PREMIUM-PEL Sunami Nightcap August 2026

Introducing the new book

0:00This is your Partially Examined Life nightcap. It's August 18th. I'm here with Wes and Seth and a special guest. Introduce yourself once again, Chris. Yes, my name is Chris Tsunami. I'm a philosopher from Columbus. I was the editor for the Partially Examined Life book, which hopefully you guys all have on your shelves at home. And if you don't, it's still available. So go out and get a copy.

0:39Hello, Chris. Hey, it's good to be back. Thank you guys for inviting me on today. Good to have you. Yes, you've been doing another writing thing. Tell us about that. Yeah, so this is my new book. It's called Free Your Mind. Basically, I've been wanting to write the book like this forever, but I think I had to be 50 years old to actually complete it. Part of it was just that it felt like the times really demanded it. Things were kind of dark. I wanted to look at kind of more of a positive vision for it. And then it's also, there were some other personal things that were happening that made me feel like, you know, this was the time to get into print. But it just came out. It came out in July of this year. And I'm happy with it. And I'm trying to get to a larger audience.

1:19Did you guys take a look, Wes and Seth? Yeah, I haven't read it, but it looks interesting. Did you look at it, Mark? I read the very beginning. I've skimmed through, about up through page 100. So yeah, you had described it as like the symposium, your version of the symposium, as a place to, you know, have these characters give speeches about and argue about the big issues of our day. So AI, race, religion. Art, politics, climate change, all of those things. You said that you felt like you had it in you for a long time, but something happened. Something now was kind of the, you know, let's call it the catalyst or whatever. What is it about what's happening now? Or what was it specifically that gave you the impetus to actually finally push through on this?

2:03Oh, that's a great question. I was somebody like, even from the time that I was young, I always felt like disaster was always on the horizon. You know, that we were five minutes away from the end. I definitely felt that way as a teenager and as a young adult, but it feels more real at this point. There's a lot of things that are very real and present dangers, not just to any individual, not just any nation, but, you know, to the entire species. Not just for me, but for anybody. I feel like if we have anything in us that we need to get out, or if we have any solutions that we think might make things better, I think it's really important for all of us to do that and not wait on it and not let the things that have gotten in the way in the past continue to get in the way.

2:39I'm really glad to hear you say that. That's very timely for me. I feel the same thing. I definitely feel like there's something happening, some kind of movement, but the idea that you translated that into this urgency to, you know, now's the time to speak is actually quite inspiring. Oh, good. Well, that was the hope. What I'm hoping for in this book is that it could be kind of a catalyst. I think part of the reason I had trouble writing it for so long is initially I kind of wrote it as essays and they were kind of very didactic. I don't think that was very engaging and I could tell, even as I was writing them, that it wasn't really the way I wanted to engage with an audience.

3:12Actually, I think working with you guys was really helpful to me because I kind of love the back and forth and the debate and the interchange of ideas. I realized that kind of what I'm hoping to do is not really sit people down and be like, this is the answer, this is how you need to do things, but convince people to think in a different way. Something I really believe, and I think you guys all believe, is that ideas are important. The way we look at things makes a difference.

Philosophy isn't just something that you sit in an armchair and argue about, but it is about how we look at the world, what we do in the world, what we believe in. So the reason that I kind of went into this dramatic mode where, you know, it's dialogues, it's debates, is that I really want to encourage people to be a part of the conversation.

3:50And I want people to bring their own thoughts and their own ideas to it. The fact that you find that inspirational, I think, is really great. That's really what I'm hoping for. I'm hoping that other people who think about ideas deeply and who philosophy is important for will start speaking up and start finding ways to kind of connect.

Inspirations and real communities

4:06So these various speakers, these various characters that you have lead these discussions. I know you sort of, at the end of every chapter, list like, yes, this is based on a real person, this is not. Is there a Socrates in your life? Are there, you know, specific people that you're trying to more or less channel the way that you are inspired by them? And so that's sort of their idea, speaking maybe even more than yours. Yes and no. I had a friend who I used to have philosophical conversations with. He passed away young, unfortunately. Kind of in the wake of his death, I started exploring some of the groups and things that he had started.

4:40And he had been somebody who, even though he's quite young, he had been really influential in our community. He started a lot of things. And there was one group in particular that he'd started a local chapter of, and I started attending their meetings. And it was really a circle of mostly young, mostly black men, but they were staying around and they were having very interesting conversations, but also like really practical ones, which it's a very rare combination, I think, for people to be talking about philosophical issues, but also really back to the real world. Being an actual circle of people who are doing that, that was one of the models for the conversations.

5:11I want to make it clear that the figures in the book are all fictional, and they're not presenting verbatim any views that I've heard anybody else give, but the kind of setup, the circle of people, the conversations, the fact that people are taking ideas seriously, that was really very much out of this group. There was also another experience also kind of related to a local black community in Columbus, which is that I grew up with a lot of people who are about my parents' age who are interested in what's kind of called Afrocentric philosophy.

5:41It's homegrown, so it's not really African philosophy. It's black American philosophy, but it really takes a lot of inspiration from Africa. It wasn't something that I really paid a lot of attention to as a child, but as an adult, I realized that these people were really kind of on the forefront of a philosophical and cultural movement. A lot of them are quite elderly now, or actually all of them are quite elderly, because me and I have to say probably you guys as well, we're all at an age where anybody who was a grown-up when we were kids is probably elderly at this point.

6:13So I've really had a strong sense of the torch passing, especially since a number of these people have passed on in recent years. It's not necessarily that I agree with all the elements of their philosophy or that I'm passing on directly what they taught, but there's a lot of things that I learned from them that maybe I wasn't as aware of when I was younger, but that I realized that I picked up. Things about the value of community, things about the importance of kind of knowing your heritage and who you are, and things about the importance of taking care of the next generation.

6:44So those were things that I wanted to kind of translate. So again, even if none of the direct arguments are like word for word what anybody would have said, I definitely wanted to give this feeling of, you know, this is a community of culture, this is a community of ideas.

Culture and generational connection

6:57Well, the nightcap is generally the place for whatever ideas have been eaten at us that are not what we're directly reading about for PEL. Do you want to start us on one, Chris, that you probably just already wrote about? It's hard for me, if I was doing this kind of thing, to not write about the thing that I just heard on a podcast that pissed me off. Like, no, these have to be sort of pervasive, you know, general interest things, not just criticizing some particular asshole that you heard somewhere. Yeah, I mean, I do try as much as possible to stay away from like that direct response, because when you're just responding to something that just came out, you're always falling behind.

7:37And I don't think you can kind of ever lead forward from that. With that said, I mean, there were some things in the book that were like direct responses to stuff. There's been a big boost in racism, open racism in the country. I wanted to kind of spend the first couple of chapters responding directly to that. But most of the rest of the stuff that I wanted to get into was not meant to be direct responses to things. I guess in terms of a general topic that maybe I'd put out there, if you were going to try to give people a message that was not a reaction to something, that was not like a response or, you know, nothing from today's headline, what would you want to tell people?

8:11What would you want them to hear? My religion is kindness. That's what I would say. So, Chris, we are acquaintances. We don't know each other well, but I'm very much feeling the vibe that you're putting out. Last night, my wife and I watched Disclosure Day. I'm not sure the new Spielberg. At its core, it's a message about empathy. That's my takeaway from it anyway. And I've seen this thematically coming up in other places, other movies, and it seems to be floating around in the zeitgeist right now.

8:44So I'm picking up on it. Like, I do think there's something rippling in the water right now, and your book is an expression, a response, you know, to what many people, I think, are experiencing and what's sort of floating around. I like this idea. You know, you said it was based in community and that you were talking about these elders. And one of the things I've been thinking about recently, as I look through a historical, I'm trying to build this sort of, I don't call it a historical, I'll call it more like a genealogical narrative about consciousness.

9:17When you see the evolution of consciousness to self-consciousness and you see this change in the way that religion functions for human beings. We have the monotheistic religions now, but I was looking at, you know, when we, time of mythos and shamanism and all that, like, are there any themes or any kind of structures or things like that that are common across different traditions? And one of the things that seems to come up over and over again is ancestor worship, this connection to the idea that you have a responsibility, you have a connection.

9:50The dead are not dead per se, right? And shamans are these mediums that connect the living and the dead and so forth. But the idea that community is not simply something that exists in current space time, but it's also generational, right? And I feel like that's something that maybe you're pointing at or tapping into. I'm not sure which direction coming from. If that sounds like the kind of thing that you want to hear more about, then please go to partiallyexaminedlife.com slash support.

10:21Thanks for listening.