EPISODE 400!

*This transcript is produced using transcription software and reviewed for quality. Despite our best efforts, some passages may be incomplete or contain errors due to audio quality or software limitations.*

Matthew:
And welcome to this episode of Superhero Ethics. Friends, how many things have you done 400 different times in your lives? We’ve all put on our pants or brushed our teeth far more than 400 times, at least I hope, or else your adventures are pretty rich. I hope you haven’t gotten married 400 times, that would be quite impressive. But is there a project, a thing where every time you do it there’s a start, a middle, and an end? It takes multiple hours, each one’s a little different, and you’ve done that 400 different times. I’m asking because this is the 400th episode of Superhero Ethics.

Technically. I say that because there have been some rebroadcast episodes over the years, times where I’ve switched from one server to another, and a couple may have been lost or double-added. I’m just trying to vamp to see how long I can go while Paul tries to count 400 things on his fingers.

Paul:
I’m up to 45, just for the audience at home.

Matthew:
That’s pretty good, although that’s a number we generally think pretty badly of right now. But you know, I look at 400 episodes, and since 390 I’ve been thinking, what am I going to do with the 400th episode? I had plans for a whole big panel discussion. I had plans about looking at some of the core questions over the years. And then I thought, let’s go back to the beginning. Let’s look at what has changed since we started this. Paul was my original… not co-host, Paul was a guest.

Paul:
I think I was a co-host at first.

Matthew:
No, no, no. Originally you were a guest. And then by episode four, I think you…

Paul:
Well, episodes one and two, I didn’t know it was a podcast. You were like, “we’re just gonna talk and I’ll record it.” I said okay, sure, cool, sounds good.

Matthew:
I didn’t really know what a podcast was either, honestly. But either way, that’s much more about Paul than the first time. We’ve come a long way.

Paul:
We’ve come a long way. Yeah. The point being, I started this in 2016.

Matthew:
And obviously a lot has changed since then, in terms of our nation, in terms of…

Paul:
I’m up to 250, by the way, now.

Matthew:
Okay, cool. So what are you actually counting?

Paul:
I’m counting the episodes.

Matthew:
He’s being a goofball. That’s fine.

Paul:
Okay, Supergirl, and then this one. That makes 400. Yeah, no, I totally remember every single episode. And you’re right, there were some doubles in there, but then there’s some I think were missed. So, you know, it’s…

Matthew:
Well, my being impressed enough by Paul that I’m not quite sure when he’s messing with me. I hope there’s no fanfiction about us out there, that’s not part of our friendship. But anyway, the point being, in the 400 episodes we’ve done over these eight years, a lot has changed, for the two of us, for the way we approach things, for the way we approach this podcast, and in the fandom and the movies and media we talk about. So that’s what I wanted to talk about today.

I wanted to talk about where we were when we started, and how we feel about this podcast project and the media we’re talking about, and the media infrastructure, 400 episodes and eight, ten years later.

Paul:
2016.

Matthew:
I was trying to figure out, does that mean we’ve been through about, it’s a decade.

Paul:
Three episodes a year? It’s been almost a decade, about 40 a year. That’s still pretty good, it’s 10 a season.

Matthew:
So, Paul, starting with that: talk to me about where you were in terms of what you were thinking about media, and what your voice had to say about it, and your thoughts on coming onto this, not a podcast, maybe a podcast project, eight years ago. Ten years ago.

Paul:
Yeah, so ten years ago it was what one might call a pivotal time in American politics, and that was one of the periods when I was most engaged, not just in paying attention to the news but in having conversations with people. We were just talking about debate a moment ago, but I mean actually arguing with people online.

I was doing a lot of that, to the point where I lost contact, or chose to lose contact, with one person who was very awful about it. I think the thing is, when something is a hypothetical external thing, it’s easy to argue about it in a detached way, like “we’ll just agree to disagree.” But when those things have real consequences, for us or for people we know, we can’t really divorce the intellectual conversation from the emotional aspect. And maybe we shouldn’t. I think it becomes harder to have some of those conversations. You and I were having those conversations at the time, and had been for maybe two decades before that too.

So for me, there was a certain, if I look back to when I was five, there’s a picture where I’m about three or five or something like that. On a certain level, I feel like my core values haven’t really changed at all. But over time, my understanding of the world has changed, in a way that shifted the application of those values, of what matters to me, of what I think sucks and what I think is great. I think I’ve lost a lot of hope for humanity in the last decade. Back then I was more hopeful that people could take their better qualities and work together in a way that led to a better world for everybody.

Because I really do believe, when we talk about billionaires versus not billionaires, there’s an element of, it’s almost foolish to think that even the wealthiest, most powerful people are actually better off in the reality we have than in the one we could have. Maybe people could live forever if they wanted to. Maybe you wouldn’t just be able to take a suborbital trip to “space,” but you could actually go to Mars, because humans had been collaborative enough, rather than “we’re gonna have to go to Mars because we’re destroying this planet.” So thinking back to then, it felt like a time when there was room to pivot and move in a direction I would have found a lot better than what’s actually happened over the last decade. It feels like not a lot of it’s been good.

Matthew:
Yeah, I can really understand that. It’s interesting, because I think you and I share a lot of views on that, but I’d describe myself as coming from a very different place. The first thing I want to name, and this is really more a thank you than anything else, but it was also part of the conversation: if any of you listen to Kevin Smith talk about his various podcast projects, particularly with Jason Mewes, the “Jay” of Jay and Silent Bob, his longtime close friend, he’s often talked about how Jay was going through very bad addiction issues and trying to come out the other side, and that they started the podcast in large part to give him something to do, to help him focus, and that it was a big part of helping Jason get to a much healthier place. As I understand it, he’s been on top of that addiction for many years now.

This was kind of a similar thing. In 2016, I was coming out of a pretty bad mental health crisis. I’d lost my career, then my mother passed away, and a lot of other things had happened. I started this Superhero Ethics project, which by the way was supposed to be a website with an occasional podcast to help advertise it.

Paul:
I remember at least one article, one piece, from that.

Matthew:
Technically now all of the podcasts are blog entries, but there you go. There’s a whole other conversation about how the media landscape has changed. But there were a couple of people, Paul more than anybody else, who got involved in part because I was like, “dude, I need something to do.” For me, that’s a lot of how this project started, both needing something to focus on so I wasn’t just thinking about all the things I’d broken in my life, but also needing a way to get my voice out there.

For me, in 2016, I was seeing a lot of what you were seeing. I was engaged in a lot of those debates, and getting incredibly frustrated. You and I actually had a conversation just before we started recording about how the term “debate” is maybe something we shouldn’t be so fond of, because a debate where two people are fixed in their positions and just trying to convince other people, without really listening to each other, doesn’t help anything in a lot of ways. And I say that as someone who used to be very proud of being a championship-level debater in college and high school.

Especially during that year, the debates we were having, and the funny thing is, I’m not even talking about arguing with Republicans. A lot of the worst debates were about how Democrats should fight against what was happening with Trump, the Sanders versus Clinton stuff, moderate Democrat versus leftist Democrat, the role of misogyny in all this, the role of racism, and also just questions of who’s being an idealist and who’s being a pragmatist, and what the strategy even is. It was just a whole bunch of people talking past each other.

That was also around the time we talk a lot about superhero fatigue now, but it wasn’t superhero fatigue then. A lot of these movies were coming out and becoming the basis of a lot of conversation. Sometime in the last couple of months before I started this project, I had a few conversations where just talking about what was happening in the world wasn’t getting anywhere, but I was able to use Star Wars or the MCU or DC as metaphors to talk to people, and that was getting through to them. Sometimes it was to talk about base values, sometimes to talk about a specific thing, but it was connecting with people in ways I hadn’t seen before. I think, more than anything else, that was the impetus for this project: the realization that I could no longer just say to people, “here’s why you should care about the poor,” or “here’s why that person who looks different from you, who might make you uncomfortable…”

Maybe sitting with that discomfort and trying to find the shared humanity is better than just rejecting them because they’re uncomfortable. Or maybe we could look at why we’re locking up huge numbers of people, most of whom don’t look like the people in power, white moderate men, et cetera. So I think part of the impetus was, we talk about this huge wave of superhero movies, Marvel and DC and all of them.

We’ve always had those, though. A big part of my childhood was the Tim Burton Batman movies, and before that the Richard Donner Superman movies, and in between all the various X-Men and Spider-Man movies. We’ve had Superman and superhero movies long before Kevin Feige met Robert Downey Jr. But it felt like this was an age when those movies were starting to grapple with issues a lot bigger than “do I wear the cape or not, do I become a hero or not, will my person love me in the end.” So I think that was really at the heart of starting this project: this kind of media is asking these questions, let’s talk about them further.

Paul:
Yeah. Thinking back, I remember that period, and basically being like, okay, this will be something fun to do with Matthew, who needs some fun stuff to do, and a way we can spend some time doing something that feels like we’re creating something. Well, that is literally what it was doing. But also, yeah, I totally agree. Just trying to express an opinion out of context, or talking about things in broad political terms, hits a lot differently than when you see, say, Sam Wilson getting harassed by cops, even though he’s Falcon.

Matthew:
To be clear, you’re not talking about the character Sam Wilson plays. We’re talking about the actor himself, literally getting harassed by cops a couple of times.

Paul:
No, actually I was talking about Falcon and the Winter Soldier.

Matthew:
Oh, never mind, okay.

Paul:
Yeah, I mean, there’s also Anthony Mackie. No, it’s fine, we can keep going. And obviously these things happen in real life too. Sometimes I think seeing things reflected in fiction is easier to talk about, because in a way it’s less real, since it’s literally made up, but it can also feel more real, because when you look at a news story that’s just using someone’s name, you think, “I don’t know, whoever that is.” But then you see someone eating breakfast in a film and think, “well, I know that character.” I think it’s easy to feel like you know fictional characters better than real people, because you get to see a part of their lives that you don’t usually get to see, although now with celebrities sharing so much of their lives online, that’s changing too.

Matthew:
Well, and I’m really glad you brought up the Sam Wilson example, even though I mixed up the actor and the character.

Paul:
Anthony Mackie, the actor, has himself also been harassed by cops at various points, as you mentioned. It’s interesting, I remember that show…

Matthew:
Him being harassed by cops was an important part, and even more so, I think, was him going to try to get a loan at a bank. That, to me, was proof of what I’m getting at with this podcast. A lot of people I knew, and a lot of other fantastic people, especially Black folks, were talking about what that moment really showed. I remember hearing from a lot of white people across the spectrum who were like, “I never really got it until I saw Sam Wilson deal with that at the bank.” And that banker wasn’t using slurs or ranting about race, he was just a normal guy.

That’s the point. I really liked Sam Wilson, and I liked that banker too, but he had racial bias he probably wasn’t aware of that was playing out in making it harder for Sam Wilson to get a loan.

Paul:
Yeah, institutional bias. It’s more than the individual, it’s not personal bigotry, it’s this deep, baked-in issue.

Matthew:
I’m really glad you made that pivot, because that’s so true and it’s why it’s so needed. Show me a cop who says a slur while hurting somebody, that’s a very clear, obvious thing to see.

Paul:
Yeah, and pro-cop people are gonna say, “that guy sucks, he’s the bad apple, get rid of him, and everything’s fine.”

Matthew:
Exactly. So I say, show me the institutional bias of racism built into policing ever since they were slave catchers, a hundred fifty years ago, or a hundred, sixty, seventy, whatever.

Paul:
A little more.

Matthew:
That’s a lot harder to show. And you’re right, so something like Sam Wilson being denied at the bank, I don’t remember if he’s actually denied or what exactly happens, but having that experience, he’s a literal hero, literally an Avenger, and it still hits him. That’s a way of making it real for people.

Paul:
Yeah, absolutely. Those kinds of institutional things, individuals can tell their own stories, of course, but I think seeing something in fiction can hit differently, and can make people more receptive to hearing people’s actual stories.

Matthew:
No, I think that’s true, and I think that’s a good place to start, because I’ll be honest, I’ve been questioning what’s going to happen with the future of this project. Part of that is that I think the media landscape has changed a lot. There are just eight million more podcasts out there now, there’s a lot more superhero fatigue. I think people don’t hear “Superhero Ethics” and get as excited as they might have been. But also the media landscape for sharing content has gotten much harder, because there’s an awful lot of schlock out there, an awful lot of AI content, a lot of people using content as an excuse to sell things.

But also, the term I love: the “enshittification” of the internet. Eight, ten years ago, I could post a link saying, “hey, I just did a talk about Sam Wilson trying to get a loan from a bank,” and anyone in my circle, or their circles, who had expressed any interest in Sam Wilson or the MCU or banking, was probably going to see it. Now I post those things and five or ten people see it.

Paul:
Yeah, it’s like, “whoa, whoa, whoa, there’s a link here, it might take people away from our site.” No, no, no.

Matthew:
Right, on Facebook, et cetera. But that’s me complaining about something every podcaster in the world deals with. The real thing is I’m no longer sure this is an area where we can have productive conversations, because internet conversations have become so much “oh my god, that’s too woke, it’s terrible,” or “you think it’s too woke, therefore it’s actually the best thing ever.”

Paul:
Can I share my experience briefly?

Matthew:
Yeah, please.

Paul:
So, as I mentioned, back in 2016, a decade before today, when I was very active on social media, arguing and talking with people, it wasn’t all bad, but I was fairly miserable as a result of it. Maybe a year later I just stopped, completely avoided it, and felt better. At some point I went back, partly because I figured I’d want to promote things I was making, and partly because I wanted to stay in contact with friends I don’t email with much.

Going back to it, there was a feeling like, it’s hard to say whether this is just my own perception, like when you’re inside in the dark for a while and then go back outside and it feels brighter, like, did it actually get brighter, or is that just me? But I found some niche communities, like chess accounts on what was then still called Twitter, and over the last few years I’ve shifted away from being completely detached from social media to talking to people mostly individually, except for Discord, and even there mostly in private groups, where there’s a barrier to entry that keeps out trolling and spamming. More recently, since I put out my new book, which we’ll talk about later, I have a copy here in my hand, it’s nice, I enjoy it.

Matthew:
And I think, to purchase that book and support this podcast, links are in the show notes. Yay.

Paul:
So I went and posted about it, and started looking around and talking to people, and I thought it was bad ten years ago, but the level of negativity I see about everything now, I don’t know whether it’s just my feed. For most of the last ten years I used something called a feed blocker, but I don’t have it installed right now, so I wasn’t just looking things up individually, I was seeing the general feed, and it’s such a morass of rage bait and other kinds of clickbait, and people seeming so angry and unhappy. I don’t fault people for it, everyone’s perpetuating it, but it’s designed to inspire those emotions.

And the level of negativity on so many things made me feel like, why would I want this to be part of my life? It’s unfortunate, because I do feel like the core idea of social media is really positive. You can be in touch with people you’d never see or contact daily, because there are too many of them, or they’re too far away. You can do that through email, texting, calls, but there’s a really positive function for social media and online conversation, it’s just really hard to find beneath the ocean of crap.

Matthew:
I think that’s incredibly true. And there is still some of that happening today, some of it shining a light on incredibly negative things. I think the genocide and the horrors happening in Gaza are only known about because of TikTok and social media, at a time when most regular media wasn’t covering it, because we were seeing Palestinians directly showing us, “this is my bedroom that got bombed, this is my real life.” We could see that directly. That’s an example of one of the most horrible things to see, but that I think we have to see.

But you can also go all the way to the other side, like TikToks of Korean fans of their World Cup team discovering tequila and tacos in Mexico City while watching the games, or Scotsmen taking over Boston and maybe significantly changing the demographics of that city for nine months. Those are fantastic, and we still get moments like that. But what we used to have is that two random people would be talking about a Superman movie, or something they saw on the Daily Show, and I might see what one person said to another and think, “oh, that’s cool, I’m gonna jump into that conversation.”

We were arrogant enough, but with some real basis: if you and I talk back and forth on Twitter, someone else might see that and have a positive response, instead of “oh, you mentioned this, let me sell you something,” or “let me tell you why you’re terrible,” or “let me convince you to join my multi-level marketing thing.”

Paul:
And it’s not that those positive interactions don’t happen anymore, they’re just so buried.

Matthew:
They’re so buried, and it’s so much harder to get to them, and a lot of people have given up on them. So it becomes this cycle where, and I’m sure I’ll get responses from people saying, “well, if you’d just gone to Mastodon, if you’d just gone to Bluesky,” and yeah, probably, if we’d all picked one, but that never happened.

Paul:
And who’s “we,” right?

Matthew:
Exactly. Also true. And that’s the broad social media conversation in general. I want to narrow it down a bit to talk about it with the kind of stuff we’re talking about here, these movies and this podcast. Last week’s episode was on the Supergirl movie, and Jessica Plummer and I had a great conversation about it, about a lot of things we liked, but also things we thought didn’t work so well. One of the things we had to talk about was that it was very difficult to have that conversation right now, because months before the movie came out, a loud part of the internet, actually a lot smaller than it seems, but loud voices get amplified, had decided this movie was going to be terrible because Milly Alcock had said something about Kara possibly being bisexual, and had been critical of men, and so therefore everything was going to be “woke, woke, woke,” and terrible, going to these ridiculous extremes that ten years ago would have been unbelievable but are now just normal. If it’s a woman-led movie, a Black-person-led movie, a queer-person-led movie, or led by any minority, that’s just what we expect now. And there’s been a rise of a response to that, which I think is completely reasonable and fair, but which says, “no, this movie’s the best thing ever, and if you don’t like it, you’re one of those terrible people.”

Paul:
Right, right. This is something I got on board with a lot later than you did. I remember when you first told me you didn’t like The Last Jedi, I had this moment of “oh god, no, Paul can’t be one of those people.”

Matthew:
That doesn’t make any sense, because there were so many people who hated The Last Jedi for dumb reasons, a lot to do with racism and sexism. But you were like, “no, I just thought this part of the movie, this dialogue, this plot point, didn’t make sense.” I was like, okay, that’s actually a reasonable conversation, we can have that.

And I felt bad that it must be hard for you to have that conversation without getting lost in all that noise. That’s a lot of what Jessica and I were talking about with Supergirl too, that it’s hard, and I think the criticism matters, but people saying an actress isn’t attractive compared to some other actress, when Milly Alcock is beautiful, how you don’t think that is ridiculous to me.

Paul:
People are attracted to different people, who cares? But that shouldn’t be your talking point if you’re trying to criticize a movie.

Matthew:
Right, like the meme of taking the most beautiful model-face photo of one actress playing Supergirl, and then a frame in the middle of a fight where she’s grimacing because she’s kicking someone in the face, and saying, “look, who’s more beautiful?” And then, when I look at it now, I admit I was concerned about putting that episode up, because I saw one person had a headline in Variety, “Supergirl Deserved a Better Movie,” written from the perspective that this is a fantastic character, and here’s a lot of ways this movie could have been done better, because the producers didn’t seem to take it seriously enough due to their own misogyny. I haven’t read all of the article, but from what I’ve read, it’s not coming from a place of “this is terrible, we should have had Superman instead of Supergirl.”

Yet the response to the article was still, “these are all misogynists, they clearly hate it because…” And it’s just, how do you have a conversation with any nuance in the midst of that?

Paul:
Yeah, I actually wrote down “the death of nuance,” because that’s where I wanted to go. I wrote a blog post once about how I thought Agent Carter deserved better than it got, the show had a lot I thought was great, honestly. The first four episodes were really good, but the character deserved a more well-written series with a more satisfying conclusion than it delivered. I think we both feel that way about Wonder Woman 1984. I loved the first Wonder Woman movie, I think it’s one of the best DC movies, maybe the best non-Batman DC movie, but then the follow-up, it’s like, “how is this by the same people?”

It was so weird, and kind of rapey, and I don’t know what was going on there. Personally, it’s not hard for me, I’ll just say what I think and ignore what people I don’t know or respect are going to say. That’s not disrespect for anybody, I just don’t know them, I’m not personally interested in that conversation. I want to talk to people whose opinions I already want to hear, and we’ll disagree or agree, and have a conversation, not a debate. But with that movie, I can imagine there was a lot of anti-feminist, misogynist, probably anti-Latino sentiment too, because of Pedro Pascal, and there are movies where I don’t really want to spend a lot of time tearing them down because there’s already people doing that for really bad reasons.

Or reasons I disagree with, so it doesn’t need any more of that. But if you ask my opinion, I’ll say, I don’t think it’s cool that Steve Trevor possesses some guy’s body, and then Wonder Woman is essentially with this guy who has no idea he’s not really there. What is that? And it felt very anti-Middle Eastern too, which is interesting, since one of the writers is, I think, Lebanese.

Matthew:
Well, and that raises another issue, which is that since the making of those movies, and some of this was more available at the time, but certainly more in recent years, and people are paying a lot more attention because of Gaza, Gal Gadot has expressed a lot of opinions that many people find deeply problematic. I’m not going to say she’s on JK Rowling’s level in terms of using her influence to spread hate, but she’s on that spectrum to an extent I’m not comfortable with. I’m probably not going to pay money to see another project she’s in.

But I think part of the conversation wants me to go back and say, “when I thought Gal Gadot made a pretty good Wonder Woman, well, she’s not even the right…” No, she’s more svelte than the traditionally bulkier depiction of Wonder Woman, but I still thought she was a pretty good Wonder Woman in that movie. I now know a lot of terrible things about her that make me not want to support her future projects, but that doesn’t make me go back and say, “actually, I’m wrong, I’m going to hunt through this movie and say her facial expression here is actually bad acting.” I think that’s often where the conversation is supposed to go, but shouldn’t, because we now know a lot more about these actors and what they have to say. Let me actually ask you about this, because I think this has been a topic between us, I think I’ve often been a lot more focused on how I feel about supporting something, not how I feel about the art itself, but whether I want to support it, based on how the artist uses their platform to express opinions.

Paul:
Yeah, I don’t think it’s changed for me. I’ve always been comfortable just not supporting things I don’t want to support, cutting things out of my life, like, yeah, I don’t need that, I don’t want to put my money there. I really don’t want to know much about actors, honestly. If I do, and it’s something good, that’s a nice story, like stories about Keanu Reeves, or Matt Damon telling stories really well. There are exceptions, like Anthony Stewart Head, who I know you did an episode on.

Matthew:
We definitely talked about him. He recently passed away. We didn’t get an episode together about it, but we’re trying to talk about him. He was Giles in Buffy, and Rupert in Ted Lasso, and an all-around fantastic guy.

Paul:
Yeah, I read about it, or my mom read about it and told me, because Buffy was huge to her, seeing a character like that as an adult, never having seen one like her before. I thought Giles was a really important character in that series, and how everything fit together. There’s a story about him, his wife or partner, I think they didn’t get married for various reasons, was a vegetarian and animal rights activist. At some point they had ants they were trying to get rid of, and he said, “well, can’t we just ask them to leave?” And I’ve had that same feeling, like, I don’t want them here, but I don’t want to just wipe them out either.

So when I hear something like that, it makes me appreciate the person, that’s nice, but while I’m watching something, I don’t want to be thinking “this is a human, this is a meat puppet.” I want to see the character, not think about the performance. There’s an extent to which I can mostly separate those things, I can still watch The Usual Suspects and see maybe the best performance I’ve ever seen, regardless of what the actor did. But I respect that some people feel differently, and if that compromises your enjoyment or you don’t want to financially contribute to something, I get that. Every movie has dead animals on the craft services table, basically, every movie is made by people who do things I think are bad, that I could have real issues with, and I could boycott almost everything for that. So on some level I have to choose my battles, and the question is whether a certain element or person exceeds a threshold I set for myself.

Matthew will be back soon, maybe I’ll read from my book until he returns. I think the computer was mad at Matthew, it evicted him, and I’m still here. So I went on a bit of a ramble about Kevin Spacey, basically saying that usually I can separate the performer from the performance, and if I held things against people, I’d basically be holding things against every movie, because there’s a huge number of people involved in making one. And then I started reading from my book.

Matthew:
Which is a great book people should check out, links are in the show notes. That makes a lot of sense, and I think for me, it’s perfectly respectable for anyone to make their own decisions about what art they want to support and spend money on, money being the primary but not the only way you support art. If we say, “hey, The Usual Suspects is a great movie,” which I think it is, someone might say, “you’re supporting it.” Well, if Kevin Spacey were getting money every time we said that, I might think about it differently, but the truth about the movie is still the truth.

The point I’m getting to is that sometimes there’s a thought of, well, actually, I think sometimes we want to read back and say, “oh, Gal Gadot was a terrible Wonder Woman because of the stuff we know now.” I think that’s problematic. But there’s another side to it too: I love Buffy, I totally get why your mother loved it, a lot of people in our generation and hers love that show, and for its time it made some important advances for women on screen and women as superheroes. Even by the standards of that time, and especially today, there were some problems with it. Knowing some of the things we know about Joss Whedon makes some of that easier to see, in the same way that I’ve loved Woody Allen since I was a kid, growing up in a half-Jewish household on the Upper West Side where that was the language of my family, and knowing more about him now, some of the plotlines about him being in love with much younger characters are a lot more uncomfortable to me, and I’m more aware of them because I have that in mind.

Paul:
But also, Manhattan’s one of the best movies ever made.

Matthew:
Yeah, Manhattan’s a fantastic movie, but also deeply ethically problematic. What are you going to do? Another one I’d bring up is Léon: The Professional, which you got me into. Since that movie, we’ve come to know that the director and writer has been credibly accused of relationships with underage women in a couple of ways, and the actor who played Léon has said he was often asked to interact with the young Natalie Portman in a more sexual way on screen, and he refused. The point is, all of that makes it harder to have the conversations we originally wanted to have with this podcast, because it’s almost like if ten years ago we said, “I want to step away from the charged atmosphere of politics and just talk about DC,” well, that’s not really possible anymore either.

Paul:
For sure. One funny thing about Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman, you know who my choice was? Gina Carano.

Matthew:
Oh yeah, I remember agreeing with that. Physically, Gina Carano is much more like the image we had, more like what Lynda Carter looked like, or the animated depictions.

Paul:
Gina Torres was my other pick.

Matthew:
Oh yeah, I think she could have done well too.

Paul:
Speaking of actors who’ve been in Mouse-related things. Let me ask you about the flip side.

Matthew:
Are there times, because you talked about how, for you, meat eating is one of the most important, if not the most important, ethical issue, and most of the world isn’t on your side there, and you’re slowly pulling me in that direction, but I get that. Are there times when a writer or actor who’s outspokenly vegan is in a project, and you feel like, well, I want to at least check that out, or support it, in the way that we’ve talked about not supporting something because of what a person does?

Paul:
I kind of just like them more. But I like James Cameron, who’s famously vegan, and I just don’t like his films. The Terminator movies are great, Aliens is great, but Titanic, and Avatar, the movies feel to me like they’re big for the sake of being big. But then again, there are things I like about him. Then again, Jeff Bezos is dietarily vegan, but I feel like you can’t really call yourself vegan if you own Whole Foods.

I’d rather you owned a chain of vegan grocery stores and ate whatever you wanted. There’s some hypocrisy either way, but moving the world in the direction I’d like to see it go matters more to me.

Matthew:
I’d say putting his editorial spin on Whole Foods, I’d appreciate a lot more than putting his editorial spin on the Washington Post.

Paul:
Yeah, exactly. So I can’t say I’m often moved to actively support something because of the people behind it, but I do feel more fondness, more comfort with it. There’s always a certain level of discomfort otherwise, kind of like talking about baseball feels a little uncomfortable to me. So there’s not a whole lot where who’s making the thing really moves the needle for me, in theory.

Matthew:
You might be happy that Megan Fox is vegan, but it doesn’t make you want to rewatch the original Transformers movie.

Paul:
Although I think that one was actually decent. Michael Bay is another director who seems to make things big for the sake of being big, but they went downhill pretty quickly after that.

Matthew:
And then popped back up, as we’ve discussed, there’s an episode on Bumblebee, go check that out.

Paul:
Oh, is there? Okay, I didn’t do that one, but I think I saw it and thought Bumblebee was definitely better. I’m glad you did it. If I listened to podcasts, I would’ve heard that episode.

Matthew:
We did do an episode on the Transformers Animated show too, link in the show notes.

Paul:
Oh yes, we did.

Matthew:
So let me transition to another question at the heart of a lot of what we’re doing. You don’t like the word “ethics.” Talk about some of that.

Because I named it Superhero Ethics. Let me actually, I’ll ask you the question, and then I’m going to do the thing interviewers do, where you ask a question and then spend five minutes answering it yourself, just to define the question. Should I do that, or let you talk first?

Paul:
No, do it, do it, I’m looking forward to this. And I feel like you should leave this part in.

Matthew:
I totally will. So for me, as I said, I wanted to talk about the ethical choices superheroes make in the movies, and also the choices made outside the movie. It could have been “superhero morals” or “superhero values.” A lot of my graduate study was in academic ethics, which you could argue is pretty far removed from how people actually make ethical decisions. I’m not trying to be pretentious about it, but that’s the framework I come from. A lot of that field of study says ethics isn’t just the string of individual decisions you make, it’s the systems that individuals, societies, and communities use to frame ethical decision-making, and to what extent that’s morally consistent.

It’s to some extent objective, because it’s not about there being one “right” ethics, it’s about starting by asking what your values are, what’s important to you, and then whether you’re being consistent with that, and whether you’re open to learning new things or locked in. That was always the most interesting question to me, because a lot of what I saw that seemed odd was people who thought it was awesome that Superman is an immigrant who came here, but were hateful toward immigrants in real life, or who thought it was terrible that Sam Wilson was treated badly, but happily supported the bad treatment of real Black people. So I think the idea of Superhero Ethics has always been about challenging people on what they value and whether they’re living that out.

Something that’s always been central to this, but I’ve never really talked about it, and maybe this is part of the shift we’re doing, is empathy. At the heart of every superhero, and every action hero to some extent, take someone like the Punisher: he’s fundamentally motivated by individual motivation, his desire for revenge, his desire to make sure these things don’t happen to others. There are versions of the Punisher who become quite empathetic, but that’s often not what drives him, which is why he’s thought of as an anti-hero.

Empathy, to me, is saying, “I have felt this pain, and now I see you, a person I’m not necessarily connected to, facing the same pain, and I want to help, I want to prevent that.” I think that’s key to a lot of superheroes, and a lot of Punisher stories are about him moving from revenge to empathy. I think that’s essential to Batman too, his empathy for every Robin he’s had, his empathy in some versions of the story for Joe Chill, his empathy for many of the villains, like Ace. So to me, when I call it “ethics,” part of it’s because it sounds cool, “Superhero Ethics,” but really it means, “what are the ethical systems superheroes use, and how can we apply them to our own world?”

That wouldn’t fit on a little TikTok logo. But I also like the idea of getting people to think. I’ll give an example: obviously sexual assault, rape, all of that are heinous crimes, and can happen to anybody, but as a masculine-presenting person I don’t live my life with that as a constant fear the way a lot of women and femme people do. So I acknowledge there’s an extent to which I can’t fully understand that horror the way others can.

But that said, I’ll hear people who consider themselves complete prison abolitionists, but also support the death penalty for rapists, and I think, how does this fit together? That may not be the best example, but there are others like it. I think that’s why I chose “ethics,” because it’s about why we have empathy for a character on screen, but not for the real person going through the same thing in real life.

And how do we, by thinking about ethics and teaching ethics, teach empathy, and teach people to use empathy to inform their feelings and decisions more than fear?

Paul:
Yeah, there’s a lot I agree with there, and maybe some I don’t. That was a very well-expressed explanation of what you mean by “superhero ethics.” One thing I definitely agree with is the idea of internal consistency. But to cut to why the word “ethics” rankles me a little, maybe not as much as “morals,” I feel like there’s an implied claim in how the word is used in lay terms, most people, I think, when they hear “ethics,” think of a certain objectivity.

Matthew:
Yeah, the idea that it’s derived from your own personal sense of values isn’t universal at all, I’d say it’s a fairly minority position in how most people think about the term. Fully agree.

Paul:
Yeah, I had a friend in my brief time in college who was an objectivist, all about proving what’s “right” because “A equals A” and so on, and I read The Fountainhead and thought, “eh.” It’s funny, because a lot of the conclusions actually resonated with me, but then it was “and then this, and then this,” and I thought, “no, no, no.” I’ve met a number of people who espouse that philosophy, or capital-L Libertarianism, and I eventually came to think of myself as a subjectivist, to the point where I know what I value, what I think is important, but I don’t feel any need to formalize that. There’s an extent to which formalizing it would be kind of nonsensical, in a way, when I can just express that something matters to me.

Something is important to me, but putting it into bullet points would, in a large way, miss the point. In terms of applying values to decisions and views, I’ve always trusted myself to make that assessment within the context of whatever the question is. I think there’s an element of formalizing things that can inhibit that. It’s not that you can’t do it. I’ll make a poker comparison: in poker we’re often trying to come up with heuristics, “generally do this in these circumstances,” with exceptions, and you can do pretty well following good ones if you have good ones. But to really play great, you need to be able to reason independently, without those general guidelines being front and center. For me, the general guideline is, barring a reason to do otherwise, I’ll do this thing, but I always want part of my mind looking for that reason to do otherwise. Like, barring a reason to the contrary, you shouldn’t put people in jail, and a lot of people find a lot of reasons to do that, and I don’t think those are very good reasons.

Those don’t compel me. So I can see the idea of ethics as heuristics, where it’s fair to come up with general beliefs about how you want to behave, or how you’d like others to behave toward you, but always with an asterisk. You were talking earlier about nuance, and I wrote down, “the death of nuance.” I think “nuance” got weaponized, and it’s really unfortunate, because it undermines the ability to see nuance without treating it as always overriding, like, “well, what about this one little thing?” Often that’s a nitpick that isn’t sufficient to override the main point, but sometimes it is. There’s an inability to accept that sometimes a small factor does outweigh, or might outweigh, a seemingly larger one.

I feel awash in all this hypothetical stuff, but the thing I really like about talking about things this way, through a given story, is that there’s always the ability to be concrete. When we did the whole Team Cap, Team Tony thing, for me it wasn’t that everybody should have unrestricted ability to do whatever they want anywhere, but that if there’s going to be a governing body trying to rein in these super-powerful beings, that particular framework wasn’t it.

I do think, in that concrete discussion, it was fair to say it was unreasonable for Steve Rogers to just throw out that whole idea, when he’d literally agreed to work for a government before, during World War II, and then got cut off, came back, had to learn about the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Vietnam War, all these awful things the U.S. military and government had done, and had to reckon with that. And then, “okay, I’ll work for Nick Fury and S.H.I.E.L.D.” And then, “oh, they’re Hydra.” Spoilers for Captain America: The Winter Soldier.

Matthew:
Which, by the way, I’m currently talking about every week on the Movie Minute.

Paul:
Yeah, that was funny.

Matthew:
There are like eight things I want to jump in with there. I’ll build backwards from the end. First, I kind of said it off the cuff, but I’m really wrestling with this idea of empathy versus fear, and I want to think a lot more about Winter Soldier, about Civil War, because for me a lot of that movie is about Tony and Steve both acting out of incredibly legitimate fear, which makes it hard for them to understand the validity of the other side. That’s actually something I think we talk about a lot with supervillains too, that they often come from a place of fear.

On what you said about nuance, I know this wasn’t your favorite movie, but I think you liked one scene as much as I do. I really love the David Corenswet Superman movie, and one of my favorite scenes is when Superman and Lois Lane are talking about whether he should have intervened in a conflict that’s clearly meant to evoke a Ukraine-Gaza kind of situation.

She’s raising incredibly relevant, legitimate questions about what it means for an American, who’s also kind of not American, but sort of is, and who also has all this power, to intervene in the foreign policy of other nations. There’s a lot of nuance in what she’s raising, and I think they’re fair questions. And he just keeps saying, “but people are dying.” That’s what I kept thinking of when you were talking about nuance being important, but sometimes that one value… I love that scene because I think they’re both right, and it highlights, for me, that conflict between being too nuanced and ignoring nuance entirely, both can be problematic.

Paul:
Yeah, I think they both have fair points. I don’t remember exactly how I felt about that particular scene, there were things I liked in the movie and things I didn’t. Who cares? But I was very much on Superman’s side there: people were going to die, and he stopped that from happening, and you deal with the fallout after, I don’t care, I’m here to save lives, that’s it. And that’s fair, that’s being consistent with his own values, whether you call that ethics or not.

I once tweeted a simple thought that stuck with me, that my only loyalty is to my own conscience. And to circle back to the Steve-Tony thing, I think Steve Rogers was absolutely right that he doesn’t need oversight from the U.S. or U.N. government, he can follow his own values and make reasonable decisions. You could say, “but they’re a U.S.-based group,” but they’re not exactly just that. But Tony was also right that he needed oversight. So I think they’re both seeing it from their own perspective, and that’s why I thought that whole phase of the MCU was quite brilliant, over the course of a bunch of movies, those two characters basically crossed the streams, in a way that made perfect sense for their characters. That’s what I always want from fiction, characters moving in a way where it feels like nothing else could have happened.

Matthew:
And maybe that’s part of why this project feels different now, because we’re not in that era of moviemaking anymore, partly fatigue, but also because it’s a lot harder to make a nuanced moral movie today, we’re in such a different stage. I also want to go back to what you were saying about ethics in general, because I think you helped me realize I want to take a concept from one part of my life and apply it to a lot of others. I’ve often said, and I honestly can’t remember if I came up with this or heard it from a professor at seminary, that religion is at its best when it asks hard questions, and at its worst when it gives easy answers. I think everything you said about ethics is the whole point of that. In the Gospels, and this is true of a lot of religious systems, people come to Jesus with hard questions, and his response is to tell a story, that’s what the parables were, and what a lot of rabbis of the time did too, and a lot of Buddhist texts are like that. The point is never “here’s the answer,” it’s “let me help you sit with the question so you can come to your own answer.”

To me, that’s what ethics should be. If the end of ethics is to say, “human life has value in this way, but not in that way,” that’s garbage. A lot of the supervillains we’ve seen, both in real life and especially in media, are ones with a fairly rigid ethical system, unwilling to find compromise or nuance. So actually, I really like your pushback, it gives me a better framing, that if I’m going to talk about ethics, and maybe that’s the wrong word, I’m not sure yet, the point isn’t to say, “if you’re a Superman fan you have to think this,” or “if you liked Civil War you have to think this.” It’s to say these movies are asking hard questions, or should be, and we want to talk about that and show how we arrive at our answers, in the hope that you think about it more. I just want people thinking more, not just saying “that lightning shot was so cool,” even if it may be, when these are people choosing when and when not to use violence, and that should make us think.

Paul:
Yeah, and what to do with unlimited power. For me, this gets back to the debate thing we were discussing earlier. I want people to agree with me, but I don’t want them to agree with me just because I’ve convinced them I’m right and they’re following my train of logic. I want to express how I see things, so that someone thinks about it themselves and comes to their own conclusion, which I’d like to be the same one I’ve reached, but it doesn’t have to be. And if they reach a different conclusion by following their own logic, and share it with me, and I find it compelling, I’m perfectly happy to change my perspective.

To me, that’s what conversation does, that structured debate doesn’t, where it’s “this is my point and I’m just going to make it.” I tend to be pretty locked in on a lot of things, and pretty loose on others, it’s hard for me to hold something at twenty-five or seventy-five percent, it’s more like zero, fifty, or a hundred. That doesn’t really reflect my worldview well, because I actually see things pretty probabilistically, so my “hundred” is more like ninety-nine, and my “zero” is more like one. There are things I’ve given a lot of thought to, heard a lot of arguments about, and I’m just not interested anymore, usually arguments about when certain lives should be ended because somebody else wants them to be. I’m like, pretty much no, you’re going to have to come up with a very specific situation.

Matthew:
And that gets to a key issue for me, the difference between arguing about values versus arguing about methods. If your starting position is that white people are fundamentally better and you want America to be a white Christian nation, I think that value is fundamentally unchristian, so there’s no real discussion to have. I can try to use science to show your ideas about race are wrong, but there’s no shared ground to build from.

If you say you’re Christian, though, that’s like saying, “Batman loves killing people.” We both claim allegiance to a central text, and if you want to say the Bible was written by many people over centuries, so was Batman, but written over decades instead, then let’s actually look at that text together that you claim allegiance to. But for the most part, that’s not someone I’m ever going to convince. If I see someone who says, “I want to fight racism, and I think the way to do that is unfettered capitalism, because then everyone has access to the same things,” I get that their heart might be in the right place, if they’re being legitimate, though I think a lot of people use that to hide their own racism. But if I think someone legitimately wants to solve the same problems I do, and just wants to do it in a way I don’t think will work, then I’ll say, let’s talk about that, let’s talk about whether you’re actually succeeding, and maybe I’ll point out some things, and maybe you’ll point out things to me, and I’ll be open to that. But at least we’re starting from some shared value.

Paul:
Yeah, for sure. The times I’ve been more likely to try to convince someone of something, or change their mind or behavior, are usually when I feel like we share some value, or they hold a value they’re not really living up to. Like when someone tells me they love animals, not just “oh, they’re cute,” but really loves animals, and then I ask, “so why do you eat them?” I don’t go around trying to convince people all the time, strategically it doesn’t seem like a productive use of time. Going around saying “meat is murder,” even if I do believe it, I don’t think that changes anybody’s mind. And none of that is to throw shade at people who do that, you figure out what you think will make the world more like you’d want it, and go for it.

But for me, if I know somebody who’s really into animals, and this happened at least once, over twenty years ago, that person became vegetarian and has stayed that way, because they realized that didn’t actually match what they believed. A lot of people do things reflexively, because that’s how they were raised, their parents put food in front of them, and they never really questioned it. So for me, it’s about wanting people to ask themselves questions, and then come to their own conclusions and act on them.

Matthew:
It’s funny, because what you just described, wanting people to realize they’re not always living out their values until it’s actually questioned, that’s exactly what ethics means to me. That’s the kind of questioning process I’m thinking of.

Paul:
Yeah, and I’ll say, “values” is a word I’ve been using, but it’s really your word. I don’t think it’s a bad word, but it connects to what I was saying earlier about anti-formalization, that’s kind of where I’m coming from, but it’s how I can meet you in the language you’re using.

Matthew:
Right, I can see that. And I do know the person you’re talking about, the one who’s now vegetarian, and I’m sure there are others who became vegan or vegetarian because of you. I’d say I’m someone you’ve had a fundamental impact on, in terms of how I relate to animals, meat and clothing. I’m not vegan, not vegetarian, but I eat significantly less meat than when we started talking about this, and now mostly only eat meat from ethically raised sources, not corporate industrial farming. Part of that is because, and you never pushed this on me, I had a curiosity and asked you about it, but you were always willing to talk about it, and to call me out sometimes when I’d say something that sounded principled while still eating animals.

Paul:
The term “ethically raised” almost explains why the word “ethics” gives me a little bit of pause.

Matthew:
Yeah, no, that’s fair. Let me actually explain the values there. For me, if you start from the position that animal life and human life are of equivalent moral value, I’m just not there. Maybe that’s an ethical or moral failing on my part, maybe it’ll change as I spend more time with the issue, but it’s not a value I currently hold. I do hold the value that cruelty to any living thing is bad, and not something I want to participate in, in any way. I also have a different view of death than a lot of people, I do think physician-assisted suicide for anyone who wants it is very core to a lot of my values, and represents a fundamental shift in how we think about people wanting to end their lives.

To be clear, if you’re thinking about that yourself, please reach out to someone, I’m not saying this is an endorsement, but the fact that I have to add that disclaimer is itself something I have a problem with. So, to me, the stories of industrial farming, animals living what I understand to be truly miserable lives that then end with them being eaten, is horrific and bad.

Paul:
Well, they end with them being killed, and eaten later.

Matthew:
Yes, hopefully. To my mind, again, probably because I don’t hold that same value about animal life, an animal living a significantly happier life that still ends in being killed and eaten is significantly better. And I get why someone might say, “if you told me that about people, that there’s a group of people we’re planning to kill for their resources, but some are treated better than others, I’d say, what’s wrong with you, you’re still killing people.” I get that, and I’m trying not to be defensive, just explaining the moral thinking. It’s not that the hypocrisy or cruelty argument doesn’t land, a lot of what I’ve thought about, you didn’t tell me any of it, you got me to think about it, to be curious about it, and that led me to do my own research and look at how much of what I thought was actually true, and how much wasn’t.

So, I’m not vegetarian, not vegan, but I eat significantly less meat, and different kinds of meat that I think are better for animals in general, and that’s very much due to your influence. I think that’s a successful instance of what you’re talking about, sharing values even when our core values behind them aren’t the same.

Paul:
Yeah, for sure. I think sometimes the most important thing is just to ask the question, and then the answer ends up being what it is. I won’t go on a long tangent, but I’d say “less bad” instead of “better.” And I’d say you don’t have to hold human and non-human animal life equal in value to see value in both.

Matthew:
That’s fair, right.

Paul:
There are actually a lot of instances, there’s a difference between minimum security prison, which I’m not necessarily in favor of, and solitary confinement or torture, and you mentioned not being afraid of sexual assault in a male body, or as a male person…

Matthew:
Not to say it’s all about you, but our society isn’t set up such that being male means living with that fear, unless you’re in prison.

Paul:
Right, and the numbers actually aren’t that different, it’s just highly concentrated within prisons, and when men are victims of sexual assault, and that’s treated as a joke, that’s insane. I’d call myself a prison abolitionist in the theoretical world I’d most like to live in, that wouldn’t be a thing. But practically, I think it’s very difficult to get there directly, that’s more like a project of centuries. In the short term, you could think about, if you’re going to incarcerate people, don’t do it for so many dumb reasons, or for so long, and the conditions should be humane.

Matthew:
Right, right. And maybe even more than that, I’ve been reading and listening to a lot of prison abolitionists who would still say, if a person has proven they’re going to try to harm other people, we need to take steps to keep them from having the opportunity to keep doing that. It’s a question of whether the current system, or restorative justice and reform, are better ways to do that. But I agree with you, and I think one of the moments that made me realize my ethics weren’t lining up was around Derek Chauvin, who was most responsible for the murder of George Floyd. There were other officers involved too, but he became kind of the poster boy for it. He went to jail, and I believe he’s still there.

When he did, a lot of memes went around about all the ways he was going to be sexually assaulted in prison, and I felt good reading those, because this was someone I was really angry at, who I saw as an embodiment of terrible things happening in our society, and I thought, people are going to do bad things to him, and we have that idea of what happens in prison, guys get raped, and it’s treated as a joke, and I felt good about it. Someone screenshotted that I’d posted about how bad sexual assault is, immediately followed by liking one of those memes, and called me out on it.

Yeah, I do think there are parts of us where revenge fantasy is fun, schadenfreude is fun, that’s part of being human, we enjoy the thought of bad things happening to people we perceive as bad.

Paul:
Or people who love The Last Jedi enjoying watching people who don’t love The Rise of Skywalker. I know that’s not the actual name.

Matthew:
It should be, The Rise of Skywalker, the Fall of Star Wars. I get it, and in those cases, it’s fine.

But I don’t think it’s terrible that people enjoy those memes, I’m not saying don’t share the meme, but if there’s a poll asking whether we should stop trying to prevent prison sexual assault based on how bad we think a given prisoner is, I’m not voting yes on that. I like the idea, but if my tax dollars go toward keeping people safe in prison, including someone like Derek Chauvin, then yeah, I actually want that, I don’t want sexual assault happening.

Paul:
Yeah, no, yep, we agree.

Matthew:
So this is now getting well into two hours…

Paul:
I was going to say, are we in episode 401 now?

Matthew:
This probably is. I’m going to do a kind of stinger, but also a transition. I have no idea how many people are listening right now, we’re getting about two hundred to three hundred downloads an episode. I really hope there are people out there still listening. I don’t know if that’s just two hundred people who forgot to turn off auto-download, or if anyone’s actually listening. But if you are, please, for the love of God, let us know.

Write in to Superhero Ethics, write to matthew@theethicalpanda.com, find us on social media, just to say you’re listening and enjoying it, or even just to laugh at the two of us, whatever it is. But if you want to engage, I have a real question: is this the kind of podcast you want to see continue?

I’m going to give you an alternative, something Paul and I have been playing around with for a while, that may replace this, or just be an addition to it, or an alternative. This started because I thought superhero media, and it expanded to all geek media, and then expanded to include all sorts of stuff we love talking about, was a good medium to talk about these questions. I don’t know if it is anymore. I’m wondering if poker is. Paul has been a professional poker player for a lot of his life, I’m working to become a much better poker player, and poker has formed the basis of a lot of conversations we’ve had, about poker itself, but also the ways poker mirrors life, and how you can learn about life through poker.

I have an article I’ve written that I’ll publish at some point, maybe as part of this new podcast website. It’ll start as a blog, have a couple of entries, and then become a podcast. The idea of how folding a hand in poker is kind of like breaking up with someone, or leaving a bad job, in that what you’ve done is prevent future pain, you haven’t actually made your situation better, you’ve just kept it from getting worse. That’s maybe not the best way to put it, but hopefully you know what I mean.

A bigger thing is that I still think empathy versus fear is a fundamental question in our world, but I’ve come to understand, and Paul, you’ve really helped me with this, that a huge part of the problem in our world is that we don’t understand variance, we don’t understand statistics, we don’t understand data. You have to understand those things to understand poker, and a lot of what I’m doing, I’ve actually hired Paul as a professional coach to help me get better at poker, is going to involve talking about that.

And a lot of this new podcast we might be starting is going to be about, okay, what does that actually mean? Everything from the statistics about an election, to how many people have done illegal things. I don’t think anyone is illegal, people are people, they might do illegal things, but borders are dumb anyway. The point is that when someone gives you a statistic about how many people are doing something, what does that actually mean, and how do we misunderstand that? That’s kind of a new project we’re exploring, that we may be launching pretty soon, that may replace this, or be something in addition to it.

Paul:
Cool, I’m excited for that. But I also wanted to say, “Nobody’s Listening” is a great episode of Andor, so you should watch that. “One Way Out” is another good one. I think, honestly, one of the things that’s shaped my worldview the most is actually poker, not just the game itself, or the player-to-player psychology, but understanding randomness and chance, and having to figure out how much of your results are your own doing versus just things that happened. I think, by and large, people either vastly overestimate their control over outcomes, or blame everything on chance and external factors.

I think it’s hard to accept the middle ground, that you have influence over a great many things, a significant amount of influence, but influence isn’t control. So basically, when you make good decisions, you’re shifting the spectrum of possible outcomes in a favorable direction, and when you make bad decisions, you’re shifting it in a negative direction.

This applies to everything from financial decisions, to personal decisions like relationships, or what kind of job you want, smoking or not smoking, drinking, driving, all sorts of decisions. You can make a terrible decision and get a good result, or make a great decision and get a bad result.

Matthew:
Just to use one example, poker helped me a lot with this. If we do this project, I have a lot to say about mental health, because poker really highlights how quickly our brains want to form patterns. If you lose a hand in a particular way a couple of times in a row, it becomes a narrative, and you stop remembering all the times it didn’t happen that way. I think depression, on some level, is fundamentally about the narratives our brains tell us, that all these people don’t like you, that you’re really bad at your job, all those things.

Every psychiatrist or psychologist in the room is about to write me an angry email, I’m not saying that’s all it is, I’m saying it’s one way of understanding a lot of it. But here’s an example that speaks to what you’re talking about: when I was at my most depressed and driving to work, there were times it felt like I hit every red light, and I had this feeling that the universe was out to get me, and it really felt that way. Was it just randomness, that sometimes I was hitting a lot of red lights and other times not, and I just wasn’t paying attention to those? Yeah, so we had randomness, cognitive dissonance, confirmation bias.

Paul:
Confirmation bias, yeah, thank you. But also, if you’d left ten minutes earlier, it wouldn’t matter how many red lights you hit, you’d still get to work on time more easily. You’d have to run really bad to still be late if you left ten minutes earlier. That was honestly my first thought.

Matthew:
Yeah, and that’s my whole point, that you can both acknowledge randomness is random, and sometimes it’s going to work against you and sometimes not, and not think too much of it, but you can also say, “given the randomness, why don’t I plan around the possibility of it not working out, so I show up early or on time instead of on time or late?”

Paul:
Yeah, there’s a saying, I’m not sure what industry it’s from, but it’s definitely used in the gig, performance-type industries: getting there early is on time, and showing up on time is late. If it takes you ten minutes to get somewhere, you can’t leave exactly ten minutes before you want to arrive, because of variance. Because that means, on average, you’ll get there on time, but if twenty-five percent of the time you’re slower than average, you’ll be late twenty-five percent of the time. So you need to know not just the average time, but the standard deviation.

You don’t have to formalize it mathematically, but you need a sense of the parameters, the span between the fastest you’ll get there and the more typical case, because most of the time you’re not going to get there the fastest. That’s just how things work. And the farther the distance, the more variance there probably is along the way.

Matthew:
We could go for hours on this topic, which is why we’re probably going to start a podcast about it. Part of why we’re doing that is that Paul has had all these poker thoughts in his head for a long time. Paul has written some books already, and is starting to write more, and you can buy them, including through our site, links are in the show notes, some of the money comes back to me, some goes to Paul, and you get great books. If you’re watching on YouTube, or this goes up on TikTok, Paul’s holding them up right now. Paul, tell us about the books.

Paul:
So the main book, the first full-length book I’ve published in ten years, is called Zen Madman’s Friday Night Is My Monday Morning, Volume One. Very snappy title, I know. It’s a collection of the first twenty-four entries of my newsletter, where I write about poker and my journey attempting to win a house within a thousand and one days, which is called Betting the House on Poker, a little snappier, but I was worried that title might get flagged by algorithms.

So, don’t bet your house at home, I guess. I assembled those newsletters along with a bunch of detailed hand analyses, which, if you’re really into poker, you can read, and if you’re not, you can skip those parts and read the rest, which has analogies to baseball, chess, martial arts, music, and I think death and taxes are in there too.

I cover a lot of topics that aren’t just poker-related, because poker touches a lot of different areas, and there are a lot of analogies to draw. If you want to pay less for the ebook and support the podcast, you can use the affiliate link in the description for zenmadman.com, where you can get the PDF of this and my other books. If you’d rather have a paperback, hardcover, or Kindle version, and want some of your money to go toward Jeff Bezos’ yacht fuel, they’re available on Amazon, and there will be affiliate links in the description for those too, which will also support the podcast. Maybe I could have skipped the Jeff Bezos yacht fuel line, but it felt right.

Matthew:
Part of what this whole ethical discussion is about is that there’s no way to live your values one hundred percent, because we live in a deeply morally compromised world. In this case, I might normally say, “actually, don’t go through Bezos, go to this other option,” but as I understand it, Amazon doesn’t print a thousand copies of your book in advance, it prints them on demand.

Paul:
Yeah, every time someone buys it through Amazon, they print it. If a book gets popular enough, I could have a batch printed, or use another print-on-demand service. But the sad truth is that Amazon is really the most straightforward way to get your work out there. This kind of speaks to how pretty much everybody does some things that are good, in my view, and some that are bad, and a company as big as Amazon means the magnitude of each of those things is quite large. So, ultimately, you make your own decisions after giving things thought, and ask the questions you want to ask.

Matthew:
So, that’s what I’ve been saying, we’ve now said that four hundred times, possibly four hundred and one, depending on how long this episode runs. But with that, I think we’re going to sign off. Thank you all so much for listening. Paul, thank you so much for being a guest, and I want to specifically say, thank you for being on a podcast that saved my life, because you were on it for a long time, and it kept me alive, quite literally. Honestly, one of the best mental health days of my life was when you said, “yeah, I’m out, I want to do more poker stuff,” because it was kind of like, “okay, I don’t need this anymore, I just like it.” So Paul, thank you for that.

All you listeners, thank you so much. Please write in if you’re just listening, just let us know you’re here. I sometimes feel like a stand-up comic on stage, or at least I do, where the audience is dead quiet, but you keep buying tickets, like two hundred people keep downloading the episode, sometimes three hundred. Is that just bots? Are people there? Let us know. Thank you so much.

I want to close with the most important words shared by someone from the fair city that the two of us come from: “My bagels are Jewish, my mayor is Muslim, the Pope’s on our side, Knick’s in five!”