Online Great Books Podcast

This week, Scott and Karl discuss Nietzche's On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense.  Written in 1873 one year after The Birth of Tragedy, it was published by his sister Elisabeth in 1896 when Nietzsche was already mentally ill. In just 24 pages, the work wrestles with epistemological questions about the nature of truth and language, and how they relate to our formation of concepts. Nietzsche's primary question is this: Where do you have the desire for truth? For him, it is difficult to explain where any drive to truth comes from when the human intellect functions to deceive us. If you've never encountered Nietzche before, Karl warns, "He's a really good philosopher with a hammer."  Tune in to learn more about the social roots of truth-seeking according to Nietzche and what happens when humans get concepts. 

This week, Scott and Karl read the 1939 novel by Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep. This hardboiled crime novel is the first of seven novels to feature the famed detective Philip Marlowe. As Chandler’s first Marlowe story, there is no introduction to the character; rather, we leap straight into the investigation as it gets underway. Throughout the novel, Marlowe finds himself entangled with kidnapping, pornography, seduction, and murder, but as Scott points out, "You have to have your eyes wide open... It's really nasty without him putting it right in your face and hitting you over the head with how dark it all is."  Heralded as one of the finest prose writers of the twentieth century, Chandler writes as if pain hurt and life mattered. Karl says, "Chandler is able to provide this contrast between beauty on the one hand and horror on the other."  The duo talks about how these gritty, realist detective stories present a new kind of hero. Scott says, "The detective never wins. He might solve the problem, but he's never better off at the end of it. He's swept up in a world of conflict and intrigue and he's put down at the end of it right where he was." Karl adds, "He's an outsider able to solve crimes and see the truth of the society he's living in." Tune in and learn more about the quintessential urban private eye.

In the second episode of this two-part series, Scott and Karl finish up their discussion of Benjamin Graham’s 1949 classic The Intelligent Investor. Graham wanted to teach investors the basic principles needed to navigate markets. In doing so, he teaches investors how to manage themselves. Graham's rules for investing are designed to help readers treat the menu of options before them with rational criteria. But as Scott points out, "His rules aren't the important thing. The important thing is seeing how to create a framework for decision making in the financial world." Tune in to learn more about and this hallmark investment guide and gain insight into understanding your own risk tolerance. 

In the first episode of this two-part series, Scott and Karl begin discussing Benjamin Graham's 1949 classic The Intelligent Investor. Heralded as the greatest investment advisor of the twentieth century, Graham's philosophy of “value investing” provides the core tenants of all good portfolio management.  Karl says, "It is [about] how to invest. But what it is not is how to speculate."  Where the speculator follows market trends, the investor uses discipline, research, and analytical ability to purchase assets that will produce a predictable yield.  Tune in to learn more about and this hallmark investment guide and dig into what Scott calls Graham's "metaphysics of corporatehood."   

In the second half of the conversation, Scott and Karl continue discussing Herbert Marcuse’s 1965 essay “Repressive Tolerance.” In the course of analyzing Marcuse, Karl creates a new word: "justism."  As Karl describes, "It's when you take a complex reality and you reduce it to one simple concept. For Marcuse, it looks like the "justism" is towards whatever his vision of freedom is, which will require the repression of the normal people who support the established order." Although Scott and Karl agree with some of his criticism on the media, they find fault in his ability to show his work and give concrete solutions. As Scott puts it, "He's a smuggler." Tune in to part two of the show and learn more about the Marcusean shape of intolerance. 

Is tolerance a good thing and who deserves it?  In the first episode of this two-part series, Scott and Karl begin discussing Herbert Marcuse's 1965 essay "Repressive Tolerance."  Marcuse argues that the whole of society shapes what is politically possible for each of us, so any discussion of politics must attend to society as a whole.  Scott says, "For Marcuse, whether something is tolerable or intolerable is entirely based on whether that thing gives his group more power."  While Marcuse doesn't clearly provide boundaries to what is tolerable and intolerable, Scott and Karl dig in for themselves.  Scott says, "We live in a world of scarcity. We are never completely liberated and never can be... there will be compromises, things we must do to not perish. [Marcuse] doesn't carve out allowances for those things either."  Tune in and learn more about Marcuse's essay and the problem when tolerance becomes a partisan tool. 

This week, Scott and Karl read Hilaire Belloc's "An Essay on the Restoration of Property." Written in 1936, Belloc attempts to rectify the wrongs in both major economic theories by approaching the problem from an entirely new angle, offering his own program for property distribution.  As Scott points out, "The whole idea underlying what he's writing about is predicated on a much different notion of 'the good' that most people carry today... Belloc's main concern is economic freedom." Property to Belloc is something that directly contributes to your economic freedom. Karl adds, "Property seems to have it's own kind of rights, at least it's own kind of interests."  Would a propertied class be a more politically active and politically savvy class? Tune in to hear Scott and Karl discuss how Belloc illustrates the practical application of many such societal questions. 

This week, Scott and Karl discuss A Canticle for Leibowitz, the post-apocalyptic science fiction classic by Walter M. Miller Jr., first published in 1959. Scott says, “It's a story about how fragile civilization is, how fragile knowledge is, and what people’s responsibility to that may or may not be."  As the plot goes, the monks of the Albertian Order of Leibowitz work to preserve the surviving remnants of man's scientific knowledge until the world is again ready for it after a devastating nuclear war. Divided into three parts, the book spans thousands of years as civilization rebuilds itself, harboring themes on the cyclical nature of technological progress and regress. The separate novellas share a nostalgia for things that have been lost. “Post-Megawar stories are about an afterlife,” Miller writes, “Survivors don’t really live in such a world; they haunt it.” Tune in to hear more about this timeless story in a mythic dimension, brought to you by onlinegreatbooks.com. 

12 years ago, an anonymous person using the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto published Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System. This week, Scott and Karl discuss this revolutionary concept of how Bitcoin set out to change the way the world views currencies.  At just ten pages long, Nakamoto’s original paper is still recommended reading for anyone studying how Bitcoin works. Nakamoto’s vision for the project is this: digital currency that anyone can use without needing to go through a bank or any other centralized organization. Bitcoin provides a solution to the double-spending problem using a peer-to-peer network. According to Nakamoto, "The network timestamps transactions by hashing them into an ongoing chain of hash-based proof-of-work, forming a record that cannot be changed without redoing the proof-of-work.” Although the paper spares no technical detail in explaining how the Bitcoin network operates, both Scott and Karl agree— there is elegance and unrealized potential of Nakamoto’s idea. Karl says, “It’s a very clever solution to get at the core of money: it’s non-repeatability, it’s finiteness, but made of digits and not gold, silver, or copper." Scott adds, "We can operate this currency using a certain kind of citizenship, a certain way of running referendum, a certain way of self-governing, and none of those ways can be changed by a court ruling or a tyrant."  Tune in to learn more about the future of cryptocurrency.   

What are fairy-stories? What is their origin? What is the use of them? This week, Scott and Karl read “On Fairy-Stories” and “Leaf by Niggle” by J. R. R. Tolkien. Both works offer answers to these questions while providing the underlying philosophy of Tolkien's own fantastical writing, such as The Lord of the Rings. In his essay “On Fairy-Stories,” Tolkien discusses the nature of fairy tales and fantasy in an effort to rescue the genre from those who would relegate it only to the nursery.  In the process of discussing the making of a fairy tale, the duo dives into the relationship between bare fact and storytelling. The power of a story, according to Karl, “pulls you out of where you’re living, what you’re doing, and makes you see things that you don’t see.” Tune in to hear more on Tolkien's defense of fantasy and why there's no such thing as writing "for children."