Chuck Bryan

speaker

2,796 appearances 5 recordings 1 series first heard Dec 2025 last heard 6 Jun

Chuck Bryan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 3.

Appearances

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Stuff You Should Know · Battle Royale: Optimists vs Pessimists · 16 Dec 2025 podcast

uh liebniz or i guess leibniz and that's interesting enough that's fine the idea was that god optimized the universe for good and minimized evil but what i thought was super interesting the word pessimism was literally made up just to counter that like as a straw man term for people to write and say well no i don't really think so so they made up the word pessimism

Yeah, I thought that was interesting, too.

Although if you look at it from, you know, this whole thing finds its roots in philosophy, it's not surprising because philosophers love to make up stuff to tear one another's arguments apart, right?

Yeah, good point.

I read that Voltaire wrote Candide to mock Leibniz and his idea of the optimized universe because he thought it was so preposterous.

Interesting.

But you hit on something here, like the entire concept of optimism and pessimism is rooted in philosophy, not psychology.

And pessimism kind of went on to have its own career.

Aside from optimism, Schopenhauer came up with philosophical pessimism, which is the basis of all life is suffering.

Everybody's heard that one and or experienced it.

And then there are a couple other versions of philosophical pessimism that I thought were pretty interesting.

The one that grabbed me the most is this idea that there's more evil in the world than good.

So evil exists in greater quantities, but it's also of greater quality too.

So a small amount of evil can spoil a very large amount of good.

Oh, I agree with that, I think.

I do, too.

I thought of a good example is, let's say you have an executive who works at a charity and they get caught stealing money from that charity.

Yeah.

Well, when word gets out, a lot of people probably are going to stop giving to that charity.

And then the good that charity was doing for other people is going to dry up all because of the one act of that one person.

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