In last week's episode, we talked about ideas
and who gets to have them.
Let's see what you had to say.
Therealquade, yes-- that is-- yes, absolutely.
Please do.
Please go and make your own "Ida Channel," and if you need help,
you know, get at me on Twitter, on Instagram.
Shoot me an email.
I'll read scripts.
I'll give you some notes, production help,
but yeah, absolutely.
I mean, one of the reasons that we're doing this kind of wrap
up thing is to let you know the ways that we tried
to put the show together so that you can either
use some of the ideas yourself or to argue against them.
You know, if there were things that you didn't like
about "Idea Channel," we're going
to let you know how we did it so that you can figure out
how to do the exact opposite, but yeah, the point being it
would be--
I mean, I would be exceptionally excited
if the info that we put together in our last three episodes
ends up with, you know, people using it in their own YouTube
channels.
It would be amazing.
Geoff Green mentions a quote from William Gibson's Sprawl
Trilogy, which is "the street finds its own use for things,"
and also the concept of idea hackers, both of which
I really, really like.
We talk about it a little bit in this week's episode,
but I mostly find the distinction between high
and low culture to be kind of classist nonsense,
and I think that it's-- and I think that the same can be said
for intellectual material in addition to cultural material.
I really like this sense of sort of wrestling
intellectual material away from the tippity top
of the ivory tower and bringing it closer
to sea level, so to speak, to figure out what it's good
for, how you can apply it, how you break it, you know,
what happens when you just try to actually use it.
And you know, the result might be nothing happens.
The result might be folly, or the result
might be, oh, it turns out it's incredibly useful.
And I think that this is just-- yeah,
this is a great way to look at it.
Chef kiss hand motion.
No gods, no masters.
[INAUDIBLE] talks about "Idea Channel" with
regards to the concept of the body
without organs, which Deleuze and Guattari sort of talked
about in a couple of different ways.
It has a bunch of different meanings.
One of them is that there is an outer appearance of a whole
that you might have a body.
You look at it.
It has arms and legs, whatever, but at the-- below the surface
level, there is a much more complicated,
much less clearly hierarchical organization of the internal
elements that--
from the outside, it looks like one thing, but from the inside,
it's much less ordered.
And one of the things that they talked about a lot
was how the body without organs was something
that had a lot of potential and that
was always sort of working towards becoming itself.
And so this is what [INAUDIBLE] is talking about.
The "Idea Channel" was always working
towards becoming itself, and that it was never really done.
And that is a thing that I--
yeah, I mean, I think that we feel that from the inside, too,
having made it-- is that we were always sort of letting the show
change, trying to respond to a lot of things, trying to be--
trying to not be dogmatic, and trying to shift when necessary.
I think that there are positives and negatives to that.
There are benefits and detriments.
You know, I think especially now and especially on YouTube there
is a--
and double especially in the educational space
there is a emphasis placed on answers
and on clear conclusions.
And that is a thing that we were not really interested in.
We're interested in having a conversation,
figuring things out, and maybe not
even at the end of figuring things out,
coming to an answer.
And that just-- the conclusion is
all of us looking at one another and being like, huh, OK.
There are many different, possibly competing, ways
that something can be--
something can be appraised or ways
that we can make meaning, ways that we can
relate to things in the world.
And I think that that is--
I would defend that position and that outcome
as very, very important and that it is needed in the world,
but I think that, you know, there
are a lot of things about it that to some people
are either scary or just not satisfying.
And I think that that's something that, you know,
moving forward I'm going to be thinking a lot about--
is what it means to purposefully not
provide a hierarchical definitive answer based
idea of the world.
Ariel [INAUDIBLE] makes some really good points
about the shortcomings of our comment response system,
and I-- you know, these are great points,
and these are things that we have struggled with
and problems that are-- you know, I would admit to.
You know, the number one thing is
that we like to talk about "Idea Channel" being a conversation.
I want it to be a back and forth.
I want to have you, the audience,
involved in the show and get your perspective on things,
but, you know, there's--
the way we do the show-- you know,
I'm the one who's writing the scripts.
I'm the one who is on camera, and so in a way, you know,
it definitely puts me in a place of authority.
And it positions me as a kind of arbiter of the conversation.
You know, everything has to come through me, and that--
you know, I think that there's a lot of ways in which I want
to deny that authority or I want to try to diminish it
so that, you know, you feel like you have that--
so that the audience feels like it
has more of a say in the show, but that
is perhaps somewhere between dishonest
and a willful misunderstanding of how the power
differential works.
I also think that, yeah, there--
we want to talk about "Idea Channel"
back and forth as a discussion, but that is relatively--
a relatively short back and forth,
given the way that we do things that, you know,
you have to write a comment within a week.
I respond to a very small number of them in a video,
and then the conversation is done with the exception of when
we do furthermore videos.
And that is not necessarily the depth of back and forth
that would be ideal.
What I will say is this--
is that I think that that is ameliorated by the fact
that "Idea Channel" videos travel
and that they inspire conversations in places
beyond YouTube.
We're really, really lucky in that a lot of "Idea Channel"
videos get used in classrooms.
They get-- they get used in instruction materials.
They find their ways into the world
where they inspire conversation, and the conversations also
happen outside of my involvement--
that we're really, really lucky, and I'm so proud
that we've built something that inspires people
to talk to one another and kind of just ignore me,
and that I've come to think of the comment
response videos as a way to indicate that people are having
conversations, but that the comment response video is not
the conversation.
It is not the thing, because it does have all those problems.
And so yeah, I think that--
I think that moving forward, you know, the next things that I
work on-- yeah, these are-- these are, if not problems
to solve, then they are outcomes worth thinking about.
It's like, how do you make something
where you can have a real--
whatever that means-- conversation-- also,
whatever that means--
around a piece of media on the internet.
We'll see.
[INAUDIBLE] wants to know how exactly it
is you go about using an idea as opposed to building on it,
and there are two different ways that I think about this.
The first is a lot of thought is put together
in service of other thought and also in the expectation
that it itself will be used by further thought.
So you know, there's kind of like this house of cards
that you-- house of cards.
You know, you do philosophy in order
to use philosophy so that your philosophy will then
be used by later philosophy.
And I think that there is a sense in which that is not--
that is not using those things.
That is building upon those things.
And so, you know, by taking those thoughts,
taking this intellectual material out of that structure,
and maybe even taking it out of context,
you may be able to find a way, like we
said a couple of minutes ago, to use it on the street as opposed
to in the ivory tower-- that you take it out of the place
that it's meant for, or expected to be used,
or expected to be built upon and you use it.
The second way that I like to think about this
is through a process that you might
call productive misreading, which is where you just
pay attention to what the things that you're
reading, or watching, or looking into make you think of--
what associations you can make through them that maybe are not
necessarily intended by the person who put them together.
You know, what you can do by not intentionally misunderstanding
a text, but by just trying to pull out of it whatever you
can, and I think that there is a fine line
to walk to make sure that you're not doing a bad faith reading,
but there is--
there is a point of, I think, intellectual creativity that
exists before you get to bad faith
where you can productively misread and use
a text in that way, as opposed to building upon it.
Carly Friesen is a teacher who is
looking to engage her students in both the use of concepts
and having a wider communication,
and asks whether or not everybody
thinks that the process of blogging
is an interesting way to do that, or whether or not there
is something particular about the YouTube format
that allows engagement, or conversation, or something.
And Carly, I have--
it's kind of half an answer to your question,
but maybe we'll get to a full answer.
One of the things that I think about a lot with regards
to "Idea Channel" is I think it was--
think it was Derrida, but I don't actually remember,
and I can't tell you what essay it's from,
but there's a point at which he talks about this idea
that we have to do philosophy, we have to do theory with text
and that there's a-- there's a point at which we decided
the way to communicate knowledge and the way
to have difficult thoughts is by writing letters
on a piece of paper and then reading those.
And that's the way that we do this work.
And then he questions why that's the case.
Why is it that we have to do this kind of work
or it feels like we have to do this kind of work
through this medium?
And one of the things I was--
that was always sticking in the back of my mind
with "Idea Channel" was whether or not you could actually
do philosophy or theory--
you could do this important work,
you know, this high concept thinking in video,
and whether or not there is-- you
know, what is it about video that might be better
at tough thoughts than text?
And that informed some parts of the show,
but mostly it was just kind of a thought in the back of my head.
So I mean, maybe what I'm trying to say is,
what happens if you let each individual student decide
what medium is the one that captures what they feel
is going on intellectually?
That maybe there is-- you know, if we look at text
and we're like, well, what is it about that,
that means that-- that is so perfect for having thoughts?
We look at video, and we think, OK,
what about this is so perfect for having thoughts?
The answer is that they both have benefits and detriments
and that maybe everything else has benefits and detriments--
dance, painting, music.
You know, they are capable of capturing some level
of intellectual material that the others aren't, and so maybe
they're-- maybe it becomes an exercise in figuring out what
about each medium is good for grabbing an audience and doing
real intellectual work.
I'll be super curious to know how that experiment ends up.
Dustin Rodriguez asks about the progression of thought
from nomadic thought and whether or not something
like the echo chamber is a result of people settling down
in some way.
And yeah, I mean, I think--
I think that the defense of nomadism,
as far as thought is concerned, is--
it's a little romantic and that I think,
you know, the metaphor does break down at a--
at a certain level, but it does have
this idea of returning to something from the past, maybe
something that is not simpler, but has this sense of freedom
to it.
You know, one of the things that we've been accused of a lot
on "Idea Channel" is--
is, you know, people would say, oh,
you guys just got high, and wrote down
the ideas that you got while you were high,
and that's how this show came together.
And I mean, that's not the case, but what
I think it does indicate is that people--
a lot of people-- the people who would say that kind of thing
view "Idea Channel" as a kind of--
as a kind of unintellectual pursuit
almost-- that there is a way that we treat
thought that is either childlike or intoxicated in some way.
And so it's sort of returning in some weird way
to this intellectual space that feels as though it comes
before how we normally conduct ourselves when we're
doing real intellectual work.
I think nomadism is another way of looking
at that kind of thought.
It's just a little bit more purposeful.
It feels a little bit more like a choice.
I think it does have that romance to it,
but I think, yeah, you could-- you could definitely
make the argument that there is--
there is an advancement and an infrastructure to thought that
exists that nomadism is kind of like an antidote to.
You're going to jump-- you're going
to jump on another train of thought with your bindle,
and you're going to ride the countryside.
Also, for the record, I haven't smoked weed in like 15 years.
Not that it matters, but.
Finally, on the subreddit, Mortals
puts together a really great comment
about what it's like to have ideas.
There was a lot of conversation in the comments about--
you know, we talked about what ideas are
and who gets to have them, but we don't actually
talk about how you have an idea, what it means to have ideas,
just who's allowed to do that.
And you know, like I mentioned, this
is something that so many philosophers have talked about.
There's an endless conversation to be had,
but I think on a practical level,
as far as making the show is concerned,
as far as being something who's--
being someone who's engaged in this kind of work, you know,
think Immortals hits on it that it's--
you know, you can't really force yourself,
but you can expect that it will happen if you put together
the right situation.
And for me, at least, and I think for a lot of other people
who do knowledge work the right situation is just
being an active participant in the world--
consuming a lot, reading a lot, writing a lot,
talking to people.
Zach Weiner, who does "Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal,"
says-- said something that I think
about a lot, which is that there's
no such thing as writer's block.
There's just insufficient input.
And I think that that is absolutely true--
that having ideas and being creative
is not a matter of inspiration.
It's not a matter of just waiting for things to happen.
It's a matter of getting to work,
and the work is simultaneously consuming things
and producing things.
If you do it enough, you know, stuff hits off.