Hello, welcome to young heretics. It's time for me to solve all your problems.

Okay, so I used to have a joke that I would make to my friends whenever they would say, like,

Spencer, what are you working on, or why are you reading that weird book, or how come we never see you when you're always in the library? I would make this joke that I am a repository of useless information and in fact that I only know information that is useless. If anything can be used, if any piece of information is of any use,

I will not remember it. And this is still true. I can't find my way anywhere.

I'm terrible at directions. I generally am your caricature of the absent-minded professor.

And I've learned to navigate with this and kind of offset it,

and I've asked for a lot of patients from a lot of my

friends and just to kind of move through the world but it does remain the case

that I am and have always been kind of interested in ostensibly obscure stuff, the kind of stuff that people think of as useless.

And maybe if you're listening to me, this is the way you are too. I don't know if you're listening to a podcast about ancient wisdom you might trend in that direction.

But as I was starting to get ready to do this episode today on practical wisdom. I

realized that I actually don't make that joke anymore. I used to make it like in high

school, I kind of as a way of you know self-deprecating explaining why I was interested in all this obscure stuff,

but I've stopped making it and I haven't really chosen to stop making it, I just naturally stopped

making it because I no longer actually believe that abstract

reflections and first-order questions are useless.

The older I've gotten, the more I've lived, the more I've realized that the things that people like me

like to think about, things like philosophy and absolute truth and ideals, they're not

useless at all. In fact, they can be some of the most useful things, the most important things,

if you understand the relationship between abstract principles and human life.

If you don't understand that connection, if you don't understand that those are two distinct things,

the world of the mind or of the ideal or of the abstraction

...