Why I Was So Sure That I Was Wrong

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"I felt like i owed it to myself and to everyone i shared the earth with to have some kind of basic understanding of ethics," he says. "It's a very disconcerting and sort of disorienting thing to have happened to you, to believe so deeply in something, and then to have your entire world inverted like in an instant"

Humans face ethical dilemmas big and small every day: Which product is the most sustainable? Can you separate the art from the artist? Should you really share your streaming platform passwords? Today’s guest, Michael Schur, has spent a lot of time thinking about morality, most recently in his Emmy-nominated show The Good Place, and in the New York Times bestselling book “How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question,” and. In this episode, Michael talks about why he’s gone from working on shows like Saturday Night Live, The Office, Parks and Recreation, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and Hacks, to reading and writing about Kant, Nietzsche, and Aristotle. Michael shares why he uses analogies and pop culture references to engage with philosophy, why he’s still chasing after the eternal and perhaps unanswerable question of “how to be perfect”, and why he believes caring about ethics –at any level– can actually make a difference.