You're listening to a podcast from Meaning of Life TV.

Hi, Agnes.

Hi, Bob.

How you doing?

I'm doing well, thank you.

Good.

Let me introduce us.

I'm Robert Wright.

This is the right show available on both streaming video and via audio podcast.

You are Agnes Callard. That's how you pronounce your last

name, right? Exactly. And you're at the University of Chicago, you're a philosopher. Yes.

And you've written a book not long ago, came out, I think, maybe last year, called Aspiration,

the Agency of Becoming. We're going to talk about the ideas in that.

There's another word that starts with A that figures into the book and that you've written about called Accraja,

less well-known than aspiration, but not unrelated to it.

I want to talk about that because that, as I understand it, is kind of like doing something even though you

think it's the wrong thing to do in one sense or another morally wrong unwise and you know

that and you do it anyway that's a crazier and I mean thinking of this I you know I was kind of

I was kind of thinking in some ways my life is a dialectic between aspiration and ecracia.

And it's not clear which is winning.

But before we talk about those two words, I want to talk about unrulyness, which is the name of an essay you wrote.

Because the way you first came to my attention

...