucci, Patek, Hublot, and their ilk. This is the part of the city designed to satisfy the seemingly infinite capacity for Chinese consumption of the gaudiest and most expensive trimmings of Western culture.

My first call of the night was at a cocktail venue, The Quinary, notable for a drink they call the Earl Grey caviar martini. On the menu, it's described as vodka, elderflower, "Earl Grey caviar and air." What the "air" refers to is essentially Earl Grey bubble bath piled high atop the martini glass. It's a non-standard ingredient, and so it wasn't immediately apparent to me how such an ingredient was intended to be consumed. I sucked in a breath-full (as one is wont to do with air), which was so aggressively flavorful as to inspire a brief but enthusiastic coughing fit that all but blew off the top of my martini in the manner of the Big Bad Wolf. The "caviar," I was delighted to find, consisted in a small deposit of Earl Grey mini popping boba at the bottom of the glass. Popping boba -- which are marbled-sized saccharine capsules of flavor that can usually be ordered as accoutrement in one's bubble tea -- are, in my opinion, a most underutilized cocktail ingredient. Taking a look through the rest of the menu, I inquired about the nature of their wasabi-infused vodka. The barkeep embarked on a lengthy discourse on its origins and constitution, then offered me a taste. I believe she was under the impression that I was a cocktail critic of some note, because I was there early in the evening, making technical inquiries, sitting on my own, and jotting down my reflections. I was then treated to a sample of their marshmallow vodka. It came in a miniature Coke bottle, filled with what is pretty much an alcoholic version of the marshmallow fluff that one can buy in a jar. It was delightful. The good news for The Quinary is that my review is two thumbs up; the bad news is that I'm not actually a cocktail critic.

The bartender who had offered me the gratis drinks introduced herself as Shao Li. It being too early in the evening for the crowds to roll in, she occupied her time by chatting with me and engaging in the repetitive activity of relocating a tincture from a large glass to a smaller one with an eye dropper. She performed this activity for about thirty minutes, conveniently located at a station adjacent to where I sat. In my mind, I knew it was a ploy to be in my presence in order to drum up conversation with me. Not to mention that it was a thinly veiled metaphor for coitus. Alas, I was too poor to afford another drink at this bar, even a free one. Our dialogue winding down, I agreed to come see her when I next visited HK. She waved as I walked out. As soon as I did I realized I was still wearing the jeans I had changed into so as not to look like a schmuck at a cool bar. I considered whether I should go back in, change in the restroom, and reveal myself to be not only a schmuck but an absent minded one at that. Not at chance. I chose to remain sticky and uncomfortable. Sometimes the moral victories are the hardest to endure. Fortified by the heady assurance that a sizable number of our planet's women have an undisclosed desire to sleep with me, I made my way to a spot of familiar joy. An alleyway carved into the crowded hillside of the Island's commercial zone. There one can find kind all the artifacts necessary for happiness. Steaming woks of amalgamated flavors and spices. Tiny red plastic stools. Sweating bottles of cold everyman's lager. Making my way through, I inspected the dishes of each patron until I found one I liked, and put in an order for "that one" at the appropriate stall. The lady indicated that it was "pork rib in salt and pepper." Which wasn't my interpretation of what I saw, but I was willing to go with it. Much to my chagrin, I could not afford a Tsingtao ("Ching Bao") beer to go with it since I only had enough cash for the meal. Soon enough, the dish came, which presented me with an occasion to consider the conventions for anglicization of Chinese cuisine. "Pork rib in salt and pepper" neglects to disclose, at the very least, the presence of chilis. At any rate, I was happy. Next I called at 7/11 for reunion with my old friend, Pocari Sweat. Pocari Sweat is a glorious beverage, a milky white electrolyte drink with a crisp, Columbia blue label. The stated marketing pitch of the company is that it "resembles" the body's "natural fluids." I don't know if the company's executive board has ever seen sweat before, but it isn't the bodily fluid that is most directly imitated by a milky white solution. Setting aside any discussion of its actual merits, the drink reminds me of my first time in Asia.

At this point in the evening, I was overcome with a desire to go back to the Quinary to see if Shao Li was still there. It was nice evening. I wished I had someone to share it with. Perhaps she was about to get off from work and wanted to go out for a beer. Alas, just because one is inclined toward creepy and deranged thoughts does not mean one is required to act on them. So I didn't. Instead I took the Central-Mid-Levels -- which has the distinction of being the world's longest outdoor escalator promenade -- up until the hillside of Hong Kong Island becomes residential and sleepy rather than bustling and studded with hip restaurants. Then I descended further until it was again commercial and posh. I was quite lonely by the time I got to the bottom of the hill. I thought of the insight Chris McCandless jotted down before perishing, alone and unkempt, in the Alaskan wilderness. "Happiness only real when shared." Hoping to inspire a rebound in my spirits, I headed toward the Hong Kong harbor ferry. This is what I'd most been looking forward to since stepping foot in Hong Kong. The harbor is truly a magnificent sight. Viewed from the Kowloon side looking toward Hong Kong Island, the commercial high rises put on an epic display of urban lights against the backdrop of the world's most delicious hillside. Beholding this sight is like conducting an orchestra. It is the feeling of watching something so splendid and so tremendous unfold before your eyes. Each section performs its own part, while inexplicably remaining concerted with the rest. Taking the ferry across, I squished into a corner of the boat, on the upper deck with about 100,000 Hong Kongers. They were all carrying on in conversation and not, I couldn't help but feel, at a whisper, either. Disembarking from the ship, I covered the waterfront. My hope at this point was to repair to a dreary pub where I'd sit alone at the bar and the man behind the counter would tersely serve me an ice cold Tsingtao. I searched for a while in the streets of Kowloon. No dice. So I settled for a bubble tea and retired for the evening. Before doing so I was presented with the evening's final joy. I went to the ATM to withdraw some currency. The transaction ended with the directive, "Please take advice." It means 'receipt.'

As our double-decker bus made the bend, the top of it seemed to lean into the oncoming lane. It put me in mind of the bus scene in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, which darts through the road with such belligerent haste as to imperil the story's hero. Or at least it would have, if I wasn't scared for my life. Sitting on the upper deck, I was confident in my assessment that the bus was actually tipping across the other lane of traffic and over the sheer cliff on the other side. I swear I could see down to the bottom of the gulley below. It was a hot day. The air was solid with humidity. Not entirely unlike trying to breathe Earl Grey air, actually. It was the kind of hot that would be of interest to scientists hoping to induce a chemical reaction or a breakfast-enthusiast attempting to fry an egg. I was going hiking. That is, if I didn't succumb to the driver's psychopathology first.

Hong Kong is actually famous for having some of the world's greatest hiking trails. Or at least they're good ones. I'd heard they were world-class. But it's not immediately clear to me what would so distinguish one hiking trial from another in any objective sense like that. At any rate, I was to tackle the fabled trail known as the Dragon's Back.

That was my plan. It was also the plan of a non-negligible number of Chinese tourists. The bus screeched to a halt at a nondescript location where there appeared to be an opening in the otherwise impenetrable thicket of brush lining the roadside. The driver called for Dragon's Back. I alighted along with a good deal of the rest of the bus. I was eager to get out ahead of them, so as not to be caught in a traffic jam. Mercifully the open stretches of the trail were partially covered. I followed the rascally meandering dirt road lined with brush. Slight uphill. Even with a healthy shade, I was drenched in sweat by minute fifteen.

Shortly, I came to the kind of staircase one climbs in a movie to reach an ancient master of an esoteric martial art. Thin wooden steps, rising approximately forever into a thin cloud cover. The top of the hill became apparent only at the culmination of the steps. Or at least the local maximum. The ridge fell and rose with a consistent periodicity, rather like a dragon's back, as it were, or at least the scrawny, undulatory Chinese conception of the creature. I emerged into a cleared hill top, which became a punishing landscape without recourse to the cover of flora. It did, however, unveil a spectacular view. Before me was a glittering sea of Hong Kong's islands. Situated on a peninsula was a scattering of urban settlements. My sweat was thick and dense. I took a polaroid.

As a consequence of my dillydallying, I became intermingled with pack of young Asian women. One had on a miniature Marc Jacobs backpack and a flannel, like it was the first day of 8th grade and not a death march through HK jungle mountains. I felt that demonstrated a lack of respect. From the apex of the ridge I felt that I could reach up and touch the sun, hot as it was. I was perspiring about a liter per minute by now. In the distance the sea continued to sparkle and the ridge to undulate. The islands gave the appearance of an old Chinese painting, depicted in geometric rather than linear projection. The lot of them proceed towards heaven rather than into the distance. I jetted past the Asian girls. Reaching the crest of another notch in the dragon's back, I could see freight headed for Hong Kong harbor. Azure water. Gum-drop islands. Glimpses of far-off settlements. Other islands could never be so verdant, or have such perfectly sculpted mounds or sit in such a blessed, glittering sea, or periodically expose the brilliant high-rises off in the distance. I was in a watercolor painting. It was unfairly beautiful.

Taking creative measures to deal with the heat situation, I took off my synthetic shirt and put it under my baseball cap so it draped over the back of my neck. I put on a tank top in order to retain a semblance of decency. I looked like an a*e. But I didn't care. The shirt was cool and damp and protected my delicate skin from the sun. Relinquishing into mercy, the trail dove into a cover of eucalyptus trees. Using this respite into coolness to reapply my eighteenth round of sunscreen for the morning, I was overtaken by a white man forty years my senior. I heard him pass the Western couple behind me. He greeted them, "Pretty warm, eh?" The man was tan and spry, obviously a retiree. Also obviously a hiking enthusiast, the kind that having a job doesn't allow for. As he zoomed past me he gave me his signature "Pretty warm, eh?" I nodded. I looked like a sea monster, one who required constant moisture or will otherwise shrivel and expire. He looked prepared to take the trail. He didn't have a shirt draped over shoulders like a jackass.

Dragon's Back Log, 11:00 AM. Supplies check: Water, two-thirds gone. Sunscreen, running on empty. Position, maybe a third of the way through the trail. Only one party member remains alive.

I passed a couple going the other way. I greeted them with a "Pretty warm, eh?" They agreed, then shot one another a look to suggest that they may have missed a key memo on standard greetings while hiking in Hong Kong.

Soon enough I came upon a creek, which ran through the trail. A Chinese couple had stopped to dip towels in the water for placement under their hats. They didn't look like dumbasses. They looked like geniuses. It occurred to me that this was probably an obvious thing to do for anyone who had ever been on a hike before. I scurried by, not wanting them to think that it was their ingenuity which gave me the idea. Fortunately, I soon came to another creek. I removed my head dress to douse it. I wanted to remove all of my clothes and submerse myself in the fresh, clear water. But I thought better of it, given that my retiree friend was also refreshing himself in the running water.

I decided not to linger, so I could get a head start on him. Alarmed by my sudden progress, he put his cap back on and gave chase. To his credit, I doubt he had come all the way to Hong Kong to be bested by some punk kid with a shirt on his head. He soon overtook me without a word. There was nothing I could do about it. It was evident that he had no intention of taking names. He was only here to kick ass.

The trail swung onto the backside of the mountain, under the merciful cover of foliage, safe from the sizzle of the open sky. I was happy to trade temporarily the glories of the sea and islands for protection from being broiled alive by what at this point seemed the unnecessarily proximal star at the center of our solar system. Now rather acquainted with the trail's flora, I started the notice the fauna. There was a spider the size of Papua New Guinea. Its legs were longer than mine. It looked like it could snatch a bird from the sky, like a baseball player straining to catch a ball at the top of an outfield fence. Only instead of a baseball, it would be a robin or a small eagle. Eminently creeped out, I scuttled onward. I added this spider to my list of concerns, which at that point contained looking like a foolishly novice hiker, sunburn, dehydration, and tigers. If you were on this trial, I think you'd be concerned with each of these as well.

At length, I reached a juncture at the bottom of a slope. I saw the retired man inspecting a map. When he noticed my approach he took off. I followed his course. There were signs for "big wave beach." Periodically, he checked behind him to make sure I was in his wake. We were on a paved road now. I dodged back and forth in the lane to remain under shade cast by surrounding foliage. I stopped at another look-out point. I could see several communities of high-rises, erected in uniform pylons. They were so tightly packed and similarly constructed that they looked like the spiky erections of iron dust when a magnet coaxes it skyward. As we made our way closer to the beach, I saw the retiree split off on a more direct route. Neither wanting to deliver the blow of whooping his ass in the final stretch nor to let him have the satisfaction of whooping mine, I continued on my present path which would descend with unhurried leisure toward the bottom.

Then the beach came into sight. In a flash of sudden insight, I understood the objective measure of a world-class hiking trail. To have all that previous wandering be rewarded with this? Just perfect. The hill from which I was descending swaddled the beach in a lush wrapping of vegetation. In some mirror image of the circles of hell, it formed a concentric ring of utopian vision. At the heart was the bay, ensconced in the Platonic ideal of white-sand beach, opening up into the luxuriant hillside. The name "big wave" less described the largeness of the surf at this particular beach as much as the smallness of surf in these parts generally. I took off my hood so as not to gave myself away as a schlub, in case I ran into Shao Li on the beach. Only having breached noon, the beach was still uncrowded. Maybe a dozen or so families. It felt like my own little share of real estate in Hong Kong heaven. When I turned the corner from path to beach, the sea was spread out before me as it faded from cloudy and sandy to idyllic cerulean. It was spangled with the same intensity as the view above, though now I could reach out and touch it. The water was warm, like a tepid bath. I waded in and immersed myself in the the strip of infinite blue. As the beach began to fill up, I noticed there were, in my estimation, entirely too many families and not enough bikini-clad women. I did not, for the record, encounter Shao Li.

In the water I roamed like a wild animal, with no pattern to govern my behavior. Sometimes floating, sometimes swimming; sometimes shallow, sometimes deep. Never with any particular destination in mind. The only sounds were those of the happy children and the waves languishing along the shore. Intermittently, there was the gentle awk and splonk of the neophyte standup paddle boarder capsizing.

After about an hour of grazing in knee deep water, I reemerged from the water and repaired, still wet, to the beach café where I acquired a well-earned Dragon's Back pale ale. While enjoying my beer I spotted a couple long-sought bikini girls from afar. I finished my beer and reequipped myself to go back in the water. Upon entering I realized it was a false alarm -- a mirage of sorts -- and dripped out of the water, this time to enjoy a Big Wave IPA. As soon as I did, the girls came back. I swear.

Satisfied with my experience in the out-of-doors, I headed toward the nearby lot where a van waited to take beach patrons back to civilization. On my way I acquired a mango popsicle. Then I spotted a sign that promised "Ancient rock carvings - 330 m." I debated momentarily whether this was worth extending my time in nature. I decided to go back home. Who gives a st about rock carvings anyway? I boarded the van to take me back. Waiting for the vehicle to fill up, I saw another sign. "Ancient rock carving - 500 m." I pretended not to notice, failing to fool anyone involved in the situation. It was then I remembered who gives a st about rock carvings. I do. F**k it. I got off the bus, put on my headdress, and went back toward the beach in search of rock carvings.

Eventually, I found them. Doubling back on my previous recollection, I now remembered why no one else gives a s**t about rock carvings. The delta between rocks and rocks with ancient carvings in them is not, as it turns out, that great. The saving grace of the endeavor was that I did, on my way back to the van, acquire another mango popsicle.

Taxi hour. The time in the middle of the night when the streets are devoid of all vehicles save for a trickle of black and yellow cabs. Some zip by on their way to the airport. Some return a pair of lovers to wherever it is they plan to spend the remaining hours of the night. Some just idle on the side of the road, killing time until called into action. One night I couldn't sleep and so found myself on the streets of Hong Kong, the lone soul wandering the streets in human form.

My time in Hong Kong was coming to a close. Visa issues sorted, I would soon be reunited with Haily. I had loved my excursion to Hong Kong. But I had also missed Haily. In case you couldn't tell, a part of me longed for a companion to enjoy it with. Happiness only real when shared.

And so we would be together again soon -- elsewhere in Asia. We continued as we had before, in our summer devoted to going places and seeing things. Her family in Vietnam. Taking the train though Java. Bali. Friends and family in Singapore. There are stories to tell from those adventures, too. But I will leave them out of this collection, to allow them to remain as stories that belong only to us.

The final episodes in the season take place at another time, in another season of the year and another season of life. They skip sideways along the Asian continent, to a portion of South East Asia on the same latitude as Hong Kong. The Buddhist stronghold of dark political history, still processing its own militant reaction to a colonial past. South East Asia's largest country by land area, but one of its smallest in terms of tourist figures. A place that I fell in love with from the moment I first stepped a dusty sandal on its soil. The final destination of the first season of Notes from the Field: Myanmar.

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Susan Goldin-Meadow is the 2021 recipient for the Rumelhart prize, the highest award in cognitive science. She has amassed an amazing body of research throughout her career. It centers on gesture, and how our bodies integrate into our linguistic communication. We touch on a lot of her greatest research hits in this episode. Something she said that stood out to me was about how she mentors her many students. She sets them on a research project to get them going, then listens to how they talk about it, really listens. In a sense, this kind of deep, empathic, multi-faceted listening is what Susan has been doing her entire career. She listens to things the rest of us seem not to hear -- from gestures in the deaf children to the proclivities of her students.

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There's a set of safety videos you're supposed to watch before you take Sani Pass. South Africa as a country is rather sloped. Johannesburg, in the center, towers several thousand feet above Cape Town, out on the coast. And rising high above the rest of South Africa, plopped Vatican-like in the middle of the surrounding country, is a tiny nation called Lesotho. If you want to drive from Durban up through Lesotho en route to Joburg, as was our intention, you have to ascend the Drakensberg range and take Sani Pass. And if you intend to take Sani Pass, you really ought to watch the videos.

Sani Pass is notable for its treachery. The weekend before we'd planned to go to Lesotho (pronounced: "Le-soo-too") it had snowed on Sani Pass and two convoys had crashed. The passengers had sustained injury. The Pass is the last stretch of the demilitarized zone between South Africa and Lesotho in the Drakensberg mountains. It features sixteen consecutive hairpin switchbacks right before you hit the top, at a steep enough angle to send you scrambling after a bag of dropped marbles. People die on Sani Pass. Every year. All it takes is a little incompetence or a moment of lapsed attention. Should you survive the journey to the top, you can commemorate the accomplishment with a stop at Africa's highest pub. Can't say the same for Kilimanjaro.

The videos, it should be said, don't offer much in the way of helpful insight. The gist of their advice is "be careful." Even so, they make it patently clear that the driver needs to pay very close attention to negotiating the road at hand.

I finished watching the videos as the rest of the crew pulled up in our four-wheel-drive rental car. My job was to take notes on the safety instructions and get our Airbnb ready for check out while everyone else went to acquire the wheels. So it was with an elevated level of curiosity that I discovered they had gotten a flat while attempting park in front of our house. I wasn't there for the event, but I imagine them careening up to our Airbnb like an out of control space craft disgorged from a wormhole onto a barren and craggy red planet. Whatever the case, the car apparently struck the curb and upon impact the driver side tire burst. I looked on as the team hefted the jack out of the trunk and put on the spare.

Our party was four strong. There was myself, my girlfriend, Haily; her friend from college, Dave Blackwood; and his colleague from work, Munesu (Muni for short). Blackwood is an American working in Zimbabwe. He's tall, lanky, and painfully caucasian with a plop of curly, unkempt hair. Muni is a Zambian working in Zimbabwe. He's short, black, and speaks with an American accent. They'd come down to Durban to bum around with us on our way to Joburg and to take the Pass.

But first we had to make a stop in Pietermaritzburg, about an hour outside of Durban, to trade in our car for one with four tires.

Pietermaritzburg is a city named for two men: one Mr. Pieter and one Mr. Maritz. Perhaps the most exciting thing about the contemporary land to which Piet and Maritz laid claim is a veritable wealth of rental car companies on offer in the town's regional airport. We exchanged our car without hassle -- upgraded to a superior 4x4, if anything -- and stocked up on supplies. I picked up a bottle of spiced rum from the Seychelles, which I'd been coveting on trips to other liquor stores in the country. The others got food, or some such provisions. Our destination for the evening, just on the South Africa side of the Lesotho border, was about four hours out, longer if we took the scenic route.

Our first stop after Pietermaritzburg was the Mandela Capture Site, so called because it was where Nelson Mandela was captured before being throw in prison for twenty-seven years. That morning I'd reread the passage in Mandela's autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, where he recounts the capture. He was on his way from Durban to Johannesburg, same as us. He was driving the N3 outside of Pietermaritzburg, same as us. He was on a fugitive on the run from the authorities, same as us. As we rolled up to the Capture Site on our left was the ditch that Mandela had prudently noted right before getting thrown in the slammer.

From the N3, the monument looks a sapling forest of black iron poles. We turned off the road by the pole forest and went someways into an adjacent field. Without knowing any better, the scene looks like any other pokey field off any other highway in which nothing exciting has ever transpired. On the far end of the field is a parking lot. The trees around the lot were infested with monkeys bounding from branch to ground and back. (This is one of the primary differences between parking lots in Africa and parking lots in America.) You walk from the parking lot past a barn, a souvenir shop, and approach the monument down a long, straight paved sidewalk. At intervals along the sidewalk stand markers of milestones in Mandela's life. His birth, his start in politics, his circumcision (he devotes a very long passage in his autobiography to this event). The milestones are spaced to represent the passage of time between them. Mandela is famous around the world for what he did after his release from prison, being elected as the South African head of state, winning the Nobel Peace Prize. What is less recognized is how vigorously engaged the man was before his arrest. To give some idea, he doesn't get to Robben Island, where he spent the majority of his time in prison, until page 379 of his autobiography. The first four hundred pages aren't filler either. They're strewn page after page with the kind of accomplishments that would make chapter titles in anyone else's life story. What is striking, moving even, about the markers is that it gives a tangible weight to what twenty-seven years in prison takes from a life. It is a literal laying out of Mandela's long walk.

At the end of the sidewalk, the path descends into a corridor opening up into the teardrop landscape in which the black poles stand. At the apex of the tear is a plaque on the ground. It says something to the effect of "stand here and look up at the thing." Upon looking up one sees that what was until now a morass of shifting iron assembles itself into the visage of the man himself, Madiba. It is as if you were looking at a chalkboard etched with his face, in profile, wise and weathered. Move to the left or the right and the scene disassembles. Shift back and there he is. Once you've taken in the monument you're left with the long walk back to the car.

The route through the heart of the KwaZulu-Natal province forks. We had the option to either stay on the highway or opt for the Midlands Meander. We took the Meander. The small roads of the Meander skirt about the hills, whereas the N3 highway blusters right through them. The Meander is named in the spirit of overzealous marketing. The route takes longer, but the landscape is as inconsequential as it would be through any other road. Frequently the Meander splits, allowing one to adjust the journey for their own appetite for meandering. Blackwood was driving. Muni's job was to call the splits. As we came to our first turnoff, Blackwood inquired, "Muni, left or right?" There was a brief silence. Blackwood turned right. Muni: "left." Blackwood shot a glance toward the passenger's seat.

Everything on the road was unexpected, at least to Blackwood, who reacted as if each hair pin turn or cow in the road was something totally misplaced, as it would be on a freeway in Los Angeles. Haily and I sloshed to and fro in the back seat, as on a winding roller coaster, with each yank of the wheel from Blackwood. There were many pedestrians walking the side of the road, and we imperiled each of them as we shot past. Periodically we would hit a rumble strip, and Blackwood would slam the breaks, throwing the rest of us forward as we took the strip at an ambitious 100 kilometers per hour. The road became dirt as we neared the mountains.

Blackwood engaged in a number of extracurricular diversions in addition to his primary responsibility of driving. Arising out of the silence of the car, "Is that a grain silo?" Equipped with his own answer, Blackwood replied, "I think it's a grain silo." Blackwood is an economist. He is well-suited to it. "This road seems expensive. Lots of Bridges." We waded through the dirt road into flaxen plains drifting off into a deep purple haze. "Some serious soil erosion on the right." In the distance, wedges of mountains were set in receding rows. "Are those the Drakensburg in the distance? I'm convinced those are the Draks. Hi Draks." Blackwood tugged on the wheel to avoid a herd of sheep, acquainting my cheek with the cool, moist window. "This is a windy road, guys." Every three minutes or so, Blackwood would ask, "Muni, left or right?" He performed this ritual with a devoted constancy, no matter how obviously subsidiary the left turn in question might be. Muni, not necessarily invested in the navigational success of our journey, could never be counted on for a timely answer. Blackwood, for his part, could be relied upon to pierce any silence lingering in our car as it wove through the Transkei.

"It's crazy. Someone, like, invested in making this fancy-ass bridge."

"Oh, look! An ice waterfall! I love ice waterfalls, guys."

"Look at those pinnacles! They've got to be something. The Draks!"

"Cows!"

"It's funny. Sometimes the dust stays for a long time and sometimes it doesn't."

At length, the road resumed its paving. Blackwood: "Imagine living out here." Muni: "Turn right." The only turn was to the left, as Blackwood noted. "I meant left." We took another rumble strip at full tilt, Blackwood slamming on the brakes once the impediment was felt. We made our way through the layer cake of a landscape. In the foreground the dark green of poorly lit fields, in temporary recess from the sun's jurisdiction, the light green of the fields still touched by daylight, the blue of the closest mountains, the purple of furthest mountains, orange fading into the purple of dusk. "Those mountains look so craggily. Must be the Drakensburgs."

At no obvious landmark the road turned to dirt again and rocks ricocheted below our car like a pinball machine. "Are those ostriches? They are! Oh wait, those are cows." We passed a 'beware of blasting' sign.

Blackwood: "How?"

Muni: "Straight." Blackwood: "Right or straight?" Muni: "Right and then straight is what I mean."

The sun went down, and we made our way into the mountains. "So clearly those are not the whole Drakensburgs," intoned Blackwood.

It was dark when we got to our destination for the evening. After hours of being subjected to Blackwood's sudden jerks of the wheel as last second responses to imminent danger, I felt as though I'd spent the afternoon in a cocktail shaker. I was eager to stretch my legs after a day sealed in the car. It was cold outside, mountain cold. We stayed the night at a bed and breakfast. The only other occupants were a fleet of Dutch high school students. There were scores of them. Our party and theirs dined on a hearty meal of bread and stew provided by the lodge. At dinner, I leaned over to one of the adults in their number and struck up a conversation. They intended to take the Pass, as did we. I asked if he had watched the safety videos. "Of course," the man said. "It's important to pay close attention to the road, you know?" As I was about to respond, I couldn't help but overhear Blackwood contribute to a separate conversation:

"Sani Pass tomorrow! I bet we'll see lots of ice waterfalls."

In the early morning we took leave of South Africa and crossed into the DMZ. Before we got going we let some air out from the tires for the rough terrain. "You ready, Blackwood?" I asked. The best he could offer was an empirically-based "I don't know."

The road up Sani Pass was dirt all the way, except when it was rocks. The route took three hours in total. An hour of that was stopping ever 500 feet in elevation, certain that this was going to be the best lookout spot we would reach. Much of the early stages were under construction, so the path was littered with flaggers and orange cones and eight-ton Caterpillar bulldozers. When the path got bumpy it was like climbing a mountain in a car. In effect we were. There was frequently a non-negligible change in elevation from tire to tire. We didn't need four wheel drive. We needed a mountain goat.

About half way up we passed a cross on the side of the road, a memorial to one who failed to take the Pass. There were also doohickies strewn about the road, like broken off car parts or something like that. It was all a bit unnerving.

We spotted three ice waterfalls, close up, and stopped to take pictures at each.

Blackwood, it should be said, buckled down for the final stage with the sixteen hairpin switchbacks. It wasn't snowing, mercifully. And our Nissan-cum-mountain-goat served us well. The only really perilous part came when I would look out my side of the window and gaze over the practically infinite distance we would tumble if our car should flip or apparate three feet to the right. In short, we made it.

When we leveled off at the top of Sani Pass we were greeted by the vast tundra plateau of Lesotho. We had climbed a mountain and instead of finding a summit we found a plain. Expanses of yellow grass stretched off into the distance, raising up into another mountainscape beyond. Here the ground was palpably closer to the sky. In the fore were three round huts and lodge. One of the round huts was border control, where we dutifully presented ourselves. The lodge housed Africa's Highest Pub, or as we called it, the World's Highest African Pub. After marking our official entry in Lesotho we repaired to the pub to celebrate our victorious assent with a round of Maluti, the everyman's beer of Lesotho.

To drive through Lesotho is to stumble upon an outcropping of the Himalayas in Southern Africa. The horizon is layered with dry mountains dusted with snow, situated beneath a cloudless sky. It is more than a little startling upon embarking across the terrain to realize that the "Mountain Kingdom of Lesotho" refers not just to the mountains which you just climbed, but the entirely novel and independently worthy set of mountains in front of you. As we arrived at the first slope coming out of the plains the car inclined to what seemed like a forty-five degree angle. Blackwood floored it. The Nissan sputtered for all it was worth. We hit thirty kilometers-per-hour, tops.

The road was nice, paved and smooth. New. Blackwood was impressed. "Who paid for it, I wonder?" Yet if South Africa featured more roadside characters and livestock than seems advisable to the western driver, it was the western drivers who seemed out of place in Lesotho. The road belonged to the characters and the livestock. After our initial assent (we'd be up and down, scrawling across mountains for the rest of the day), we passed two Basotho men walking their mule up the road. The mule dragged a cart of building supplies. We slowed to overtake them. They seemed friendly. They waved. We waved back. They made the universal pantomime for 'picture' and struck engaging poses. Amused, we snapped a picture. They immediately implored us to reimburse them for their modeling services. They were savvy. We'd been snookered into it. Lesotho is a remarkably poor country, even by African standards. A man's gotta make a buck.

We gave them oranges from our stash instead.

What is most breathtaking about Lesotho -- ineffable, as well as uncapturable in photos -- is to take stock of whence you came and discover that you've traversed a sea of terraced mountains, piled one upon the other, as far as can be seen. We reached the highest point at 3240 meters. Highest point of what, it didn't say. Probably the World's Highest Basotho Point.

From there we continued to slalom through the countryside. On our way down we passed a mule piled with straw. We never saw a driver. It looked like a mobile bush. We began to hit more Basotho villages as we went. We passed many herders and each one of them attempted the ol' picture-for-money gambit on us. They would see our car coming down the road from way off and take leave of their field of sheep to run toward the road in desperate hopes of soliciting some monetary pittance. To travel this road is to acquire minor celebrity. We were of unconscionable wealth and unimaginable circumstance to those whom we passed.

Each village is sprawled across the hillside like a broken rack of billiard balls. The men and women alike are draped in colorful and festively designed blankets, a signature of Basotho culture. It's cold up there. They don the blankets to have even a semblance of a chance at warmth. Their huts are round with thatched roofs, each about the same size. A queen-size bed coerced inside would start to curl up along the walls. The hillside is spangled with handsome livestock, goats and sheep mostly. Off in the distance a larger flock of sheep or a pasture of cows graze and are watched over by a blanket-robed shepherd. I must say that it is all a beautiful sight to behold. To say as much is an incontrovertible romanticism of poverty. But it is true nonetheless.

No one passed us in the other direction. We overtook no one. And no one overtook us from behind.

We came across the Letseng diamond hostels. Lesotho is home to one of Southern Africa's most prolific diamond mines. (None of the wealth ends up in the hands of the average Basotho, of course.) The hostels are where the workers live. Away from their families they stay while there is work, then return home. Such hostels are common in this part of the world, for instance in Johannesburg when it was a gold boomtown. The mine was quiet when we passed. No workers to be seen at the hostels.

At length we reached Afriski, where we planned to stay the night. Afriski is southern Africa's only ski resort, as well as its preeminent douchebag basecamp. It features one ski run. While it was cold up there, it was not snowing. They had a snow machine to rectify that impediment to hitting the slopes. It is a rather pathetic scene to see an otherwise barren hillside painted with a single strip of white powder, like roots showing under dyed hair. Haily and I don't ski. We were mostly there for the hot tub. Which even in Africa, so we thought, they surely must understand is a critical amenity at any ski resort worth half its salt. Alas, there was no hot tub at Afriski.

We dined at the resort's lone restaurant. Overpriced burgers, pasta, pizza, "salads" -- that sort of fare. On every television (and there were several visible from any vantage) was a promo video for Afriski, displayed on an endless loop. People skiing, drinking, cheering, skiing, drinking, cheering: offered for the consideration of dining patrons all evening. We split a bottle of wine between the four of us. Then Haily and I retired to our room. Blackwood and Muni went to do something else.

What we anticipated when we rented a "ski chalet" was a posh little bungalow outfitted with a fireplace, a number of tacky taxidermied animals on the wall, and tall ceilings supported by hearty wooden rafters. What we got was a dinky little bunk house with a kitchenette and a temperamental space heater. Worse still it was shared between our party and another, made only slightly better by the barrier separating our bunk room from theirs. The beds, it is worth noting, were mercifully outfitted with electric blankets, as the room was otherwise more or less the same temperature as the outside world.

When we got back to the room, I decided to make friends with the neighbors. I grabbed my bottle of Seychelles rum and knocked on their door. So commenced our first night at Afriski.

Their crew hailed from Joburg. I introduced myself, and as each of them told me their name I foisted the the bottle of rum in their direction. We became friends very quickly. I asked them about what brought them to Lesotho. They told me they were filming a rap video. Oh, really? Yes, they told me, they had to get up at four in the morning the next day to scout a shooting location. I asked them who the rapper was. "Shane Eagle," an eminent up-and-coming South African rap artist, or so I was informed. Alright, sure.

I hung out in their room for a bit then bid them adieu and went back to ours to take my leave of consciousness for the evening.

In the morning we wandered down to the slope. Blackwood and Muni had come to ski. Haily and I thought about giving it a shot. But never having skied before we were overcome with a strong desire to do nothing. I'd also run out of money somewhere back in Zimbabwe some weeks before. We retired to the room.

It was nine or ten in morning. Haily and I were back in bed reading when into our room walked a new fellow, who we didn't recognize, accompanied by a lady-friend. They gave us a cordial nod and went into the room next door. Shortly after they were followed by the crew from last night. That had been Mr. Eagle himself, retreating to the room for a little R&R after an early morning shoot.

In the afternoon we made our way down to the ski slope. We posted up with our books at the Apres Ski Cafe, situated at the bottom of the run. We went in to order a couple hot chocolates. A rugby match played on the television. It was the Jaguars versus the Wallabies, or something like that. I watched it with academic curiosity. The thighs of rugby players have always intrigued me. They give the impression of the legs of an NFL linebacker having been glued onto the physique of soccer player. Then all of a sudden, there was an eruption from the other patrons. The Wallabies seemed suddenly heartened, for reasons I was unable to ascertain.

Back outside, we sat in the cold air with our hot chocolates and listened to the Euro trash blasting on the loudspeaker. People were beginning to engage in Apres-ski activities, such as drinking from funnels and dancing on tables. They played that one song where Shakira sings, "This one is for Af-ri-ka." Everyone went f*g crazy. The entire place was filled with white people. Probably South African white, but it was still weird to hear them worked up over the mention of Africa. Two men wandered through the crowds in gorilla suits. I overheard one conversation in which the gentleman next to us related to his colleague, "All good vibes out there, bro. All good vibes." Inside the café there hung a set of snowboard bindings from the rafters where, evidently, patrons are voluntarily strapped in and encouraged to take as many shots as possible while hanging upside down. The winner-board displayed names and tallies, the most outstanding performances from the previous evening. Mark scored twenty. David scored an heroic twenty-five. All good vibes out there, bro. Lines of neon plastic shot glasses were strewn about each table. There was an Afriski official going around pouring an unidentified liquor into people's mouths, straight from the bottle. All good vibes.

Another official paraded through with a device -- an upside-down traffic cone positioned to funnel liquid into a tube which ran to a Y-junction splitting the tube into two -- and as he passed people stood back, mouthed, "oh, s**t" and gave an impressed look, apparently intrigued by this feat of plumbing. The gorillas seemed not to notice when the officials passed and kept on dancing. This apparent lack of appreciation is undoubtedly why their species has failed to contribute any advancements to the practice of HVAC or pipefitting.

"This next one is going to get your body moving," the DJ proclaimed and then dropped the needle on the Macarena. As it turns out, the Macarena is quite difficult to do when drunk. Lots of coordinated fine motor movements. However, one reaches a point of drunkenness where precision takes on a subsidiary role to zeal and candor. Then you get good at the Macarena again. Really good.

These people all looked so dumb. Yet, I wished I could be a part of it. Perhaps if I had skied all day the whole thing would've made sense. But it just didn't. Surreptitiously I poured another dose of rum in my hot chocolate and slunk back to reading.

At length we located Blackwood and Muni on the slopes. They'd put in a good session. They joined us in a round of hot chocolate and gawking at the partiers. We returned to the room and washed up. Then we went for dinner. At the restaurant we were seated at a table for four near the back. In the corner we spied a number of familiar faces. It was Shane Eagle's entourage. I went over to strike up with some of my closer mates in the group. They'd had a good day of shooting and were about to head back to Joburg. They asked me if I'd be going back that way any time soon. I told them I would. We exchanged contact information. I bid them farewell and returned to my seat. I even received a nod from Mr. Eagle himself, who sat laconically at the far corner of the table.

After dinner, we returned to the room. Since the Eagle entourage flew the coop, we had new bunkmates. Two girls, about our age. We liberated the alcohol from our stash -- a few bottles of wine, the rum, and a bottle of South African brandy which we mixed with soda -- and began to consume liberally. We got to know the girls a bit. They were a lively couple. From Bloem, the same town where J.R.R. Tolkien hailed, as they made a conspicuous point to mention. After a few drinks, they drew us a map of the places we ought to visit in this, one of South Africa's all-too-easily overlooked interior cities. We asked them why they were in Lesotho. This proved to be a mistake -- both their coming to Lesotho, and our getting mixed up in it. But we wouldn't understand that fully until later.

The last entry in my notes for the evening reads: "Tequila YES France [undecipherable] swift."

The tequila I endorsed so enthusiastically had been obtained when we moseyed back down to the Apres Ski Café for the evening's festivities. There was supposed to be a ski burning (an ancient douchebag rite of passage, I believe). But we missed it by a couple minutes. France came into play with a young man with whom our group became acquainted. He's from there. I'm not sure what exactly it was that had transpired swiftly.

Upon our arrival in the seedy nightclub that was the Apres-Ski, we had acquired a number of beers. With these beers we played beer pong, the four of us. Muni and I blew Haily and Blackwood to smithereens. Sincerely, we demolished them. I celebrated with another round of drinks for Haily and me. Shrewdly, Muni and Blackwood ceased to drink at that point. I'd attained an advanced level of amicability by now. This is when we met the French guy and his colleagues. French guy worked at Afriski. Come to think of it, he was probably the one going around with the inverted traffic cone in the afternoon.

He challenged us to beer pong. Or we challenged him. I don't remember. Muni and me versus him and Haily. I drank Muni's portion. From this junction on, the night comes to me in snapshots. After the game, French guy bought a round of tequila shots for the group. It ended up being him, me, Haily, and his friend. I don't know that he was keen to buy me drinks, as I reckon he was mostly interested in Haily. After that there was dancing. By now I would likely have been very good at the Macarena, should the opportunity have presented itself.

Prudently, we made our way back to our room. In tow was French guy, the two girls who were our new neighbors, and a man with whom they were affiliated. Likely some other people as well. There manifested something of a commotion between the two girls and the guy, a conflict to which the ladies had alluded earlier in the evening. They had been rather modest in retailing the magnitude of the hostility.

I'll tell you what I can remember and what I was able to reconstruct from accounts the following day.

There was a huge spat between the girls. The man was the husband of one of the girls. She had come to Lesotho at the behest of her friend to get away from him. He was no good for her, apparently. She wanted to reconcile with her husband, but her friend had advised against it. The man was adamant that her friend couldn't prevent the reconciliation. The reason that we were involved in this was that the man was outside the bunkhouse and had to come through our room to get to her's. The members of our party had sided with the friend and were not in favor of admitting this man onto the premises of our domicile. Staff members of Afriski were present, French guy included. There was much shouting. The husband shouted at the girl for not accommodating him. He shouted at the friend for preventing him from getting his way. The girl yelled at the friend for preventing her from acting on her wishes. The friend shouted at the girl for consistently f*g up her life. The Afriski team stood there and did nothing. Haily maintained our delegation's moral position while Blackwood and Muni tried to keep peace as best they could.

The details of this conflict were mostly lost on me -- they still are -- though I found the whole thing rather engaging at the time. In the midst of the kerfuffle French guy stuck around. I supposed at the time he was just hanging around to see how everything turned out, and so I was amicably disposed toward him. However, that changed in a matter of moments as Muni made it clear to me that the reason he was sticking around was that he was attempting to coax my girlfriend into running off to some shadowy corner of the premises to make out with him. Upon reception of this intelligence, there was a momentary lapse in my pleasant disposition. I grabbed him by the collar of his shirt and backed him away from our bunkhouse, excusing him with an aggressive shove in the opposing direction. This obstacle appeared to make the endeavor no longer worth his pursuing, and he began to clear off. This marked a point of escalation in the evening, and there was a consensus afterward that it was time for me to go to bed. As I stepped back into the bunkhouse my amicability was revived and I poked my head out to wave to French guy and convey that no hard feelings were felt. He seemed unmoved this sentiment and left in a minor huff. I tucked into bed and was asleep shortly thereafter.

The next morning the friend (the one whose aim was to keep the husband out) came sheepishly into our room. She apologized for the whole mess. Then she lapsed into a sob story about something to which I was not in a position devote my attention. The other girl was nowhere to be found. She had gone off with her husband. As for the French guy, I asked Muni about the incident. "You don't remember?" he asked. "You told that guy to 'le f**k off.'"

For the first hour of that morning I had the distinction of being the world's most hungover person. We piled in the car and took our leave from the premises of Afriski. We set off through the Basotho mountains on our way toward Johannesburg. And as we wound down the mountainside, surveying the infinitude of Basotho majesty before us, I stuck my head out the window and yorked. Laudably, not but a skosh landed on the exterior of the car. Blackwood pulled over into a turnout, and we took a moment to appreciate the scene while I finished hurling. Just like that my hangover was exorcised. We lingered for another minute to take in the beauty.

Our final destination in Lesotho was the site of an ancient cave painting. The decent from the heights of Afriski to South Africa along Lesotho's north border is less precipitous than the Sani Pass route. The goats, the mules, and the villages were spaced further apart on our leisurely decent through the mountains. We pulled off at one of the auxiliary roads that links up with the main highway. We parked the car and piled out. Down a paved path we came across a wooden building, closer to the kind of wooden structure you'd expect in a rural part of a developed nation rather than the traditional circular huts. Inside we paid for a guide to take us down to see the cave paintings.

The guide, a Basotho woman native to the area, took us past the barn to where the path became dirt and dropped down a canyon slope. We descended a wooden staircase implanted in the hillside. Then we crossed a bridge where the guide pointed out that if you fell off it into the crevasse you wouldn't easily get out. In fact this had happened before. Not to tourists, per se, but other varieties of out-of-place white people. A little further in, the hillside flattened out into a dried up river bed with a peculiar outcropping of rock. Immediately in front of us was a rock wall with a bent and cavernous face that looked like an overgrown half-pipe. It wrapped around out of sight. Our guide explained that a great battle took place here long ago, the details of which were lost on me. I was feeling better than before, but my head wasn't yet on straight.

Then she took us over to the cave paintings. They were on a rock wall across the dried river bed from the half-pipe. We crossed a man-made boardwalk that led over to the paintings. The boardwalk fenced off the last couple feet right before the wall. The guide hopped the fence and put her finger right up to them.

The cave paintings were a faint orange scrawling of stick figure persons. They weren't much in the way of an imposing visual presence, but I guess that's true of most things people wrote down a long time ago. How long does it take a newspaper to yellow, a couple decades? These had been here for hundreds and hundreds of years. Ostensibly (and by that I mean this is what the guide said), they depicted ancient Basotho hunters going after elan. My initial interpretation was that this painting was composed on a slow day of elan hunting. From the one hunter to the other: "And you see, Joe, this is what it would look like if we had in fact caught an Elan today." That's when he would've put down the drawing of the elan with a spear going through it. The guide's interpretation differed slightly. She said they were depictions of the visions that came to these Basotho hunters while in trance. They drew themselves tall and skinny, though in fact they were rather squat in figure.

The rock walled canyon bottom did seem like a good place for a trance. There was an engaging acoustic effect where you could cast your voice across the river bed. It wasn't so much of an echo as a single repetition from across the way. Still recovering from a hangover, I found this simple effect fascinating. Doped up, I imagine it'd be quite riveting.

And with that we hiked back up the canyon to set off for the South Africa border. There was still a ways to go from the edge of Lesotho to Johannesburg, a few hours maybe. The terrain contrasts sharply. Lesotho's endless array of mountains is engaging and beautiful. Interior South Africa is infertile plains, distant buttes, and straight roads. It's like taking leave of Nepal and finding yourself in Wyoming. The country boundaries must have been drawn along scenic borders rather than ethnic ones. We were no longer in the Mountain Kingdom of Lesotho.

Back in Joburg we split our separate ways. Haily and I spent a night or two in the city then took off on another road trip through the country down to Cape Town. Muni and Blackwood went off to whatever their next plans were. We'd had a densely packed couple of days, from wandering Mandela's long walk to taking Sani Pass to participating in a domestic disturbance to communing with man's long-standing devotion to commemorating his conquests. We were ready for something a little less involved during our stay in Johannesburg. Thankfully, during that time, nothing would ever come to fisticuffs nor would we project unwelcome bodily contents into a vast and comely mountainscape. My only disappointment, looking back, is that we never did hit up Shane Eagle's entourage.

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In this episode I talk to Richard Shweder, one of the founders of the field of cultural psychology. He has had a wide-ranging and interdisciplinary career. We talk about his roots, early education, biggest influences, his experience as a grad student at the Department of Social Relations, the origins of cultural psychology, and his recent work on pluralism. Ultimately the conversation reflects Rick's gift as a psychologist and anthropologist: observing the world for what it is. It's a long one, but we cover a lot of good stuff.

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Our flight to Zimbabwe seemed to tumble over a dirt road, rather than float through the air, threatening every few seconds to eject us from our seats. When mercifully we touched back down on African soil, we disembarked into the terminal at the modest airport in Victoria Falls. Haily and I were officially in Real Africa. Which, to an American mind, is any part of Africa where there's a non-negligible chance of being eaten by large and aggressive fauna.

There were only three gates in the terminal, along with a small waiting area and a ramp down to customs. We took a customs card and ambled down the walkway with two-hundred other people who intended to gaze at waterfalls and wildlife in this epicenter of African tourism. The people who look the most out of place in safari clothes are also the one who are most likely to dress up in them, full regalia. Those people had arrived with us en masse in Victoria Falls. On the ramp down to customers a poster on the wall read, “A healthy nation is a wealthy nation.” Haily made note of this prudent sentiment. Then she suggested that a nation that issues its own currency would seem to be one step closer to affluence than a nation that washes it hands. I asked her what she meant. She informed me, “My Zim friend told me the country doesn’t issue its own bank notes. It doesn’t have any ATMs, either. He said they don’t accept credit cards.”

This sparked an otherwise latent economic curiosity in me. I had about $40 in cash on me between USD and South African Rand. I remarked on how I wish she had shared this factoid before irreparability touching down in country. This was worse than Poland. I need to start checking CIA Factbook or something before entering a new country. Wikipedia, at least.

The good news is this intelligence proved not to be entirely accurate: Zimbabwenese bank notes, while rare and printed in the same factory as Monopoly money, do exist. They also do indeed have a few ATMs and almost universally accept Visa and Mastercard. The bad news is that I wouldn’t discover this for another few hours as I waited in line to go through customs. It’s not that their customs lines were especially inefficient. They just conspired to be especially inefficient for me. As we hadn’t moved with a sense of urgency to get into customs we ended up near the back of the line. There were ten queues. We were in number five. The airport seemed surprised to have just received a freight full of visitors, as if this was something that happened only on occasion and unexpectedly. Then an usher came over and redirected me—and just me, because I’m white, presumably—to number six, in which I would, it was my hope, be able to get an on-arrival visa. The different numbered booths offered different visa options, depending on whether your nationality was African, Chinese, or other, and whether you’d already obtained a visa. I trusted, naively, that the usher had omnipotently placed me in the appropriate line. After thirty minutes the lines started to atrophy. That is except for number six. Haily was about halfway closer to the customs desk than I was.

At that point a new flight came in, unloading about four hundred Chinese tourists, all outfitted in Safari gear. In Zimbabwe, Chinese tourists are celebrated guests. If you’re Chinese, you don’t need a visa to get into the country. It’s free to you, welcome home. If you’re not Chinese, then you’ll need a visa. Which kind you need depends on which nation you’re from. For example, an American multiple entry visa costs fifty bucks. If you’re British it’ll cost you an extra ten bucks, just for being a limey Brit. Canadians: no double entry. Once is enough for you folks. Now, customs lines are notorious for being inefficient and taking forever. But this generally isn’t the case for me. I’m an American. Typically, when I present myself in a new country all I have to do is proclaim, “I’m an American, and I’m ready to come in now!” Then they unhook the red velvet rope and let me through. I’m not used to having to wait in line, ask nicely, and slip some money to the guy at the desk. At length I got to the front of the line. By "at length" I really do mean to imply a serious amount of time here. By the time I reached the front, there were precisely zero other people -- that is, not a single other person -- in the customs area. Not only had everyone on my flight made it through customs, but every one of the Chinese tourists had made it through as well. I deduced that it had been the desk guy’s first day in queue six. That's why he had processed our line slower than everyone else's. I handed him my passport.

“Hey man, how’s it going?” he asked.

“Fine,” I said hotly. I’d already decided it was his fault I was still here.

He looked at my passport and crinkled his nose in consternation.

“My friend, you are in the wrong line,” he told me. “You are supposed to be in queue five.”

He handed me my passport and I stepped sidelong toward the attendant in the adjacent stall. I presented her with my passport and my credit card. She went bang-bang-bang with a few official stamps, wrote my identifying information down and sent me on my way. When I finally was allowed to exit the airport I met back up with Haily. “Where have you been?” she asked. “I was beginning to worry.”

A van was waiting out front to take us to our hostel. We hit the road through the savannah, where we were apparently the only vehicle in Zimbabwe that could attain one-hundred kilometers-per-hour. Even at a languorous ninety, we blew the doors off competing vehicles on the two lane highway. On the side of the road were cows, donkeys, monkeys, and varieties of African deer. We were officially in Real Africa.

The van delivered us to a compound in a residential stretch outside the city center of Victoria Falls. The driver tapped a code on the compound gate which gave way onto the premises. The communal area featured a modest array of the necessities of tropical luxury, such as a small pool, a lounging swing, and a giant human-sized chessboard carved in the suggestive motif of White Man versus Black Animals. The rooms were housed in huts with thatched roofs. The notion of a thatched roof conveys a flimsy covering that could fly off at the behest of a zealous wind gust. But this is far from the reality. Upon inspection they are sturdy, like a weaved steel, and inspire the utmost confidence in their structural soundness. The façade of the compound was Real African Safari; the bones were up to the duty of coddling tourists.

Having deposited our effects in the hut, we inquired with the concierge about a satisfactory spot for dining in town. He recommended a craft brewery that served good food and good beer.

So we took off into town. It was a two mile walk, about forty minutes on foot. We picked our way through the asymmetric layout of our residential neighborhood. We stopped on our walk to admire a couple warthogs wallowing in someone’s front yard. On the outskirts of the city center—so called because of its centrality, not its urbanity—I decided to bring us through a short cut. Instead of taking the long road around the park, we could simply cut through the park and shave off tens minutes from our walk. There appeared to be a dirt path, and we took it. On this dirt path we were joined by a troop of baboons. This was sort of like finding oneself in the midst of a cohort of persons known to be on methamphetamine. They’re a twitchy bunch, and if they decided on a whim to come at you they’d likely overpower you through sheer force of abandon. Uneasily, we made our way through the park. The shortcut did however work to shave a couple minutes off the trip, and soon we found ourselves at the mouth of the road leading to the brewery.

This brewery would no doubt have been at home in Seattle or San Diego, such was its hip and industrial allure. Judging from the rest of the offerings in town and the surrounding countryside, this was probably the only craft brewery within five-hundred miles. We ordered a couple beers and a couple burgers. At the table next to us were a group of Zimbabwenese white guys. They were swapping what I can only imagine are typically Zim white guy stories. “On my way over here,” began one of them, “I was walking down the road and—SMACK!—the guy behind me had been hit by a car. He went skidding across the pavement and the car tore off. Then I walked the block and half to meet you blokes here.” He relayed this anecdote with all the casualness of if he had just run into a mate from university. His buddies nodded in amusement, as if this tale merited some acknowledgement but not much. Then the conversation wandered toward baboons, as I imagine it so often does in Real Africa. “I was taking a nap earlier today,” another of the men intoned, “when a baboon came in and took the sugar off my night. I yelled, ‘Hey, you! Come back here!’ And he scampered off.” Classic stuff.

When we were sated with food and drink we walked back through town. We made a stop at a liquor store to acquire brandy, because that’s what Hemingway would do, were he ever to find himself dropped down in Victoria Falls. Then we hailed a taxi and retired to our compound where doled out brandy and clinked to being tourists in Real Africa.

The next morning I awoke in Zimbabwe, which was surprising, because that had never happened to me before. We got up from under the mosquito net, showered, and presented ourselves again to the concierge.

“We’d like to do a safari,” we told him.

“Well,” he replied, “everywhere is a safari. The walk to town is a safari.”

We looked at him skeptically. We insisted that he take our money and shuttle us off to somewhere with animals of a more lethal strain. We also booked a white water rafting trip, and—what the hell, let's go for it—a helicopter tour of the Falls. Then we made our way back into town to investigate Victoria Falls on foot.

The indigenous name for the Falls is Mosi-oa-Tunya, which means ‘the Smoke that Thunders.’ This is indeed an apt label if ever there was one. The Falls can be seen from a ways off as a restless mist somewhere beyond the horizon. Then it disappears, occluded by trees and flora. You hear it before it comes into view again. We took a path toward the Falls, and it was strewn with men proffering Africana trinkets laid out on blankets. “My friend!” each one of them implores, “We have the best deals! No one will beat our deals!” they called out, employing the same rhetorical strategy as Donald Trump. We bypassed the deals, purchased a ticket and a poncho at the gate, and entered the grounds of Victoria Falls.

Victoria Falls is the largest waterfall in Africa. It first became known to white people through the adventurous exploits of David Livingstone, who presumably stumbled on the Falls and murmured a dumbfounded "holy s**t." It was revered as a god by the locals, and it’s clear to see why. It is power personified.

Like a quality stripper, Victoria Falls reveals herself piece by piece. To see it up close is only to glimpse a single section at time. It’s a synesthetic experience. Feeling the rumble and hearing the resonant booming come from the same merged, all-encompassing sensory input. It rains at the base of the Falls. Inevitably, you get wet when you enter its vicinity. The rain comes from below, though, bouncing off the invisible ground at the base of the waterfall, like so many bouncy balls. You get more drenched as you go. It’s a state of permanent rain during the wet season, and eventually it just looks like dense fog. We concluded with a sidelong view of the Falls, which drops off from the river into a great open slit in the earth.

Having made contact with the Falls, we repaired to the Lookout Café for lunch. This involved a rather long walk down a dirt road away from the Falls. Clearly it was meant to be driven to in a tour bus, as we were the only ones on foot. It had a nice view but no tables, so we headed back down the road to catch a cab back to our hostel. As we walked down the road an oncoming African man said to us, “‘scuse me guys.”

“Sorry, we’re not interested,” we began to say.

“There’s an elephant behind you.”

Sure enough, moseying along through the path about twenty yards behind us, was an elephant. It traipsed along the road, then disappeared into the trees on the other side. Everywhere is a safari, I guess. We walked back along the road toward gates of the Falls where a line of taxis waited. They quoted us a murderous price to get back to our compound. It would’ve been cheaper to cover the equivalent distance in Manhattan. But, same as the taxi negotiation process in Poland, we didn’t have recourse to other options. When we got home we ordered lunch and enjoyed a couple Zambezi beers by the pool.

After lunch a car arrived, and we were driven out to a game reserve. This was the helicopter launch site. A Norah Jones song played the in terminal when we arrived. The entire album, on repeat. After a brief instructional session, we loaded into a 'copter and spun up toward the Falls. As we approached, we saw the Mighty Zambezi trail off into the horizon. All at once it drops off into a vast crevasse. We came at it from the it canonical angle, which is what you see in the postcards around town. Then we made the first turn to get the view of the Falls from the side. Breaths, at this point, are hard to come by. We circled it a few times while rainbows danced around in the mist. Then we were shuttled home.

Later that day was the World Cup final. We headed back to the brewery we’d scouted the day before. On the way in we met a guy wearing a shirt with the name of the establishment on it. I told him we were headed to the same place. He introduced himself as Ibrahim. We informed him of our confidence that Croatia would take the whole thing. He contradicted us, placing his confidence in France. I proposed we bet a round of beers on the result. He proposed "tequilas" instead. In the end France won, and I bought a round of tequilas, which we threw back.

Then we returned in the evening to the compound for brandy.

Our cohort left on a bus at seven on a cool morning in Victoria Falls. We were headed to the Zambezi river, for whitewater rafting. It was the two of us and eight Irish college students. They looked to be about fourteen years old.

Our first stop was the tour group’s office in the city center, where we were offered instant coffee and tea. We sat in a semi-circle and were given an intro to whitewater rafting. Basically, it was an enumeration of all the ways one could die, be maimed, or sustain serious injury. We would be traversing level-five rapids, which is the highest, most perilous echelon of rapids. Attempting such a feat could incur broken arms, capsized rafts (this, our host emphasized, was a likely occurrence), and dislocated shoulders, among other maladies such as death from cracking your head, or losing consciousness and drowning. This information painted a contrast with what a couple of the more feeble looking Irish kids had in mind: a gentle paddle down the stream. As the list got longer, so did the space between the blond Irish girl’s upper lip and her jaw. Eventually, she was able to rest her chin comfortably on her knees.

We were presented with an indemnity agreement, which we had to sign before we were allowed even to hear the safety info—how not to crack your head and die. Before the distributing the papers, the man explaining the plausible deformations and threats-to-life told us: “Just sign it. I don’t recommend to read it. It’ll just leave a sour taste in your mouth.” I read it. It said that if you die, even if due to negligence—for instance, your guide hitting you over the head with his paddle—you cannot sue the company. I raised my hand and asked about the trip's historical rate of death. “It’s uncommon,” he assured us.

After we signed our waivers the lot of us were shuttled off somewhere into a fastness north of Victoria Falls, upstream on the Zambezi River. We were fitted for helmets, life-preservers, and handled paddles. The leader of the Irish pack engaged me in conversation, which was an unwelcome social advance.

“So, where are you guys from?” he asked Haily and me.

“Boston,” I told him curtly.

“Lots of Irish there, huh?” he followed up.

“I suppose so.”

From there, we were instructed to hike down the gorge to the river. The man pointed over the rolling edge of a cliff and told us to follow the trail. We hiked down the gorge, clambering over rocks, informal ladders, and steeply graded hillsides. Before the river came into view we glimpsed the canyon-side carved by the venerable river and the African sun peeking over the top of the dusty striations of the gorge. It was about five hundred meters down, not an especially easy hike for something not properly advertised as a hike. There were some in the party whose lack of physical adroitness—let us call it—was inferable from their prodigious accumulation of mass. One of the girls was on the chubby, honestly. I don't say that to knock her, but it did prove to be a protracted struggle for the poor girl to descend to the river. By the time she got there she looked totally spent, which isn't a promising state in which to begin a treacherous rafting expedition. A more favorable sign was that, by this point, her colleague—the blonde one—had collected her jaw off the floor.

We were divided into two rafts and embarked on our journey. Our crew was Haily, me, Leader of the Pack, Mouth Agape, and Cumulative Mass. Together we set off into the Mighty Zambezi. Importantly, the river's name is pronounced ‘My-tee Zam-baaay-zee,’ in your best Lion King voice. Linger on the baaay, and try to wrap your whole mouth around the syllable. Never speak of the river in any other manner. None of our guides, who knew and respected the river, ever did. Our guide taught us to row in concert according to three commands: Forward!, Stop!, and Get Down! Forward, we ventured forth into the Mighty Zambezi.

At first the journey was serene. I looked up with geological interest at the tall canyon walls, layered with rock striations encoding the events of millions of years available at a single glance. We floated along in the lazy wanderings of the Mighty Zambezi's repose.

Then we began to take on rapids. They started off easy, as mild disturbances in an otherwise calm stream. They were like flight turbulence—perhaps a bit bumpy, but don’t require of you any direct engagement. Things got more tumultuous as we entered our first level-four. “Get Down! Get Down!” yelled our guide.

We hit the thrashing white water. The bow of the boat shot up and as it righted it did so without the burden of the largest passenger. In a period shorter than a moment she was hoovered into the water and under the raft. Her colleague's mouth gaped. It was a look which conveyed the sentiment that her friend had just been consumed by the Mighty Zambezi and may never return from its digestive tract. Our guide scrambled over to the side of the raft, calling me to move out of his way. I scurried to the opposite side. He searched for her in the water but only found more rapids. After lingering under a few long moments she reappeared as a specter under the water. The guide, calling on all his bodily power, gave a great big heave and hauled her back on board. She returned physically undamaged, save for a couple scratches. But from the look fixed on her face for the rest of the outing I believe the Mighty Zambezi may have kept a small portion of her soul for itself.

After that incident we held a vote: should we take on the level-five or should we skirt around it and remain in a level-three? Our guide explained that there was, in his statistical estimation, a ninety-eight percent probability of flipping if we take on the five. The rule was that if anyone voted for the lesser adventure we had to go with that. So we went with that.

There’s a sort of negotiation with the river that takes place right before you hit a rapid. Our guide would call out “Forward! Forward!… Stop!” at precisely the moment that would angle us toward a minute but desirable swirl in the rapids. This particular swirl would position so as to maximize the chances of us being in that two percent. We came to a junction in the river. The near side of the river looked like the sort of rapid we had already been taking on. The other side of the river frothed menacingly. It presented us with a continuously cresting wave, which towered over our hopelessly inadequate watercraft. Our guide did the mental trigonometry to angle us precisely in the direction of the more tenable rapids. But the Mighty Zambezi had other plans for us. We drifted helplessly in the direction of the level-five, caught in a rip tide toward the oncoming tsunami. The rapid pitched us about with no consideration for any of our predilections concerning our direction or orientation to the ground. It was a sort of probabilistic splash mountain. We entered the vertex of two colliding currents. We took a real shellacking from the river, at one point going completely airborne, but remaining blessedly upright throughout. The Mighty Zambezi had been merciful.

Once through, we looked on at the other raft, which had successfully made it into the lower level but had capsized nonetheless. We made fun of them for being unskilled rafters, but left out how we’d been the unintended beneficiaries of inept navigation.

Filled with sailor’s hubris we rounded a bend in the river. The wind was against us now, coming head on. We paddled desperately for all we were worth, and then some. But we went nowhere. Though we were stuck for only a minute or so, it was a stark lesson: you don't get anywhere unless the Mighty Zambezi wills it. That we were able to have any say in our trajectory at all is a small miracle. Though he had misled us into the level-five, our guide was a man of phenomenal skill. He called out Forward!, Left!, Right!, Stop! as if reading the transcript of events that have not yet transpired. It's as if he was looking at a map that is being composed in real time. It was really quite something.

At length we parked our watercraft on the river bank. Our rafting trip was over. Any further and we’d careen off the magnificent and never-ending drop of Victoria Falls. But just because the rafting was over didn't mean the activity was. Between us and lunch stood a half-kilometer in vertical ascent up the face of the gorge. What goes down must come up. I don’t think this came as a welcomed development for our colleague C.M.

Once at the top of the canyon we ate a lunch of grilled chicken and rice. We drank ice cold Zambezi beer while looking out over the Mighty Zambezi itself, which we had just conquered in our own inconsequential way, an event which will be neither remembered nor acknowledged by the river. Sated by the beers I went to relieve myself in the little bull’s room, as they say in the bush. As I peered over the canyon edge I made my own modest contribution to the flow of the Mighty Zambezi. I reflected on how strange it is that something so grand as the gorge could be architected by a force so unthinking as moving water. Something so stupid with so much power. Sort of like the American government, if you think about it.

Later that afternoon we were met outside the compound by a four-wheel-drive safari vehicle. It resembled a large pickup truck, stacked with three rows of canopy-covered stadium seating in the back. Save for us, it was empty. We were shuttled off down an open highway with Zimbabwanese plains sprawling out on either side of us. We felt part of a great expansiveness, alone in the open seating of the truck, the yellowed space unfolding around us. Men, women, and children, rarely all three at once, walked along the side of the road. We turned off the highway and onto a dirt path. No other cars were present, and we made our way through the nascent wilderness at high speed, unsettling a festive commotion of dust in our wake. Soon we were presented at the gates of a compound, the game reserve. Our driver hoped out and a new man swung in. He informed us that he would be our guide and introduced himself as Pressure. He pronounced it Presh-uh. “Like the song,” he said.

We ventured forth into the six thousand acre game reserve. The trail through the reserve was a dirt road with two deeply carved ruts through which the vehicle sped along, as if on the track of an Indiana Jones ride. At first the terrain was dense with vegetation. The dimensions of the brush seemed precisely calculated to fit the vehicle. It was like driving under a twelve-foot overpass with a semi that measures in at eleven-foot-eleven. The brush would’ve severed off an extended limb if you’d have given it an opportunity. Sometimes the truck would veer at an angle, tilting to one side, persuaded by the soft dirt, even though it was still moving straight ahead. At seventeen kilometers an hour, we were really bookin' it.

Soon enough the jungle opened up into undulating plains of yellowed grass and small clusters of eucalyptus trees. Pressure acted as both driver and spotter. He scanned the landscape. First all the way to the left, then ahead, then ninety degrees to the right. He was looking for animals in the fore and background, as well as signs of animal activity (for example, informatively arranged piles of s**t; to be distinguished from the uninformative variety, of which there were many). The plains were speckled with herds of impala, as common as squirrels in a park. There were scores of dopey little birds running around on the ground. We even passed a duo of lady lions—possibly lesbians—and their kill, which we viewed from a distance.

After traversing for a while we stumbled upon a quintet of Zebras. Pressure stalled the vehicle and we watched them admiringly, pondering the evolutionary mystery of their inexplicable stripiness, as well as their pitiful role in the animal kingdom as lion food. One of the Zebras approached her colleague. This caused the targeted zebra, evidently a male, to acquire an erection of prodigious magnitude. It looked like something a SWAT team would use to bust down the door right after the captain yells, ‘Police!’ We had arrived punctually for zebra mating time. The erection inflated with the length and curvature of a long balloon. In full bloom it thumped against the Zebra’s chest. The three of us looked on with zoological interest, as well as that poorly disguised excitement that comes with any act of voyeurism. The zebras were angled in preparation for the male to mount. But just as quickly as he had gotten it up, his erection retreated. The female, sensing performance issues and growing impatient, turned around and stuck her nose in the male zebra's crotch in an apparent inspection of the unit. Dissatisfied, she wandered over to a nearby compatriot and began to inspect his unit as well. Meanwhile the underperforming zebra commenced to scratch his head against a tree, seeming to find more gainful diversion in this activity. The female shivered with desire. The new male however wandered off to an adjacent patch of grass and began to graze. She made another go at the first guy, but he could not be compelled to scratch any itch other than the one on his head. The female huffed off in a fervor of sexual frustration. It was riveting.

We went down to the lake to have a drink and enjoy the sunset. Then we heard a call come in on the radio about a rhino sighting. Pressure got on the horn and inquired of its whereabouts. He asked us if we’d rather sit serenely by the lake and watch the sun go down or head off in search of the unfolding spectacle. We hopped in the truck and made off toward the rhino.

We got there just as the other cohort was concluding their visitation. Their truck was spilling over with people, some of them hanging off the sides like monkeys. There were two rhinos, a mother and a baby. The rhinos appeared heavy and dense, like granite, like something you could build a bridge out of. Under all this weight they seem to sag, first in their long face culminating in the horn, then in their thorax, which bends from the weight. Their eyes are like black glass marbles. The other car drove off. We were alone with the rhinos, Pressure, Haily, and me. The rhinos came over to have a look at us. Should they have decided to charge us, our open air vehicle wouldn’t have protected us from them any more than it would an incoming Scud missile. My heart beat heavily. I readied myself to record a video of a mother rhino charging our vehicle. Alas, no such footage was captured.

It was dark now, and time for dinner. It became bitterly cold and we layered up in blankets provided by Pressure. We were driven to the other side of the reserve and delivered to a covered patio where dinner was prepared, buffet-style. The menu was braai and accoutrement. We took up a table by the fire and called Pressure over to join us. Together we looked up at the foreign constellations of the Southern hemisphere. They weren’t foreign to Pressure, and he illuminated a green beam from his hand into the night sky using a laser pointer. He indicated the constellations which were the most notable and his favorite. I asked, “Pressure, how long have you been guiding?”

“Guess,” he replied.

“No,” I said.

“Guess,” he repeated.

“Ten years,” I offered.

“That's a long time,” he said. “No, I’ve been a guide for just three.” He went on to explain that he had trained for six years prior to be coming a guide.

“That’s a PhD!” I remarked.

“And that’s only to be an assistant guide,” he told us. The full thing takes another couple of years getting familiar with a specific reserve. His expertise and passion were clear. He told us how he got into the job because of his love for conservation. We asked if poachers were common.

“Quite common,” he said.

The most recent had been about two months prior. Even though the guides are constantly monitoring the grounds, it’s still a big place to patrol.

After dinner we piled back into the truck and headed back to our compound. As we snuggled up in our blankets, rocketing through the thicketed brush on our way home for another round of brandy, we decided that being a tourist in Real Africa was a pretty sweet deal.

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One thing that's immediately clear about Annie Duke is that her best self is pretty damn awesome. In this conversation, we get deep into the story of her career and the key moments that defined who that best self is. It gets really personal really quick. We start off with a discussion of her family, and in particular how she learned to separate work from identity. From there we talk about the big steps in her trajectory, from leaving her PhD program with one month left to go, to deciding on becoming a professional poker player. Then we get into her books: first, Thinking in Bets, as well as her new book, How to Decide. It's a wide ranging conversation, and we cover a lot of interesting ground. Ultimately it comes back to the role of mentors -- Annie has had some great ones in her life -- and how their job is to help you find the best version of yourself.

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As I took my bulkhead seat on the plane, I was welcomed by the pretty blonde girl seated next to me. She introduced herself as Ilke. She hailed from Johannesburg. We got to talking and it turned out she was an artist—doing politically charged art installations, of all things—which I thought was very cool. I’d yet to understand that Joburg is more or less one giant ghetto-cum-art-installation, such is the prevalence of visual spectacle. I asked her about her name, which sounded odd for a South African. She said the name was Bulgarian. Her parents had chosen it because they liked the sound. She asked about the nature of my engagements in South Africa. I told her. I was there to poke around and eventually meet up with my girlfriend in Durban, a city out on the coast, who is doing field-work there. “Oh, that’s nice,” she said. “My brother gets mugged every time he goes to Durban.”

This is something that one grows accustomed to when planning a trip to South Africa. Everyone knows someone who has been mugged, kidnapped, run-over, mauled, shot, or otherwise imperiled in the country—usually a close blood relative, usually meeting a violent and grotesque fate. The typical anecdote sounds like this: “Oh, South Africa. My great aunt Mary went there once. She was sitting at a traffic light when two armed men shot her and snatched her purse. They would’ve taken the car, too, but they couldn’t see through the windshield on account of the scattered brains.” As a would-be traveller to South Africa, you collect a small treasure-trove of anecdotal nuggets of this sort.

Usually when I get off the plane in a new country, I take public transport into the city. Figuring out the transport system is part of the fun. However I decided to ease into my South African experience, on consideration of possible death, and took an Uber to my hostel instead. I tossed my belongings in the back of the car, and we sped off into the urban sprawl of Johannesburg. I looked idly out the window as we passed through nondescript highway systems of concrete interspersed with patches of yellowed, garbage-strewn grass. It didn’t look like much, honestly. There wasn’t a lot to take in. My sense of curiosity grew as I noticed we were nearing my destination and the urban landfills grew denser and apparently more combustible. It was like being on a boat in a sea of household trash. Fifty-gallon metal drums sat on the side of the road, trash fires ablaze inside. Just as the trash water-line reached the height of a twelve-year-old child, we turned onto a street of appealing storefronts, brightly colored murals, and happy, attractive people strolling on their way to brunch. I had arrived in the serene and beguiling eye of the dereliction storm: Joburg’s Maboneng district.

I presented myself at the front desk of my hostel where I was greeted by a young woman with a face as soft and buoyant as a cloud, yet dark and enticing like Nina Simone’s voice. She has long braided hair, and a colorful shirt. She introduced herself as Dudu. I introduced myself, and told her it was my first time in South Africa. “Welcome to Maboneng, Cody,” she said my name slowly and deeply. The way she said it, it occurred to me for the first time that my name had two syllables. She showed me through the hostel. It had a homey, worn-in feel, with a bar counter situated against the back wall and an iron hearth in the corner. She took me past the open courtyard in the back to where the barracks were. She danced as she walked. “This is your room, Cody, isn’t it lovely?” She twirled as she posed the question, and I agreed that it was indeed lovely. Then she took leave of me to return to her desk. I set my stuff down, freshened up, and set off to see what was happening in Maboneng.

Dudu had recommended a café, her favorite, which I called at first thing. I sat at the counter. The ladies were really nice. I had the "Jozie breakfast." There was a sausage, green chillies, scrambled eggs, and toast. It warmed my soul. As my attention wandered away from breakfast, I was struck with a feeling of guilt: I was in cheater Africa. Sure, the people around me were Africans, as most everybody was. But really I was in a western land, transplanted to this continent for the enjoyment of people like me. As this occurred to me a family of white people came in to order cappuccinos. I could have been in Venice Beach or Melbourne. That’s exactly what it felt like: Abbott Kinney or Fitzroy. Then I was overcome with a second feeling—wow, they took everything I love from places like Los Angeles and Australia and plunked it down in Africa. Cool! Both feelings were equally heartfelt and equally silly. Really, I was just overwhelmed by the prospect of being on a continent I didn’t know the first thing about.

After breakfast I was ready to have a look around. But walking and biking as usual weren't serviceable strategies. I was told it was too dangerous. And I believed it. Maboneng is a rectangular strip of about five blocks by one which are safe for people who look like me. Step a half a block outside of that and all bets are off. I opted for a guided tour instead, mostly because they were easy to sign up for at the hostel. The first was a bike tour of the surrounding area. I didn't have to wait long for it to begin.

We saddled onto a fleet of dinged-up old bikes and set off. There were a half dozen of us, looking like a gang of multilingual Aryan enthusiasts. Our first stop was a mural, commissioned by a Mr Jonathan Liebmann. He’s the one who has invested in making Maboneng look like an Angelino neighborhood. After that, we made our way through a variety of squalorly dilapidations: Doorfontein, Troyville, Ellis Park. We looked quite the sight, a fleet of white people on small bikes cruising through ghettos, just to check them out. People felt compelled to provide commentary as we proceeded down the street. They yelled things like, “Hey, what’s up guys!!”

The arresting thing about these cross-sections of Johannesburg was that they featured two distinct layers. The bottom layer was garbage, strewn about the ground on every available square foot. Meanwhile the top layer was art, mostly commissioned murals, many of which are several stories tall, which are festooned all over the city no matter how beat up the area looks. We passed a whole garden full of children’s art and sculptures in Troyville.

At the end of our tour we stopped to visit a "roof-top bar." I say it with qualification because it was a bar on a rooftop, but it wasn’t much of a bar and it wasn’t much of a roof. For one thing there was no one else there. It was three in the afternoon. The other thing was the building wasn’t taller than those around it. You had your choice of inspecting the mural painted on the adjacent office building or a dingy apartment complex. The most interesting visual offering was a pigeon stuck in a tree planted on a patio across the street. The pigeon was hanging by its feet. It was handcuffed by a piece of plastic to a tree branch and hung there limply like someone who had been hanged upside down. At intervals it would attempt a desperate escape, flapping its wings mightily and straining the branch like a fishing rod. Then it would give up hope and hang limply again. As I watched this protracted struggle, the Germans in our group took notice. They cooed in empathy. A guy named Pitts wandered over to see what was going on.

“What’s up with the pigeon?” he asked.

“It’s stuck,” I explained.

The Germans, Pitts, and I stared at the scene in silence for a minute.

“On what?” Pitts asked.

“Can’t tell,” I said. It was obscured by the tree.

We watched the pigeon give up its final hope at life in an attempted escape, only to work up the courage for another try a minute later. But it was to no avail. The Germans remarked how sad this was, how the pigeon was going to die there. Then Pitts and the Germans wandered off to enjoy the less dire offerings of the rooftop bar. There was, after all, nothing we could do. Thankfully, as with all difficult situations that are not strictly one's own problem, we could forget about it when we looked away.

After the tour I went out to catch the Spain vs Russia game. I ended up in a local "independent cinema." I sat for a few minutes enjoying one of the many local craft beers on offer. But soon I realized it was too quiet and took leave of the establishment. I went to get braai, which is the most celebrated local dish of Johannesburg, and South Africa more generally. It’s their version of barbecue. I’d identified a promising braai establishment in Maboneng, which blessedly I never strayed more than three blocks from. It was hardly even a restaurant. More likely some guy had set up shop barbecuing on the sidewalk, then grew in popularity until he had to throw a roof over the enterprise to make it legit. The menu was delightful. You choose between steak, chicken, and sausage. Then you point at the sides you want. I chose steak and pointed at the pap, a grits-like corn paste with little flavor but very cheaply made. It’s ubiquitous in this country. “Your order will be out just now,” said the girl behind the counter. This was actually a subtle instance of South African idiom—just now. There are three kinds of ‘now’ in South Africa. The first kind is ‘now’ which essentially means never. If someone says they’re going to do something for you now, you might want to renegotiate that contract. It's easy to see how this might confuse an interloper. The second kind of now is "just now," as I had just encountered. This means soon, shortly, presently, in a minute. The third kind of now is "now now" which is the only one that actually means now. At any rate, I scarfed down my steak, which cost only three bucks American, and returned to the hostel to watch the rest of the game.

The hostel lounge area was the most happening bar on the whole of the Maboneng strip. I procured a seat at a long, wooden communal table situated near the TV. Communal tables being communal, I had to engage in human interaction during the match. Of particular amicability was the guy seated across from me, who was impressively drunk considering it had only just now breached dinner time. He was interested in everyone surrounding him, but he showed a special fondness for the two blonde girls sitting to my left. As trying circumstances bring people together, the annoying drunk guy gave the girls and me a special point of connection. One of them was Dutch and the other an American, who studied at Northeastern, just down the road from where I lived in Boston. I asked them how long they’d known each other. “Just since today,” the Dutch girl replied.

“That surprises me,” the dunk guy chimed in. “Seems like you two ladies have known each other a long time!” The girls gave me a look of undisguised dismay that said this had been the nature of their conversation for the past thirty minutes or so. Drunk Guy ogled the book lying next to me on the table. He directed his attention toward me and said, “Mandela, you know he’s a sellout right?”

I’d planned to go through Mandela’s autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, while in South Africa. At eight-hundred pages, it could prop open a bank vault.

“Really?” I offered Drunk Guy in return.

“Yeah,” he replied. “Gets all the credit… But he’s just a sell out, man.”

“A real sunnuva b***h,” I agreed.

Drunk Guy nodded in approval, pleased that I understood. Then something more pressing caught his attention, presumably beer, and he wandered off.

The girls and I talked some more. At length they said they were about to head out. “You’re welcome to join if you want,” said the girl from Northeastern. “Sure,” I said. “That sounds nice.” As I got up to use the restroom, I realized that I didn’t want to spend any more time with them, because they were boring. I’d rather sit by myself in a bar and read. So when I returned I wished them a nice evening, grabbed my copy of Mandela, and left on my own.

I strolled about a block down the street before being accosted by live music. I popped my head in to scope the scene. The venue was entirely cement, spacious and high-ceilinged, like an airplane hanger of which a section had been cordoned off. On stage was a duo of singer and keyboard-player-slash-DJ. They were killin' it. I procured a drink and sat down at a large table by myself. My attention rotated from the music to my book to the Croatia match playing silently from a projector onto the large concrete wall. The music was loud and good, so I put little initiative into reading. As I was sitting there, tapping my foot and staring into the middle distance of the stage, a beautiful African woman came up to my table and stood next to me.

“You look lonely,” she said. I was.

“Oh, I’m fine,” I replied.

She asked me something. I couldn’t hear what she said because the music was loud, but it sounded like an invitation to hang out with her and her friends.

“I’m okay,” I said and smiled. “Thanks though.”

She disappeared back into the crowded hangar. I immediately regretted what I had done. I wished I had just got up and gone with her. I looked for her, to make eye contact and beckon me over. But I couldn’t find her anywhere. Now I really couldn’t focus on Mandela. In the midst of my consternation another person came up to my table, a guy this time. He’d come over just to welcome me to Joburg. I was the only white guy in the hangar, save for the singer on stage, so I clearly wasn’t from the area. He wished me a pleasant evening. Imagine—one human being approaching another just to offer some pleasant words and welcome an outsider to their neighborhood. Now when’s the last time you saw that? Johannesburg really is a wonderful place.

Then I noticed another person present at the bar. It was none other than Mr Drunk Guy. He was dancing with a woman who was about seven feet tall in heels. Standing erect, he could practically walk between her legs, like a car under a bridge. She had a good natured look on her face. She was humoring him.

I walked across the room to the bar to get another drink. Then I found her, the girl who had invited me to her table. We made eye contact. She was standing with her friends at the back of the room. She beckoned me. I waved over the bartender and changed my order from a glass of wine to a bottle. The guy handed me a bottle of rosé and told me the glasses would be forthcoming. I went over to their table bottle in hand.

At this point, I wasn’t drunk, not even tipsy, at least not nearly enough to talk to a group of strange girls who infinitely surpassed me in coolness. I wasn’t there to hit on them, so without a couple drinks in my system the standard bar banter didn’t seem right. They were dancing, and it wouldn't have been inappropriate to join them. But the disparity in skill made it seem out of the question. I cannot begin to tell you how whack it feels to be the only white dude at all black dance party. I took off my coat, just to have an action to perform. Then I thrust the wine bottle in their direction, as offering of friendship. But I had nothing for them to drink from it, as I didn’t have the glasses yet. The bottle sat idly on the table. I looked over at the bartender. He proceeded to hold each of the glasses up to the light and meticulously polish each one.

C’mon buddy, just bring the damn glasses over…

I engaged the girl who’d brought me over in conversation. I asked her where she was from. "Soweto," she said. “That’s real Johannesburg,” she told me. I wasn’t really dancing and I had no drink to hold, so I wasn’t sure what to do with my hands, like Ricky Bobby in a television interview. They moved from my hip to the chair to my shoulder back to the chair and then to a different chair. We soon understood why our first interaction had gone the way it did. I was sitting alone because I am no fun, and things would have gone better for everyone if I had just remained in my natural, antisocial state.

I inched my way toward the back of the group, a wallflower in bloom. Then my glasses arrived. I finally had some social utility to offer. Drink in hand, I was ready to give dancing a shot. The alcohol helps, sure, but it’s more about the comfort of having an anchoring activity—holding your drink and sipping from it. If you’ve ever watched inept white guys like me dancing, you may have noticed there’s a lot of finger pointing involved. All we’ve got is hips, shoulders, and fingers. I don’t know why. It’s just how we do. Having a glass to hold helps quell this inclination. By this point I had been soundly rejected as a square by the girl who had brought me over, and rightly so. But her friends didn’t know that I was lame, so I went to talk to them instead.

I was quite inadequate in my initial attempts to participate. But they appreciated my engagement anyway. I excused myself to the bar, just to collect myself for a moment without having to wallow in my shameful lameness. Another drunk gentleman attempted to engage me in conversation at the bar. He offered some unsolicited advice about picking up girls. “You have to go to them, not let them come to you,” he explained. He then provided two unsuccessful examples. At this point he decided my education was complete and dragged me in with him. He offered my romantic services to one of the girls in the crowd I’d been hanging out with. She inquired of me, “Why is this guy pimping you out?”

My mentor seemed deterred by this question and left. I was abandoned to talk with the girl on my own. I engaged her on the only subject I knew we had in common: how uncool I was. This turned out to be a productive talking point, as it led to an enumeration of all of the guys who were in fact less cool than I was. There was Drunk Guy from the hostel, who had hit on her earlier in the evening. Then there was another guy, wearing a Canadian Tuxedo, dressed in denim from head to toe. Then there was the guy who was going around soliciting the attention of girls and offering the services of men he had acquired, my former mentor. I was less uncool than all of those guys, and that gave me a sort of statistical, somewhere-around-the-mean credibility. This helped my confidence greatly. The wine helped, too.

Another of her friends approached us. She was large and imposing, like an army general. She volunteered to teach me to dance. She would lead, I would follow. We salsa’d: one-two-three-four, two-two-three-four. It was a valiant attempt at teaching, but I’m not a great instruction follower. Mercifully, the wine was really starting to kick in. I started to let loose as a dancer. I was making lots of friends now. I went up to the singer who had been on stage earlier in the evening and told him how much I enjoyed his stuff. I offered him some wine. He graciously accepted. Then I saw him set it down on a table and wander off. So I picked it up for myself and sloshed it down the hatch. At this point, my mentor came back into the mix. He tried hitting on the girl to whom he’d been pimping me out. Multiple of us had to run interference on him to deflect his attention from her. Eventually I started to let loose. My dancing was South African Approved.

By now the party was starting to cool off. The Croatia game was in its final throws. I approached a group of African dudes, which included the keyboard player from earlier in the evening. We got to talking. He pointed at a guy across the room talking to a group of three girls and told me, “See that guy? He used to be the most popular recording artist in all of Johannesburg.” We got to debating World Cup teams.

I got the number of one the girls, I think the original one who had invited me over, but I can't rightly recall. She said she would take me to Soweto, the real Soweto for the real Johannesburg experience. As I stumbled back down the street to my hostel I thought to myself about how much I loved Joburg so far. One of the things the girl said to me stood out: “It's important to us that people like you come to see our city. I’m glad to you get to experience Africa, to realize people don't have lions in their back yard. We have civilization here, too."

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Don Norman is a cognitive scientist and designer. He is perhaps best known for his book "The Design of Everyday Things." This was a landmark work which detailed the fundamentals of human-centered design. It is a conception of design not just based on how things looks, but how people think. And while this book has been most influential among designers and other practitioners, its origin is in Don's work as a cognitive scientist. Throughout his career he has found himself in many of the most exciting times and places in the field's history, including the Center for Cognitive Studies at Harvard, led by George Miller and Jerome Bruner, and in the very first years of UC San Diego's department of cognitive science. In this episode we talk about Don's career, his process for finding and learning about big ideas, the difference between academics and practitioners, the cognitive science origins of Don's design work, how Don went about crafting his style of prose, and a host of other topics. It's a fun one.

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I can think of nothing more exciting than the prospect of touching down and finding oneself in Istanbul. When you’re there it really feels like you’re in Constantinople, the legendary nexus of East and West. The city is tinted in sepia, like an old photograph. It has a palpable historical gravity. You feel as if you could wander around a corner and stumble upon some significant artifact, as would Indiana Jones. It’s not just that it is an old city. Europe is full of musty, old cities emitting the last wheezing respirations of life. Not Istanbul. Its former glory is also its present glory. The city doesn’t need life support, because it’s still spry and muscular, in the prime of life.

I had only 36 hours in the city on a long layover. Thirty-six hours, you may well note, is a ludicrously insufficient amount of time to investigate the historical depths of Constantinople in full. And I’d agree with you. But it sure as heck beats nothing. Plus, I didn’t have to book an extra airfare, rather than just pick one with a long layover. Pretty savvy, if you ask me. I had booked accommodations at the ‘Cheers’ hostel, so named not for the American television show of the 1980s but for what British youths say instead of "thanks" at the end of a transaction. That's where I headed now.

I hoped off the metro in the sepia-tone city center. Actually I wasn’t sure if it was the city center. I didn’t know the first thing about Istanbul or how it was laid out. But it seemed bustling, and there was a grandly-domed Mosque, called Sultan Ahmet, which took up about the same footprint as a football stadium. I meandered up the side street on which Cheers was located. Meandering is the only form of locomotion one can perform on an Istanbul side street. Each street heads in some direction but only vaguely and with dramatic reorientations at unexpected points, like the trend line of the stock market. I noticed that the streets were littered with kittens. They were feral cats, in the sense that no one owned them. But they didn’t look scraggily like most intercity fauna. From the looks of the bowl of milk on the sidewalk, people took care of them. I made my way down the street with my suitcase, scanning each brightly lit façade for some indication that I had found my temporary home. Then from the cool shade of an ivory laced café called a voice:

“Hey, man. Are you looking for Cheers?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Well, you found it, man!”

A Turkish fellow named Ahmed greeted me as if I were an old friend. He took me into the hostel to the front desk, where he introduced me to Sinan. They both had the air of men who had been relieved of ambition through many devoted years spent with Mary Jane. They were ludicrously welcoming, and I loved them immediately.

“Are you staying at Cheers, man?” Sinan asked this as if a buddy had unexpectedly popped by to crash on his couch. I informed him of my intention to do so.

Sinan and Ahmed showed me around the place. The building was long and lean, with a tight spiral staircase running up its spine. Everything was wooden and well-worn. The first floor had a modest kitchen in the back, where breakfast would be served. My room was on the second floor, with twelve bunks and a bathroom, arrayed in an unusually spacious room. The third floor had more rooms. On the floor above that was the in-house bar, where I made the acquaintance of yet another warm and kindly Turkish guy who invited me back to enjoy half-priced beers at happy hour. The bar boasted a spectacular view of Sultan Ahmet’s dome, pillared at four sides by great, spear-like columns, the scene practically springing in through the window as it would in a 3D movie.

There is an idea from psychology called the "explore-exploit tradeoff." It is a decision-making dilemma that any thinking organism must solve: I can either choose the option I know to be the best right now (exploit), or I can try something new in hopes that it might prove even more beneficial (explore). It is notoriously difficult to describe the optimal solution to the explore-exploit tradeoff. The crux of the matter is that it’s tough to know when you’ve collected enough information to stop exploring and start exploiting. Well, I developed my own solution to the problem. I had several weeks before made a reservation at a restaurant called Mikla, which was recommended by a gourmand friend of mine who had recently spent two weeks in Turkey. It was a tasting menu establishment, where the general arrangement is to hand the waiter an immense wad of cash in the promise that sometime later he will return, course by course, with a series of whatever the chef has on offer, minusculy proportioned and neatly arranged. Like White Rabbit in Moscow. I enjoy that sort of thing, and so does my friend. I trust his tastes, too. My solution to the tradeoff, at least when it comes to restaurants, is to exploit his explorations. He said Mikla was the best thing in Turkey.

However, earlier that day I had sent Mikla an email canceling the reservation. It was a lot of money. Not as much as it would be at an equivalent restaurant in US, or somewhere else relishing an economy that isn’t teetering on the verge of collapse. But certainly it would cost more than whatever I’d be able to find stumbling around the streets. When I got to the hostel I equivocated for a bit. Would it be worth it? At length I decided to fetch up at the restaurant and let fate decide—if they still had a table, I’d snag it. What the hell? I’m worth it.

When I left the hostel I wasn’t sure if I was in Europe or Asia. Approximately half of Istanbul belongs to one and half to the other. I assumed since I was on one side of Istanbul and Mikla was on the other that I'd crossed from continent to the other. I felt as though I was crossing a border illicitly, as if into a forbidden nation. I wasn’t, I later learned. But I reveled in the sense of espionage anyway. When I inspected the map, it looked like Mikla was on a main drag. But as I trekked up the hill on which it was situated, I learned it was most emphatically not. Maps of Istanbul bear only a loose correspondence with reality, as the streets are constantly shifting, like the moving staircases of the dormitories at Hogwarts.

I presented myself at Mikla on the 18th floor of a hotel situated on Istanbul’s highest eminence. I had walked for about an hour to get there, mostly uphill, and it was really hot out. I showed up in a bit of a tizzy, more than a bit disheveled. I was wearing running shoes, which had been a different color when I bought them, green shorts that extended down only as far as my upper thigh, and had a soot-stained face that brought to mind an industrious but unfortunate character in a Charles Dickens novel. I looked like s**t, really. I inquired with the maitre d’ about the possibility of restoring my previously appointed spot in the dining room. He demurred and told me it was full-up. The restaurant, I could see, was empty. I managed to negotiate a spot at the bar. Then I excused myself because, as I told him, I had come prepared to change into something more presentable. He directed me to the men’s room. While I was changing in the tiny bathroom, a guy came in to check on me. He offered some banal explanation for his presence, like making sure I knew how to operate the flush handle on the toilet. But really he was there on orders from the maitre d’ to ascertain whether I had in fact transmogrified into a form that was presentable and unlikely to cause embarrassment or mirth among the other dining patrons. I had put on dark jeans and a light blue linen collared shirt. I had also wiped the grime from my cheeks. I wouldn’t be turning any heads, neither for reasons of sexual intrigue nor arresting sartorial faux pas. I made my way back to the host’s table. He had managed, magically, to find a table for me, provided I could vacate by 9pm. Excellent.

I submitted my request for the full tasting menu and a glass of Turkish rosé. Then I went to look out over the city. It was amazing. When I returned to my seat I beckoned the garçon. “I have a dumb question,” I told him. “Which continent am I on?”

“Europe,” he genially informed me. “Asia is that way,” he pointed across a body of water. He explained that the heart of Istanbul formed something of a Y shape divided by waterways, the Bosphorus and the Marmara Sea. One segment of the triad was Asia and the other two, including Mikla and my hostel, were Europe.

The first courses came promptly as a couple rounds of amuse bouche. Bite sized fishy stuff. These were accompanied by a basket of bread with goat cheese butter, from a goat named Yagmur. I sat there at the table to take it all in: I was in Istanbul. At the best restaurant in the city. Eating exquisite food and savoring a view of the whole thing. I couldn't have been happier.

Throughout my meal I watched Turkish playboys trickle in with their exquisitely dressed blondes in tow. Each of the women was dressed in white. Every single one of them. It might have even been the same white dress. They also appeared to have had the same plastic surgeon do their boob-job. Regardless, no one failed to show up in anything but their finest duds. Myself included.

I looked up from my book from time to time to take stock of the other patrons. I noticed the woman next to me carefully dabbing tears from her perfectly made up eyes. Then she started smiling. I could never quite figure out why. Eaves dropping didn't help, as the conversation was not only subdued but in Turkish. Istanbul is a city of mysteries. A couple was seated next to me. They were the same age. They also sported the same just barely elevated casual that I did. The girl was Asian; the guy was difficult to tell. They were speaking English, neither natively. I fantasized that they were lovers who met in a distant land and could only continue their affair meeting in Istanbul for all-too-brief romantic encounters. The tasting menu seemed to be a bit exotic for their tastes, as they prodded at the fishy amuse bouche experimentally with a fork and a pair of quizzical looks.

Eventually I decided he was German. He was talking about the country as if he was from there. I could tell she was Korean. But then again he was uncharacteristically tan for a Teutonic lad. Turkish German, maybe? Anyway, doesn’t matter. There were more excellent dishes to be had. I was out by 8:50, as promised, and fully sated.

After dinner I was eager to stretch my legs in the streets of Istanbul. I called first at a bar that I'd identified as promising on the way up to dinner. It was adjoined to a hostel. I walked through the lobby and a spacious diner to open air patio in back. The walls were festooned with flags and books, as if someone loaded cultural artifacts into a canon and shot it all the wall. Every table was filled. There was a Volkswagen van parked in a corner of the room. Bob Marley and his musical offspring were featured heavily in the musical selection. The place had vibes for days. On the cocktail menu were a bunch of Turkishly named drinks without an ingredient list. I ordered the Fahrettin, for reasons of phonological pleasure. The bartender, a busy guy to be sure, dropped my drink while presenting it to me, spilling on me and my book. He said sorry then wandered off, which I thought was a rather neat trick of nonchalance. What remained of the cocktail was quite good—tequila-based, accompanied by a mysterious concoction in the traditional idiom of Istanbul. He comped me the drink, which seemed like a fair trade for having to wear part of it.

Time to hit the streets again. I reemerged into the humid Turkish night and set my course down the steep hill. It was steep enough that if you took a tumble, you’d continue rolling until you spilled out onto the level street a half mile below. I was clearly in a hipster area. Every storefront had a shop, a cool one. There were lively bars, vegan kitchens, and The Pure Love Café. Groups sitting at tables spilled out from restaurants into the street. All the people were good looking and appeared dressed to attract mates. The street featured a modest strip of sidewalk, wide enough to comfortably fit my three leftmost fingers. Enabling a safe place for walking ranked relatively low among its priorities. Mostly it was dedicated to other things, like rubbish bins, cellar stairs, stray cats, their generously proportioned milk bowls, and scooters thrown onto the sidewalk as if abandoned by a fugitive who had escaped down a nearby alley. The texture of the street was a comely but treacherous cobblestone, so the entire thoroughfare was a sort of a mini obstacle course at ground level. The street lights were spaced just far enough apart that when your shadow died in front of you it resurrected behind. Scooters and cars whizzed by as if finding themselves fifteen minutes late for a meeting on the wrong continent. Being a pedestrian in the city requires a certain extra sensory perception for knowing when to be in the street and when to get off. Istanbul is a game of inches.

The street dilapidated as I descended. It was no longer populated by hipsters, as it had been near the top, but mothers and aunties sitting outside while mending clothes and folding laundry. At length I found myself back on the main road, which I took in the direction of my hostel. I followed signs to an underground "tramvay" which proved to be a closed market, shuttered for the night. After a few subterranean turns and what seemed to be too far to just cross the street I began to fear I'd been trapped in another Moscow metro maze. Then I resurfaced right in the metro stop that I'd aimed for, where I promptly boarded the next tram. I had learned an important lesson from the Russians—always offer your seat to elders, women, and children. This was taking me far in Turkish etiquette points. I no longer needed to be waved off by elderly men on the subway, but actively offered my seat when they came aboard.

When I got off at the stop by my hostel, I noticed a massive hole in the sidewalk where some men were working. It hadn't been there when I left. The men wore plaid shirts, jeans, and one was knocking back a beer (obviously, he was the supervisor). I'd like to think they weren't engaged in any officially sanctioned work but rather indulging in their Saturday evening hobby of amateur ditch digging.

I went back to my hostel. In my room I met a young man my age, named Dylan, from San Francisco. He was clearly of a strain of human being known as West Coast Bro. I told him I was also from the West Coast, Seattle. West Coast people have a certain way of communicating with one another, as if everything the other person relates is a cause for minor celebration. The excitement just sort of leaks out. He told me he and his buddies had covered 16 miles the day before.

"Dude, nice!" I responded.

"The asian side is pretty chill," he told me "You should go."

"Hell yeah, man."

This is another thing about the West Coast. The most prized attribute of anything is chill. As in: man, that party last night was chill; I went on a date with a girl, and she was pretty chill, man; I failed that exam, but don’t worry, man, it’s chill. One of the primary reasons why I don’t fit in on the West Coast is that, at 98.8 degrees Fahrenheit, I don’t have an ounce of chill contained anywhere in my body. For example, I go on rants about how silly the notion of chill is. That’s decidedly unchill. But I put on a cool front with Dylan, not to alert him to my lack of chill. In this I achieved a level of success sufficient for him to invite me to hang out. “Hey man, Kevin and I are about to take some vodka shots in his room. Wanna come?”

"Sweet!” I told him. “Maybe I’ll meet up later.” I didn’t plan to meet up later.

I took leave of Dylan and went up for a drink at the rooftop bar. We had a view of Sultan Ahmet in the evening air. I met an Indian girl who worked as banker in London and a Slovenian professor of public health. We bullshitted for a while. I wasn't quite ready to retire for the evening, having spent much of it sitting at dinner. I went for a walk to take in the evening streets of old city Istanbul. It was not exactly bustling, but there were still people out, mostly in search of food and drink. Restaurants yearned for customers. Turkish men stood outside of their eateries and implored you to dine in their establishments. I'd like to think that if I were really undecided about where to enjoy my next meal that I might actually be swayed by their amicable inducements. I do love to be courted. I returned to the hostel bar, where my friends lingered. We bullshitted more, until late, like 1:30. The Slovenian girl took a look out the window and remarked, “That's an interesting view." Then I retired for the evening.

The next morning I was eager to get going. I sprung up, showered, and went out in search of one of the handsome cafes I had passed the night before. I realized as soon as I left that I had no idea where anything was—the grand bazaar, which mosque was the Ayasophia, how to cross to Asia. About three blocks away from my hostel I equivocated for a moment, pacing back and forth as I changed my mind several times over. First I decided f**k it, just wander; then I noted how short of a time I had in the city and I should be prudent about how I use it; then I went back to the first mindset, how hard can it be to find the grand bazaar? It’s pretty big, right? Ultimately I about-faced and went back to the hostel. I pulled out my map and my food recommendations, noting the major landmarks and eating destinations. I had a cup of strong Turkish coffee while I deliberated, along with heavily seeded watermelon. I located the Grand Bazaar, figured out which mosque was the Ayasophia, developed a game plan for my transcontinental crossing, and picked out a breakfast destination. Time to hit the streets.

Where Russia is fixed and inflexible, Istanbul is fluid and free flowing. The rules here are like the addresses, an approximation, meant only to get you in the neighborhood. I had begun to understand this the night before when I looked up the address for Mikla and found that it took me to the right block but didn't commit me to any building in particular. The same was now true for my breakfast spot. The Russians would, however, I think, be quite fond of the way the Turks lay out their streets. They couldn't possibly be more convoluted.

At length I tracked down my destination in an enclosed market with several different food stalls. I called at the one serving Menemen. It was unclear where exactly the seating area ended and the kitchen began. I presented myself to a gentleman standing vaguely in the part of the restaurant dedicated to preparing food rather than eating it, and asked for some Menemen, please.

"Only one?"

Yes.

"Please take a seat."

That kind of protocol would never have flown in Russia. I still would have been waiting for attention from the waitress when, mere minutes later, I was delivered a bubbling cast-iron pan of egg, pepper, spices, sausage, and tomato, more spice red than yolk yellow. Turkish omelette. After setting it down, the guy took the lid off a Tupperware container, exposing about two whole loaves worth of bread. I eyed it, appreciating the generosity, but not sure what I was supposed to do with about ten times more bread than omelette, by volume. I also ordered a Turkish coffee. I soon realized that what I had at the hostel had not been strong Turkish coffee at all. That was a strong cup of American-style, brewed drip coffee. I had just forgot what strong drip coffee was like, since the Russians enjoy a rather lighter cup. This was the size of an espresso shot, served in an oriental ceramic set. It had the consistency of melted chocolate. The gradient of Turkish coffee starts as liquid and ends as solid. Instead of fork and knife, I used pieces of bread to scoop up the omelette. By the end of my meal I looked over and saw that the Tupperware container was mostly empty. I was immensely satisfied.

Before I headed out from breakfast, I spread out my map onto the table. It was a physical copy I had obtained at the airport. I always pick up the free tourist map whenever I touch down in an unfamiliar city. I forgo Google Maps if I can help it. The problem with Google Maps, you see, is that you can never really be lost. It tells you where you are, so you never have to figure it out for yourself. Getting yourself unlost is the best way to quickly become familiar with the layout of a new city. And gaining familiarity with a city’s layout is one of the most efficient ways to gain a sense of intimacy with the place. This was a cityscape I wanted to get to know. I pocketed my phone, resolving not to appeal to its GPS-augmented maps.

I set off in the direction of the Grand Bazaar on a circuitous route, for there was no other kind available. I quickly became nowhere in particular. I was not on any discernible path or route. Istanbul is laid out not as a grid but rather as the pattern glass takes when you throw a small rock at it. It’s as if the road-builders made only game-time decisions about where the road should lead as they were laying the foundations. If you set off down a particular thoroughfare you're just as likely to find yourself circling back to your present junction as going on straight ahead. There’s simply no way of knowing. The other thing about the streets of Istanbul is that you never know what you’ll find on them, but you can be pretty sure it will be some sort of informal commerce. If Paris is a moveable feast, then Istanbul is a permanent market. As I wandered—potentially in circles, I couldn’t tell—I wondered where all these textiles come from. There’s a seemingly limitless supply of cheap clothes, shoes, gadgets, bags, household supplies, and provisions of every nature. Whence the demand? Who, for instance, needs four hundred little girl’s wedding dresses? As my mind slowly returned from its absence I grew concerned with whether I would even know when I breached the Grand Bazaar. Everything I passed was a bazaar. All of it seemed pretty imposing. I wasn’t confident I’d be able to distinguish the minor ones from the Grand One. Eventually I discovered I had ambled in correct direction, and I strode in through an arch labeled GRAND BAZAAR, est. 1461.

At once I was thrust into a sort of capitalist cathedral with high ceilings and densely packed rows commercial stalls rising toward the heavens like a downtown avenue of product-laden skyscrapers. The scale of it resembled the Sistine Chapel, had it originally been zoned for commercial purposes. Salesmen lingered at their stalls like doormen at a building. In the section I had entered they sold mostly familiar sartorial wares: knockoff Gucci, LV, jerseys from the major soccer clubs, that sort of stuff. They didn’t look to be much engaged in the act of selling. Mostly they stood there drinking tea. The tea was delivered by couriers carrying hanging trays that looked like one side of the scales of law. Many of the salesmen yelled to colleagues across the way, or shared quiet confidences with their business partners in the stall. Most of them were just sitting or standing idly, seeming to take it all in, or at least facing the right direction to do so.

I perused a few different boroughs of the Grand Bazaar. There was one with lots of jewelry, shiny and brightly glaring. It was like walking through an intergalactic market hawking small star systems. There was another area, labeled the "Old Bazaar," that sold antiques, like lamps from which you could solicit the services of a genie. The comparatively modern bazaar offered an array of goods without any unifying theme: picture frames, chess boards carved from marble, ceramic plates, glass tea sets, and rakish canes that would seem apropos in the wobbly grip of an octogenarian pimp. Kitty-corner to the stall I looked at now was one with much the same wares—the same chess boards, the same tea sets, though here they were featured in conjunction with various spice jars and décors of an Islamic bent. It occurred to me that something seemed fucked up in the supply and demand system here. There's an awful lot of supply. Turkish economics must operate by different rules, I figured. On the other hand, I wanted all this s**t. It was beautiful and unreasonably cheap. It wasn’t like the flimsy, crappy knockoffs on offer in many such markets. But I didn’t purchase anything, mostly because I didn’t want to have to lug it around. Still, it made me think about the guy selling the stuff. That guy could stand in front of his stall every day for the rest of his life, make his pittance of Turkish Lyra per diem and sell only a handful of goods every so often. It didn’t seem right.

As I continued my stroll I noticed a band of policemen: three guys in jeans and Nikes with Polis vests, one strapped imposingly with an AK-47 diagonally across his chest. This is not an entirely uncommon sight around the world, but it is still somewhat off-putting.

It wasn’t until I chanced upon the borough of preserved food—with teas, dried fruit, and the like—that the dynamics of Bazaaro economics started to jibe. The supply and demand was amortized. The timescale was that of many years, not of now. It was the opposite of scalable and innovative, the prized economic considerations of the modern West. But it was sustainable, which though highly-touted in the West is a much more low priority distinction. I was struck with the realization that all this would continue to carry on after I left, as it had since 1461. The supply could sit there and the demand could wander in as it may. It wasn’t a simple function of this point in time. It left me with a deeply seated appreciation for object permanence, that things are there even when I’m not looking at them. The world continues to go on, whether or not I appreciate it. And I was sincerely grateful just to see it, even if momentarily.

In sum I’ll give the Bazaar points for Grandness, as advertised. But truth be told I expected the Bazaar to be, well, more bizarre. Perhaps I felt it should be filled with turbaned snake charmers, or a well-suited James Bond escaping from a band of international criminals on motorbike, careening off a nearby roof to unsettle a table of civilians just about to sit down for a large family meal. I don't know exactly.

It proved easy to exit. However, it was not easy to know where I had exited once back in the unruly constellation of satellite bazaars. I had no idea which direction I was now oriented. When I stopped to get my bearings I saw a huge mosque. Surely, I thought, this would give me a landmark by which to establish my position. Not the case. When I surveyed the area surrounding the Bazaar on my map, I identified no less than a dozen mosques which I could have been gazing at now. For all I knew, this one could've been too minor even to be included on the map.

I soon discovered that all roads lead back to the Grand Bazaar. I needed to get the hell out of this area to have a hope at establishing my whereabouts. It took me mere seconds to become completely lost. I was suddenly out of range of the main market and ambling helplessly through a sepia-toned hedge maze of storefronts, delivery trucks, and product-strapped couriers. There were no landmarks and no visibility in any direction. There weren’t even any right angles. There were however half a dozen guys unloading a shipment of approximately seven tonnes of the same little boys underwear. At length I found what seemed a promisingly distinctive landmark: a stately building with a plaque labeled ISTANBUL LISIPI. After a bit of scanning I found it on my map. I appeared to be situated on a street that led directly to the main drag. Nope. I ranged up and down the street, trying both directions, but it refused to spit me out anywhere besides nowhere in particular. I was totally lost again. By now I had made the worthwhile discovery that only sixty percent of the streets were on my map, which was already packed with detail. Only about twenty percent of the included streets featured names. When finally I found the main drag I had been searching for I pieced together post hoc from street names that I had been looking at wrong Istanbul Lisipi. I had been at Lisipi Zirkek, not Lisipi Kiz as I had suspected. Of course.

I headed back toward my hostel for a reliable toilet. I found a Starbucks along the way and contemplated a cold coffee. This is something that the rest of the world has yet to figure out—when it’s hot, it’s nice to have the option for an iced coffee or a cold brewed coffee or whatever. Starbucks is the only global institution which reliably abides this philosophy. Also, Starbucks, like me, is from Seattle, so there’s an ounce of hometown pride involved in the process. I have the authority to inform the barista, “I’m from Seattle, so I really know what I’m doing here.” I'll often congratulate the manager on everything being up to snuff. At any rate, the queue was too long, and I desperately required the services of that toilet.

Once relieved and back on the street, I realized that I expected Istanbul to have more smells. Even the roasted corn purveyed on the sidewalk is mostly scentless unless you get a really big snootful. I sort of imagined there would be an ever-present light dusting of za’atar or ras el hanout, like Turkey was actually located inside an oven cooking something exotic and seriously delicious.

Speaking of seriously delicious, I decided to get some ice cream—something to tide me over until I made my way to Asia for lunch. I fetched up at an ice cream stall, where the gentlemen was engaged in serving a family of a mother and four little ones. Whereas the service of ice cream in the US involves a dim-witted, pimply eighteen-year-old scooping from one of thirty-one barrels and inquiring as to whether you'd prefer a sugar or a waffle cone, Turkish ice cream is served with a demonstration, like a hibachi chef at Benihana. This guy had flair. A magnificent mustache, too. He stood at a cart with a refrigerated cavern housing four barrels. The cones were stacked in a leaning tower on the side of his cart like a human-sized scimitar. Above the ice cream man were bells that he’d swat at deftly and rhythmically with his rapier. In his other hand he held not merely a scoop, but an ice cream spade. He served each child individually. I watched him start the little girl off with a cone on which he dolloped a scoop of pink ice cream. Then he thrust his rapier toward the little girl, who would recoil and giggle. While she was distracted he stole back the scoop he had just moments before conveyed to her. This stirred in her brief consternation followed by more giggling. Thus continued a cycle of dolloping, swatting bells, giggling, stealing, thrusting, and more giggling, until the girl had a cone piled high with four colors of ice cream. She was immensely gratified. As the family left still giggling, the man asked me, “Do you want all four flavors?” His voice was about an octave higher than you’d expect for a man whose upper lip was part wildebeest. “Yes, please,” I told him. My presentation was less elaborate, as I was clearly of a more esteemed clientele than his previous patrons. Thankfully, he still smacked the bells a couple times with his rapier. Then, just as he handed me the cone he upended it, and pretended to drop the ice cream. He performed the act so convincingly and with such conviction that my heart dropped and hit the floor at approximately the same time as the cone would have if he had actually dropped it. I giggled like the little girl. Getting Turkish ice cream, I noted, was one of best decisions I’ve ever made.

As I gummed down my ice cream—it was chewy, flavorful, and unrepentantly delightful—I walked past the Sultan Ahmet mosque situated next to my hostel. I reflected on its grandeur, a sort of fractal monolith. Buildings were much better when we built them for God.

I descended the hill on the other side of Sultan Ahmet, headed vaguely in the direction of the famous Ayasophia. I watched as the Bosphorus river shimmered in the distance, like the eponymous cymbals. It was a stroke of brash, spangled sapphire in the otherwise dusty cityscape of Istanbul. I thought I was on a street that would take me directly to Ayasophia. I wasn’t. I intended to cut smartly across the residential hillside, but instead I ended up at the bottom of it on an arterial street that more or less circumscribed Istanbul where it meets the water. I walked along that street. Clearly I would make it to Ayasophia eventually if I just stayed on this street. I spent forty-five minutes walking along, at first admiring the shimmering Bosphorus but then realizing that it was about high time to ask where the fk this mosque was. How the hell do I get there? I knew I was getting close because I had to pick my way through a kilometer long queue of idling tour buses, their drivers napping in their vans. I still couldn’t see anything of significance. Impatiently, I glanced at Google Maps. I didn’t feel as though I was on the verge of becoming unlost. When at length I found my way there, I became confused. That’s it? I thought to myself. There was no real sight, just a mosque. There are mosques every seven or eight steps in this city, so that’s not exactly a big deal. It wasn’t even large. I guess its esteem derives from the fact that it is exceptionally old. As I scrolled unromantically through Google Maps to see if I was indeed missing anything, I realized that I hadn’t even been looking at the famed and idyllic Bosphorus river, as I had thought. It was actually the Marmara Sea. I stormed off, incredulous that I had gone to such trouble just to ogle at something so underwhelming. I later discovered that I had not visited the Ayasophia but the "little" Ayasophia, whose diminutive I had failed to notice. Totally different site. At any rate, I was ready for a new destination. I was ready for my transcontinental crossing to Asia.

I gambled that a bus could take me along the waterfront to the Eminönü ferry terminal. I didn’t know that it would. But it seemed a good bet, since I was on a main drag headed toward a central location. I walked along but there were no bus stops. Magically, as with Catbus bounding out of the darkness in My Neighbor Totoro, a bus appeared with the word Eminönü on top. I waved the bus over, it stopped, and triumphantly I stepped aboard. Not only did it drop me at the intended ferry terminal, but I realized quickly that I was about a manhattan block away from my pide recommendation. I knew this would give me the strength necessary for my transcontinental voyage. Pide is essentially Turkish pizza, but greasier and meatier and therefore better. It comes in an elliptical shape, with a folded galette shell. It’s like a pizza crust orbiting a galaxy of meaty, saucy goodness. I happily inhaled a full serving before setting off for Asia.

I had no explicit destination in Asia. My plan was just to get on a ferry and see where I ended up. There were three ferry terminals, all with vastly different destinations, spanning multiple continents, though I couldn’t quite tell which one went where. I boarded the one I evaluated to have the highest probability of terminating in Asia. I hoped at the very least it would end up somewhere still in Turkey. I boarded the maritime vessel along with six hundred of my closest Turkish friends, and together we set sail for I knew not where. I was one of the last aboard, as I had more or less hopped on whichever ferry left soonest. There was precisely three quarters of a seat available when I got on, and I wedged myself in on the top deck next to some Turkish youths. We took a sharp right out of Eminönü, back along the waterfront where I had taken the bus from Ayasophia. I looked at the hill of Istanbul from the water. After about thirty minutes the boat docked. I went down to the gang plank to discern whether I was at a decent location to disembark. I stood there while the boat’s ramp met the dock. No one got off. Several hundred new passengers stood in wait to pile on. I had no idea where we were, or where this boat would go next. I asked a few people around me—"Excuse me, where are we?" Everyone’s reply was uniformly unhelpful, "Sorry, no English." I equivocated, then at the last second I jumped ship right as boat was kicking off. Good thing, too. I believe the boat was going on to Beşiktaş, back in Europe.

I had made it to Asia. But before I got to exploring I needed to make arrangements to get back to Eminönü. I couldn’t afford to be stuck in Asia and miss my flight. Luckily, the ferry official standing in the vicinity of the terminal was able to direct me to the proper concourse where I found the schedule. There were ferries back to Eminönü every twenty minutes. Perfect.

It was time for a quick jaunt around Asia, a sort of warm up lap before I headed there in earnest. In front of me was a grey and sprawling business district along the water. The action clearly was located on the hill behind it. I ascended. Immediately, I was struck by a feeling of recognition. I was in Hong Kong. It felt to me like an Asian San Francisco, built on a hillside, with brightly lit storefronts catering to an amalgam of eastern and western sensibilities. There was an idiosyncratic flow to people’s movement, also as in Hong Kong. They move with the same purpose they do in West but on the madhouse, strewn-about streets of Asia: Manhattanites in a maze. I wandered into a used bookstore, the delightful kind where the proprietor values books more than organization. He delivered me to the English language section, and over-explained to me how the system worked. I appreciated the earnestness, but I had ascertained everything I needed to know pretty early on: here are the books. At any rate, the Turks must be avid readers because they have a s**t-tonne of book stores. I called afterward at a hipster coffee shop. They had cold brewed coffee in a carafe lingering in a space of frigid clime. Amazing.

I sat outside and listened the conversations of the other patrons. They were all conducted in Turkish. As I matched words to menu items, I realized that spoken Turkish words begin the way I expect, then terminate in something completely indecipherable. At length, I descended back to my port-of-call for a late afternoon trip from Kadıköy, which I learned was the name of the terminal, to Eminönü. I sat atop the ferry in the dusky light of Istanbul.

Eventually I arrived back in Europe. Then I headed to the metro, almost embarked, but decided against it in favor of one more stroll through the streets up to the hostel. At a three way intersection I saw a pavilion with mini chairs and tables, oriental table clothes, and these tiny Turkish teas I’d been seeing all day. I wanted one. It was perfectly positioned to watch the people traffic, too. Strong black tea in a glass three inches tall. Slightly more than a generous shot glass. I repaired back to the hostel bar just in time to watch the evening's soccer match.

It was five, or just after. I looked out over Sultan Ahmet. Then a noise. Let me just say, there is nothing more exotic than the five o’clock call to prayer over the loud speaker in a Muslim city. It is the most non-Western sound in the world. It sounds to naive (and potentially blasphemous) ears like a sitar player drunk on a far eastern spirit, crooning a love song you'll never know the story to. It continues for just about ever. The cadence is such that it dies down, and just when you forgot about it, begins blaring again at the highest register, making the descent all over again.

There was one last stop on my Turkish agenda: Asmalı Cavit. It is an eating establishment located by Mikla—by now feeling like an old haunt of mine—and serving hot and cold meze. When I presented myself to the maitre d’ I inquired about procuring a seat in the restaurant. “Inside is complicated,” he told me, enigmatically. Then he brought me round to an adjacent corridor, which was filled with white-clothed tables. This area was less complicated. I could take a seat toward the back, if that was fine with me. Happily, I accepted. The corridor was terraced, so there were three levels of diners. Since I occupied the furthest back it was also the highest and most regal. I wouldn’t even have to leave my seat to make my usual rounds of inspecting what everyone else is eating. When the waiter approached me I confided in him that I wasn’t sure what to order but I wanted lots. He required no further information. “I’ll bring you a plate of cold starters.” I’ve never felt so understood. As he turned to submit my order I called out, “Wait!”

“Yes?”

“I’ll take an order of Raki, please.” Turkish absinthe.

“With water?” he said, and raised an eye brow.

“Sure,” I acquiesced. I wasn’t sure how one was supposed to take Turkish absinthe, so I went with the house recommendation. The Raki came out swiftly. It was served as a triptych. There was the shot-glass worth of absinthe, a tall glass filled with ice, and a small a pitcher of cold water. I set to work on my build-your-own Turkish cocktail, dumping the absinthe over the ice wholesale. I settled on a portion of water somewhere between my masculine inclination for neat spirits and the rather large volume the glass would contain. Of a sudden, the concoction turned ghostly white—chemistry meets conjuring. I took a sip. “Jesus Christ!!” This seemed the only handle by which my mind could grasp the experience. The drink felt like a swift kick to the nuts, but it happened where my face should have been instead of further south. I ventured another sip. Another audible “Jesus Christ!!” was the only response I could produce. There was something eminently realistic about imbibing this drink, like reality shone through with startling clarity after every intake. Two sips in, I could feel clinically interesting effects come on. I tried to recall whether I had passed any banks on the way up here, and I flirted with the idea of sticking them up. Just as I remembered I forgot to bring my pistol, my cold starters came, a plate of delicious mysteries. I was filled with a child’s wonder as I surveyed a landscape of variously colored and textured entities I knew nothing about. I stuck them in my mouth to learn more. The servings resembled what you’d find in the prepared section of your local deli, but it was as if they were assembled by a martian who was given a slate of fresh earthly ingredients and a keen incisiveness for eliciting delightful gustatory experiences. This alien had none of our usual prejudices about how food should look or be combined. There were spicy little green beans (actually seaweed), fava beans, spiced tomato paste, all with a vibrancy and color palate that felt at once exotic and lucid. I took another cool hit of Raki-inspired reality. “Jésus Cristo!!” It came out in Spanish this time.

I took a break from the plate and surveyed my surroundings. I cast my gaze skyward. There was no sky, it was simply the interior façade of an apartment complex. I was seated almost in the inner courtyard. I dispatched with my food much as a dog chows down on her bowl, though with the addition of much happy and rewarding experimentation—“what if I dipped the seaweed in the tomato? Exquisite!” When I was finished and ready for another go-around my waiter was nowhere in the vicinity. I searched around for him, but all I could see were the goblins hanging from the AC units of apartments above and the other patrons in the restaurant wearing grass skirts and dancing the hula in unison. I made visual contact with the waiter from across the room. I gestured that I was ready for the next round. He made a circular motion with his hands and mouthed the word next. I nodded. He gave me the thumbs up and left, never to be heard from again. The goblins must’ve got him. I sat patiently for about twenty minutes before getting up, collapsing like a felled tree, dusting myself off, and inquiring with the only remaining familiar face—the Maitre D’, he who spake of complicated matters—about whether I had an order forthcoming. “No,” he told me politely. I told him I'd like to fix that. I ordered the lamb chop, which I had been eyeing. Then I added, “I’ll have another plate of starters, too.” What I had meant to convey was that I’d like a different plate of starters—a martian landscape as mysterious as the first, perhaps sweltering this time. I thought since my terse order had been so deftly intuited the first time around, I’d be just as lucky the second. I wasn’t. I got the exact same plate of cold starters, which I still wolfed it down, scattering bits of kibble across the white-tiled kitchen floor. I paid the reckoning, then at the moment I reached for my last dose of absinthe I was sucked into it, like a flushing toilet, and all at once found myself back at the hostel. It had been a Portkey.

Intrigued by this newfound form of transportation but otherwise undaunted, I collected my bags from Cheers and bid farewell to my friends, Ahmed and Sinan. “Later, man!” they called as I scooted out along the cobbled streets of Istanbul to grab a train back to the airport.

I took a seat on the train—old men, women, and children be damned. I pulled out my phone, connected the train’s Wifi (yes, Americans, even economically imperiled developing countries offer this service now), and began to watch the second half of a World Cup game, Portugal versus someone. As I streamed the match, I saw the white-mustached Turkish gentleman next to me eyeing my screen, surreptitiously, as one eyes a dirty magazine tucked away in the far corner of the rack. I inclined the screen toward him, a gesture of international goodwill. He nodded in appreciation, and together we gazed at the figures jaunting around on the otherwise verdant illuminations of my phone. Moments into our shared and intimate viewing experience, the Turkish man leaned in to share a confidence.

“Beşiktaş is number one team in Turkey.” He gave me a wide smile. “Beşiktaş is my team,” he clarified, pressing a thumb to his chest and then an index finger distantly toward, presumably, the glorious municipality of Beşiktaş.

“Oh?” I said, impressed.

Then he pointed at the screen, “Pepe plays for Beşiktaş.”

Pepe is a Portuguese defensive stalwart. He is one of Portugal’s most internationally prominent players, after Cristiano Ronaldo. Not only that, the man relayed as further intelligence: the Beşiktaş outfit also boasts among its numbers Ricardo Quaresma, who is a less distinguished footballer, but notable as one of the few Portuguese players who doesn’t identify under a mononym.

“Oh, wow,” I intoned, convincingly, as if playing an Owen Wilson character.

This Turkish-American connection via the Portuguese pleased us both and we sat there in happy silence for a few minutes. Then he retrieved his phone from his shirt pocket. He scrolled through and offered me a picture of him and his daughter at a game, indicating that this was Beşiktaş. “This is very nice,” I said. In return I offered a picture of Haily and me at our Portugal game in Russia and explained how I had actually been at World Cup before coming to Turkey. The man was keen on this information, as of course he was, because Beşiktaş is technically in Europe.

When his stop came we parted as friends, as two men who had just before been strangers and in the intervening moments shared with one another intimate experiences held closely to our hearts and connected on a deeply-felt, fundamentally human level, which only an event like the World Cup brings out. Soon the train pulled up at the airport terminal. And as I hopped off the train I reached into my jacket pocket where I felt the smooth surface of a foreign object. I looked down and pulled out a manila envelope. It was stuffed with reams of neatly wrapped, bank-marked two-hundred Lira notes. “Now where do you suppose these came from?” I said to myself, depositing them furtively back into my pocket and making my way through the automatic doors of Istanbul’s Ataturk airport.

I got to the airport at 11:30 PM for my 1:30 AM flight. The muslim girl at the Turkish Airlines check-in counter greeted me cheerfully. I handed her my passport. She banged away on the keyboard as airline clerks do—about a thousand clicks for what you imagine can only be about a dozen bits of information. Then she pulled a phone up to her ear and made a call. It wasn’t a short call, either. Not a good sign. She was speaking in Turkish, but I could make out the word “standby.” My stomach dropped. This had happened to me once before, in Mumbai. I had booked an intercontinental flight (on Air f*g France, for the record), which was slated to depart in the wee hours for Paris en route back to America. There had been a tinsy miscalculation, and the doggedly optimistic algorithms at Air France had, unfortunately, unexpectedly, inexplicably, overbooked the flight. I was one of a handful of ticketed passengers denied entry. As you can imagine, I wasn’t happy. But as you also might be able to imagine, there were people who got more heated than I. One guy started yelling at the poor Indian girl behind the desk, “You can’t DO this to me! Do you know who I AM? I have somewhere to BE!” She did her best to assuage him. At first I understood his rage, empathized even, at least in the sense of mirroring his emotion. I thought he was a douchebag for yelling at her, sure, but I understood where he was coming from. He continued in this vein for tens of minutes. “Where I have to be is IMPORTANT! And I am getting on that PLANE!” Eventually I couldn’t watch anymore, because he was taking his anger out on this girl who couldn’t do anything about it. “Do you know who I AM?” He yelled at the clerk. “Yes, fuckhole we all know who you are,” I chimed in. “You’re a pompous, self-important, poorly-adjusted jerk. So just sit down and shut up like the rest of us.” I didn’t actually say that to him. But I did intervene and attempt to soothe him, which worked and the girl shot me a look of sincere gratitude.

Anyway, the muslim girl on the phone had still not addressed me directly. She went over to her colleague for a brief conference. Then she returned and told me to follow. We went over to another counter. She consulted again with her colleagues in Turkish. After they reached a verdict, her colleague printed me a boarding pass. The girl handed it to me, smiling, and said, “Your gate is not open yet, but you can go through customs.” I looked down at my ticket.

“Is there a problem?” I asked. Where my boarding pass should’ve had a seat number it just said “JMP.”

“The flight’s overbooked,” she told me. “Just wait at the gate until everyone else is boarded. Then see if you get on.”

While I’d been waiting I had noticed a sign that said you should request a compensation brochure in the event that you’re bumped from a flight due to overbooking. I requested one.

“I don’t understand,” she said, suddenly not an adept English speaker.

“Brochure,” I said, pointing at the sign.

“No brochure,” she countered. “You’ll be fine.”

I gave her a blank look for three silent seconds, then dismissively rolled my eyes at her and huffed off. As I walked away I thought about how that wasn’t a very nice thing of me to do and, reminded of my time in Mumbai, turned back and yelled, “Do you know who I AM?”

I was in the throws of uncertainty concerning one’s destiny that only a waylaid transcontinental flight can bring on. I threw down my bags at the gate I was slated to fly out of and took a brief leave of consciousness, which was the most productive thing I could bring myself to do. When I awoke I was still marinating in qualms about the stochastic nature of my flight assignment—would I be able to get on another flight? Would I have to go back into the city? Would Sinan and Ahmed take me back? Of course they would, I assured myself. But it didn’t help.

As the seating area around the gate filled up, I started to see them—white Africans. They were headed to Johannesburg, like me. They were speaking Afrikaans. I would’ve found this very exciting if I weren’t so nervous. One by one I watched each of them be graciously accepted onto the plane. Once the great throng of people had boarded the plane, I presented myself at the counter to be installed into any unclaimed seat. They said they were still waiting for a few passengers to trickle in. I took a half step away from their desk and tried to put on a patient face as I waited. Joining me in hoping that the stragglers had succumb to some unfortunate scenario were a couple of backpackers and an asian girl, with tattoos, in her thirties. We shared brief commiserations. A pang of kinship shot between us while resting in the clammy and masculine hands of Lady Fortuna.

“Hope we get on,” the Asian girl offered to me.

“Yeah, me too,” I replied.

A family with two small children came running through the terminal, waving their tickets, and petitioning the agents not to close the door just yet.

Then as the doors were closing, in dramatic slow motion, the clerks went bang-bang on their keyboards and out popped a fistful of boarding passes. They presented them to me and the two backpackers. They told the Asian girl there was no room for her. The three of us gave our comrade a doleful look as we were ushered down the runway. I wished her luck. Then I promptly forgot about her. For me, this was a happy occasion. I was on my way to Africa.

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In this episode, I go in-depth with Mahzarin Banaji on her life story. Mahzarin started off just about as far away from life as a Harvard professor as you can imagine. And while she's a superstar of social psychology now, her introduction to the field was a chance encounter with a set of the five volume Handbook of Social Psychology, which she haggled down to a dollar per book at a random market in a train station. She's a truly fascinating human being, as well as a top-notch scientist.

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The Russians are a people who are serious about their rail travel. I began to grasp this point with a certain nuanced clarity as we took the train north. Our car was, to put it modestly, well-appointed. The bathrooms were spacious, nicer than anything I encountered in any building in Russia. It was so clean and inviting I felt inclined to lay down on the floor and take a brief nap inside. I could lock the door, so no one would disturb me.

The Russian countryside passed out our window like an old-fashioned movie background circulating on a loop. It was difficult to know what we were looking at except lots of pine trees and a few minor villages interspersed throughout. The foreground pines zipped by, while the background pines lingered in the picture.

Upon getting into the city we checked into our new residence, called Cuba Hostel. We were informed that we had not gotten the proper paperwork from our previous hostel (no surprise there). The Russian government likes to keep tabs on the lodging arrangements of tourists. We had apparently failed to register with the appropriate authorities. Once you move on from your initial residence, you cannot gain this paperwork. This was a little disconcerting given that we were going to skip around from hostel to hostel every two days or so for next few weeks. The girls at the front desk gave us a slight reprimand but told us that it wouldn’t necessarily be a problem. Surely we weren’t the only World Cup tourists who had the misfortune of initially lodging with a Russian host who couldn’t be bothered to fill out the correct paperwork.

We spent that first afternoon wandering from pub to pub watching the games. Our first stop was at the bar next door to our hostel, where we ordered Chicken Kiev with a Kasteel Rouge. We were gratified to discover that every entrée comes with a gratis shot of whiskey—a practice which should no doubt be more widely adopted. Argentina and Iceland played to a tie. We made friends with the Iranians sitting next to us. We also became friends with the drunk Germans, though it wouldn’t be accurate to say we made friends because a drunk German typically considers anyone close enough to share a Prost or two as a natural alliance. We decided to move to another bar for the next game. We ended up underground in a sweaty “traditional English” pub. Every room in St. Petersburg boasts a mysteriously higher level of humidity than the world outside. The best outcome is a bit of additional moisture, the worst outcome is the scent of warm cheese and Russian body odor. We sat at a table with some Americans, from the midwest, who had spent the last four years teaching in Korea and Shanghai. As we left, we nodded goodbye to the Socceroos behind us.

Aussie #1: “Go Australia!”

“That’s right, mate!” I replied in a good natured, moderately drunken spirit.

Aussie #2, obviously a very clever lad: “Good luck to USA in the tournament. Oh, wait…”

To which I replied, “Good luck remaining influential in world politics.”

Oh, wait.

We went out to get a feel for St. Petersburg. If Moscow is arrayed as nested circles, then St. Petersburg is arranged as intersecting lines. Moscow’s center of gravity is Red Square, and everything emanates out from it. St. Petersburg features a number of main drags along which the prominent landmarks are scattered. We walked now along one of the most touristed main drags, then up toward the Church of Savior on Spilled Blood. The extravagant architectural sensibilities that produced St. Basil’s Cathedral—the one topped with exotic sour cream and dumplings—are more prominent in St. Petersburg than they are in Moscow, as Spilled Blood attests. It isn’t nearly as dire as it sounds. Though less celebrated than St. Basil’s, it is every bit as enchanting. It’s a church conceived by Pixar animators, with improbable spires plopped upon decadent columns. A magnificent, blood red brick structure festooned with elaborate dashes of color. It is a curious mix of eastern and western, resisting easy categorization—just like Russia itself. We stood for a few moments to take in it.

The church was situated right next to the FIFA Fan Zone, which we went to investigate afterward. The Fan Zone was a large concrete swath of city set aside for fans to watch the game. They served beer there, as well as some game food. The most that it had to recommend it was that the television screen was large, the alcohol was attainable, and the venue was public. It was exclusively standing room. None of these were inducement enough for us to hang out around. So we retired for the evening.

We awoke the next morning at 5am with the sun high overhead and spilling into our room. We heard the sound of partying on the streets, straining to perpetuate the festivities in transition from the wee hours to more substantial ones. There were chants in Spanish. We heard someone york in the bathroom adjacent to our room. Then we fell back asleep.

When we had risen for the day we set off for St. Petersburg’s ethnography museum. We found it on a street several removed from one of the cities main arteries. We were the only people on the block. Thinking the museum might be closed, we approached its vast wooden doors, standing ten feet high, and tugged on them experimentally. They opened in an empty room with high ceilings, at least three stories tall. We walked over to the ticket booth. No one in line. I cheerfully engaged the ticket clerk, testing how far English would get me if I delivered it with a gracious smile. The lady, however, seemed indifferent to whether or not a warm body found its way into the museum. She mechanically slid us a ticket and a map, then we went to explore the exhibits.

The display gave accounts of the various indigenous ethnic groups of the former Russian empire: Moldovan, Ukranian, Belarussian, etc. Each display featured a tidy alcove of life-sized figurines engaged in activities, such as fishing or weaving. Importantly, the figurines were not intended to be representations of what the people looked like—with ungainly carvings and over-exaggerated features—but just to give the feeling that a scene was taking place, with a person and an action. Each display had a wall of labeled paraphernalia germane to the societies in which the peoples lived. The displays were clearly put together with great care and admiration for their subjects. The little old ladies monitoring the exhibits, unlike most museum security, seemed like they would have responded with passion and knowledge if you had asked them about the exhibit they oversaw. Of course we couldn’t because we didn’t speak Russian. The exhibits were labeled in Russian, so we were unable to understand the specifics of them. We discovered a stash of laminated cards explaining what we were looking at, but we were disappointed to find that they too were in Russian. One of the monitors observed us looking over the card and explained to us, in Russian, something lengthy and involved that amounted to the effect of “Put the card back when you’re done.”

We were unable to learn all that much about the indigenous peoples of Russia, except that they were more various than we might have supposed. But it was clear from the exhibits that each of these people groups, along with the contemporary brand of Russians, were a people who payed exquisite attention to detail. Their traditional garbs without exception were complex and ornately decorated, as if they had had all winter with nothing to do but spend it sewing and had used that time productively. Whoever constructed the exhibits shared the same keenness for nuance as the people depicted. My favorite were the dioramas. These weren’t your elementary schools constructions in a cardboard box. These were fantastic beyond anything I could have ever imagined a diorama to be. They were built in such a way as to convey the appearance of linear perspective. In a typical diorama, the figures in a scene are all the same size, and looking over it as a being of larger magnitude, you have the privileged perspective to view the scene as God would, everything all at once uncommitted to any particular vantage point. This description is merely factual and does nothing to give you the sense of how much goes into executing such an effect in three dimensions. Not so with these displays. One diorama showed a seamstress workshop. The sewing stations in the back were smaller than those in the front, like they would be in an oil painting, giving the scene an appearance of depth. I was hugely impressed.

Another of the dioramas was of an entire town. Every detail was carefully implemented, all the way down to the texture of the thatched roofs. I got the feeling that I was seeing the same pride in the presentation of a model city that I had observed in the presentation of a real one in Moscow.

My one regret from the museum was that I got the feeling that I was looking at a varied and diverse set of people groups, but I was unable to distinguish between them. I couldn’t even contextualize them geographically, because I couldn’t read the inscriptions. They didn’t have maps, either, which would’ve been a big help. Even with that in mind, it was a delightful showcase of, in the words of the museum’s introductory video, the “universal and synchronism of culture of the Russian empire.”

We were ready for a coffee break and presently found a hole-in-the-wall coffee shop on our walk back toward the main drag. I got a cup of coffee and a donut. It is well known that Europeans give Americans st for their croissants. And they’re right. Americans just don’t have the wherewithal to make croissants like Europeans do. I don’t care how good the bakery is. They’re not gonna make a croissant like you could get at even a mediocre boulangerie in Paris. What is less well recognized is that a symmetrical inability applies to Europeans attempting to make donuts. They just don’t get it. The proper execution of a donut is beyond them. Just as Americans don’t have the proper cultural legacy to do a croissant with that je nais se quoi, it’s not within the cultural repertoire of Europeans to get the significant details of a donut correct—from the springiness of the dough, to the proper surface tension when you bite into the epidermis, to a committed distinction between cake and raised donuts, to icing that doesn’t immediately call to mind molten plastic that is in the process of setting. Europeans couldn’t make a donut that competes with even a meager offering from Dunkin. This was, at any rate, the theory I emphatically related to Haily as I scarfed down my donut.

Caffeinated and reveling in cultural superiority we made our way to the Fabergé museum. I must admit I didn’t expect much from a gallery whose most celebrated attraction is a collection of nine eggs. Big deal, right? But as soon as we walked in I was struck by a feeling of recognition. This was the same love of ornateness and convolution that had inspired the exhibits in the ethnography museum. Whereas the indigenous Russians developed complex ornamental clothing, the imperial Russians developed complex ornamental eggs. If the Moldovans or the Ukranians had had the proper equipment, no doubt they would’ve been churning out fantastic eggs all winter long. These eggs were the centerpiece of the collection, obviously—colored in glowing azures and low-on-the-horizon sunset, studded with diamonds and other baubles that made you comprehend why these ornaments are so expensive. They looked substantial enough that if you tried to pick them up your hand would immediately be pinned to the floor, like a mortal attempting to wield Thor’s hammer. They were ornate without giving the impression of being overly busy. Nothing was superfluous; if one pattern were removed, it would feel like it’s missing something. Even the rooms that housed the eggs were spectacular: gold-laced fenestration, moulding that commanded attention, and a chandelier that was, well, one big ass chandelier, which is the only thing that can separate one chandelier from another in my mind. The museum featured more than eggs, too. One case was filled with tea sets that would make Queen Elizabeth blush. This all felt like the logical extension of what we’d previously seen, and it was superbly satisfying.

Now it was time for a drink. We repaired to a bar which we had identified as suitable establishment for day drinking (it was about 2:30). We were the only customers. We like being the only customers. Partially, it's about service. We don’t want to wait. Nor do we want to compete for the bartender’s attention. But we also like to get to know the person making our drinks behind the bar. That’s the difference between a chef and a bartender. The position of a chef is not customer-facing. A bartender plies her craft in the open. But these bartenders—Russian bartenders—were there solely to conduct business. They had no interest in banter or introductory dialogue, as is customary in America. Our relationship was transactional—what do you want? I’ll get it for you. You drink it. That’s it. We’d hoped instead that we might’ve made friends with the gentlemen before their shifts began in earnest and knocked back a couple convivial shots of vodka initially at our behest, then a round on the house, as a sort of celebration of a life and all that it has to offer. Alas.

That night we went to the Fan Zone again. This time for the Mexico versus Germany game. Now the Moroccans and the Egyptians were out en masse. Both of these groups endeared themselves to us throughout our time in St. Petersburg. In the case of the Moroccans, you could not possibly imagine a friendlier group of people. I went around the city in my Portuguese Ronaldo jersey. The Portuguese and the Moroccans were slated to play one another the following week. Seeing my jersey, dozens of Moroccans came up to me and asked to take a picture. We may be adversaries tomorrow but today we are comrades, drawn together by the mutual respect inherent in a competition. It is an amazing sight of the World Cup to see people representing different cultures taking pictures together and acting in a congenial manner expressly because they come from opposing factions. The world can use as much of that as it can get, wouldn’t you say? The Egyptians, for their part, are very good at cheering. I didn’t meet a single North African who wasn’t a remarkably warm and agreeable person.

Afterwards we went to Orthodox, the preeminent craft cocktail venue of St. Petersburg. Orthodox specializes in traditional Russian alcoholic beverages. We sampled Polugar (the Russian national drink, also known as "bread wine"), Chacha (a type of brandy, also know as "grape vodka"; Russians don't have command over an especially large array of alcoholic templates), and Khrenovukha (vodka made from horseradish root; this one infused with wasabi). Each of these base spirits was paired with a unique flavor profile, such as sea buckthorn. Afterward our stomaches felt as if they’d been experimented on by a Russian chemist. We felt finally felt culturally grounded in Russia.

On our way back to the hostel, staggering jauntily through the streets of St. Petersburg, we stopped for funnel cake. Vendors are scattered throughout the streets of the city selling these absurdly delicious treats. The essential idea is to take dough, and wrap it around a tube which looks more or less like what you'd use to repaint your living room. Then you cook it on a wall of spits. After that, douse it in something sweet, like cinnamon sugar. Happiness ensues. While waiting for funnel cake, we chatted up some Moroccans. I can't honestly remember what they said, but I can tell you they were, as always, very nice.

Crossing the street in Russia is like crossing Las Vegas Boulevard. The destination might only be 20 yards away, but it could take you 45 minutes to get there. It seemed we spent whole days waiting at walk signals.

We walked to the Hermitage, which is known as a building of historical significance in St. Petersburg. What is less known is that it is also the world’s largest and most well-appointed doll house. It looks as if the architect was inspired by the finest playhouses available to young girls in 1950s America. It is so big that it is impossible to take in the whole façade in one view. It is also painted teal. Specifically, it’s the teal that a thirteen-year-old girl chooses when she’s bored of whatever the original color of her room was. It is a grand, feminine, and slightly surreal building.

We made the long walk across the city's main bridge. It was hot enough to set brownie batter. After wandering streets that felt increasingly suburban, we chanced upon a vast, open compound. The compound, it turned out, was something of a lost and found bin of monuments and attractions. My favorite was a series of still shots celebrating Putin's presidency. They were printed out on posters the size of a large television. Each depicted a memorable moment of Putin’s term. Some of the events seemed significant, such as Putin gravely signing a document, German chancellor Angela Merkel nodding approvingly in the background. Other events commemorated seemed significant but in a different way. Take for instance a shot of ol' Vlad riding a horse bare-chested exposing the fleshy expanse of his upper body. It looked like someone had taken the kinds of pictures that a normal person would post on social media and printed them out and stuck them in the ground at the entrance to this fortress. I loved it.

Among the other attractions on the premises was a tall and pointy church, several remarkable statues of giant, human-sized rabbits, like something out of Alice in Wonderland, a world-record-holding bug, and an exhibit on King Tut. We were unable to figure out what was remarkable about the bug, other than it certainly was a doozie.

Then we went to the State Museum of Russian political history. Russian museums in general have the delightful benefit of being astonishingly cheap and of commendably high quality. They do on the other hand tend to have the drawback of being almost entirely in Russian. This is not especially helpful if this is not a language over which you have a solid command. They feature lots of details, not a lot of narrative. What was clear was that Russians have for most of their history been at the mercy—or lack thereof—of their rulers.

Sated on Russian history, we made our back toward the city center. At length we passed a bus with the slogan for the Egyptian national team: “When you say Pharoahs, the world must get up and listen.”

Oh, must they?

The thing is, I’m sure this makes perfect sense in Arabic. Unfortunately it’s quite unsuitable for English. I think this is something that we tend to forget about unless expressly reminded of—just how differently sentiments can be expressed in different languages. Only when we are faced with the problem of translation (which we rarely are) does it become apparent. That being said, most World Cup national slogans are stupid, or at the very least lack wit.

Poland’s for instance is, “Go Poland!” That must’ve required a lot of thought.

But at least it’s a coherent thesis. Some countries are just not to be trusted in this respect. Consider Australia’s in 2014: "Socceroos: Hopping Our Way Into History!" Maybe it's best not to indulge the creative itch for sloganeering, if that’s not your strong suit.

Here’s one that’s not so terrible, Senegal in 2018: “IMPOSSIBLE IS NOT SENEGALESE.” (Note that it’s not uncommon for teams to opt for all caps, presumably because it’s a more intimidating way of delivering the content than simply stating one’s slogan.) However, the slogan becomes a bit more suspect in light of the 2014 French motto: "Impossible Is Not A French Word.” See any similarities? Maybe the French wiped out the notion of impossibility during their colonial rule, who’s to say.

Here’s a couple good ones from 2010. Denmark’s rather provocative claim: "All you need is a Danish team and a dream.” New Zealand’s rather casual: “Kickin’ it Kiwi style.”

In the evening we set off to find an appropriate venue to watch the Belgium game. We stumbled upon a Belgian brasserie. We poked our head in and were disappointed to find that the establishment was full. Then a table in the back noticed my Belgium jersey and beckoned us over. We graciously joined them. The occupants were Belgian Moroccans, or Moroccan Belgians—at any rate ethnic Moroccans who lived in Belgium.

“You Belgian?” asked one of them.

“No,” I replied. They eyed me suspiciously.

“Why Belgium?”

I didn’t have a particularly strong answer to this.

One of the Moroccans was a drinker, loud and emphatic. He pounded the table when an opportunity was missed by the Belgian national team. His friend, not a drinker, was stolid and gestured for his compatriot to calm the hell down. The non-drinker didn’t have a strong command of English. We made a brief attempt at an exchange in Spanish, and then in Dutch, both of which were more successful. It’s a rare moment on planet earth that someone is worse at English than I am at those languages. But there you are.

After the game we went in search of further drink, unconstrained by association with the European lowlands. We found our way into an alley in which we had identified a cozy bar of interest the night before. We had declined to stay then since it didn’t have a TV to watch soccer. We took a couple seat along the back wall. The bar counter was three sides of a rectangle, each face with three or four seats. There were about half a dozen seats along the back wall. It was intimate. You could listen in to any conversation in the establishment if you were so inclined. Everyone there was Russia. No English menu, either. The bartender suggested some local fare: a Moscow Mule and a White Russian. We declined those offers. We managed two negotiate a couple mystery drinks—whatever the bartender found himself into at the time. We got the drinks. They were served high in sugar content, in accord with Russian preference. News spread through the bar that we were Americans. One of the men sitting at the bar leaned over to me. “My friend Roman wants to know," he asked, as if soliciting an illicit substance. "Why Belgium?”

The cocktails frankly were not good but the people were and that’s just as well. That’s really the most that I can tell you because my notes from the night were not that helpful and my memories were not well retained in any more natural form. When a couple spots opened up at the bar we moved over to sit next to everyone else. We did eventually order a couple White Russians. It's a delicious drink, really. The barkeep served us another dealer’s choice, this time a Sambuca and cream (our new friends were not sophisticated palates).

We saw the bartender serve a set of shots to another group of patrons. They were in vials. The set included a dozen shots in total. We ordered a round. We liked the look of it—real Russian chemistry—but it was far too much for us. We were pretty knackered at this point. So we shared with the bar. Needless to say, this act endeared us to the locals. To our left were a couple gentlemen with whom I got along with very nicely. They took a great interest in me. We suspected them to be homosexuals, so I won’t disclose their identities here since the Russian government doesn’t look kindly on that sort of thing. We spent most of the night conversing with them and then also, sitting perpendicular to us at the bar, with Roman and Roman’s friend. I impressed them all with my ability to spell Polugar in Cyrillic.

Then we went back to Orthodox. We tried to convince our new friends—those of the unsophisticated palates—to come with us. It was, after all, traditional Russian alcohol. They politely had one drink, exchanged perplexed glances while they thought we weren’t looking, then took off. We ended up making friends with some Belgians. We discussed the Congo and the United Nations, or something like that. They were a very worldly pair. But we were not, suffice to say, in the best state to entertain nuanced political discourse.

The previous evening I had filed a request for laundry service with the front desk of our hostel. Judging from her expression, I could not have saddled the young woman at the front desk with a weightier imposition. That morning I asked her if our laundry was done. She told me it wasn’t. “But we saw it in the drier with an hour left last night.” She gave me a pained look to confirm that I was going to make things difficult. The two of us went in search of my clothes. When after a couple minutes we were unable to locate them she sort of shrugged said, “don’t worry.”

“I’m not not going to worry,” I told her. “I have no faith in you.”

“It’s here,” she said indicating toward the dryer.

“But these aren’t my clothes,” I said as I rifled through someone else’s delicates.

She disappeared for a moment to do something else. I couldn’t tell what. I stood there and researched places I had already searched a couple times. She came back. “Don’t worry,” she repeated. “In here.”

Then she reached into the dryer and pulled out a drawstring bag, which upon inspection was full of our clothes. This seems like it might perhaps have been worth mentioning at the outset.

Laundry progress verified, we presented ourselves next at Kazan Cathedral. This is the most notable cathedral in St. Petersburg. It take up an entire city block, in two directions. Most of the building is a series of extended wings supported by columns, as if designed for a raised air strip, rather than a sanctuary. Entering the cathedral, you’re not struck with the same gravity that often comes with these kinds of churches. The difference is that Kazan feels that it has been preserved in a way other cathedrals are not. It is like walking into a living room where all of the furniture is covered in plastic. Everything might as well be covered in Saran wrap. The interior showed the same commitment to detail as every other cultural landmark in Russia. A long queue formed to offer a prayer in front of a small picture of Jesus. It seemed an extremely individualized experience. The visages of saints and important people in portraits hanging on the wall were noticeably different than they are in Catholic or Protestant traditions. There's something slightly unorthodox about Russian orthodoxy.

Our main attraction for the day was a museum called the Kunst Kamera, the main anthropological museum of St. Petersburg. It proved difficult to enter. When we approached it from a main street, there was a small door marked “group entrance.” There was no one coming in or out, and it was too undistinguished of an entrance for such a large and significant building. We followed the building around down a side street. There was another, more conspicuous entrance. It too was labeled “group entrance.” We weren’t sure if the entrance was designed for us or for buses full of Russian school children. The queue was only a half dozen people or so, but they were lined up outside of the building waiting to get in so there were no officials to ask. We didn’t want to wait in line only to find that we didn’t qualify as a group. So we continued to walk around another side of the building down an even smaller street—a back alley, really. We found a small door marked “exit.” I’m not sure why it seemed to us that an exit was more promising than either of the entrances we’d found, but I think we were tired of inspecting doors. We tried it. The door opened, and we entered. At least that way we’d be inside.

We wandered all the way through the lower level of the museum by the restrooms and the coat check only to eventually find our way back to the second “group entrance” we’d come across. This was what the people outside had been waiting to get into. We inquired with the guard, thinking it might be possible to sneak out through this door and join the line outside. Of course, it wasn’t. This was an entrance and therefore it is not in its nature to be utilized as an exit. So we walked back through the museum, back down the alley, and onto the side street. By the time we got back to the appropriate entrance the line was several dozen people long.

The Kunst Kamera’s take on “anthropology” was more like a sort of human zoo or natural history museum. Each wing considered a different geographical area, and behind the glass of each case was a different tribe or people group. It was similar to the ethnography museum featuring the indigenous people of Russia in the contents of its displays, but it lacked the obvious sense of respect and admiration for its subjects. There were plastic life-sized figurines of people with exotic features and brown skin. Tools and primitive implements were arranged on the wall. It all had the feel of “isn’t this a curious specimen of a savage?” Not a good look for anthropology.

Granted, material culture is difficult to interpret out of context (“What do you supposed they did with this baseball bat looking thing?”). But it really wasn’t put together in any compelling manner. The overall thesis of the museum was, “There are a great many places in the world and in each one of them the people make objects of various forms and complexions.” Not a terribly interesting or nuanced insight. It was like looking at a pile of bones and with an inscription that says, “Together these bones make a dinosaur. Use your imagination.” You don’t actually learn anything about the dinosaur from taking a casual look over an unstructured collection of femurs and teeth. It’s the same problem as a “Great Books” course you’d take in Freshman English. Yes, the collection is impressive. But it’s not about anything in particular. Really the only thing it successfully conveys is to exoticize the groups of people it features. It was heavily populated by tourists, too.

I’d heard tell that there was an exceptionally peculiar exhibit in the museum but wasn’t availed of any details. I hadn’t thought much about it when I entered a wing innocuously labeled “First Scientific Collections.” I entered unaware. Before I could make note of the collection my attention was arrested by a thud and then an emerging circle of onlookers. A young girl, maybe thirteen or so, had just fainted. She was blond. Her mother was able to collect her off the floor and usher her into a chair by the window. A museum attendant came over to see if she was alright. I looked on at the excitement with interest. At first I didn’t actually associate the fainting with the display. I just figured that the girl had a condition in which she just keeled over from time to time. Or maybe she was eminently hung over. Who knows?

But then I looked at the case that had temporarily relieved her of conscious bodily control. It was an exhibit featuring deformed fetuses, preserved in formaldehyde. I looked around and saw that the room was full of shelves with dead babies in jars, each with some striking defect, such as a comprehensive absence of limbs, or six eyes, or a hand where its ear is supposed to be. I would like to report that it’s not the single most disturbing thing I’ve ever seen. But I can’t. It was the single most disturbing thing I've ever seen. However the Russians and the tourists alike seemed unmoved. They looked on with a certain detached curiosity, as if they were staring at a collection of exotic flowers rather than pickled dead babies. “Tasteless” seems like a harsh critique for a venerable institution such as the Kunst Kamera. But the presence of judicious and thoughtful presentation by the museum’s curators was very hard to detect.

And with that imagery to contemplate, we took leave of St. Petersburg and boarded a night train bound for Moscow.

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Spanish cheers went up in celebration as our plane touched down in Moscow. “Arriba! Vamanos!” Partly we celebrated a safe landing in Russia. Partly we celebrated the distance we’d come. I’d crossed an ocean and a continent. The Mexicans one continent more than that. The Peruvians another still. But most of all we celebrated the World Cup and the events that would transpire over the coming weeks. Then our delegations separated, and I went off to meet up with my girlfriend, Haily, at our hostel.

It was past midnight when we got off the plane, and I needed to catch a cab to my hostel. I also hoped to procure a SIM card for my phone, allowing me to telecommunicate in country, but this was less of a priority. The airport didn't have Wifi (at least, you needed a Russian phone number to access it). But it’s not like anyone had any important information to tell me at this point.

I had a few different options of what to do next and spent maybe twenty minutes equivocating among all of them. There was a taxi kiosk inside the terminal with a long queue, and a taxi booth with no queue at all (perhaps for a reason?). Then there was a SIM card kiosk with a long queue, and a SIM card booth with no queue at all (again, suspicious). I started with the SIM card booth, no queue. The young man at the booth was on the telephone. I tried to assert myself and he moved the phone about three microns away from his ear to tell me that they were currently out of SIM cards. His friend would be back in twenty minutes with more. I went to the other SIM card kiosk but soon grew impatient after standing motionless in line for five minutes. I tried my luck with a taxi. I went outside to see if it was possible to hail a cab directly. Three paces outside of the airport terminal, I realized that this was not how it worked. My only option for a taxi was to join the line inside. Turning to reenter the terminal I was stopped by a Russian guard, who spun me around and ushered me in a different direction. I was trying to enter through an exit, and this was strictly forbidden.

After reentering the airport through the appropriate screening checkpoint, I decided to try my luck again with the SIM card kid. Maybe his friend had been able to deliver some merchandise. When I got back to the booth, I had heard him explain to another would-be customer that they were currently out of cards, but that his friend would bring a new supply in twenty minutes. Then he went back to his phone call. Not going to happen.

So I went to the taxi booth. I told the gentleman where I was going. He gave me a ticket with a fixed price for my ride from the airport to my destination. I asked if I was supposed to take the ticket outside or remain at the booth for further instructions. “Yes,” he said. I clarified, “So I should go outside?” He gave me a look that said, “Do you really think I give two tiny moose s***s about what you do?” I decided, a touch optimistically, to stay where I was. He seemed to agree this was the best option as well. I waited for a few minutes without receiving any further attention, beginning to grow uncertain that I wasn't just standing with a ticket in my hand, waiting for a cab to pull up inside the terminal, like an American dumbass. Eventually, an attendant came and escorted me to a cab. I was off.

The streets on the way into Moscow were liberally decorated with World Cup advertisements. The primary one being the official statement from the Russians, “Welcome the game” and its variants: Welcome the Serbians. Welcome the Belgians. Welcome the Egyptians. I thought this an odd sentiment. It seemed more like a directive to the native Russians (read: Don't fk with the tourists), rather than a warm greeting of the foreigners. "Welcome to the game" would seem more appropriate, no?

My cab driver dropped me off at my hostel. I had no internet, no knowledge of Moscow, no way to contact anyone. He could’ve dropped me off anywhere within 30 miles of the airport and I wouldn’t have figured out that something was amiss until he’d speeded off to pick up the next sucker. He dropped me off on a side street and indicated this was, to the best of his knowledge, the location specified by the address. It was just a residential street of multi-story apartments. There was no sign or anything. I got out and fetched my bags, because I didn’t have any alternative hypotheses.

By now it was 1:30 in the morning. Well passed check in time. Thankfully, Haily had already checked in, since her plane had arrived earlier that day. I found the building number of the hostel and pressed the doorbell. Nothing happened. It didn’t seem promising. I couldn't contact Haily to come get me, as I had opted not to get the SIM card. No internet either. Happily, just as I was about to take up residence in the doorway like a vagrant, another guest hopped out of a cab and helped me into the building. The hostel was on the third floor and appeared to be just a converted floor of separate rooms. I presented myself at the front desk and handed the old Russian lady my passport. I’d come a long way to be here, and I was excited to arrive at my destination. She looked at my passport for a moment, then made a phone call. This, I was beginning to understand, was the customary manner in which Russians conduct a transaction. While she was on the phone, I got on the Wifi in the hostel. A flurry of messages came in. From Haily: "There's been a housing snafu."

Oh, that was the important information.

I had no way of knowing whether the phone call the Russian lady was presently engaged with had any relevance for my situation. She could have been talking to her grandson for all I knew. She hadn’t said a word to me since I came in. But whatever was going on was clearly not in my favor. Apparently, as Haily explained to me, they had our reservation on their books but had given away our room nonetheless. We hadn't paid in full ahead of time. “But I have an email right here from a week ago saying you confirmed our reservation and that we could pay upon arrival," I protested. I rifled through my bag and waved a printed out email in front of her face. This intelligence failed the move the Russian lady, as she spoke not a word of English. She presented me with the phone, and I spoke with another Russian lady, one who spoke English—fluently enough though not very nicely. She told me that we had been given a room at a different hostel. "Why did you not come to the new address? Did you not get the SMS message? Your friend said you would get the SMS message. You should have come to the—“ I cut her off. "No," I snapped. "You should have had a room for us here. The only question you should be asking is why I have an email confirmation for a room but no room." But I wasn't in a position of power, and it sounded like we had a room, just located somewhere else. I got the new address from Haily, the only trustworthy person involved in the transaction, and set off.

Only slightly daunted, I arrived at our accommodations. I was immensely happy to be reunited with Haily. I was even somewhat happy to have suffered through my ordeal in getting situated, since it seemed to have worked out alright. Disorder and chaos in the face of resolute commitment to arbitrary rules—where else on earth could I be but Moscow?

Moscow is organized in a schematic of concentric circles, with Red Square and the Kremlin at the center. We made our way from our hostel just inside the second ring toward Moscow’s heart. We passed five or six cafes on the first street alone. Not quite hungry yet, we pressed on. The buildings in Moscow don’t feel generically European. Vaguely, you get the sense that you’re in Europe—as opposed to, say, North America or the Middle East—but I couldn’t place my surroundings in the context of another European city, like I could for Warsaw.

But that is, I suppose, the point of Moscow. It’s a city in Europe the same way Cairo is a city in Africa. Technically that’s where it is in a geographical sense, but not necessarily in a cultural one. Moscow lies at the junction between east and west, to be sure, yet is subtle in how it combines them. It’s neither a mix of things eastern and western, nor an amalgam of the two. You get the sense that you’re somewhere singular. But the again you are. Russia.

The façade that impressed me most as we walked through the city did not belong to a building but a construction site. The Russians had made a temporary facsimile of the building’s face and strung it up in front while they did construction behind it. From a distance, it just looks like a building. Only up close do you realize something looks a little off. It is immediately obvious that Moscow takes pride in its appearance. No liter on the streets. Nothing out of place. Yet it doesn’t feel sterile, like this cleanliness is an act they’re putting on for the tourists. No, what it feels like is a city that takes pride in itself.

The Kremlin, where we found ourselves now, is a foreboding place. No doubt this is the aesthetic they intended. It features an imposing red castle wall protecting the inner sanctum from intruders. It’s the kind of wall that even a Texan would look upon with admiration as sufficient for keeping out unwanted guests. The only thing that would further its point is a sign that says “beware of dog” or, better yet given the scale, “beware of dragon.” What it is that goes on in the buildings within the inner sanctum I have no idea. But if you were, say, to conduct a back alley transaction with a representative from FIFA, you’d have plenty of furtive places to do it. As we stood before it, there was in fact another fence of a much smaller order—the kind used at music festivals or other large public events—to restrict pedestrians access to no more than a hundred yards from the Kremlin wall. This mode of arbitrary sequestering of the public, we would learn, is something the Russians like to do very much.

Off to the side is the iconic building of Moscow, St Basil's Cathedral, with the distinct Soviet architecture, colorful and columnar, topped with exotic dollops of sour cream. The building feels just a bit out of place. It seems a little overly whimsical to be set next to the we-shoot-to-kill sensibilities of the Kremlin wall. We looked at all of this from a bit of a distance, as the whole of Red Square was fenced off. Wouldn't want to chance it, what with one of those soccer hooligans attempting to penetrate the Kremlin's fortifications.

Having explored Moscow’s epicenter, we followed a different spoke toward the outer ring. It was raining cotton on this day in Moscow, falling daintily from the sky, and so the whole city had a mid-summer-winter-wonderland feel to it, like being in a room-temperature snow globe. We were hungry now. But the street we found ourselves on offered no cafés. The only one we did find was unaccountably humid and smelled of moist cheese. Not of interest to us. We retraced our steps where we remembered seeing a few promising establishments and settled on a restaurant offering Georgian fare (what they eat in the former Soviet satellite, not in the Southern US). This was something I’d never had before. This was something I hadn’t even known existed before this moment. And with this loss of innocence came an even more pronounced loss of faith in my fellow human—as I decided that Georgian food is the most worthwhile, most rewarding, most delicious secret that no one had bothered to tell me about. I couldn’t believe it.

We sat outside. It was late morning. Past breakfast time, but no where near time for lunch. It was possibly for this reason the waitresses eyed us with disdain. Or, equally likely, it was just because they were Russian. We started with Kharcho, a sort of Georgian minestrone—spicy, with beef. Then Khachapuri. They described it as pie, but really it was spinach pizza. Three kinds of dumplings: lamb, cheese, and pork. When served, they reminded me of blanched versions of the ornaments on the building in Red Square, a sack of goodies twisted up and ready for consumption. It was phenomenal.

We continued on our walk around Moscow. We made off in the direction of no where in particular, eventually meandering back toward Red Square. We found ourselves on Nikolskaya, the main shopping thoroughfare of the city, near Red Square. This was clearly the most densely touristed section of Moscow. It was here we first came across the traditional garb of the World Cup attendee. The base is the national jersey (older kits connote longer-standing devotion). On top of that is the scarf, a flag worn as a cape, a flag painted on the cheek (your opponent’s flag on the other, if you’re feeling diplomatic), and a gaudy wig of curly hair painted in the colors of your nation. There were the Argentinians in blue and white (to be distinguished from non-Argentinians who merely wore their Messi jerseys). The Swedes in their blue and yellow. The Mexicans, of course, with their egregious sombreros substituted for the wig. The Peruvians were also out in complete regalia. I already felt a certain fondness for their number because of their show of spirit and enthusiasm on the flight over. A quartet of Peruvians stood outside a KFC drinking beer—most of it successfully making it from can to mouth, too—and carrying on in an even more spirited and enthusiastic manner than I had previously observed. Noting that it was only a few minutes past noon, I added ambition to my list of endearing Peruvian qualities.

As we wandered through town we passed a statue. It was quite large, maybe three times as tall as me, but we couldn’t tell who it was of. We took a moment to study it closely. “It looks like that guy has a scroll with just the alphabet,” I remarked, thinking it a bit of an odd thing for anyone beyond first grade to commemorate on a scroll, let alone a statue. As we wandered off we heard a tour guide say that it was a statue of Saint Cyril. It was an alphabet—ol' Cyril was proud to show it off because he had just invented it. Presumably he thought it worthwhile to tell his friends. It is very important to my Bulgarian acquaintance, Momchil, that you understand that Cyril was a Bulgarian and, accordingly, what is usually thought of as the Russian alphabet is, in fact, the Bulgarian alphabet.

Developed around 800 BCE, Cyrillic really is a delightful script. As a native English speaker, one gets the feeling that one should be able to pronounce it if one just tries hard enough. Cyril developed it, with the help of his colleagues, from a hodgepodge of Greek, Latin, an older script called Glagolitic, and a few inventive markings of his own devising. It looks a bit as if a particularly stubborn English speaker—not one to bow before authority—took our alphabet and made it her own, using more or less all the same letters but assigning to each one the phonetic value which seemed more appropriate to her than the original. Some stay the same. For instance, “трактор” sounds like “tractor.” But others are completely bastardized—"Москва" is pronounced "Moskva" and "ресторан" pronounced "restaurant." They also added in a few a doodads and odd balls of their own invention for good measure, such as the final morpheme in "сад," pronounced sad but meaning garden.

We repaired to a bar for a few midday drinks. We found a spot within supervising range of Cyril, but convivially situated under ground. We sat at a high topped table and ordered a pair of Aperol Spirtzes, apparently the traditional drink of Moscow (they are advertised in front of absolutely every drinking establishment). We consumed several of the delightful, pinkish beverages, each served in an accommodatingly wide wine glasses. Satisfied and slightly tipsy, we walked back to our hostel. We’d gotten a feel for the city and we wanted to rest up. We had a big evening a head of us. One of the events we were most looking forward to in Moscow: dinner at White Rabbit.

Getting a reservation at White Rabbit had been an ordeal of its own. We emailed multiple times. No response. When finally they responded and asked for a prepayment, they failed to include a link. When we requested a link, we never heard back. When at length they did send a link, it was—and what else would you expect here?—to some sketchy payment site, of the kind you wouldn’t be surprised to visit if you needed to purchase weapons-grade plutonium on the black market. I entered my card credit information if not happily then at least dutifully.

We walked through a construction zone to get to the restaurant. In the general vicinity but at a loss for where to proceed, we had to look up specific directions to get in. The entrance was located on an unassuming side street, the building only exceptional if you look up at the top of it. You’re required to take two elevators, neither of them helpfully labeled, to get there. This is, you understand, one of the nicest, most famous, most expensive restaurants in Russia. The door isn’t unlabeled in some ironic hipsterish attempt to insinuate that you need to be “in the know” to find it. It’s just unlabeled because, well, f**k you, this is Russia and that’s just how things are. We found it nonetheless. That’s how in the know we are.

We got there early, at five, because the tasting menu was supposed to take a few hours and we wanted to catch a World Cup match at nine. We were seated in an open air deck area, instead of the main dining room. It seemed agreeable enough, and we probably didn’t have much of a choice. Not wanting to have a request to move denied, we decided that it was better not to make the request in the first place. But we were clearly in the low-rent district of the establishment, where they stick the schlubs. I’ve never been to Dubai, but I imagine this was close to what it would feel like. All of the chairs were plush lounges, with more room devoted to the several luxuriant pillows than to one's ass. We were on a roof top with a definite view of nothing in particular. There were inane tropical bird noises playing over the loudspeaker. And, speaking factually, the only demographics who could afford to enjoy this restaurant as a casual 5pm meal on the lounging deck were Arabs, Asians, and Russian aristocracy. Tell me that those aren’t the same three demographics going out to eat in Dubai. The three young Arab gentleman at the table next to us were clearly consuming their meal out of a sense of obligation to eat some place conspicuous, rather than from any apparent genuine pleasure.

Our waiter was a young Russian man, Aleksandar. We told him we’d like the tasting menu. He informed us that this was the right choice and dutifully shuffled off to enter our order into the system. We started off with polguar, a traditional Russian spirit. “Just try it,” was Aleksandar’s advice… Sea urchin sorbet, which was probably the highlight… Honey wine: they bury it when a child is born, then dig it up when the child starts their own family, traditionally around 15-17 years old apparently.

When the check came, they charged us for the full thing plus the drinks we had. It was only several moments after the transaction had been finalized that I realized I had prepaid for the meal. I informed Aleksandar of this. The color drained from his face. “Oh no,” he murmured stoically. “This is my mistake.” We had to transact with manager to settle the issue. He told us that he would issue a refund to the card. It would go through in a couple of days. This was, mind you, the same establishment that had requested we prepay for the meal without being thoughtful enough to include a method for doing so. The bill was not an insignificant amount of money. I was supposed to trust that they were going to summon up enough dependability to reimburse me several days hence forth. And I did, if not happily then at least dutifully.

After dinner we snuck up to see the main dining atrium. This was a mistake. It was inordinately superior to the deck. This was what had been featured in the documentary we'd seen about the restaurant. This was the real Russian treatment. The decor was intense and ornate. It featured a beautiful view of Moscow. We felt cheated for not having been sat there—for we had missed out on a crucial element of the White Rabbit experience. Alas.

There’s a lot to be said for White Rabbit. The food was very good. It was inventive and delicious, no doubt. But no matter how high quality it may have been, the restaurant is—like everything else in Russia—not necessarily designed with the distinct ambition for you to enjoy your experience.

Haily wasn’t feeling well after dinner. I accompanied her back to the hostel, made sure she was settled in for the evening, then hit the streets for the Portugal-Spain match. This was one of the marquee games of the group stage. Spain were among the favorites to win it all, and Portugal, highly ranked themselves, boasted among their numbers one of the two best players on the planet, Cristiano Ronaldo. We’d identified a promising spate of bars along one of the avenues by our hostel. Outfitted proudly in my Ronaldo jersey, I set out with this destination in mind.

I called first at an Irish pub, called something so overly generic as to not even be plausibly authentic, like Patty O’Hoolihans or Leprechaun McLuckycharms. The restaurant was large, but stuffed to the ceiling with World Cup fans. The televisions were large and numerous. I snagged a seat next to some Russian girls. I sat for a happy moment and took it all in. I was in a bar in a foreign country—the one where the World Cup was being held—and so were all these other people. These were individuals from all over the world, from Russia and Peru and France and Senegal and Poland and Costa Rica and everywhere else. And they were all here for the same reason I was. I found it all immensely gratifying.

I tried to flag down a waiter. When eventually I experienced some success in this enterprise I asked for a beer. “Not this bar,” the waiter informed me. He pointed to the next room over, “That.” This left me with several queries I would’ve liked to pose. I was actually in comforting proximity to a bar that appeared to be fully operational. I was close enough to slosh a beer with confident accuracy into the face of one of the bartenders—that is, if I was inclined to do so and actually able to procure a drink. I was at least academically curious about why I couldn’t order anything from that bar. But there were many other tables whose requests he needed to deny, and he wandered off before I could ask.

I forfeited my seats next to the Russia girls. I bid them adieu, but they weren’t all that invested in my presence anyway. I poked my head in the room indicated by the waiter, but there were no seats. There wasn’t even standing room. I went to search the upper deck, just in case. Nothing.

It was still early in the game, and I didn’t want to commit to a suboptimal experience. I went next door, to another Irish pub, Guinness McJameson, if I recall. This one looked more promising. The TV screen was more modestly sized, but agreeably visible. Furthermore, I felt optimistic about the possibility of getting a drink here. It proved difficult to solicit the attention of the bartender, as he was occupied with fending off pushy drunk Russians. I waited patiently for my turn and was duly rewarded with a Harp Irish lager and then a lone seat at the bar. It was still the first half of the match, and I had a satisfactory, if not to say lavish home from which to enjoy it.

The table next to me was a group of six. Mostly English speaking, but the ring leader was clearly Russian. An immense block of a man. He was especially excited about one bottle of Scotch in particular behind the bar. It was important to him for his compatriots to appreciate this fine specimen of Highland whisky. He petitioned the bartender to remove it from the shelves so he could present its façade to his colleagues. After looking at it admiringly for several minutes he gave the bottle back to the barkeep and requested a round for his table, six shots. The bartender obliged. But when the shots reached the table, Mr. Blok looked dissatisfied. There was, he complained, a problem with the volume of the drink. It was not enough. “This shot no,” he stated in broken but effective English (presumably the Irish bartender’s Russian was worse). I can personally attest that the bartender measured the shots before he poured them—I’d watched him do it—and he informed Blok of as much. This, to Blok’s mind, was not a valid excuse. The bartender assured him that the volume of Scotch would not be increased under any circumstances.

“Niet,” challenged Blok.

“Da,” affirmed the barkeep.

“Niet.”

“Da.”

Niet.

Da.

Defeated in a competition of wit, Blok returned to his friends—though his efforts were not entirely without consequence, because the bartender eventually delivered another glass of Scotch to his table, gratis. Rewarding this kind of behavior, no doubt, serves to make pushy, drunk Russians pushier and drunker.

Though I’d been able to obtain a seat, I decided to leave the bar at half time, as the match was a good one but seemed to be an auxiliary consideration in the establishment. Unsure of where else to turn, I equivocated then returned to the first Irish bar. That one at least had a committed fan base, I thought. I sat in a different place, though in same room as the one I had previously been ushered out of. I was sitting directly at the bar this time, even more convenient sloshing distance. I attempted to persuade the bartender into serving me a beer, but to no avail. He just looked at me for a moment, unmoved, and announced, “Later.” Unsure of how to interpret this intelligence, I reinvested myself in the game. Anticipating such difficulty in procuring further alcohol, I had done my best to drink while I was afforded the opportunity in the previous establishment. I’d done pretty well, actually. I was in a good place to engage with the action around me.

Eventually I felt that perhaps later had rolled around while I’d been attending to the game. I turned again to the barkeep, but the Russian gentleman next to me indicated that this attempt would be futile. Everyone else around me, I noticed, had a glass of one kind or another, but apparently there was some prohibition on my ordering a beer. The game ended in a tie: 3-3, with a Ronaldo hat trick matching the output of the entire Spanish team. All told, I spent over an hour in that bar without being able to get a drink.

It is the Chinese inflection of broken English—affectionately referred to as “Engrish”—that is widely celebrated. But its Russian counterpart far outstrips it in implausible constructions and confounding linguistic inventions. Russians put the “ish” in English.

Above the toilet in our hostel read a sign: “DEAR GUEST!!! TO AVOID NATURAL DISASTER, WE SENTLY ASK YOUR TOILET PAPER AND MEANS OF PERSONAL HYGIENE TO PICK THE BUCKET!” I’m actually at a loss as to suppose which word contracts to form “SENTLY” in that context. But the gist of the message is not to put anything in the toilet that isn’t s**t. It seems that their concern is about the offending object’s choice of where to reside—ideally, it'd choose the bucket. Their consternation about a “NATURAL DISASTER” also seems a little dramatic, does it not?

Above the stove there read another message: “Dear guests !!! Convincing request !! DO NOT INCLINE THE BOTTLES OF THE COMFORT FOR THE MAXIMUM MODE “9” !!!! USE THE MODES NOT ABOVE “6” COOKING OF EASY DISHES (EARTH, OMELET, CASH, PEMENI ) The power of the plate is not calculated for the greater !!” Your guess is as good as mine here, but I think it means that if you’re gonna cook up some eggs then keep the burner turned to about five or so. Maybe best to try Google f*g Translate next time rather than going it alone.

Then there was the additional hostel rule, helpfully posted in several locations around the lobby: “Feel yourself like at home, but do not forget that you are guest!”

Hostels really are curious places. This is especially true in Russia. Many hostels have themes, but here they’re taken on with a certain imperative gravity. The theme for the hostel in which we stayed the first couple nights in Moscow (same as the one we were supposed to stay in) was the television series Game of Thrones. The hostel’s name was Winterfell. There were toy dragons hanging from the ceiling and outcroppings of fake stone nestled into available counter space. The sense of whimsy elicited by having medieval-looking crap everywhere was decidedly at odds with the manner of the frosty tempered b***h—she really was, even by Russian standards—who attended the front desk about twenty-two hours per day (the same one who had reprimanded me not for receiving the SMS indicating the change of arrangements). There were unattributed quotes from the show, many of them rather peculiar out of context. One quote, prominently displayed, read: “I will not bear children.”

Probably just as well, honestly.

But, alas, just as we had begun to feel ourselves like at home, we had to leave. We were on our way to St. Petersburg.

Next Episode:

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This week's guest is neuroscientist, filmmaker, and inimitable personality Sade Abiodun. She is a first year PhD student the Princeton Neuroscience Institute, and her latest film project was Godspeed. This short film has done well on the festival circuit, and Sade was a finalist for the highly selective Sundance fellowship. In this episode, we talk about the difficulties of starting grad school, especially while a world-wide pandemic is in progress. In particular, we talk about balancing grad school projects with non-grad school projects (e.g., filmmaking, podcasting), and the opportunity for reinvention of identity that beginning a new program offers. We also talk about the connection between neuroscience and film, in using experimental paradigms with naturalistic stimuli. We try our best to get #neurocinematics to become a cultural phenomenon. Finally, we talk about a paper Sade wrote a couple years back on academia and race, a conversation which has -- how should I put this? -- been brought up with renewed fervor over the past few months. She summarizes the perspective she gave in that paper and how it might be updated in response to current events.

You can find more about Sade's work at her website: https://www.sade.space/

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En route to World Cup 2018. "You're an American."

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The name "Nigel Shadbolt" is spoken in my corner of the world with hushed tones and much reverence. This is not only because he is a big deal generally, but because he is an especially around Jesus College, Oxford, where he currently serves as Principal. What exactly one does as Principal of an Oxford college, I'm not entirely sure, but like all of Sir Nigel's accolades, it seems pretty significant. Nigel has made contributions in a wide range of fields, including artificial intelligence and public policy. His work was key in developing the technology for the World Wide Web, alongside his long-time collaborator Tim Berners-Lee. Together they founded the Open Data Institute. Trust me on this one, Sir Nigel's list of accomplishments is long. I look forward to sharing this conversation with you.

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Welcome to Season 1 of Notes from the Field with Cody Kommers.

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Dan Everett is the closest thing we have to a real life Indiana Jones. He is an academic whose work has mostly taken place in the far reaches of the jungle, where few others dare to tread. His crowning achievement is learning the Pirahã language, which before Dan undertook it had never before been cracked by an outsider. Dan began his swashbuckling career as a missionary and Bible translator. After a while, his ideological alliances shifted and he remained in the Amazon as an anthropologist and linguist. In this interview we talk about how this shift impacted his relationship with his family (imagine having a crisis of faith while on a mission in the Amazon while your entire family is along with you; his ex-wife, by the way, is still there as a missionary). We also talk about how he brought back evidence that directly contradicted major claims that Chomsky had made, his experience between the subject of famous American writer Tom Wolfe's last book before he died (The Kingdom of Speech), and Everett's forthcoming project on the life of Charles Sanders Peirce. Dan's official title is Trustee Professor of Cognitive Sciences at Bentley University.

A picture of Dan, fully immersed: https://daneverettbooks.com/about-dan/

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One of Maria's biggest influence as an undergrad was Steven Pinker, who she studied under while at Harvard. The family resemblance is easy to see. She is so confident, smart, driven, and competent that it can at times verge on overwhelming. She earned her PhD in psychology from Columbia, where she studied under famous psychologist Walter Mischel. Eventually she went on to become a staff writer at the New Yorker. But lots of people get their PhD. Lots of people write for high profile magazines. What makes Maria truly unique is that she is the only writer ever to take leave of a job at the NYer to pursue a career as a professional poker player. This sabbatical is the subject of her new book, The Biggest Bluff. I am tremendously excited to her it the moment it comes out. Maria is a huge inspiration to me, and it was a great pleasure to have her on the show. We talk about her childhood as a Russian immigrant in America, the two crucial lessons she learned from Steven Pinker, the steps she took to establish herself as a writer, how she convinced Walter Mischel to take her on as a grad student by going against the conventional advice, what inspired her to get into taking on the subject of Sherlock Holmes in her first book, and the origins of her interest in poker and risky decision-making. Ultimately, I think the big lessons of Maria's fantastic career are not so difficult to understand. She wanted to be a writer. So what did she do? She wrote a lot. When she needed a further experience (e.g., getting her PhD, becoming a poker player) to serve her material, she went ahead and did it. There's no doubt about it: Maria has done the work.

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"Uncertainty" would not exactly be the first word that comes to mind when one thinks of Steven Pinker's current position in the world. But that wasn't always the case. There was actually a stretch in Steve's early career in which he found himself in the throws of uncertainty and anxiety. In this conversation, we dig into a lot of Steve's early career experiences, as well as his process as a writer. One of the things that stood out to me in what Steve said was that from early on he had an overarching sense that he wanted to study human nature. But it wasn't always precisely clear to him what that entailed -- or at least there were a number of paths he could've taken to get there. Obviously, he did quite a bit right throughout the process, but it was nonetheless fascinating to see the bets he made that paid off and how he balanced his options while equivocating about what the right move was. In addition to the nature of humans and their societies, we also talked about important subjects like the content of Steve's closet (including his notable collection of cowboy boots) and his advice for sourcing potential mates through literary and philosophical correspondence.

Steve's official title is Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. You will recognize him from his books -- including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, The Sense of Style, and Enlightenment Now -- as well as whatever mean thing Nassim Taleb has most recently tweeted about him. Be sure to keep an eye out for his forthcoming book on the tools of rationality.

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Mark and I recorded this interview about a month ago, before the outbreak of protests across the world in support of the Black Lives Matter movement. A lot has changed since then. Conversations are different, as are the topics under discussion. This interview does not reflect those changes, at least not directly. Even so, a number of the topics in our conversation and in Mark's research more generally are relevant. In my hometown of Seattle, I watched these protests turn violent as the city toppled into rioting and chaos. And while individual acts of vandalism and looting are deplorable, there is no doubt that riots have played a crucial role in societal change over the course of history. When a riot spurs on regime change, we call it a "revolution." As you'll hear in our conversation, the societal, economic, and psychological causes of revolutions has been an underlying motivation in many of Mark's great ideas. In particular are his threshold models of collective behavior, which compare the spread of rioting to -- of all things -- an epidemic. Still, these abstract concepts can seem very distant from the heart of the matter while it's unfolding around us.

What I hope Mark's perspective and his research can help us keep in mind is that riots are not isolated events perpetrated solely by malicious individuals. They are reflections of the societal and economic systems in which they are embedded. It's easy enough to identify that connection between the actions of seemingly violent individuals and broken systems when it's occurring in someone else's country. Such dramatic actions may even appear a necessary impetus for change. But it can be harder to see the connection when it's happening in our own country and our own city. And while this does not mean we should support or condone violence, it should be taken as a signal of a massive issue with the system. Healthy societies and economies don't produce riots, no matter what the ideological motivation of their citizens might be. Throughout history these events have often proved to be tipping points into a different way of doing things. That different way can either be much better or much worse. Let's make sure that we are doing everything we can to make sure ours is a case of the first one.

So much of what is interesting in the world consists in the interplay between the specific and the general. Sciences tends to focus on the general ("what are the laws that govern the universe?") while humanities tend to focus on the specific ("what did this particular individual do at this particular time?"). There is also a similar interplay between studying behavior at the level of the individual ("what is this person's psychological state?") and studying behavior at the level of the group ("how do all these people fit together into a coherent whole?"). I know of no person who has dedicated his career more fully to the study of social behavior in a way that bridges these perspectives than my guest for this episode, Mark Granovetter. Mark is a professor of sociology at Stanford, and one of the most influential sociologists of all time. His work formed the backbone for Malcolm Gladwell's Tipping Point, and several of his papers are among the most cited in his discipline. We cover a lot of ground in this episode, mainly drawing from Mark's early career experiences and where his most famous ideas came from. But we also get into his relationship to Gladwell, as well as the interplay between psychology and sociology. When talking about where his initial interests in sociology came from, he said something that I really loved because I think it captures the core of so much of his work: "Of course it was very interesting: 'Why was there a French revolution?' and 'Why was there a Russian revolution?'... But I realized that the thing I really wanted to understand was 'Why are there revolutions?'"

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Alan Baddeley is a professor of psychology at the University of York. He is best known for his model of working memory, which essentially won out in the history of cognitive psychology as the model of working memory. He's been in the game for many years, and a couple years back published a career retrospective called Working Memories, which details his experiences, where his ideas came from, and what he observed around him during the Cognitive Revolution. What is perhaps less known about Professor Baddeley is that he began his PhD doing memory working at Cambridge because his studentship was sponsored to help develop memorable postal codes for the U.K.'s postal service. Otherwise, he might not have become a memory researcher at all. In this episode we talk about how Bertrand Russell influenced him to become a psychologist, the difference between the U.S. and the U.K. during the Cognitive Revolution, and how to develop an academic career by proceeding through a series of logical steps.

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This week's guest is someone very special. Michèle Lamont has had a huge impact on my own thinking as a psychologist. She is the Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies and a Professor of Sociology and African American Studies at Harvard University. The first time I encountered her work was in a book she wrote, published in 2000, called the Dignity of Working Men. It's a work of comparative sociology in which she interviews working class men in both New York and France, both black and white individuals, and essentially allows them to tell their story of the way they see the world while providing some sociological interpretation. It's a brilliant work, and has only become more relevant over time. I highly recommend to anyone interested in understanding more about a huge section of the population that isn't as well represented in typical academic discourse. At any rate, it was a huge honor to talk to her. She has a number of other books that you can check out. In this episode we talk a lot about how her ideas have built on top of one another over time, to really become a truly holistic comparative sociology covering a big part of our world.

Here is the interview she mentioned in our conversation: https://sociologiskforskning.se/sf/article/view/19754

Oh, and the movie she was trying to think of was Mephisto by Werner Herzog.

Michèle's website: http://www.michelelamont.org/
Michèle's Twitter: https://twitter.com/mlamont6

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Mickey Inzlicht wanted to be a dentist when he grew up. But unfortunately he only made it as far as Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Toronto, with a joint appointment in the Rotman School of Management. He represents one psychologist and two beers worth of the Two Psychologists Four Beers podcast. He's someone who I look up to a whole lot, and there's a lot about what he's been able to do in his career that I'd like to be able to do in my own: successful podcast, professor in social neuroscience (similar topic to the lab I'm doing my PhD in), strong family life, and seems to have a lot of fun doing all that stuff. He's done a lot of excellent work over the course of his career, my favorite of which is the effort paradox which is the idea that the most effort something costs us to pull off the more we value it. The paradox is that we are still for the most part effort averse creatures, try to avoid unnecessary hard work, and are unlikely to begin things that we think we necessitate a ton of it. In this episode we talk about his background in psychology, especially as a first generation college student. Mickey gets into his three top productivity tips that work for him. We also talk shop about pods, how he started his, as well as the podcast ecosystem generally. We wrap up discussing effort, value, meaning, and other topics related to Mickey's research.

Mickey's Twitter: @minzlicht
Mickey's Pod: https://fourbeers.fireside.fm/

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Little known fact about Brad Love: he holds the world record for the youngest sounding voice for any fully grown adult male. Okay, that might not literally be true. But the guy sounds young -- a fact that belies his prominence and esteem as a professor in the field of cognitive science. In fact, he's such a venerable academic figure that he's mentored students who have gone on to establish themselves as venerable academic figures. So how does he keep himself so young? That's easy: constant exploration. As Brad says in our conversation, he has never felt like he quite locked into doing just one thing; he's always on the lookout for what strikes him as new, fresh, and interesting. We get into a wide-ranging discussion in this episode including the differences between the British and American higher education systems, how to read through a new scientific literature (for example, should you just open a thousand Chrome tabs and hope to get through them eventually?), and what the ideal psychology undergraduate curriculum would look like. We also talk about Brad's unique experiences as an undergrad at Brown and as a grad student at Northwestern. He is currently a professor at University College London, and is also a Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute.

Brad's Lab: http://bradlove.org/
Brad's Twitter: @Prof Data
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Rob is a Gates scholar at Cambridge, doing his PhD in Psychology. He's written for such venerable outlets as the New York Times and Quillette. As you'll hear, he served in the Air Force and grew up in the foster system. He brings a different perspective than the usual one to the academic realm. Rob are exactly what we need in the academic world: people who have a different set of life experiences than the median one who are intelligent and thoughtful and trying to reconcile the empirical findings of psychological science with their own experiential portion of the world. He's got such an interesting story, which is mostly what we talk about here, and if you find it compelling I'm sure he'd appreciate it if you sign up for his newsletter.

Rob's Twitter: @robkhenderson
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Olga's family moved to America when she was four years old. They were a Jewish family from Russia. Growing up in small town Texas, let's just say that she was the only one of her classmates named Olga. She is intimately familiar with what it's like to be an outsider. In her new book, Weird, Olga studies how the ways in which we fail to fit in are often what gives us our unique advantage. She is a staff writer for the Atlantic, and this book draws on her experience as a journalist. She's spent the last five years tracking down weirdos and outsiders to tell their stories and connect the dots on what's common between them. In this conversation, we talk about Olga's story, how her parents were against her going into journalism (they've since come around), when she began thinking about weirdness as an intellectual puzzle, and the works in which she finds inspiration as a writer.

The Olga Khazan Outsiders Reading list: https://www.codykommers.com/post/the-olga-khazan-reading-list

Olga on Twitter: https://twitter.com/olgakhazan @olgakhazan
Olga's website: https://olgakhazan.com/

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Steve is a PhD student in social psychology at Cambridge. He recently published an article on Psychology Today about the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic from the perspective of social psychology. I thought it touched on a lot of great points, and so I wanted to have him on the show to go into it a bit deeper. We also talked about adjusting work expectations to match our new mode of cooped-up existence, the implications of the pandemic for the theatre industry, whether the "War on a Hidden Enemy" metaphor lands from a psychology perspective, and what's going to be different once we're on the other side of this thing.

As always you can connect with me through Twitter @codykommers and through my newsletter, which you can find at codykommers.com/newsletter.

You can connect with Steve on Twitter @SteveRathje

Steve's article: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/words-matter/202003/will-the-coronavirus-bring-us-together-or-push-us-apart

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This is probably the most interesting interview I've done on Cognitive Revolution to date (sorry, Paul Bloom). To call Dr Julia Shaw by her title of psychological scientist at University College London is to severely underestimate the breadth of her mind. She is the kind of scholar who could accurately be described as "complete." It's not that she knows everything. But nothing is outside of the bounds of her interests or capability for engagement. It's a very inspiring thing to see. In this episode, we talk about -- what else? -- the Coronavirus pandemic, but also: lockdown reading lists, how Julia's troubled family history influenced her interest in psychology, overcoming toxic grad school environments, whether it's possible to appreciate great art from terrible people, whether heterosexuality exists, and a host of other far flung topics.

You can follow Dr Julia Shaw on Twitter @drjuliashaw and on her website drjuliashaw.com. You can also check out her books: the Memory Illusion, and Making Evil.

If you want to keep up with Cognitive Revolution you can subscribe on whichever platform you may be listening through. You can also follow me on Twitter @codykommers and through my newsletter at https://www.codykommers.com/newsletter.

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Jeff is a PhD at Harvard Business School. He's been working from home for years. And now that the rest of us are in the same position, he recently shared some of his tips for keeping productive and sane when work life and home life begin to coalesce. You can follow him on Twitter @Leesplez. You can also read my recent piece about self-motivation here: https://www.codykommers.com/post/self-motivate

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In this crazy times characterized by the chaos of a worldwide pandemic, I've decided to do something a little different on the pod. It's a series I'm calling "Lab Lockdown." The idea is to talk to other grad students about how they're getting through all this while trying to maintain a semblance of sanity and productivity. It's also an opportunity to talk about their current research projects. My first guest in this series is Jaclyn A. Siegel. She's a PhD student at Western Ontario, and she has such a powerful story that connects her personal experiences to her academic interests. We talk about gratitude, using self-isolation as an opportunity for connecting with others, feminism, and adopting cats. You can follow her on Twitter @jaclynasiegel. More info available at codykommers.com/podcast.

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Christof Koch is a one man symphony of passion. The only thing he has to offer is an unrelenting, indissoluble, incandescent fascination with the subjects that he's drawn to and develop a profound expertise on their every aspect. And oh my, what a thing it is to behold. The primary objects of his interest are consciousness and the brain -- what is the physical basis of existence and our experience of it? Christof is the director of the Paul Allen Brain Institute -- which, to give you an idea of what that means, billionaire Paul Allen was hanging out in his office one day, and asked himself, "If I could have one neuroscientist in the world run my institute, who would I choose?" Christof was the obvious answer. He was mentored by Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA. I can only imagine what it was like to be in a room with those two, in a swirling discussion of the physical basis of consciousness that would have surely convinced you of the truth of determinism because once it got started there was no stopping it. In this conversation we talk about many things, but probably none of them are as eminently worth mentioning as our discussion of Christof's experience of 5 MeO DMT -- which is a psychedelic compound secreted on the back of a species of toad inhabiting the Colorado Road that, so I hear, makes psilocybin seem like an aspirin. Christof's new book is "The Feeling of Life Itself." Make sure to check it out! More info at codykommers.com/podcast.

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Michael Tomasello is one of the most influential cognitive scientists of the twenty-first century. And yet I would still argue that he is still somehow under-appreciated. He's a truly independent thinker and throughout his career he has pursued ideas that don't fit neatly into any particular intellectual silo but make their presence felt across many of them. In this episode, we talk about the influence of Jerome Bruner, Lev Vygotsky, and Jean Piaget on Mike's thought, where anthropology went after the Cognitive Revolution, how he wrote his first book because he had nothing else going on, writing to shape the minds of young people, the role of outlines in writing, being "problem centered," and the intellectual freedom that comes with being outside of the establishment. More info available at codykommers.com/podcast.

If you enjoy the show, please consider subscribing! You can follow me on Twitter @codykommers, and through my newsletter at codykommers.com/newsletter.

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If you haven't recently, go look up a picture of actor Paul Rudd. Now, Ben Affleck. My guest for the show this week looks like their love child (go ahead, look it up for yourself). It's uncanny. At any rate, Sander is also a professor of psychology at Cambridge and directs the Social Decision Making lab there. In this episode, we talk about being a night owl in a morning person's world, lucid dreaming, his short-lived career getting umbrellas for bankers, increasing motivation by tying tasks into a larger goal, doing research that's meaningful for society, balancing scientific research and public outreach, "Why not just reach out to people?", perseverance ("Just send them another email"), improving as a mentor, and tackling big research questions. Hope you enjoy! More info available at codykommers.com/podcast.

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Dr Heather Berlin is one of the purest science communicators I've ever come across. Pure in the sense that she is, above all, a scientist; her dedication to the craft is obvious. But she also clearly believes that it's important those results don't stop at a handful of specialists. Because she values in the insights of science so deeply, she can't help but make sure as many people as possible can benefit from them! Her day job is as a professor of psychiatry at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Her other day job is as a TV doctor, in which she cohosts shows like Star Talk with Neil DeGrasse Tyson or the documentary "Bill Nye: Science Guy." In this episode, we talk about writing and performing off-broadway shows with her husband (who is a rapper), her re-specialization into clinical work, choosing a PhD over med school, strategies for putting yourself out there, and increasing representation of women in science communication. More info available at codykommers.com/podcast.

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Have you ever wondered what it's like to be a bird? Not just to fly, but to really, truly understand the world from a bird's perspective. I don't think I have. At least not to the extent that Nicky Clayton has. She is a joyous human being full of unique perspective on corvids, animals, humans, babies, magicians, artists, and scientists. Her official title is professor of comparative cognition at Cambridge, and you can find her on twitter @nickyclayton22. In this episode we talk about her work in China, the phenomenology of bird existence, how to make your own luck, combining science and art to explore memory, letting ideas grow organically, how to encourage others to be more sensitive to the world around them, the connection between magic and cognition, and informal fieldwork in everyday life. As always you can find more info at codykommers.com/podcast.

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Weiji Ma is an associate professor of neural science and psychology at NYU. He is the co-founder of the Growing Up in Science seminar series in New York (you can find more about those seminars online), as well as the Rural China Education Foundation. In this episode, Weiji and I talk about making friends when you're different than your peers, living up to expectations, how we dealt with an "addiction" to online chess and other pathological cases of distraction, finding the right "tough love" mentors, surviving the post-doc phase to get running your own lab, setting the tone of a lab as a PI, managing friction between lab members, why working with Christof Koch didn't go well for him, and how to make the academy a better place to work in. More info at codykommers.com/podcast.

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David Pizarro is an associate professor in the department of psychology at Cornell. He is also chief science officer at BEworks and cohost of the venerable psychology/philosophy podcast Very Bad Wizards. In this episode, Cody and David talk about learning to work with your natural strengths and weaknesses, finding collaborators who make you better, how to structure your work around laziness, learning to say no, using anger as an academic motivator, getting in early on the podcast scene, and what Cody's advisor thinks about him doing this podcast. More info available on codykommers.com/podcast.

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Dorsa Amir is a postdoctoral fellow at Boston College. She took her PhD in anthropology from Yale, and has a popular Ted Talk on how the industrial revolution changed childhood. In this episode, Cody talks with Dorsa about strategic planning as a daily routine, mastering self-regulation, aiming big even when you're risk averse, ultimate goals versus proximal goals, and the most important things psychologists can learn from anthropologists. More info available at codykommers.com/podcast.

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Nick Epley is the John Templeton Keller Professor of Behavior Science at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He is the author of the book "Mindwise: How We Understand What Others Think, Believe, Feel, and Want." In this episode, Cody talks to Nick about the value of true liberal arts education, the advantages of getting married young, learning the craft of psychology, Nick's crazy proposal to his wife (which didn't go as planned), having kids during grad school, the biggest differences between working in psych departments versus business schools, and what it means to design a good life. More info available at codykommers.com/podcast.

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David DeSteno is a professor of psychology at Northeastern University, where he directs the Social Emotions Group. He has published many books, including "Emotional Success: The Power of Gratitude, Compassion, and Pride." In this episode, Cody talks to David about the difference between academic and popular writing, balancing your true interests with pragmatic considerations, how to be optimally interdisciplinary, and debating core beliefs versus trying to learn from one another. More info available at codykommers.com/podcast.

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Linda B. Smith is a professor of psychology and cognitive science at Indiana University. She is a prolific cognitive scientist, specializing in child development, who has won many of the most prestigious awards in the field -- including the Rumelhart prize and the Norman Anderson Lifetime Achievement Award. In this episode, she talks to Cody about transfering from engineering to psychology, what it means to be truly rigorous as a psychologist, going against the grain of Chomsky, getting through personal doubts and crises, being influenced by unexpected sources, and making the best local decisions in your career. More info available at codykommers.com/podcast.

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Cory Clark is a professor of quantitative social psychology at Durham University. She is the co-host of the Psyphilopod podcast, as well as the proud owner of the prestigious Twitter handle @ImHardCory. In this episode, Cody and Cory talk about the gateway drugs to psychology, getting traction in research, on being a modern psychologist (with a podcast), and what we still don't know about successful de-biasing. More info available at codykommers.com/podcast.

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Bradley Voytek is a professor of cognitive science, neuroscience, and data science at UC San Diego. He is the author of Do Zombies Dream of Undead Sheep? and was the first data scientist at Uber. In this episode, Cody talks to Brad about the neuroscience of zombies, community building, being an insanely good mentor, overcoming low grades or initial setbacks, the influence of Oliver Sacks, and Brad's CV of failures. You can follow him on Twitter @BradleyVoytek. More info available at codykommers.com/podcast.

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Axel Cleeremans is a professor of cognitive science in the Department of Psychology of the Université Libre de Bruxelles in Belgium. He is also a Research Director for the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research. In this episode, Cody talks with Axel about his decision to move to the US for his PhD and work with pioneers in artificial intelligence like Jay McClelland and Herb Simon. They also discuss significant life changes, being at the forefront of neural network research in AI, how students mold their advisor's interests, and being in on the ground floor of scientific interest in consciousness. More info available at codykommers.com/podcast.

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Susan Fiske is a professor of psychology at Princeton University. She is a pioneer in the field of social cognition, and co-author of the famous text Social Cognition. In this episode, Cody digs into her decades of experience as a social psychologist. They discuss the biggest single thing that psychologists can contribute to society, why conservatives tend not to become social psychologists, how Professor Fiske made her mark in a male dominated field, and the trip around the world that jump-started her research career. More info at codykommers.com/podcast.

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Scott Barry Kaufman is a professor of psychology at Columbia. He is the author of several books, including Ungifted: Intelligence Redefined. He is the host of the The Psychology Podcast. Most importantly, he is a caring and compassionate human being. You can find him on Twitter @sbkaufman. In this episode, Cody talks to Scott about having a tactical plan to achieve goals in the course of plotting a unique life path. More info available at codykommers.com/podcast.

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Chantel Prat is a cognitive neuroscientist, author, and general-purpose badass. She is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Washington, where she leads the Cognition & Cortical Dynamics Lab. In this episode, Cody talks with Chantel about the magical moments of randomness that life throws at you and how a curve ball can be just what you need to hit a home run. Keep an eye out for her forthcoming book, slated for release in early 2021! More info at codykommers.com/podcast.

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Paul Bloom is a prolific author and has written books such as "Against Empathy," as well as articles in venues like the New York Times, the New Yorker, and the Atlantic. He is the Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science at Yale. In this episode, Paul talks to Cody about his unique schedule for productivity, what it takes to write for a broader audience, and how to pick the perfect title. More information is available at codykommers.com/podcast.

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Art Markman is an accomplished author, podcaster, and psychology professor at UT Austin, as well as Founding Director of the Program in the Human Dimensions of Organizations. In this episode, Art gives Cody his perspective on how to take risks, be in the right place at the right time, and get your work out there for a broader audience. More information is available at codykommers.com/podcast.

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Welcome to Cognitive Revolution. If you're new to the podcast this is a good place to start. It is an introduction to what you'll be hearing later on, in which Cody tells the story of Bertrand Russell's famous work "Principia" and the personal woes that Russell had to go through to finish it. Find out more about the show at codykommers.com/podcast.

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