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Who thinks that they can subdue Leviathan? Strength resides in its neck; dismay goes before it. It is without fear. It looks down on all who are haughty; it is king over all who are proud. These words inspired PJ Wehry to create Chasing Leviathan. Chasing Leviathan was born out of two ideals: that truth is worth pursuing but will never be subjugated, and the discipline of listening is one of the most important habits anyone can develop. Every episode is a dialogue, a journey into the depths of a meaningful question explored through the lens of personal experience or professional expertise.
PJ Wehry (00:01.987)
Hello and welcome to Chasing Leviathan. I'm your host, PJ Weary, and I'm here today with Dr. Jason Storm, the Francis Christopher Oakley Third Century Professor of Religion, Chair of Science and Technology Studies at Williams College. And we're talking about his book, Meta Modernism, The Future of Theory. Dr. Storm. Yes, thank you. Thank you. I love, and yes, your previous book had a great cover as well, and I don't have the title in front of me, but anyways.
Jason Storm (00:21.378)
Yeah, my prop.
PJ Wehry (00:29.163)
Maybe another interview. But before we get into the other book, Meta Modernism, The Future of Theory, very enjoyed the cover. But tell me why this book.
Jason Storm (00:30.572)
Yeah, yeah, right.
Jason Storm (00:42.286)
Um, yeah, so there are different ways to tell the story, but basically, I, how, how autobiographical, how long of a story, the long story is my parents are both philosophers. Uh, and, uh, I've been sort of grappling with, um, this kind of stuff more broadly from almost my entire life. Uh, I can't remember a time when I didn't know who Kant was, but when I went to school, uh, I know it's totally weird, but when I went to school, I was, I got very enthralled by.
what was then considered the cool and rebellious form of philosophy, namely continental and Asian philosophy also for heritage reasons or for my family reasons. I grew up with a of Asian philosophy, but it was continental philosophy that was, is most relevant to this project. And so already from undergrad, think even more specifically it was when my dad was driving me to college, he put on these tapes like great philosopher audio tapes and one of them had.
an episode, it was the last one in the series. So we were driving from Ohio where I went to high school to Massachusetts where I went to college. And I think sometime in the last few hours of the drive, the last tape kicked on and it was whatever, I think it was called Postmodern Philosophy, but it was Derrida and Foucault. And it made them seem really, really bad ass. So, and then it was a way to, so sort of as a way to both rebel from my parents, but also follow a parental kind of idiom.
I got interested in continental philosophy and then I was taking courses in Asian philosophy and neither of those were taken very seriously in the philosophy department. And so I shifted toward religion where those were considered more legitimate forms of intellectual inquiry. And then I went on to graduate school to fast forward a bit and did my PhD program at Stanford.
where Richard Rorty was still giving lectures, although he was retired at that point, but he was still physically around, or married at that point, but he was around. And then I went to lectures by all sorts of trending folks, Cornell West, or I went to Jacques Derrida's lectures. I then lived in France for two years. And I saw people like Agamben and Zizek and Latour. And so I was really kind of soaking this stuff up.
Jason Storm (02:58.446)
And in the process of doing that and doing my own intellectual formation, I was sort of split between what we could call more philosophical analysis and more historical analysis. And so for me, Foucault was the real touchstone, even though he'd long been dead by the time I was doing this kind of work. But my advisor had been Foucault's translator in Japan and knew him. And so there's a kind of intellectual lineage there. And I was also doing coursework with Jean-Pierre Dupuis, who is a French
a philosopher who does philosophy of science stuff, but from a continental idiom. So kind of mixing history and philosophy. I'm now giving you way the longer version than you needed. So the other way put it is my graduate training was very much in a kind of basically postmodern idiom. But I started getting an increasing sense that it was delivering diminishing returns. What had started as a rebellious attempt to question authority was mostly questioning
PJ Wehry (03:39.915)
No, that's fine. No, it's good.
Jason Storm (03:57.664)
its own utility and leaving the structures of authority in place. And so I felt it both wasn't working as a fulcrum for important kinds of political agency, but also it lacked a certain kind of intellectual purchase. It purported to provide answers to a whole host of really important questions. What is the nature of meaning or in terms of language or how does power relate to subjects of intellectual inquiry or how to understand the formation of the subject or whatever.
but it hadn't updated its model since, I don't know, my parents were in grad school. and what's more, you know, like that whole generation had now been positioning themselves as rebels, but they were, know, here we're talking the early 2000s here, were already in certain respects on the way out. And again, there are some sort of short critiques of that that I also found badly motivated. So a lot of people, I don't know, the Steven Pinkers of the world or whoever, were happy to dismiss things without having read them.
PJ Wehry (04:31.063)
Yeah
Jason Storm (04:56.27)
And I was coming out of the movement. So in a way, this book could have been called, know, Confessions of a Recovering Postmodernist, although that makes it sound a little too harsh, because I really think that there's a lot that's very valuable in what we could call postmodern philosophical movements. But there were, it was a time to take stock and figure out what still was worth engaging in, what was worth developing, what do we have to leave behind, how might we move forward?
And part two also because I had in mind workaday academics. And I wanted a kind of theory that you could use to do the kind of work that philosophy at least has the potential to do, which is shape one's fundamental subjects and foci or ethics, et cetera, of inquiry across the humanities and social sciences. And what instead had happened had been a situation which we'd largely canonized a particular set of folks and were dropping their names like crazy, but in ways that were often
not advancing the conversation, and where academic theory had become increasingly synonymous with jargon and name dropping and certain kinds of obscurantism. Technical vocabulary are cool. I'm not against that. it had become its own parody after a certain point. So I wanted to think what tools, and this was my third book. So I had two books previous to this one. And I wanted to kind of think, what tools did I wish that I had had in graduate school? And I also wanted to think.
you know, now that we have a certain set of skeptical challenges or philosophical issues brought up by the postmodernists, which of those are still living issues? Which of those can be resolved and how? And then my reading methodology was incredibly capacious. So I was trying to very much by both practice and discipline read not only in continental idioms, but also in analytic philosophical forms.
and in various parts of world philosophy. My first book was on Japanese thinkers and movements, and I converse in and also teach Japanese and Chinese philosophy. But then I also read and dip my toes into Africana philosophical thought, South Asian philosophy, Islamic philosophy, et cetera, just looking across the board for conceptual tools and techniques that might help me work through and past the postmodern moment.
Jason Storm (07:21.526)
without doing the thing that many analytic philosophers do, which is just reject postmodernism as a bunch of junk and toss it out the window without even seriously engaging it. Yeah, that's sort of a long rambling answer, but hopefully that gets at it. I'm warming up, yeah.
PJ Wehry (07:31.319)
Yeah.
yeah, it's great. It's great. As we kind of look at this, immediately you talked about your influence by continental philosophy, know, hearing Derrida and Foucault as that final, you're like, these guys are cool, you know, on your way there. But you mentioned that you had some Asian influences. Do you mind sharing a couple names there fairly early on for you?
Jason Storm (07:59.064)
Sure, well, so, historic, mean, so, relevant to this book in particular, Tanabe Hajime and folks in the broader Kyoto school. So there's quite an intense engagement with Tanabe's, a text that we could translate as philosophy as metanoetics, Zangendō no Tetsugaku. But more broadly, I grew up engaged with East Asian forms of Buddhism in particular, and then,
in already an undergrad started doing coursework in Daoism and classical Chinese thought. And some of my very first, actually my very first publication was a translation of, or it was in an added volume, but it was a translation of Japanese writings on Daoism. So what I was very interested in, and one of the things I do when I'm not publishing my own work, I published a few standalone translations and they're mostly from the Japanese.
Just because you know, I have other languages too, but that's where I started out. And yeah, let me think. But I can, yeah, that's a first pass. I can give more specific names too, but yeah.
PJ Wehry (09:05.473)
Yeah. No, that's immediately. mean, it just helps ground me in what your kind of what your personal history is, because this is obviously grows out of that. It's forgive me. I just want to make sure I'm tracking with you here. We talk about we're talking about the critiques and the postmodernism is kind of.
There is a program there, but it's mostly critique. And so I think as I'm looking through your work, one of the things that kind of comes out is that it's easier to critique than to build, but you can't ignore the critiques, right? So is that a very, I know that's simplistic, but is that a good kind of grounding statement?
Jason Storm (09:46.03)
Correct,
Jason Storm (09:49.571)
Yeah.
Jason Storm (09:54.38)
Yeah, Sure, yeah. And I can, the way I put it, even punch in a more punchy kind of way is we need to start from the critique rather than terminate in it. So unlike a whole bunch of folks who are like, no, you don't need the critique. And this is where, you know, even some of my fellow travelers in the sort of a post critique world, I think I have some disagreement. I think we need to start with the critique. think the critique is important. But if all we're doing is critiquing, if everything just ends in another critique, we are not doing
even the critique justice, and we're also not moving the conversation forward. And exactly as you said, I think it's easier to criticize than to build. And so it can be more vulnerable to build, but we don't wanna build in a naive way, nor do we wanna engage in some kind of defensive rear guard maneuver where we try and protect the object from the critique that emerged in the first place. And so there's a lot of folks who are like, you don't be critical at all. And I'm definitely not saying that. I'm saying be critical, be harsh, be as critical as you can be.
But just don't stop there. Then ask, now what? Now that I've shown x is problematic in way y, then we want to then go, OK, but what are the next steps? Don't just leave us there. So yeah, that's, think, another way to argue, to describe the architecture of the project. Yeah. Yeah.
PJ Wehry (10:54.797)
Yeah.
PJ Wehry (11:13.027)
Yeah, like at the end of book you have the human sciences as a way of life and so it's this idea one I mean that sounds transdisciplinary, right? That you are that the the idea and I'm curious to hear and if you don't want to get into this that's fine, but like the goal of a liberal education as building a way of life when we talk about like what's the use of literature? What's the use of
philosophy, what's the use of all these sorts of departments that are often getting cut, and you're looking at this and you're saying, well, we're supposed to, they're supposed to build something after the critique. And part of the reason they're getting cut is because they're terminating in the critique, and then it's like, well, if I can't get a job, and it doesn't make me a better person, like, why are we here, right?
Jason Storm (12:03.724)
Yeah, totally. I I think like a lot of my peers here, for instance, at Williams basically use their particular academic pulpit to teach students to feel guilty about their primary subject of interest. And that's a shame. And there are reasons to, I'm not trying to deny the past, right? Like we wanna, I don't wanna whitewash, I don't know, Herman Melville's racism or whatever, but.
We can grant that and then figure out what it is about literature or about Moby Dick that we find compelling or whatever. So, I mean, I think exactly that what we mostly end up doing, if all the humanities are, are either anemic calls for some kind of critical thinking that aren't being actualized or if they're just a form of pessimistic self-critique that is mostly making students feel shitty about things, that's not gonna work.
And we can't also be pretending that we're training students for a job market that we don't understand and which is in constant state of shift and transition. So none of those work as models for the humanities and social sciences. And instead, and this is a way in which I'm trying to reach back toward something that was there at the very beginning of the intellectual project that became the liberal arts, which is, if we look at texts like Pico de la Mirandola's famous oration on the dignity of man,
We see this idea that what the liberal arts are supposed to do is help us think about what it would mean to live a life worth having lived. What would it mean when we recognize that we ourselves are malleable? We ourselves are capable of autopoiesis, of self-creation. How do we take that in hand responsibly? And in other words, as I gesture to also Pierre Adot in this section, what would it mean to take seriously academic disciplines as ways of life? In other words,
How can sociology help us figure out how to build better societies? Or how can psychology help us in our thinking processes, et cetera, et cetera? And so again, and I'll underscore this just to be clear, this isn't in any way a denial of the critical work. And I think that critical work is really valuable. But again, an attempt to think about a future intentionally determined and necessarily pluralistic set of directions that we might want to move in. And so.
Jason Storm (14:17.312)
Even if I tell, so let me give you an example. I teach a class with students that's kind of the intro to my department called The Meaning of Life. And the goal of that class is to introduce them to a cassette of thinkers that are per-rocketably interesting to grapple with, including folks like Camus, Kierkegaard, folks like Dogen, Zenji in the Japanese context, or whoever. And in each case, the main issue,
and impulse for the students is just to ask them, to the students to ask themselves what would it mean to live a meaningful life and not to give them one answer, right? And so I'm not saying, you know, there's one life and it has to be to be a philosopher. I'm saying you just have to be able to interrogate that. And if you're able to interrogate that with a certain kind of intellectual honesty and openness to both self-critique and to being in a pluralistic environment in which other folks are in the room and they have different views.
and you have to listen to them, then I think you can open up a whole bunch of really great stuff. And so, you know, for my students, I asked them, you know, like, why are you here? Why are you in college? And often they haven't even really thought about that fundamentally, or if they have, it's always in terms of the market, to make more money. And then I'm like, okay, dude, that's not gonna make you happy. And here are the reasons that that's not sufficient, at least, like you can be rich and profoundly unhappy, as we know from the all the freakish billionaires who are parading their flaws on
social media in our particular moment. Or you can be someone who, a modest means, who is quite, quite happy. so money isn't going to be, yes, it's good to come up with a set of marketable skills, et cetera. But even more importantly, there's some self-reflection and insight that can go into that. And so then I say, so we use that as an opening, not a closing. And then
PJ Wehry (16:06.498)
Yeah.
Jason Storm (16:07.628)
And then that can feed into other disciplines and can, and you can, and students can look quite broadly. They can think, I don't know, meaning making is creating art. And then I'm like, great, go to the art department, have them help you with this, right? Like, or they're like, meaning, meaning making is about, for me about my community. And then I'm like, okay, let's think in terms of sociology. Let's go to your community. Let's think about how communal systems function and how to build organic forms of socialization rather than quote unquote mechanical ones or whatever, right? And so.
Then there's a whole vast repertoire of literature already out there, but that can be repurposed and reinterpreted as part of a broader mission toward living a more meaningful life, living a life worth having lived. And that also helps us. And then we look at the pitfalls of that. We look at the challenges. What are the things that are likely to get in the way? That gives us an opportunity to talk about things like prejudice or can give us an opportunity to talk about things like.
challenges, you know based on economic markets or you know a whole range of things that come up right and so You know we bring power back into our analysis and our discussion and all those You know and again, we don't have to ignore all the things that make it hard and we have to recognize Ultimately our own fallibility as human beings too. And so the other part of that Intellectual work is you know, not whole recognizing that yeah, we're all just flawed people trying to make it in an imperfect world. Yeah
PJ Wehry (17:34.435)
Well, and I appreciate that we're not just flawed people, but we're different people, right? You're like, where is your like, like, hey, why don't you go to this department? Because this seems to be where you're finding meaning, right? Instead of being like, and I've made this joke on here before, it always makes me laugh that you read Aristotle and he's like, now the perfect being is the one who sits around and thinks all day. And you're like, that feels a little self congratulatory. I'm just saying, you know, yeah, I'm appreciating you talking about like, you're like,
Jason Storm (17:35.02)
And then, yeah, yeah, yeah, totally.
Jason Storm (17:44.781)
Yeah, exactly.
Jason Storm (18:00.641)
I it. Yeah.
PJ Wehry (18:03.117)
Hey, you don't have to be a philosopher to have a meaningful life, right?
Jason Storm (18:07.118)
for sure. I think also then, and I also point folks to a whole range of resources. So it's not just in the Western canon too. So we can also say, and there are other lives on offer. You could decide to be a, I don't know, the Taoist sage might be the model for some students or a life in the clergy for other students, right? So, I mean, again, like, and I point them to the folks, to the Catholic chaplain if they need to. So again, I don't wanna,
preemptively secularize this project. But then I also, yeah, and there are questions where we can think individually or whether, and moments where it's important to think about how we fit into various groups and how we think about a collective project too, because one of the things that I'm committed to, and this is in the Meta Modernism book, but are to epistemologies that grapple with the fact that we're socially embedded agents. And so when we're thinking about knowledge, it's often
PJ Wehry (18:51.043)
Mm.
Jason Storm (19:04.622)
the idea of a single great individual, I don't know, Descartes returning to first principles and coming up with the whole of modern philosophy, that's almost always a myth. And then it turns out, Descartes was massively influenced by a bunch of folks that he didn't always cite or engage with explicitly and so on, right? And he's part of a particular period in time and social context and all that. And so we're not isolated reasoning agents. We're embedded in epistemic communities.
And for that reason too, we need to look to other people and other people can help check us when we're going down certain unhelpful directions or they can help amplify us when we're, you And part of that also involves a lot of listening. So I like when you were talking to me about your model for this podcast. I mean, a lot of what we need to learn to do and here I'm speaking less to my students than to my peers is also learn how to listen because there's a tendency within the ivory tower
to think that we have all the answers and that we just spit them out at a populace. Then we're surprised when folks don't respond to us. And I think we often need to do a little bit more listening. And not that we don't have a lot to contribute, but that we often need to start from the listening phase. Or maybe not start from the listening phase, but listening phase needs to be part of that practice as well. Yeah.
PJ Wehry (20:28.663)
Yeah, there's so many threads to go towards. one thing I appreciate, you're talking about the epistemic communities and the way that not only can they amplify us, they can check us. And so when you talk about a critical virtue ethics, I, if I'm again, making sure I'm tracking with you here, it's not just the methods or the movements that give us critique. It's also submitting our work or our lives to other judgments.
to other people who are able to, like, it's not just like, hey, if I have the right approach here, then I won't need to go and get my work, like my life checked. It's like inviting, and that's part of the listening, other people to come in and be like, dude, what are you doing?
Jason Storm (21:17.11)
Yeah, totally. think that there are two ways. So to take a step back for those viewers of your podcast who are still trying to get a handle on what I'm doing in the book, I'll just say it out. It's attempt to do kind of systematic philosophy in a range of different areas, but starting from the question of what kind of academic paradigm do we need in the contemporary humanities and social sciences or series of paradigms once we recognize that the quote unquote postmodern, and I can talk.
about how I'm defining that and how that's applicable is no longer, is delivering diminishing returns. And we recognize that for various reasons, analytic philosophy has often become too specialized to answer the kinds of questions that those of us across other disciplines want answers to, or at least not, there's no single place to point it out. So you can, a few bits here and there that are incredibly useful, but it tends not to be the main thing analytic philosophers are doing. anyway, so it's an academic paradigm.
Part of that is recognition that a bunch of things that we often hold as separate are intermittently related or maybe I should put that more differently, are entwined in different ways and have implications with each other. More specifically, we need to be thinking about our social ontology, we need to be thinking about our epistemological norms and stances, we need to be thinking about our notions of language and meaning, et cetera, et cetera.
One of the parts of that project is an attempt to articulate a particular metaepistemic stance, so orientation toward the enterprise of knowledge. And part of that stance is rooted in a recognition, again, as we were saying, that we're part of epistemic communities. And then the question is, and what that means is that communal norms, epistemic norms, make a big difference. When, for instance, the enterprise of peer review was originally intended to be structured as a way
to lead toward more robust and reliable kinds of conclusions. And it doesn't do that now. often, half of the people who peer review my stuff just want me to cite them more. Or there's a lot of academic gatekeeping going on. But it was a cool idea. It was a good idea initially. so we have to think about, and one of the ways that a well-formed version of peer review can function is it can
PJ Wehry (23:18.647)
Ha
Jason Storm (23:31.778)
challenge you to elaborate more where your argument is lacking or it can help you figure out when you might be wrong. And I'm committed toward a kind of radical form of epistemic humility such that not only do we have to always recognize our capacity to be wrong about things in the external world, but we also have to recognize that we're capable of being wrong about ourselves. And this is an insight which I think
can be even more challenging, I think, in the contemporary versions of the postmodern academy. Students, for instance, often come in with the view that of a kind of incoherent pluralist relativism where everybody can be right about everything, at least everybody's right about themselves, and then they just, that's just your opinion, and everybody has their own opinion, and everyone has their own truth, et cetera. And that leads toward a bunch of paradoxes.
But even more so, I want to internalize the insight that we could get from Freud or whoever, we could see this also in various religious traditions, but that we are capable of self-deception. And so that man, can be wrong. And in that respect, yeah, we can be wrong about ourselves. And that's important too. And there are various concrete ways that that plays out, but it means that we have to take the skeptical doubt
not just toward the empirical world of our external senses, but even towards things like our self perceptions. And again, not that Descartes would necessarily disagree. He wants to sort of start there, but then he thinks he has something, know, then he articulates a rationalism in a very different way. So that then presumes he can reconstruct a whole bunch of thinking without reference to sense experience, et cetera. So, you know, and then God, you know, God wouldn't deceive him and then he's back out in the world and running around or whatever.
I mean, where was I going with this? Yeah. So yeah. So yeah. But I'm rambling a bit here. Yeah. Let me, I'll let you bring it back.
PJ Wehry (25:25.687)
Convenient, yes.
no, no worries. I wanted to and this was one of those threads that came up earlier that I wanted to talk on. literally in the middle of reading an invitation to reflexive sociology by it's a quant, I think I might say. Yeah. And I do see because Bordeaux is really interested in building something, right? He's not just he like he he recognizes the critique, the reflexive side of it. How does your project?
Jason Storm (25:43.365)
Yeah. Go do it and walk on. Yeah. Yeah.
PJ Wehry (26:01.507)
relate to that kind of reflexive sociology that turn again to yourself to critique in order to have what he calls more objectivity, but really, I think there's that idea of he's building something that matches what you're talking about a little bit.
Jason Storm (26:19.02)
Yeah, so I mean, think one of the central insights of reflexive sociology as I see it, and this is in Bourdieu, but also you can find in a few other places, is the recognition that sociology itself begins to trouble the society in which it is housed. And so even in a more concrete way, you know, people, there's a lot of evidence that, you know, if you ask people to check boxes on social surveys, that shapes their self perceptions, right? So there's a problem.
that sociology has trouble dealing with, is sociology's own effect on its field in a Borgian sense of a disciplinary field. And so in one of the sections of the book, so probably the second part of the book, I look at a set of category critiques that emerged in a range of disciplines in roughly the same period, basically. And they often recognize the limitations of the disciplinary objects in similar ways. So we could.
make the observation reflexively. can note that sociology started to get suspicious about the category of society, in part based on its own recognition that it was transforming the object that it studied, producing an artificial sense of coherence in a world that was full of a bunch of heterogeneous actors trying to do different kinds of things. That wasn't the only critique of the category, but you could note that similarly folks in art history.
began to become increasingly aware of the way in which the academic discipline of aesthetics or the appreciation or study of art was beginning to transform and had fact had already completely transformed the art world such that what it meant to do art was often much more in dialogue with academic conversations than it was with a bunch of other possible things that art had been doing in earlier and different periods.
That isn't the only source of these critiques, but it's one version of it. And so part of what I'm observing in the book is the way that the scholarly master categories, whether they're terms like art or religion, a society or philosophy itself, can have problems built into them. in some respects, those are problems of definition, which I'm happy to get into in a minute. But there are also categories that do a lot of productive work
Jason Storm (28:38.038)
mobilizing individuals and resources and causing changes globally. And so one of the things that postmodern skepticism was motivated by was just the recognition, literature has all these effects. It's often a category that is normatively loaded. So to call something literature is often an act of praise. And dismiss something as not being really literature or whatever.
So in that respect, the English department, for instance, with its control over the category of literature, started to what people were doing in the fiction world. And then folks in English departments got self-conscious of that, in a way. And it used it as just more fuel for the consumptive fire that was burning through the department in its attempt to self-criticize, its autoconflag duration, in a way.
But to step back in that section of the book, I'm interested in there's a more fundamental issue about concepts that is even more than the reflexivity and the issue that Bourdieu is noting around and his peers are noting about sociology, which is that basically starting in the immediate post-war period, so shortly after the Second World War, there were a bunch of conversations around
happening in very different disciplines in which, to sort of spoiler, they all internalized versions of a skeptical Wittgensteinian critique of categories. What do mean by skeptical Wittgensteinian critiques? I'm often lecturing to undergrads, so forgive me if I then spell, I want to make sure I spell things out. What I mean is that, you know, famously Wittgenstein had achieved early fame based on a project
PJ Wehry (30:05.708)
Yeah.
PJ Wehry (30:17.825)
Yeah. No, no worries.
Jason Storm (30:29.058)
that he later either repudiated or decided to radically reclarify. The early Wittgenstein of the Tractatus at least was legible in certain contexts as a kind of foundational work in what would become, quote unquote, logical positivism or logical empiricism. Late Wittgenstein, however, in a series of lectures and in works that were only published in properly anthologized forms shortly after his death, had begun to direct his criticisms toward the nature of conceptual categories.
famously his critique of the notion of games as a family resemblance category. So what he asked, I don't know I need to rehearse that for your audience or not, yeah. So Wittgenstein asks, what is it that all games share in common? Because any defining feature you might come up with of game will turn out to leave some obviously recognized members of the category.
PJ Wehry (31:07.145)
No, no, go for it. Yeah, yeah,
Jason Storm (31:24.878)
out and or might include things that you don't want to fit in that category. Like you can think, you know, what do football, monopoly, poker, Resident Evil, sorry, my video game references are all outdated, have in common. And you'll see that there's very little, right? And so what Wittgenstein suggested was perhaps all that they shared was a certain family resemblance.
PJ Wehry (31:41.793)
I'll go for it, yeah.
Jason Storm (31:54.382)
Shortly after Wittgenstein's texts gained circulation, and they circulated first in a small narrow community of British philosophers, but then quickly became published in different forums, different kinds of folks in different academic disciplines, early in this narrative, and I trace out some of these folks in my book, was a dude named Morris Veitz, who was a philosopher of aesthetics. And Veitz famously...
using Wittgenstein as his point of departure, began to ask, you know, what is it that all art has in common? And art is a good one to showcase the importance of this category of critique because in the first case, it's hard to figure out if you just, I mean, it has a problem that is even more radical than games. Like what does Duchamp's urinal, Picasso's Guernica,
and a statue of Apollo have in common. It becomes a maddeningly difficult enterprise to define art. And indeed, what is more, because of this self-reflexive looping that happens in art circles, and this is something Weitz was well aware of, as soon as you define art in some way,
some artist is gonna come along and just fuck it up and they're gonna do it on purpose, right? So that's Duchamp in the first place, right? Exactly, yeah. And if it weren't for him, the data, it could be Tristan Tsar doing cut-ups to push the limits of painting or it could be situationists who are calling their art, I don't know, or people taping bananas to walls. However you define art, artists will cause that category to break. So in the first instance, what Weitz observes is that
It's what he calls an open category or open concept. He said, what is work is the category of what's open. You can't bound it. And that means it cannot be defined according to necessary and sufficient conditions. At its best, he thinks that there's a certain kind of family resemblance. And I'll get to why you can't actually anchor categories and family resemblance in a minute. then Weitz also observes it's a heavily normatively loaded category. So again, as I was saying about literature, we could say about art.
Jason Storm (34:09.55)
even more so to cause, know, that's a work of art. That's not a work of art, you know, already it's richly evaluative. And so, and then also in particular, because art is an active category at which there's a lot at stake, it continues to change. And what is a member of the category art, you know, almost any way you'll define it, whether, you know, you want to do an institutional theory of art or whatever, that won't work because somebody will just change it up or, you know, reject that, you know, whatever.
So, yeah, so all that is just, then so VICE is doing this in, think, I forget now the date it's in the book, but it's in the early 50s. And we have folks doing it in history with a category of history. We have folks in the study of science, Hanson, his first critique of the category of science, which then gets amplified by Thomas Kuhn in the early 1960s. Same thing in religious studies.
PJ Wehry (35:08.322)
Yeah
Jason Storm (35:09.27)
Yeah, Campbell Smith is the key figure in the religious studies, self-critique in the category of religion, sociologists criticizing society, anthropologists reject culture, folks in English departments start rejecting the category of literature, and so on. So one version of this book, and it's very early embryonic form, when I realized that there were these common critiques, was to just line those up. But I actually soon realized that I could abstract from these critiques, that they were often
rehearsing similar moves. So for your viewers who happen to be in grad school now, you can distill the strategies that were taught in different academic disciplines to demolish the disciplinary objects. And I rehearse them. I provide a kind of disciplinary dojo. So if you want to knock down a category, here are set of moves you can use. But, and then this circle back to our very beginning of our conversation, is it the place to stop? And so I'm not denying those moves, although,
PJ Wehry (35:41.004)
Yes.
PJ Wehry (35:56.866)
Yes.
Jason Storm (36:08.504)
They lose some of their edge when you recognize that almost all the archonceptual categories can be demolished in similar terms. So folks in religion thought that when they were demolishing the category of religion, they could easily move to the notion of culture, for instance. This was a big pattern in religious studies. But then they didn't know that anthropologists were demolishing culture in the same period. So that didn't work. And similarly, anthropologists were often preferring the category literature just as it was under attack elsewhere in the academy and so on.
PJ Wehry (36:25.053)
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
Jason Storm (36:38.508)
So what happens when you line all those up? Well, it also, I want to suggest, tells us something very fundamental about the nature of our social categories. And indeed, as I elaborate in the book, it tells us something about how what we could, and I use this term as a placeholder, how social kinds function. And by social kinds, I mean socially constructed kinds. And I don't mean social as opposed to political or as opposed to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's just a shorthand for.
And I work out a way to describe them in some detail in a long chapter, but I argue that they're process kinds. And if we recognize that, we can recognize one of the things that motivated the turn toward open concepts or categories in the first place. We also recognize, anyway, I come up with whole set of features that tell us how not just humans, but other social animals produce certain kinds of categories, including things like artifacts, but also by de facto.
categories of organizing their environment one way or another and how those have similar kinds of features. And so, indeed, we can kind of take a mirror image of that deconstructive or demolition work and it can show us that we're actually working on similar kinds of things across the academy. so, for reasons of space, I'll point to the chapter, it's a long chapter, I go into a lot of detail, but I try to argue for a...
PJ Wehry (38:02.115)
Yeah, well, I was just gonna say, I mean, that's why people need to buy the book. mean, this is a teaser. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, and I think this is, you have this very long, and I appreciate it. There were a lot, I'd heard a lot of the different types of turns, which of course, it just became such a cliche thing. And then there were, you had compiled the list, I was like, I haven't heard of a lot of these. These are like,
Jason Storm (38:05.1)
Yeah, something that'll work. Yeah.
Jason Storm (38:10.542)
Yeah, thank you. Yeah, Yeah, this is a teaser, exactly.
PJ Wehry (38:31.555)
Is that kind of that move where you're talking about metamodernism as like the systematic account? Is that a That relationship to the linguistic turn to the transnational turn to the pragmatic turn to the sensory turn the The mobility turn the quotidian turn all these is that kind of? What we're talking about here, too. Is that this conglomeration of like?
all these different people are like, well, this isn't working and they're trying to find and they're all making similar moves and you're trying to systematize that and abstract that. Is that?
Jason Storm (39:06.518)
Yeah, totally. mean, that's part of it, right? And so part of it is a frustration with that metaphor, so of turn, especially because often the turn, it's produced to me, once you read a lot of this literature, a kind of sense of things spinning in circles and not getting anywhere. And also, especially because they're turns that often talk completely past each other, terms with the same name in different disciplines, to antithetical effect, or like,
turns to history that keep reoccurring without awareness of other turns to history that happened earlier, or turns to the body again and again as though academics haven't always had some engagement with our bodies, like we need to be reminded or whatever. So part of it, as a sort autobiographical confession, so one of my, as a kid I had some trouble reading and I had some remediation for what was a very mild form of dyslexia, but I leapfrogged based on that remediation to learn to read very quickly.
So I learned at a young age what are effectively sort of speed techniques, although, you they were to overcome a very minor disability. you know, I think there probably anybody could do this, but, you know, I read very quickly. And as you can see, I read a lot of stuff. so one of the things that frustrated me was when you're, you know, because I like to just digest a lot of intellectual content and quite rapidly, and you just see the same pattern everywhere and often in complete ignorance of what other folks are doing.
So part of it too was a kind of frustration around that. Like, dude, can't you even go one discipline over? Can't you realize, I don't know, that the ontological turn in political theory is the exact opposite of the ontological turn in anthropology? Or at least they're talking past each other. And so then you're like, dude, you're using the same phrase or whatever. So that kind of thing. And I often, yeah.
PJ Wehry (40:44.835)
you
PJ Wehry (40:55.611)
Well, yeah, well, I was going to say I like I've definitely run into that where I've there are a few things like a philosophical hermeneutics and I won't name it. But then there was this hearing someone say this is a revolutionary new idea. And it was this that I was like, that's that's just the fusion of horizons. That's been like, I'm like, you know what I mean? You're like, and every time you see one of these turns, people like this is revolutionary. And you're like, I it's
Yes, but not because you did it. You know, it's... I don't know if
Jason Storm (41:27.384)
Yeah, mean, one has to be very careful of what is called Columbusing, arriving in a new territory that's, well, you think it's a new territory, but it's already occupied. And you're like, I have discovered this land. And then you're like, what about the Vikings or what about the indigenous people that were already here or whatever? And I try and be honest about what I'm trying to do in the Meta Modernism book is both produce a paradigm shift. So it is an attempt to produce something new. I'm not trying to describe a preexisting Meta Modernism, although I definitely have some interlocutors.
PJ Wehry (41:31.639)
Yeah.
Jason Storm (41:56.322)
But, and I'm trying to be, you know, to do that kind of intellectual honesty and footnote the shit out of it so that people know, you where I'm getting ideas from. Like I'm more interested in what works. then, and I do think, you know, I'm trying to innovate on my own terms and in part because having spent a lot of time trying to look for alternative movements to postmodernism, being frustrated that most of them, I don't know, I, you know, I spent a while
hanging out with the new materialists and I spent a while with critical realists and I spent a while reading the object-oriented ontology stuff or reading the affect theory stuff. And it kept not really grappling with the movement that it claimed often postmodernism to move past and often just reduplicated things without analyzing them. For instance, the notion of actin, which in actor network theory, sometimes people think, new materialism, it's taking us out of the text.
That term actant just comes from literary analysis. So it's just a direct transposition of the text onto the world in a way that is less innovative than it presents itself as. so again, we want to be like, it's part of this broader thing I was saying also at the beginning, which is we're in epistemic communities. And so part of it is to recognize that we're always in dialogue with lots of folks. And I'm a little bit more extroverted than some of my peers. So I often take
my stuff to other people and ask them for feedback and advice. I'll email people sometimes out of the blue and I'll say, I need feedback on this. Like, do you have time to give me some? And most often people say no, but occasionally they'll say, yes, I have time. And then I get feedback on it and I'm always trying to learn. So part of it is, is this book is written in, although it is in a very much an aggressive and a manifesto like idiom, it's also rooted in a humility and in a set of conversations.
and influences that I'm very happy to highlight. so, you know, like, yeah, and I kind of, but it was the hardest of my books to get published, definitely. And, you know, it's since won an award and is now translated into two languages, into Spanish and Vietnamese with translations into Turkish and Chinese forthcoming. So, it's, you know, it's had a bigger impact than other things that I've written.
PJ Wehry (44:16.46)
Awesome.
Jason Storm (44:23.138)
But it didn't fit into the niches that people, as easily as people streamline for publication or whatever. So yeah.
PJ Wehry (44:33.967)
I keep getting pulled into discussions about academia. That wasn't my goal with this interview, but it is interesting to me. Part of what you're... And maybe I'm... I don't know. Maybe this isn't a fruitful line of discussion, but I think it is. This emphasis on publishing for the sake of publishing, for the sake of career, rather than publishing... And I think that's part of the reduplication process.
Jason Storm (44:38.348)
Yeah.
Jason Storm (45:02.754)
Yeah.
PJ Wehry (45:02.755)
Even as you're talking about like peer review doesn't really seem to do what it's supposed to do anymore And so you're trying to do peer review kind of like but most the time people say no I will say part it. This is this is so ridiculous, but most people say yes to me, but that's because I'm just trying to learn from them But why did they say yes to me because then they can tell their publisher look I'm marketing
And it's just really, I mean, it feels a little bit like gaming the system in that sense. But there's that economic, there's that economic thread there that is leading to some of what you're talking about. If I, or I think.
Jason Storm (45:31.406)
Well, yeah.
Totally, yeah, and, yeah.
Jason Storm (45:46.786)
Yeah, for sure, for sure. in the book before this one, one of my main figures of engagement was the German sociologist Max Weber. he famous essay, als Berufs, so science is a vocation. And he means science is in any form of organized knowledge. So it could be called academics as a job. And one of the things he notices in that essay is the ways in which the conditions of
one's employment reinforce certain kinds of intellectual trajectories and patterns. This is something Bourdieu will elaborate in Homo Academica. Yeah, but that's definitely there. We have to recognize that. And totally the publisher perish model. And I see why it's there, it's why people do have to respond to it because it's what's happening in their professional environment. But it definitely produces perverse incentives and it makes for a lot of low quality work out there. And I, for me, I think books have to be ends.
PJ Wehry (46:18.979)
Homo academicus. Yes!
Jason Storm (46:42.766)
they can't be means to make a broadly Kantian kind of observation there. And I think that at least in my case, I made this decision after I finished the first book. The first book was my dissertation and also my 10-year book. then after that, so I won't say I never paid attention to the realities of the profession, but after that I was thinking, I had a real grappling with myself because I had a second project that I was about 100 pages into writing.
PJ Wehry (47:03.331)
Yeah.
Jason Storm (47:11.84)
And I was, but it was very similar to the first book. was like, I've staked out this territory and then here's the one iteration here. And it would have been a very much more straightforward professional path and everything with all the, the path was greased that way because I now had spent so much time in a particular intellectual niche that I knew who was going to peer review it. And I knew I could get it out and I knew I could get out at the same press, but I felt bored and it felt like a means, not an end. And
And so I abandoned that project. I wrote a second book that was very, very different. that one, luckily, the concept was catchy. And so that was The Myth of Disenchantment, Magic Modernity, and The Birth of the Human Sciences. And that one was the easiest, actually, to get published of my various books. But I often find myself, yeah, at least in terms of books, yeah, they have to be, at least for me. And I'm privileged in that I have a tenured position.
at an academic institution. So I totally get it. Folks on the job market, they're just trying to churn stuff out. But that does have a direct impact on the kind of scholarship. There's a lot of low-quality scholarship out there. And one of the ways that theory in particular tends to feed into that is that people like to coin jargon phrases that are bullshit in the Frankfurt sense of the term bullshit, which is to say that they're indifferent to their truth value.
So people come up with something and they'll call it, I don't know, I hope this isn't a real one, like ontothiogenesis or whatever, and they won't know quite what it means, but it sounds really catchy. And so they'll drop it into their work in a few places. And then they'll, as I coined, this is an ontothiogenesis of the subject or whatever. then you're just like, and maybe, it works as career advancement to some extent, I think. But it's citable.
PJ Wehry (49:01.059)
It's sideable.
Jason Storm (49:03.566)
Yeah, totally. And people brand it. and often it can, you're especially good if you can do this sort of like, if it can be both either radical or obvious, depending on different readings. And so you could do the Moten Castle defense. So seem really radical. But when people push you on it, go back to the more obvious, commonsensical one. Like, I feel like, you know, like, I don't mean to knock Derrida for this. know, in his, you know, pathmark, you know,
you know, if you're going to say that writing precedes language, but then define writing in terms of paths in the forest or whatever, making marks on your landscape, you're either saying something trivially obvious, and I know we say that's all Derrida was doing or I mean to be dismissive of him, but like, you can lead to a disclaimer that sounds shocking, know, writing preceded language or whatever, but what you're actually saying is just really not that radical anyway. And so, you know, or at least has that potential interpretation to it.
Or, you know, I mean, there are a lot of bullshit strategies out there and I don't want to do them. So partially what I'm trying to do is do no bullshit philosophy. And so the other part of this book in particular, the Metamonism book, is that I had an undergraduate student class read it and I told them to highlight any jargon and asked me for examples whenever they felt I was being too abstract. then I did that and then the book was too long and then the press was like,
and then cut it by 20 to 30%. And so then, so most of that is in there, but there's a lot cut. And one of the things that I cut, I realized that it turned out to be most irrelevant to the book was some of the fights of the secondary literature. Like a lot of that stuff I can suck into the notes and drop a footnote here, drop a footnote there. Like, do you need to know that there are like five ways of reading this part of Derrida and blah, blah, blah? No, probably not. You just need to know, whatever, this is a common.
This is the one I'm fighting here. And we'll leave for the footnote that there are other ways to read that passage or what have you. So yeah.
PJ Wehry (51:06.945)
Yeah, awesome. And I want to be respectful of your time, but I did want to ask because I really appreciated.
Jason Storm (51:11.618)
Yeah, I have till three, so I have another hour. Yeah.
PJ Wehry (51:14.999)
Yeah, awesome. So when you talk about, you mentioned at the beginning that the book was more destructive, and then you took a four month break to welcome your daughter into the world, and it was more compassionate after that. Can you talk a little bit about that movement from being destructive to compassionate? what is the role that, that's your first child, what role did becoming a father, how did that change your perspective?
Jason Storm (51:38.136)
Yeah, my only, yeah.
Jason Storm (51:42.562)
Yeah, it totally changed my perspective. So like in the first iteration draft of this book, which I was working on, you know, right up until my daughter was born, I was really motivated in part by a lot of frustration and anger. And that was very much on the surface of the book. I was in certain respects, you know, really like try to burn it all down. Like I had that I had that feeling like a sense of, you know, turning the tools of postmodernism on itself.
but not just postmodernism, turning various academic, various things that I found frustrating about the academy on itself. I was conceived of the project already from the very earliest drafts as a kind of manifesto. And so the first draft of it, it was kind of harsh. then when my daughter was born and I took this break, I had a semester, they only gave me a semester of parental here, but...
They've since changed that policy, now the, you know, anyway, male faculty at that time, male faculty only got a semester. And so I, yeah, I paused the book. I didn't work on it. I just tried to be as good a dad as I could. And then when I returned to the project, I just realized that it was less about calling out bullshit and more about trying to think about how to build a better world.
a world for my daughter, a world that, you know, for all of our children, you know, that could make it a more positive future. And so that really shifted the points of emphasis in the book and also helped to remind me to sort of the fragility of life. so I think that there's often a tendency to forget that the people we're arguing with are also just fragile, ordinary people that were once, I don't know, babies or whatever.
It's can easily lose sight of compassion in the academy. We can be very quick to criticize and especially when we criticize people, there's a tendency, the proximate others tend to be more threatening in certain respects. people, I've been at academic meetings where people are treating the scholarship one click adjacent to them as though it was, I don't know, fascist or something.
Jason Storm (54:04.174)
when it's just a guy slightly to the left or to the right of, or maybe not even. They just had a slightly different preferred vocabulary around category X or whatever, right? So yeah, entothiogenesis. Yeah, right, which is a trademark, right. And so I had to recognize that we're sort of fragility and come at it with a sense of compassion and care.
PJ Wehry (54:16.031)
Ontothiogenesis, which, trademark it, yeah.
Jason Storm (54:31.992)
Of course, the book that I've just finished, which is out in April, is back to the more wrathful formulations. Although I get into the compassionate and positive stuff in the end, and there's a long ending to it. it carries, it's back to that angry energy, because that one is my pandemic, turned out to be my pandemic book. So it takes a long time for these things to get written and come out and what have you. But anyway, we can.
Maybe circle back to that at some point too.
PJ Wehry (55:03.063)
Yeah, yeah. And I think there is something there too. think if you're going to get cited, very similar thing that happens in the algorithm, my day job's digital marketing, It's like harshness, critique, wrath, you get the horseshoe effect. right? So like if you're harsh with your academic book, you're more likely to get cited because you'll either have people are like, yeah.
Or you'll have people like, no. Whereas if you're really kind, people are like, oh. You know, you don't get cited, right? It takes more, you have to build something more powerful, I think, in terms of like, and I don't know, I feel like an undercurrent here of this discussion just being about kind of the process of publishing and how that has really...
worked with theory in strange ways. If that like, like it's created, yes or yeah.
Jason Storm (56:03.278)
Yeah, for sure. And I'd be curious to hear, if this is your sense in terms of the digital marketing. I felt like maybe this is still the case or maybe it's not. But for a long period of time, outrage was a central feature of marketing and branding. So I remember being struck, for instance, reading the reviews of, I don't know, I it was like a Wonder Woman movie where they had intentionally put it in a theater that was only women.
so that some right-wing dudes could get outrage and so they could then amplify that outrage to make it feel like it was political to go and see a superhero movie as a feminist statement instead of being aware of the objectification that was going on. But it was all like a cynical, it seemed to be all motivated, at least in the summary I read and I admit I didn't see the movie, as a cynical marketing ploy to get outrage.
And is your sense that that is what people are still doing or are we, have we moved past that moment?
PJ Wehry (57:10.149)
I mean, it's a very yeah, I would say that's it's still real. I mean, that's old too, right? But where you get only a few seconds, you want like a more primal fear will make people swipe away, anger will make them stay. Beauty can work or like, you know, you have but that's more like a counter thing. Most of the time it's anger. One of my like this is a tried and true tactic. There are a lot of creators.
Jason Storm (57:16.887)
Yeah.
PJ Wehry (57:38.221)
who will intentionally misspell things in their work because then people will comment and tell them that they misspelled and that drives the algorithm. Comments are big for the algorithm, right? anyways, it's kind of like what you were talking about. again, this is just very old. It's like you say something really radical and then you make it
Jason Storm (57:41.102)
Why?
Uh-huh.
PJ Wehry (58:07.668)
Trivial by the end, but if you say something radical people like no way and then by the end you're like But you've watched the whole video and that's something a track right and so it's just a more sped up version anyways, but that's Well, I digress. Yeah
Jason Storm (58:21.71)
Yeah, and I think as, as I could, yeah, yeah. And as academics, think, you know, or at least as an individual academic, I don't want to do that. Like I want to try and like just, you know, be human and, know, I'll get polemical and I'm okay with that. And I, and I don't think I'm not aiming for a D for, for what's the word, some kind of weird neutral bland as fuck boring to read writing. I'm, you know, I have emotions, I'm engaged and I sometimes they're angry, but they're, but I don't want to.
PJ Wehry (58:29.131)
Hahaha
Jason Storm (58:51.902)
I don't want to craft any of my stuff. I want to just have ideas and try and get them out there. And especially because also, and maybe this is a way in which one of the few places that capitalism hasn't fully impinged on the world is that, I have a tenured position. My salary does not depend in any significant way on my books. I get like a dollar a book. it doesn't like, it's not, know, academic publishing is screwed up in that way. like, you know, but,
PJ Wehry (59:19.126)
Yeah, yeah.
Jason Storm (59:20.878)
Like it doesn't make it, I'm not trying to sell books. I'm just trying to get ideas out there. And so I don't wanna, I mean, I'm happy to, and I don't think marketing is evil. I don't, I mean, some of what marketing can be in its ideal form is finding people who would be interested and pointing them to something that they would otherwise overlook. And that's useful. I mean, like, you know, and everybody needs that, you know, because we're in a world, a heavily saturated media environment in which it is very easy for.
the signal to get drowned out by the noise. And I don't see the new book coming out on, I don't know, causation, getting causes from powers or whatever that I should have known, because it got, you it just didn't get promoted in some way or another. So, I mean, again, I'm not anti-promotion, but I don't want to crassly, cynically manipulate people's feelings just to get, you know, sell a few more books. yeah. But anyway, that's me. Yeah.
PJ Wehry (59:58.307)
You
PJ Wehry (01:00:13.527)
Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. Yeah. So I want to be respectful of your time, but so if I could just ask this final question, besides buying and reading your excellent book with the cool cover, which and I love it because we did get to talk, you know, we referenced the beginning critical virtue ethics. And I think that there's a hint of like that broader systematic account you're trying to build. So we can find that in your book.
Jason Storm (01:00:23.96)
Yeah
PJ Wehry (01:00:41.153)
So besides buying and reading that book, what is something you would recommend to someone who's listened for the last hour that they either meditate on or do over the next week in response?
Jason Storm (01:00:52.11)
Hmm.
Yeah, it's hard because it's hard for me to imagine exactly what your audience is still. But I would say, so I mean, I would think in terms of, so for just to give this little piece for your viewers about what the critical virtue ethics is, it's the, in a way, I think of it as the least original part of the book, but I think it's an important one. It's where I end, which is to say I'm putting critical theory in dialogue with virtue ethics. And the piece I'm getting from critical theory is a recognition that there's a lot of suffering in the world.
And the piece that I'm getting from virtue ethics is a recognition that people want to live a life that's worth having lived. So a eudaimonic emphasis on virtues. And out of that, I try and take all the dystopian. I'm going to circle back to what your folks should do in one sec. We're in a moment that can seem downright dystopian. where there is a dysfunctional political system
PJ Wehry (01:01:40.941)
Sure. Yeah.
Jason Storm (01:01:54.342)
incredible amounts of local violence, a collapsing sense of global environment and war and sexism and homophobia and racism and who knows, like a whole bunch of shit going on, right? The world in certain key respects is full of a lot of suffering. The important thing I would suggest that we do is while recognizing that suffering, we emphasize the importance
of struggling together, nevertheless, to build something better. And we can, to take the lines of the old gospel song, keep your eyes on the prize, and work on, and struggle forward. And so in our day-to-day lives, what that can be is, I think, different ways to find
what it means for you to flourish and define sources of meaning. And I think, again, this is where not knowing your audience, I don't know, I can't overly recommend what those are. For some folks, political engagement is their main form of flourishing and in which case you have to recognize and service and doing things for other people. There's a lot of evidence, for instance, from early studies on altruism and studies on so-called positive psychology that when we're doing something for other people,
we often can get a feeling of greater satisfaction than when we're doing it just for ourselves. So when I get my daughter, who's now at this point seven, you know, like something, a toy, that money makes her much more happy than me buying myself an equivalent, another academic book for that same amount of money would necessarily make. But on the other hand, we also have to know that for some of us, we're tapped out. Like some folks in our current moment, because of the continual
crisis after crisis after crisis. Some folks are, don't wanna take this so far that you're self-martyring, that you're, it's okay if you're exhausted with the act of giving and what you need is to preserve a kind of inner citadel to again, Marcus Aurelius gesture. And what you need to do is work on whether that is taking the time out of your day to enjoy the,
Jason Storm (01:04:19.33)
you know, beautiful sun set over the hills or garden, return to your garden. I don't know, another candide here or whether you need to, you know, just pick up a good book and engage with that. That's all legit. So you shouldn't feel as though you have to be constantly in a state of struggle if that's not, you know, if you're going too far in that direction. That's sort of rambling, but that's one thing that folks could do. Yeah.
PJ Wehry (01:04:46.305)
Yeah. No, I think that's great. I think that that's a gesture made at the beginning where you talked about different meetings and appointing people to different departments, right? Some people will wear themselves out and some people maybe need to do a little more, right? And I think that's a fair thing to say. Dr. Storm, been an absolute honor having you on. A joy to talk to you. Thank you. Appreciate it.
Jason Storm (01:05:04.152)
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, of course. Thank you. Yeah, of course. It's a pleasure to talk to you.