Hello and welcome to Overthink.

The podcast where your two coolest professors connect philosophy to everyday life.

I'm Ellie Anderson.

And I'm David Peña Guzman.

I got to say, the billionaires today are trying so hard to be cool.

You have Lauren Sanchez, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg showing up to Fashion Week,

sitting in the front row, wearing fancy Prada outfits, but the internet isn't buying it. When I started

Googling the phrase Mark Zuckerberg trying to like find some photos of him in this situation,

so I just start Googling the phrase Mark Zuckerberg trying

Google auto filled it with trying to be cool. Trying too hard maybe. You know, there is nothing

more cringe than aging, rich people trying to use their wealth and influence to buy their way

into the zeitgeist. And that's definitely when trying to be cool becomes trying too hard, which is, as we'll

talk about later in the episode, the most uncool thing that you can ever do.

Yeah.

It's to be perceived as wanting to be cool.

Yeah.

And poor Zuckerberg has multiple articles written about how he tries too hard to be cool, you know.

I mean, he does. He does try really hard. Yeah. Yeah. And I think the line between trying to be cool and trying too hard to be cool is really thin. And I've been thinking about this a lot in recent years because I've noticed a real shift has happened for me. It used to be that I had my

finger on the pulse. I had an intuitive sense of what was cool. But then I got to a certain point in my

30s, and this I think happens generally speaking, even to, you know, maybe not the coolest among us,

but the relatively cool among us among whom I might count myself. When you lose that sense.

Yeah, no, I would say, like, in my 20s, I wasn't the coolest by any means.

...