Hello, you found the portal. I'm your host, Eric Weinstein, and today I'm here with University of Chicago Professor of Philosophy, Dr. Agnes Collar.

Hi. Agnes, welcome. Thank you. I want to talk to you about everything. Do you mind?

No. Okay. So you just had an interesting and bizarre gambit. I didn't know that you were coming out to Southern California, and you said to me that after a meeting we had in your office at the University of Chicago,

hey, you should take a look at this article I wrote partially based on our meeting, and the article is one about negotiating initial meetings, and what are all of the layers of dynamics that are going on when two people collide for the first time?

Yeah, I think that when two people collide for the first time, I guess there are sort of two things at the base level that are happening. One of them is like they're trying to figure out how to get along, how to cooperate, and the other is they're trying to take the measure of one another, and those activities aren't totally separate from one another.

And I've noticed a pattern with you, which is that you take great delight in talking about the things that many of us do sort of naturally or unconsciously, and might be very uncomfortable to promote, to full consciousness, so that you can use your metacognitive facility to interrogate and dissect what is going on on many, many different levels.

Some of them philosophical, some of them rooted in biology, some of them may be with illusions to literature, when you and I met, were you aware of what you were going through in real time, or did it come to you later?

That this was going to be grist for an article, totally later. I was my mind was completely on another article I was working on.

So you weren't concentrating when we were when we were meeting on our meeting?

No, not really. I mean, I mean, I think that a lot of the time, you know, I feel like a lot of the thinking that I do is like unpacking thinking I did earlier, but wasn't realizing I was doing or something like that.

So like, it's hard with the language when you have to say, I, and you're actually realizing that you have so many different processes.

Right? Yeah. Okay, keep going. But I guess maybe one common threat, I do like to, yeah, maybe I have a kind of affinity towards like the provocative or something, but maybe at a, at a deeper level, I think that there's just like when we talk about ourselves, when we think about our lives, there are all these sort of cracks in the facade of like who we take ourselves to be and how we represent ourselves.

But the thing is that like we've kind of convinced ourselves that the cracks are parts of the design, because we've been looking at them for so long, right? Like, what a pretty pattern.

And I just want to split those cracks open and be like, look, there's something in coherent in the way that we think about ourselves and we've covered that in coherence over with certain kind of language.

And just a lot of the time those cracks are to be found exactly in the places that you would call maybe provocative or something like that.

But sometimes they're not, and I'm interested in them in those places too, it's just other people who are not philosophers are less interested in those cracks, right?

So I wrote my dissertation on weakness of will, where I think that there's something-

Weakness of will like Ulysses lashing himself to the mast?

Well, that would be a case of strength of will, right? But yes, he's responding to the prospect or the possibility of weakness of life.

So he's using his agency ahead of time with a strong will so that he can actually go through an adaptive valley of weak will that he anticipates correctly.

Yeah, he's sort of turning a synchronic problem into a diachronic problem, right?

And he's giving a diachronic solution to a synchronic problem, but like, so which I could do say if I know that I'm very susceptible to certain forms of temptation, I could in advance make sure that I don't encounter those forms of temptation, right?

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