Hello, and welcome to Overthink.

The show where you find out there's a lot of philosophy at work

in the activities of our everyday lives.

I'm Professor Ellie Anderson.

And I'm Professor David Peña-Gusman.

Ellie, I want to begin today with the kind of snarky claim

that you only get when you get a French philosopher

reflecting on American shallowness.

Jean Baudriard seems weirdly obsessed with the popularity of jogging in the United States in his 1986 book, America,

which, by the way, is an amazing coffee table book.

It's beautiful, it's square, you can put it on a table.

But here's a quote from that amazing coffee table book.

Nothing evokes the end of the world more than a man running straight ahead on a beach, swathed in the sounds of his walkman,

cocooned in the solitary sacrifice of his energy, indifferent even to catastrophes,

since he expects destruction to come only as the fruit of his energy, indifferent even to catastrophes, since he expects destruction to come only as

the fruit of his own efforts, from exhausting the energy of a body that has in his own eyes become

useless. Wow. Such poetry to describe what he finds to be this terrifying spectacle of somebody running on a beach.

I'm just picturing like a shirtless buff guy.

Nowadays it would be AirPods instead of a walkman.

But nonetheless, like this 1986 example still holds up.

David, how do you feel about jogging?

Do you agree with Bodriard that nothing evokes the end of the world more than this? So I'll respond. Being clear that I went running today, I ran for

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