All The Feelings • The Sins & Virtues
Feeling Green: Our First Clip Show! The Pride & Jealousy Review
Thu, 03 Oct 2024
This week on All the Feelings: Sins & Virtues, Tommy and Pete tackle the tricky duo of jealousy and pride. With a season planned around the seven deadly sins and seven heavenly virtues, the hosts find themselves two episodes short. Their clever solution? A clip show featuring highlights from their previous discussions on envy and pride, cleverly disguised as a thematic pairing.The episode dives deep into the nuances of envy and jealousy, dissecting their differences and exploring their evolutionary roots. You'll be treated to a replay of a past humorous attempt to define these often-confusing emotions, complete with an on-topic bit about Cain and Abel. They also revisit their discussion on the evolutionary basis of jealousy, exploring its role in mate-guarding and the fascinating differences in how it manifests in men and women.Beyond the clip show format, the episode offers fresh insights as well. Tommy teaches the world of daredevil Robert Oberacker's jet ski that one time it met Niagara Falls.So, if you're curious about the fine line between envy and jealousy, the dangers of unchecked pride, or simply enjoy a good clip show with a twist, tune in to All the Feelings: Sins & Virtues. Just be prepared for some mathematical mishaps, anthropological deep dives, and a healthy dose of shenanigans. ---Learn more about supporting this podcast by becoming a member. Visit our website to learn more.
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All the Feelings presents Sins and Virtues. This episode...
Jealousy. Pride.
14.
And yet how many episodes do we have for every season of our podcast? 12. Wait a minute, Pete. How are we going to do it? We're only having 12 this season, and yet we have 14 things. How? It's because we've already done some! I answered my own riddle. That was so tricky.
Last season, when we switched over to the All the Feelings, not knowing that we were eventually going to be talking about Sins and Virtues, we talked about Envy and Pride. And so, ladies and gentlemen, for the first time, this is exciting. We got a clip show, Pete. And if you say it really excitingly, people might not realize how lazy that makes us.
well there are two things uh eagle-eared uh listeners will note that just putting pride and envy in one episode does not actually make up for our total of 12 episodes the math still doesn't work out so i just want to say don't worry we've got you and we've done there are more shenanigans to come this season so just wait for more shenanigans later right that didn't And I was so excited about it.
Oh, all right. Well, I'm not a listener.
I don't listen to the show.
And so we are going to talk about other stuff. That goes without saying. Yeah. So that's number one.
And we have a brand new Feeling Friends segment. There's reasons to listen to this. And only to remember, we have chosen the choicest cuts of podcasts.
Tom has chosen the choicest cuts.
Oh, that's right.
I may have included some fat. Yeah.
Uh, because we're going in alphabetical order. Do you want to go first, sir?
Yeah, sure. Um, okay. So this is another thing that's a little bit complicated because when you look at the, the pairing of, um, you know, the sins and virtues, uh, Pride and envy don't pair with each other. Right. Because they're both sins. Yeah.
Some would say our sin shows have been our most fun shows.
Well, we would say that.
Yeah, but I remember going back just a couple episodes of being like, diligence, huh? It's tough to get in. We got in and it was really fun, but yeah.
So, you know, how do you just before I start telling you about what I picked, how do you put together these two pride and envy? How do you make sense of them as a dynamic duo of sins?
They it's they're they're an interesting collection because they're not just completely separate. Like if someone is really proud of something because they've accomplished something that can lead to other people's envy. Right. Of your proud, of you being up on that pedestal, which is interesting. So it's either having achieved or desperately wanting to achieve.
But then also an unenviable situation is having pride when you shouldn't. We will be getting into that. Because I took pride, you took envy. So we'll be getting into that a little bit, reminding the different types of pride. Well, I'll get into that later. Sorry.
Well, and that's what we get into with Envy and where I pick up. And actually, if you listen to the show, I'm doing it out of order. Because as we talked about the show, we talked in the second half of our Envy show about why humans are jealous. And... It turns out we may have had to wrestle a bit with some of the anthropological sort of history, but it turns out we got there.
We figured out why humans are jealous. And that's where we go with my first clip. Welcome to the first clip of the clip show. Why are humans jealous? I would like to know if you have any insight Before I tell you that there is insight and an answer, I'd like to know if you get it right. Why are humans jealousy? Jealous.
Why are humans jealousy jealous?
Yeah. Now I have to leave that in. You made a joke about it. Now I have to leave it in.
I guess humans are jealousy jealous because. Envious, I know, because you would just see the difference between you and someone else. You mean like evolutionary? I don't know. I don't know if I have a thing.
Evolutionarily. Why are we jealous? Because does it make any sense to you intuitively even? Even if you can't put words to it, does it make sense why we are jealous?
Yes, to a certain extent. I guess if you had when resources were very little and you had a teeny bit of what was important, like a rock or stone. A rock or a stone. There's a huge difference. If you have a rock and you're like, boy is boy, that stone looks good. That maybe it came out of just... self-protection that you had the thing that you needed.
And so if it got taken away from you, you would be in a lot of trouble. Boy, that's all I got. I don't like it.
I love that you went with rock and or stone as the root of all jealousy. You know, it's funny that there are people who really believe very stridently, stringently, assertively, all of those, that jealousy is a cultural construct that without jealousy, like the modern sort of Anthropocene complications, we would not know jealousy. There would be no reason for jealousy. Okay. Right?
That humans, the only reason jealousy can exist is because humans are a constituent element of it. I see. Got it. Right? And yet... Behavioral scientists have really come down to the following logic.
From an evolutionary perspective, jealousy is very likely to have developed as a mechanism to mate-gate, to protect pair bonds that are important for successful reproduction and child-rearing, encouraging partner fidelity... helps ensure a male's genetic lineage is passed on and prevents, or at least absolves, small microcultures of genetic complication. Got it.
Put that in English again.
When jealousy exists in a community, partners are more likely to stay partnered with each other and not co-mingled genetic nonsense.
Got it. Thus, the tribe continues and gets bigger and better. And thrives and is healthy. Oh, so that's not humans? That's all animals?
It could very well describe a lot of single-partner creatures, right? A lot of animals are single-partner animals, and they do, in fact... Stick with swans, right? Like swans are notoriously single partner, even though they do. They have been known to sleep around swans. Actually, apparently, according to biologists, do sleep around and it is measured in males.
They are incredibly jealous, incredibly jealous creatures when their single mate sleeps around on them. Can you imagine? I want to be the guy who does that research. I want to do the jealousy research on swans. It's amazing that that even exists.
So how does jealousy then manifest in that? Is it that you work harder to keep your mate happy so they won't swan all over the place? Well, both ways. Okay.
And can you guess how jealousy manifests? And this goes back to the evolutionary perspective too, weirdly, how it manifests in male-bodied people versus female-bodied people.
Jealousy. Male-bodied people, I would just because... We like to knock things over with our penises. I would think that we would maybe respond with suspicion and aggression, maybe keeping people away.
Over what specifically? What behavior makes men jealous versus women?
Oh, like flirtation? Yeah. Something like that? You're digging in the right hole. Okay, gross. I would think that it would be... Well, yeah, jealous that someone can take our mate away. I guess that's – I'm sort of saying the same things over and over again. You could say it in fewer letters, as many as three.
It's sex. It's always sex, Tom. You said knocking pigs over with penises. I did. It's the sex. That's how you use sex, right? Yeah. You just slam around stuff. What about women?
Love? Affection? Is that sexist to say? Emotional connection.
Emotional connection. Yeah. Yeah. And that's that is how it is described. Like that is that is how jealousy is generally described between the, you know, across the broad swath of research that exists historically not addressing the complicated nature of sex and gender today. I don't think there's a lot of that research. I could not find a lot of that research.
But when we're talking about sex and jealousy, women tend to get jealous when their single partner has an emotional connection with another person, and men get jealous when their partner has sex with another person. Now, you would think that the corollary is that women are not as jealous when men actually have sex, that it's just a sex thing, and that
The opposite would be true, that men would be okay with women having emotional connections with other men. I didn't find anyone that said, oh, yeah, that's totally true. That doesn't seem to be true. Right.
But it's just that one is more of a priority, I guess. Yeah, yeah. Takes up more of a fixation. Okay. Right.
Right. So I thought it was really interesting when you add the because a lot of people, especially in the comments, I read it, come back and say, but what about the tribes or cultures like in Uganda that are polyamorous or the Inuit people, which have a practice, a general accepted practice of sharing one's wife? Right. I didn't know that. Apparently they do. OK.
And so I'm curious what your thoughts are about those things. Do you have any speculation as to as to what might what might be true in respect to jealousy in those communities? No, it's not good. It's not a good thing. Right. Because you use this on the surface. You use it as a as a cultural guard. Right. That says, OK, humans are we it's our culture that makes us jealous, not anything else.
But in truth, when you look at this is the research that I thought was really interesting, that infidelity. In groups like the—hold on, I have to scroll. I've lost my point. There it is, bingo cards.
Stay there. I got it. Bingo cards are out. Everyone that has a bingo card, that's one of the spaces.
I actually have to Command-F and find Inuit. It was up higher than I was even looking. No, that's not fair. I wanted to make this point 15 minutes ago. Okay. So for those who argue that jealousy is a cultural invention and using the ammunition of societies like the Inuit, it is really interesting because the outcomes of those –
don't address the fact that for the Inuit, a wife-sharing relationship is an act of extraordinary and painful generosity, right? That it is – the actual sharing is it's a massive gift that you're giving to someone else to share your wife and not something made easily or commonly.
Oh, it's a real sign of respect? Yes. Okay. Wow.
And – Also, spousal abuse is very, very high in communities with polyamorous relationships. It's much higher than in monogamous relationships.
So it's like pretending that you're so cool and open with everything, but really it's simmering. Everything's simmering underneath. Right. Got it.
So I thought that was really interesting. Did you agree? I totally do. And we got there. That was exciting. Yeah, we got there. The second piece that I think is really important is where we started. And this is where you wrestled the most, which was how do we talk about envy?
without talking about jealousy right do you remember this i do but i want to re-hear it to remember fully but i do remember that i am remembering now for the first time that we took on both envy and jealousy because we originally had them separate and they just overlapped so much we got skittish podcast the worst kind podcast skittish
Yeah. If you are like me, you say things on the podcast and then you immediately move on to a different podcast and you don't remember what you thought about your perspectives. And I look forward to having you hear those again on this show. Okay, good. Just like I look forward to you hearing. It's possibly my favorite biblical joke ever.
of any joke i have made on the show i this is pride right here i am proud of the joke that i make and it's about cain and abel do you remember the joke i want to tell you i want you to hear it but i'm very very proud of this joke let's hear let's hear it the ultimate question for my part is going to be if you had to choose would you rather be envious or jealous
If you had to choose. Now, before you answer that question, I think we have to decide the difference between the two. Do you know what the difference between the two is? Because unless you're a smarty pants, which I think you are, I thought that they were literally the same word. Not literally the same word. That would be insane. I thought I've been using them synonymously. Is that the right word?
Interchangeably. My entire life. I never thought that there was a difference between the two. And there is. And I was wondering if you perhaps know what it is.
Well, so robot helped just a minute ago, but not really. Right. Because this whole idea of being resentful or aroused by someone else's possessions, qualities or luck, that's envy and jealousy. Protective or vigilant of one's rights or possessions. There are a lot of the same words in there. Yeah.
The difference is, even if you look very closely at those two definitions, envy, for lack of a better word, and this isn't science-y stuff. This is all my writing, so if I'm a little bit jumping, my apologies. Envy seems like is when you want what someone else has. Jealousy is when you're worried that someone's going to take what you have. Do you see the difference between those two?
So if you want your neighbor's... This I found on the internet. If you want your neighbor's new convertible, you feel envy. Envious. If your neighbor takes your wife for a ride in that new convertible, you feel jealousy. You're jealous. You're afraid you're never going to come back and you just wave goodbye to your wife and she lives in a convertible now.
Well, and that's why a lot of the therapists, behavioral scientists... are calling out jealousy when it involves humans, like the sort of traditional triangle of jealousy in relationships, right?
Right, because jealousy involves another party.
Yes.
Usually, because you're worried that something will be taken. Correct. Envy is internal. Envy is something that you're feeling inside. Jealousy, well, jealousy is also something that you feel inside, but it's about other things. It's from, it's hard.
It's hard because also envy is internal, but it can lead to external actions because, you know, what's the most famous thing about envy if you had to pick? I don't know where we're going here. What is the most famous thing about envy? Well, envy is a deadly sin. Oh, it's one of the bigs. Envy, if you're comparing envy and jealousy, jealousy is not a deadly sin.
Envy is a deadly sin because where does the deadly sin come from? Do you know that from the Bible? You are going to be the one to answer that. That's a cell phone. It's Cain and Abel. Cain felt envious of... his brother's offering of lamb was chosen over his offering of wheat. And so Cain committed the first murder. He slow, he slayed, slain, slain? He slewed. He unbegadded.
He slayed his brother like a real Bible jerk. I don't know any of the words. That's why it's a deadly sin.
That's right.
And thou shalt be pescatarian. So, okay, so those are the two. Are you able to separate them at least a little bit? One is more, you've got the stuff and you're afraid someone's going to take it away, or you don't have the stuff, but you want it. That's jealousy and envy, respectively. Yeah, okay. So... Now that we have that sort of, I want to try this again.
If you had to pick, because I know what I thought, but then I went and reversed it. Spoiler alert. If you had to choose one, would you rather be envious or jealous? And why? Really putting you on the spot.
I think envious. Okay, I'll come. I think because... I don't know. This is such a weird question. Like, oh, I really want to be one or the other, which I don't. I don't love either quality in myself. Yeah. But envious because... I don't like what jealousy does to my most important relationships. Go more into that. Well, I have been in the past a jealous person.
I don't think I'm a jealous person now. And part of that is having been in a relationship for 25 years. So I think we're beyond it.
Until your neighbor gets that convertible.
Until my neighbor gets a convertible. And so, but I do know what it feels like. And I have those really, you know, we did the whole thing on regression. And this is one of those experiences when I can put myself in a place of being furiously jealous and making up some incredibly impossible stories in my own mind that are rooted in jealousy and are fabulously untrue.
Right, you're filling a void, and you're filling it with something dark, because that's, yeah, well, we're also anxious people. Yeah, I don't love that.
Yeah, right.
Yeah, that's what we talked about an episode or two ago. Ideally, if you're going to make something up, make it happy.
Yeah, right. I know how to make up really dark stuff.
Right, the convertible crashes, but then she flies out right into your arms. Into my arms, right. That's not a good way to do it. And I'm riding a unicorn at the time. Sure. Would you like to know me? Of course. I thought it would be better. I would rather feel jealousy after knowing the difference between these two because I have the thing that I want.
Like, it starts with jealousy is you have something and you're afraid it's going to be taken away. And so I was like, oh, but in that case, sure, I'm a little anxious about it, but I have the thing. Like, it's better to have and lose than never had at all or whatever I read at HomeGoods.
Doesn't that make you a miser, though, kind of?
Maybe. Just make you a real Scrooge McTom. Well, I love diving into my coin room. So that's why I thought I would rather feel jealousy. But jealousy involves feeling, like you said, unsafe or bad about other people. And that's something I strive not to do, just like you just said. And I switched to envy because envy, even though it's a gross internal feeling, it can also be a motivator.
When used correctly, I want that thing. Because there's two types of envy. Can I break it down for you real quick? I hope you do. There's malicious envy and non-malicious envy. Do you want to guess what those are or should I just blaze right through? You can probably figure it out. Yeah. Malicious envy involves hostility or resentment toward another person who has it better than you.
You it's almost like you want to take away what they have or you want to undermine their success or happiness. You wish them the worst because you don't have it. Non malicious envy focuses more on the objects and wondering how did they get it? And can I do the same thing? You don't actually want their thing. That's where covet is.
You don't necessarily want their thing, but you want your own version of it. That's non-malicious envy. And that can be a really good motivator for things. It's how it's like what vision boards are. Vision boards are in a way non malicious envy is you put up all of these pictures from magazines of things that you want. And you're like, how am I going to do those?
I don't think you should shoot a wish laser out into the universe. For those of you that are still but just found the secret. I think instead you should like take night classes, whatever you need to do on the ground. We've all heard the phrase, pride goes before the fall.
And we've all been quoting it incorrectly, as the actual phrase from Proverbs 16.18 reads, Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall. Either version of this quote can be applied to a 39-year-old daredevil named Robert Overacker. Although a combination of the word fall and the word destruction might be most apt.
For Mr. Overacker wanted to attempt a stunt that no one had ever tried before. He was going to ride a jet ski off Niagara Falls. When warned against embarking upon this harrowing feat, Overacker's confidence and yes, perhaps his pride got the best of him. He would be fine, he explained, because he had done some careful planning.
You see, his jet ski was fitted with a rocket booster, which would launch him well away from the waterfall when he reached its brink, and the parachute on his back would help him float safely to the water below. Unfortunately, in all of this careful planning, Mr. Overacker overlooked one important fact, the fact that water is wet.
As such, on October 1st, 1995, at approximately 12.35 p.m., after entering the Niagara River near a power plant, Mr. Overacker, chest surely pumping with pride and ambition, navigated his jet ski to the brink of the falls and pressed the ignition for his rocket booster, which was soaking wet and thus failed to ignite.
On his immediate and unplanned descent, he tried to open his parachute, which was equally waterlogged and failed to deploy. Much like Icarus from Greek mythology, perhaps the late Robert Overacker's pride and haughty spirit led to his fall and destruction.
But, much like the end of Thelma and Louise, why don't we instead freeze him, taking a snapshot of his last moment of glory, when he's at the brink of the majestic waterfall, his rocket booster at the ready, his parachute waiting to unfold, his historic flight about to take off. Now that's a moment worthy of envy.
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So we talked about Pride in episode 805. Thank you, Robot. And we started with your segment. I'd like to start with your segment where you broke down Pride into the types of Pride. Most people would just think it's Pride or no Pride. No, Pete, there's a good type and a bad type. What are they?
I've been thinking about it as we've been going into this, as I've been prepping for this show.
And it, it fascinates me the nature of learning pride, particularly because there are, there are associated words with, you know, pride, like, and you know, there's just, it started because there's this researcher who, who put these, this table together and these words for both authentic and hubristic pride. Those are sort of the two flavors and the words I find interesting because I
And I wonder how I learned to internalize a subset of these words when I was a kid, because that's it feels like when you learn to be proud of what you do. Right. As you said, when your dad said, I'm proud of you, son. And, you know, what are the kinds of activities that you did that led to that? something happened that you could be proud of. And I didn't really play sports.
I was not a sportsman in my youth. I did play soccer on a... I think I talked about this. I played youth soccer on a very winning team, but played a goalie on a very winning team and never really played. I just stood there and... And so I had nothing to be proud of.
I didn't feel like I ever earned a win as a part of that team and didn't play long enough to really get good at it to feel like I was accomplished. By the time I was in high school and started performing more regularly... I think I started getting the hang of it, but didn't quite understand why. You know what I mean?
Like I didn't have a whole lot of those very early days of doing something that both I felt good about having done and other people told me I should be proud of what I just accomplished. And so I would be on stage and I would perform, but I had no idea like why if I did well, I didn't know how to rationalize that in my life.
Does that make sense? Well, it does, because that's and I'll be getting into that a little bit more in my is that pride is an internal feeling, but that usually also comes from an external additional feeling that you said that I feel that I did good, but it also needs other people saying you did good.
It's a car crash of those two things that can be sometimes really easy, sometimes really hard, especially in a non-performing situation for both of those to feel because I think you really do need both of those. That's what makes it partly authentic pride versus hubristic.
Yes. OK, that's a really interesting thing. And I as you know, I'm a brand new fan of Formula One racing and I'm loving it. And the guy that there are like there are people there are athletes in the cars that exemplify this. And it is fascinating to me to see how these guys have grown up and become people that I like to watch win versus people that.
win and i hate to watch right well and in a sports context like when i watch lewis hamilton win in mercedes it is he always comes back around and says yeah i know i'm a real fan i know i love it no i'm so excited
And I watch him against like, I got really excited and I went back and watched an old race yesterday and to watch him win and hear him say, I am just like honored by the other people in the field. And I'm honored by to be here. And the team is amazing. And I just, I feel like as such, such an honored representative of, Right. Right.
A mistake is a mistake, and to carry pride over as an excuse becomes arrogance and narcissism. That gap is defined to me as narcissism, and I think that is a really— That has been a really interesting thing. And I've never had that as a kid. Like, I never grew up with that kind of experience as a role model.
It took me, I feel like, a lot of time to figure out that those words exist and define a feeling that I would experience at some point. So Dr. Tracy, in 2007, presented this list of sort of words.
Wait, who is Dr. Tracy?
Did you already bring that person up?
It's like a friend of the show. It's how you made it sound like. Dr. Tracy, who's in the other room?
Dr. Tracy is the author of the journal article, The Psychological Structure of Bride, A Tale of Two Facets, in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and presents this table of words. And I really like the sort of... antithesis buried in this table.
Under authentic pride, that comes from somebody who feels accomplished or confident or triumphant, somebody who is a, quote, winner, victorious, achieving, honor, right? These are all words of internal strength that comes with authentic pride. And hubristic pride, arrogant, conceited, cocky, stuck up, boastful, haughty, egotistic, self-righteous, pompous, pretentious, like
All of those words that indicate a sort of a pretender and what the research came out, Dr. Tracy's report says these findings show that authentic pride is associated with high self-esteem, whereas hubristic pride is associated with low self-esteem, high narcissism, and a tendency to experience shame. And I think that is fascinating.
Right, because one comes from inner strength. The other one is trying to pretend, look how much inner strength I have. So one is radiating, authentic pride is radiating into yourself, right? Hubristic pride exists only to radiate out to others.
Well, and here's another piece that I feel like my sense of reading this is when I see somebody who like Lewis Hamilton, who is incredibly well accomplished, well spoken, has a fantastic family life, all this stuff. that when Lewis wins a race, the pride is the pride about the accomplishment and that's it, right? Like that's the end.
That experience doesn't have to do the heavy lifting of low self-esteem, right? And so somebody who has low self-esteem comes off as arrogant and cocky because they need that win, the thing that they just accomplished to buoy so many more aspects of their personality.
Because they're just- They're just – they're bailing emotional water all the time.
Yes. That is my new kind of awakening to what this looks like is that it just has – cockiness and conceitedness is doing more sort of psychological work.
Right. It's a band-aid. Social behavior. You're just trying to fill in all the holes. God, if there was ever anyone in the news that represented that kind of hubristic, I just can't – nothing comes to mind. That's so interesting.
I can't believe this was written in 2007. Yeah. And the final quote, like, in fact, narcissism is associated with a discrepancy between low implicit self-esteem and high explicit self-esteem. In other words, a trademark of narcissism is that deep down on a non-conscious level, narcissists experience high levels of shame and low self-esteem.
To compensate for these negative evaluations of self, they express an inflated conscious self-esteem.
And I've been thinking about that a lot. The idea of hubristic versus authentic pride, not as much that, but the idea of taking every sin or every virtue and seeing if you can break it apart. That too often, I think I've always thought of things as either good or bad. While I live most of my life in an area of gray, I've taken certain words and not tried to pick them apart.
I don't have an example for you. I just, I want to always keep that in mind. There can be jealousy, for instance, like, well, here, let's keep going because this gets in to a new thing of there's a good part that can come from envy or jealousy. Because for my segment, I talked about a socially. Oh, real quick. I should have said this up front.
Avid listeners will notice that it sounds like I swallowed all of the gravel in this episode. I was suffering from not this episode, the episode that you're listening to. I was suffering from a terrible sore throat that I got. You will remember from saving orphans in a fire. So that's why I sound so eye-wateringly terrible whenever I talk.
Anyways, for my segment, I talked about a social experiment by psychology professor David Desteno that involved using pride as a motivator for harder or better work. So not sitting on your laurels, but instead using pride to help you do better work. I am not proud of how long it took me to explain the experiment in this episode. In the multiverse, I'm still explaining it.
And we both have long gray beards. Like it is, I swear, it's like 20 minutes of me explaining it for three seconds of, oh, interesting. So anyways, we're not going to go into all that. What you need to know is using pride as a motivator led you, Pete, to have a nice thought about raising your children. And I want to share it real quick. Okay.
It makes me rethink so many parenting decisions that I've made. About how to motivate your kids. About how to motivate my kids, yeah. And I think that's one of the things like parents will know. It's hard in the moment to think about those things because you're like – you're not naturally attuned to celebrating. It can feel like celebrating with faint praise. Right.
A kid because what you want is to aspire them to be really great and have great taste and And that it's sometimes you just have to say you did a good thing. You're good at that, what you did. And in your head, you're saying you're great at that as a six year old. Right.
Like, it's OK.
And and we had this I had this conversation with my son because we still have in our bedroom. An actual work of art, a square canvas that is 10 inches square of something that he had painted when he was very young. And he said, that is—he's standing in my room the other day, and now he's like going on 18. And he said, that is an objectively bad painting. Yeah. Objectively.
He said, why is that still hanging in your bedroom? I said, because it reminds us that the six-year-old who painted that. did a good thing. The six-year-old who painted that loved it. And that was the level of the six-year-old's taste and aspiration. And then it was great. And today, when we look at it, it reminds us of that feeling. Right. Not of what you could paint today. Right.
And he said, I probably couldn't paint that today. Right. Let's just say in the intervening years, he hasn't spent a lot of time painting. But that's the idea. And when he was six, I wonder if I, like, would he have painted more in the intervening years if I had told him more assertively, that's good. You're good. You have something to be proud of and see what happened.
Do you still love your children, Pete?
All these episodes later.
They're really busy and gone most of the time. And as you know, when they're not right in front of me, I forget about them.
Right. How many things have you accidentally... With all people. With all people, you're really out of sight, out of mind. How many times have they come home from something and been like, why is my room filled with files? Yeah. Like you just... That this room is like it was a border and they're gone now.
Well, listeners know that the first thing I'm going to fill my children's abandoned room with are files. You love files.
You go to offices and say, like, can I take any files off your hands? I just like the idea of files.
We've known each other for like nearly 30 years and you know me and my file habit.
You're a real aficionado, a file aficionado. Write that down.
You know, one of the things that I think is really interesting, it's something you brought up in the last break, which is, you know, breaking these things apart. And it gets to one of the things we talked about in the Envy podcast. which is malicious envy, which is kind of the dark side of envy.
It's when you could be jealous of somebody because of their success in a way that is healthy, and you can also be jealous to the point that you want to dox them and bring them down to your level. And I think that's the lesson of both of these things, right? Like both of these elements, envy and jealousy and pride, which is like to, you know, what have I learned?
Well, be aware of my dark side because I think everyone's got it. And, you know, we'll put that in a file for sure.
I think all of this, of course, all the heavenly virtues, but then all of the deadly sins, they all have a good potential aspect to them. You just got to keep an eye on it. I think that should be the subtitle of this whole season is sins and virtues. Keep an eye on it. Keep an eye on it.
Well, that was really fun, Tom. I'm glad we went down memory lane. And, you know, as avid non-listeners of our own podcast, sometimes it's fun to go back and hear what everybody else is hearing.
Long time talker, no time listener. Thank you, everybody. We are going back to a normal episode next week. Pete, what do we have?
next week we are talking about temperance tom temperance real quick what is temperance um it's the my guess is it's the opposite of gluttony Is that right? Maybe not. You know, it's funny. The dictionary definition we'll have to check with Robot to confirm next week, but absence from alcoholic drink is one of them. Oh. Oh, so it's just being sober? It's moderation.
The quality of moderation or self-restraint is the second definition to teetotaler.
Let's definitely have that in there, though, because I don't want to just talk about not drinking. That sounds like a drag.
Exactly.
For that episode, we're going to do a clip show of what we tried all those canned alcoholic drinks. It's just clip shows from here on out.
That's it. It's clips all the way down.
Yeah, that's our summer break.
Thank you all so much for hanging out with us. We appreciate you. This week's tune is Make You Mine by Mina.
And that wasn't that other week's tune. Spoiler alert. Thank you so much for downloading. Until next week, I'm Tommy Metz III.
And I'm Pete Wright. See you next week with all the feelings, sins, and virtues. Go keep an eye on them.
And I, I, I'm gonna make you mine, I'm gonna make you mine. I, I'm gonna make you mine, I'm gonna make you mine. I, I, I'm gonna make you mine, I'm gonna make you mine. make you mine