Ian Bogost
speaker
439 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 7 Jul
Ian Bogost’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.
Appearances
They made more money or they had better SAT scores, they got into better schools and that kind of thing.
So that was the idea that postponing gratification would make you more successful.
Like imagine you're a three-year-old kid and you see a marshmallow.
It's not just about like consuming the marshmallow, indulging in it.
Like even just seeing a marshmallow is incredible.
holding it in your hands and it's so squishy and soft what a weird object and in some ways like listening to children's intuitive sense of the world their curiosity and their interest and their intrigue this sort of thing gets missed in studies like this like the idea that you can only consume the marshmallow by devouring it instantly and then waiting for another is already kind of mistaken
But also, if you're a kid, you know, like imagine, like here's a marshmallow, wait for later.
If you come from a background where you don't have that much at home, then you're just going to take it, right?
That's not about delaying gratification.
It's about taking something that's given to you in the moment.
So when they tried to kind of prove their point about these later life experiences,
successes, what they found is, ultimately, it wasn't really about the marshmallow, it wasn't about delaying gratification, it was about, you know, coming from a wealthier family and having more support.
And those are the things that made you successful, not whether or not you ate two marshmallows instead of one.
It connects you.
It connects you to the world.
It's like one way to think about it is of all of the ways that you could be happy or content, don't you want to pursue all of them?
like why would you withhold some of them because they're not as important or they don't seem as large scale as others so if you know we think of happiness in terms of like big stuff this big overall life contentment your career your family your community your purpose in life and all of that stuff is important i'm not against any of that but then all that little stuff
Even the sound of something outside my window as we're talking now, it's available to me.
It adds like a little bit of connectivity between me and the world.
It's a good feeling of connecting my body and my senses to the world.
Showing 361–380 of 439 · page 19 of 22
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