Is There a Craving for Advice?

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There really is a natural craving, especially at a certain age, to hear good advice about how to be like and what to do. And there are things that my mentors or advisers or whomever have said to me that stuck with me for so long as sort of guiding principles. But the funny thing is that when they said it, i don't think they had any idea they were making that difference in my life. You can take or leave what they give you, by at least you're getting something.

David and Tamler dive into David Foster Wallace’s celebrated and surprisingly earnest Kenyon College commencement speech “This is Water”. How can we escape the prison and prism of our (literally) self-centered perspective? Can we choose to adjust our natural default settings, take a break from our running inner monologue, and pay attention to what’s in front of us right now? Is DFW appealing to Buddhist ideas or something more general that you can be found across all spiritual traditions?

Plus we ask the AI ethics program “Ask Delphi” some tough moral questions (spoiler alert: "just the tip" is "rude"), and almost get into a big fight about the potential of AI ethical robots (but we’re saving that argument for a future episode).