20: Exploring Ethical Problems through Stories with After Dinner Conversations

Thank you so much for joining me, Kolby. It’s really great to have you here.

 

Kolby Granville
Yeah, great to be here. Thank you.

 

Seth Villegas
So first off, I just wanted to hear a little bit from you about what is After Dinner Conversations, if you just kind of sum it up in a few sentences for us.

 

Kolby Granville
Yeah, it’s a great question. So After Dinner Conversation is a magazine, a monthly magazine, as well as a podcast and print books that focuses exclusively on publishing short stories that ask interesting, ethical or philosophical questions. Could be any genre of story, as long as it has some sort of larger question that needs to be answered. And then each story comes with suggested discussion questions in case you want to discuss it with friends, family, book clubs, or just in your own mind.

 

Seth Villegas
Yeah, after reading a couple of the issues, I definitely noticed how much of a range of different kinds of short stories there were. So for instance, there are things that are more futuristic, more science fiction, but also other stories that are a lot more grounded. So as an acting editor, how do you pick what stories you’re interested in?

 

Kolby Granville
That’s a great question. So it’s any genre, we get a lot of science fiction, near-future dystopian, but that’s just because it lends itself a little bit to what we do. We’ve essentially created our own genre, the genre that we work in is stories that ask questions that focus on the larger human issues. So I’ll give you an example. So somebody writes a story and sends it in and it’s about Donald Trump lying to America about overthrowing the government, insurrection on January 6, we would say like, “No, we’re not interested in that. That’s not what we do.” Because that is a very topical, very moment-in-time question, irrelevant. Now, if somebody instead wrote in a story about the leader of a country who wanted to continue to maintain power, and the ways and the tools that a person might manipulate the levers of government to maintain their power by using modern populist technology tools, we would say, that’s really interesting, right? I’m really interested to know how modern populist technology can affect public opinion. It’s like a new way to overthrow governments. Right? That would be interesting. How it actually worked in America, or in any country, for that matter, irrelevant. And so it’s really looking at more universal questions, as opposed to this-moment-in-time questions.

 

Seth Villegas
One of the other things that I noticed about a lot of the way the discussion questions were framed was the story seemed to really try to put you in the driver’s seat, so to speak, of the person with the ethical question. So for instance, if I’m trying to imagine this story that you’re talking about, maybe it could be from the perspective of the leader or from the perspective of an advisor who might be seeing how effective those populist technologies could be. And then talking about all the ethical quandaries that go along with taking that set of actions.

 

Kolby Granville
You’re absolutely right. So if someone gives us a story, this happens sometimes, where there’s a really interesting question, but the answer is obvious or not reasonably debatable. We’re not interested in that. It needs to be something where two reasonable minds could understandably disagree on the correct answer, and so if we’re using that same example of using newly formed populace tools to overthrow a government, the way that we would want to frame that -I’m just spitballin here- to make it more interesting is we would say, what if the populist was right. And so now we’ve got a much more interesting question. The question then becomes the role of democracy is to do the will of the people, the will of the people is presumptively correct. That’s what democracy does. And so you could very easily frame something about what if the will of the people didn’t get the most votes? Or what if the will of the people isn’t actually what’s best for the country? Or what if there are gatekeepers that prevent necessary changes to the government from happening that the majority of the people want? Is it then okay to overthrow those barriers? Like, there’s lots of ways that you can spin it so that a person could say, Well, if that’s what the majority of the people want, it’s cool, you should be able to sort of brush aside these throes of dictatorship because the people are never wrong. And then another person, the other side could say, but the people are wrong. And so you can’t trust populist opinions, even if they’re in the majority. And now suddenly, we’ve gone from having a quaint little story about a guy trying to overthrow the government to the very arguments that are made between the Federalists and the anti-Federalists. And the reason we have a bill of rights. So what we find is when we get authors who are authors who are trying to submit something clever, we rarely accept their writing, not because we’ve seen their biography, just because they’re not asking the right questions. The people that we tend to publish are people that have PhDs in economics, philosophy, political theory, psychiatry, neuroscience, informatics, data science, who also are sort of recovering writers. And so what ends up happening is we tend to publish smart people writing, as opposed to writers trying to write smart.

 

Seth Villegas
Yeah, definitely. And the kinds of issues that you’re talking about too, are really interesting, because the kind of conflict you’re even just spitballing about goes all the way back to Aristotle’s criticisms of democracy, which it may be not even everyone’s necessarily aware of, but I did find that really striking of trying to put myself in those kinds of spots, seeing who the different kinds of situations worked out for and the deliberate complications of my intuitive response to the situation is something that came up over and over again. For instance, there was a story about mailorder brides in one of the issues I was looking at, and I thought the author did a great job of Oh, but what about all these sorts of things? Or what about the messiness of the circumstances? What if it does work out? What if the people critical of that don’t end up having a happy life because of their own attitude? It was just really interesting to see even the kind of challenging if my baseline assumptions going into it, even though it’s not really an issue I’d ever really thought about.

 

Kolby Granville
And that’s exactly what we’re shooting for, is something where it says, look, here’s what you think, because you’ve always thought it or because your parents thought it or because your parents taught you or because your faith taught you. And that’s all fine and well, and I’m not arguing with any of those places of values, but it’s really easy to take a base value and start to nudge it just nudge nudge nudge. And at a certain point, we’re going to nudge you to the point where you go. Yeah, I don’t know. And the example that I’ve used with lots of different people is you’ll talk to someone who’s says, oh, you know, I’m anti gun control, which is fine. There’s a perfectly legitimate place for that. But then you start to nudge them and you go, Okay, are you anti gun control? Or are you anti weapon control? Because I’d really like to have hand grenades, could I buy those at Walmart? They go, Well, no, no, of course, you can’t buy those. And I’m like, why not? Well, because you can’t. I mean, I can’t because I currently can’t or I can’t because there’s some logical inconsistency with your desire to kill people that is different? We are because grenades kill people indiscriminately. It’s like, okay, that works. So let me use a rocket launcher, as my example, rocket launchers don’t kill people indiscriminately? Should I be required to get a background check for that? Well, yes, of course. Okay. Why? Well, because it kills a lot of people. And suddenly, when you start to chip away at the edges, you start to find out there’s a core thing there, that’s different when you can finally chip it away, or you’ve chipped it away to the point where the person finally has to acknowledge the reason I believe this is because I believe it. And there is no logical basis, which is also a perfectly valid reason to have a belief. You can certainly say one of my favorite lines from a movie ever is from the movie Contact. And there’s a scene where Matthew McConaughey asks Jodie Foster in the movie, do you love your parents? She says yes. And he says, Prove it. And it’s like, well, no, you can’t, like I know because I know. It’s also a line from the Matrix. Right? You know, because you know, and no one can tell you that you don’t there’s a place for that sometimes. But ultimately, if you’re reading the right stories, and the stories are asking the right questions, we either have found your reasoning or we’ve whittled away your reasoning to where faith, meaning not religious faith, but I mean, sort of an opinion that is not necessarily based on a foundation of logic or provable logic, is the basis of your opinion. Totally cool. Totally fine. I know I love my parents. Can’t prove it, but I know it. And so these are all the things that we try and deal with, ideally doing it in a way that’s accessible to the average person, if our only market were people working on their PhDs, we wouldn’t have that many readers. And so the hope is that we have people that aren’t just smart people, but they’re the sort of people that are maybe thumbing through a copy of Mental Floss in their free time, right?

 

Seth Villegas
There’s definitely a lot of different things that you’re discussing here, and it actually kind of goes back to the way in which philosophy is taught in terms of, you know, this example that you’re giving with the weapons of, oh, let’s go through yet another example, to see just how large the category is that you’re actually talking about, and what the sort of baseline assumptions are and that’s definitely very difficult. I think it’s also maybe one of the reasons why people don’t always like philosophy, if I’m being honest. But one of the things I appreciate about the magazine is that it is through stories, and I do think that stories are a lot more accessible than going through a logical kind of argument. There’s something about the structure of the story and the plot which challenges those assumptions. So is the larger hope that you have to give people the ability to do that kind of self reflection, is that a part of why you created the magazine in the podcast?

 

Kolby Granville
That’s exactly it. You’re 100% spot-on. And I didn’t invent this idea. This is what the Grapes of Wrath does, in the book. This is what the Simpsons do. This is what South Park does. This is what all these different things do. What Star Trek: The Next Generation does, is they bring a scenario to you that seems relatively harmless and not about you, and the more you get invested in it, and the more time goes on, because it’s not confronting your beliefs, it’s not about you, you’re willing to listen to it, and absorb it in a more open way. And think about it in a more open way. Until eventually you realize, sort of too late, it is about you. If you think of that old, old original Star Trek episode, the original series, where they come across the planet of people, all the people on the planet, some of the people the left side of their face is black and the right side of their face is white and the other people the right side of their face is black and the left side of their face is whites, so it’s revers. And they hate each other. And then of course, they they land on the planet. And they go, Well, why are you fighting? They’re like, look at them. They’re inferior. They’re brutes, their culture is different. They’re weird. They do all these things. As an American in 1960-something watching this? Yeah, you’re just watching a TV show about people flying through space. And about 10 minutes into the episode, you’re like, Oh, this isn’t about people flying through space. This is about the race issues going on in America today. And the absurdity of them and how minuscule our differences are, that we draw these huge cultural wars and discussions. But you’re 20 minutes into the episode before you realize. It’s allowed you to think about it before your natural defenses of your own ego and self have gone up and quicklist.

 

Seth Villegas
Yeah, certainly. And when you’re going back and forth, say with a prospective writer, do you usually try to push them in that direction of the two people could disagree if it’s not quite there?

 

Kolby Granville
Yeah, that’s a great question. I’ve tried from time to time to work with writers to make changes. and I’ve pretty much given up on that. Because writers tend to be very, you know, somebody spends weeks or months or maybe even years working on a short story. And they hand it to you and you go, this is 70% of what I want, here’s what I want. And they go Yeah, but it’s 100% of what I wrote, like I wrote this, because it’s what I meant to say. And every word I change is one word different than what I meant to say. And so they become very protective of that, which is fine. Like, it’s their piece, they can do whatever they want with it. So I have generally found authors are very unwilling to make changes, the only changes I’ve been able to successfully sort of get his in some cases of vocabulary. And once in a while authors have used terms where I’m like, Look, you’re an academic that’s a writer, nobody’s going to know what this terminology means. Can you put in a brief like a side explanation or footnote or endnote? Or can you change this so that it’s very, very minor things just to make it more accessible to the reader. That’s the only kind of changes I’ve been able to get authors to make. We published one story in season one or season two, it was called Give the Robot the Impossible Job. If you haven’t read it is totally worth reading. It is hard reading. It’s about 20 or 25 pages; it’s one of our longer pieces. And it was written by a person who has like a dual PhD in AI programming, but then also AI ethics, something crazy like that. And he wrote it for himself. And at the end, I was like look, man, like we got to have footnotes. And so we went in and we added 20 footnotes. I mean, there’s like two or three footnotes on every page just with definitions. Like this is what this means. This is what this means. This is what this means. Because I wasn’t in the changes story, but I certainly wanted to make it so that a person with maybe an associate’s degree could read it and have a fighting chance.

 

Seth Villegas
When I was going through the stories, I definitely did notice that most of them were pretty digestible, it kind of seems like, at least in terms of my own personal tastes, I like it when I can sit down and read a short story all at once. That’s definitely been my thing. And it was definitely a lot of fun to go through all these different stories and the different conundrums that they had. But you know, when I was reading through them, unfortunately, I didn’t have someone to discuss them with. Does the editorial team come up with the discussion questions, or is that something that you leave up to the author?

 

Kolby Granville
We talked very briefly about having the authors do it. But we very quickly realized that the reason we selected the story might not be the reason the author wrote the story. So the author might have written the story thinking, I’m writing a story about this. And we go, yeah, that’s the story, but that’s not the point. The point is this other thing, right? And so sometimes the author writes the story, and we really like it for a reason, maybe not even entirely for what the author meant. We just had a podcast come out about a story. And it’s a wonderful story. It’s a wonderful podcast discussion we did in this case, and it was about a person who’s walking down the street in small town in quaint America, it’s called The Devil You Know, and guy’s walking down the street, and he sees the devil, like the legitimate devil, walking down the street, and he walks up to the devil, and he’s like, “You’re the devil.” He goes, “Yeah.” He goes, “uh, why aren’t your devil-ing?” And he’s like, “I outsource most of that now. You know, we’ve got departments. I get, you know, I’m mostly on vacation, I just check in from time to time.” And the guy says, “Well, I think I should fight you.” And the devil is like, “Well, according to what I see, all you got is a bag of stuff for knitting, you’re going to fight me with the knitting needles? Because I think that’s not going to go well for you.” And the guy’s like, “I know, I know, that would be stupid. I’m going to go home.” Perfectly good story, wonderful story. But the reason we selected it, and the reason we loved it, is because it asked a very fundamental question. And that is, should you always speak out and fight evil, even if the effort feels absolutely futile? If you are literally armed with nothing but knitting needles against eternal horribleness, should you fight and lose anyway? Do you have a moral obligation to always object to? And that’s a really interesting, deeper question that probably isn’t exactly what the author meant when they were. And so that’s why we don’t let the authors write the questions. Because the reason we select it might not even be the reason they wrote it.

 

Seth Villegas
As a follow up question, I know that the magazine itself is called After Dinner Conversations. And the way that I see the magazine, I think that the discussion questions themselves are really important for framing how the stories should be read, in a sense. And just from the title and from the questions, if I’m trying to imagine what I think this scenario would be, it’d be something like, you’re just talking to your family, your friends, like, oh, you know, I just read this really weird story about this thing I’d never thought about before. And maybe you just start talking about it. Is that what you imagine will come out of that, or what you’ve seen come out of it?

 

Kolby Granville
That’s exactly what the intent. The intent was: You sit down with your family, and you have dinner, and invariably, conversations come up about your day and about life and about choices. And those conversations become a really important part of how we build a moral foundation as children and how when we’re talking with adults, it can be a really important process of how we justify and sort of do a sniff test on our own values, and philosophical frameworks for choice, but you have to talk it out. The idea of the magazine is that a person doesn’t learn about the trolley problem, and then sit in a room quietly, until they’re like, yep. Now I know. That’s not- That’s not really how opinions are formed. Really strong opinions, you talk with someone else that you trust about it, that can they can probe you about your opinion about what about a grenade launcher? What about whatever? What about- someone who pokes and prods, and then it’s through the discussion and the defense of your ideas that they start to solidify. But that requires community. And that’s why the name of the publication is After Dinner Conversations. Because, while certainly there are people who read the magazine by themselves, it’s really designed for a couple of friends or book club or a philosophy meetup to have these discussions.

 

Seth Villegas
You’d mentioned earlier that the way that things are usually framed so that two reasonable people could disagree on what the right conclusion is. So it seems then that one of the things that might also come up in these conversations is some form of conflict. I know it sounds the way that you framed before is kind of just talking things out. But it could be that people have really strong opinions on whatever is discussed in it. Even thinking about this story, the Devil You Know, people have very different instincts about futile conflict or about conflict in general such that I can imagine even pretty passionate arguments, perhaps not completely logically based, in some sort of a philosophical system, but people feeling very strongly one way or the other.

 

Kolby Granville
Yeah, I think that’s very true. That’s part of the process of being a good, the word I’m looking for is something like being a good human. And by human, I mean, a person who develops an integrated relationship with their surrounding society, it’s really easy to digest talk radio, or whatever, whatever the angry media is that people listen to, and regurgitate that. And so when you have a conversation, you’re not having a conversation, you’re a marketing rep, whether you’re a marketing rep for Rush Limbaugh’s opinions, or Obama’s opinions, or God’s opinion, or the Bible’s opinions, or the Catholic Church’s opinions, or whatever. As soon as you’re not listening and engaging in the conversation, you’re no longer a person, you’re a marketing rep, and it doesn’t matter if you’re selling, I’m gonna borrow this from another movie, it doesn’t matter if you’re selling computer chips, or Industrial Lubricant, you are no longer being a part of a conversation. You’re selling. And it doesn’t matter what you’re selling. And so one of the things that you need to find when you have conversations with people about our stories, but ideally, just, you know, my opinion with your friends and acquaintances, is you need to find people that aren’t being marketing reps, but they’re actually trying to develop an empathetic and sort of better developed understanding of the world.

 

Seth Villegas
Sure, sure. I think two things come to mind. But first, I can really see your passion for education around critical thinking, around self reflection, all of these sorts of things that ideally would be brought up in some sort of a humanities education of some kind, which I feel like we actually don’t do that well, now nationally. I say that as a humanities person, myself, but most people don’t see the point of it. But even just as I’m talking to you, it just- it seems so important. And yet, we often don’t do it, you know, even with our own friends. And second, I think that the kind of time that we’re living in which we’re bombarded with information, and there’s influencers and things like that, people who actually are paid to pedal opinions and whatnot, this process of reflection can seem really difficult, but also maybe it can take a lot of courage to come out with an opinion that you worry might not be popular.

 

Kolby Granville
Absolutely. It requires courage. I mean, you think about the thing today, there was just the case-

 

Seth Villegas
Kyle Rittenhouse.

 

Kolby Granville
Yeah, Kyle Rittenhouse, right. Regardless of what your opinion on it, whether he was, should be found guilty or not. What’s interesting, though, is the way that you would engage in that conversation with someone that you wouldn’t just say, here’s what I think, and let me sell my opinion to you. Instead, you could say, here’s what I think I think, can you talk to me about what you think, and maybe between the two of us, we can come up with a stronger opinion that we understand better. And that requires a level of sophistication. That requires a level of empathy. One of the things I used to tell my students when I was a teacher was that you really can’t say that you understand someone’s opinion until if they got up and walked out of the room, you could continue to have the conversation from their perspective, without them. Like I know what you know, so well, that if you just went up and got a drink of water, I’m cool. Like I can cover your side of this conversation. Like it’s only at that point, when you’ve given it that much credit and thought that you can really start to decide what’s right and wrong.

 

Seth Villegas
That’s definitely really difficult. I think it takes a lot of empathy. I think it also takes some imagination to see things from a different person’s point of view, to imagine what other kinds of values might be important. But also, I think there’s a need for humility in that too, of, oh, perhaps I should listen to this person, just because I might be wrong. And that’s actually something that I think about a lot, especially because there’s so much information about everything. Okay, what am I ignoring? Or why did I think this? Or why did I come to this kind of conclusion immediately? And I think that being able to kind of pull that apart is a really tough skill, and it’s hard to teach for sure.

 

Kolby Granville
It is hard to teach. One of the things that friend of mine used to say, it’s relatively easy to shake the faith of a person who inherited their faith from their parents. It is practically impossible to shake the faith of a person who has entertained the idea legitimately and honestly, that God does not exist, and that after they have legitimately and honestly entertained the idea, they have come to the conclusion that they have faith. That person, you’re never going to shake their faith, because they know why they know what they know, as opposed to a person who hasn’t given it much thought. And this is not just true of questions of faith. This is true of questions of all morality, of all values. Once you have entertained the idea truly and honestly that you’re wrong and then you come back to the same answer, then you are positive you are right. And I don’t use that as an example because I think religion is the best example of this necessarily, but that example is true of all- Once you have truly and honestly entertained to the idea that your opinion on a topic is wrong. And you’re like, yeah, no, I could be wrong. Let’s look at it. Am I wrong? Let’s figure it out. What am I wrong? Dadada- you go through all all in, you’ve taken that in a sincere way, and you’ve come back to your initial presumption. That’s it, you’re done, you’re solid, you know what you know, and you know why you know it, and there’s no shaking that anymore. And that’s one of the really useful things about our stories that we publish, and also the conversations that we hope people have that even if none of your opinions change, by entertaining the idea that you’re wrong, you’re now much better qualified to explain the reasons why you’re right.

 

Seth Villegas
That’s definitely true. I found that to be true in my own life of a lot of things I’ve had to consider. And it’s great that you’ve created something that’s about that. So kind of looking into the larger landscape, then of, you know, the internet and social media, this is an internet magazine, what sort of need do you think that you’re filling by putting these kinds of things out there?

 

Kolby Granville
So the first thing I would say is, if nobody read the magazine, I would print the magazine anyway, because it’s important to me that this kind of content exists in the world. Happily, there are people that read it. And the need that I feel like is so important that I would do it, if nobody read it, the need is for people to ask themselves in sincere ways about their values, about their opinions, the same reason people study philosophy, right? You don’t study it necessarily because it solves anything, you study it, because it develops the very meaning of what it is to be human. I’d much rather watch that than the life of you know, Kim Kardashian on some TV show doing something stupid.

 

Seth Villegas
The thing that keeps coming to mind as you’re talking is a need for being genuine and authentic and the kinds of worldviews that we’re putting out there. So for instance, as you’re talking about, oh, really wanting people to sit back and reflect about what they’re thinking, and not just sort of projecting stuff that maybe they haven’t thought about. And as I’m thinking about this, I often wonder about how deeply people are tied to particular opinions or not, or how much they really care about things or not, because Talk is cheap, in a sense. But as you’re kind of saying this, it seems like the the better thing, the more human thing is figure out where those things are, so that we can really inhabit them in a deeper way, which sounds paradoxical, right? Because we are human, it doesn’t seem like we could be more human. But the fact that we can get to know ourselves even a bit better in the face of all this other kind of stuff that’s going on that’s pushing us in all kinds of directions.

 

Kolby Granville
Yeah, no, I think that’s true, I think it’s a product of what we consume. If you consume a lot of junk, then that tends to be the things that you’re attracted to, it tends to be the things that you think about, if you have a lot of repetitive advertising, not necessarily for McDonald’s, but for an idea or a life view, or perspective, you internalize that and you digest it. And that’s all you can do. And as soon as you step away from that sort of junk food, you can have some really interesting ideas that I think create a much stronger sense of peace, because it’s cool, right? Like, it’s cool, I’m good, you’re not going to convince Thoreau that he’s not wearing the right kind of shoes that are in season. And that’s because he’s already understood that that’s not the point. And so when you talk about, whether it’s teenagers, or social media, or adults consuming, you know, whatever is being thrown at them by one person or another, once you understand that that’s all just noise, there are real things to think about. And once you’ve understood where your opinion really is about them, then you can walk among the junk, and be totally unaffected by its influence. Maybe I’m overselling it. But I really think that’s why people should not just read a magazine, but why they should study philosophy, why they should be introspective, why they should seek therapy, like all of these things, because there’s just a better way to live life.

 

Seth Villegas
Getting back to this larger project. And it’s not just the magazine, but you also have a companion podcast that goes a little bit more in depth. To me, that seems like another way of having kind of an on-air conversation about what’s happening as pseudo dialogue partners, so to speak, for- for people as they’re going about their days, is that the way you see the podcast?

 

Kolby Granville
Yeah, you know, it’s a good question. So the podcast came as an afterthought. The podcast was us trying to model the conversations we were hoping other people were having. And so it was really podcasts for us through modeling, really. And we’re saying like, look, when you have a conversation about the story with your friends, the details of it might not sound anything like the details of our conversation, but the framework and the style of the discussion should and we hope it does. And so while we do the podcast for people to listen to our opinions, we don’t think they should adopt our opinions. We’re only one small perspective, they should figure out what they like and dislike about what we’re saying. Maybe they dislike all of it, and they should continue to look at their own belief systems with other people. But No, by no means are we trying to come up with the answer to the question the story for someone to accept. We’re just trying to model sort of good behavior.

 

Seth Villegas
In, well I’ll say, at least within the kind of American political climate, it seems that not pushing for a particular opinion, especially a particular political opinion, can be a little bit dangerous, right? It’s something that you can be criticized for these days. So how is it that you’ve maintained this strict focus on okay, we’re not going to get swept up in these particular issues. But rather, we’re here to educate others, regardless of where they are on the political spectrum.

 

Kolby Granville
You know, that really comes down to the story selection. If- the fastest way to get turned down in first submission is to use the name of someone currently living in your story, because as soon as you start talking about a living person, generally speaking, the reader is going to have their pre-existing opinions about that person, and you’re no longer able to help them have a mental dialogue. Once you say, Oh, this is about so and so, they quit having a dialogue in their mind, to pulling the three by five notecard out of their memory and laying it on the table be like, Oh, here’s what I think about that. At that point, you’re not having a conversation. And so it’s really about the story selections, and getting ones that try to get at universal truths. We go through a lot of stories. So I would say for every 100 submissions we get, we may be publish three. And it’s really hard to find good submissions.

 

Seth Villegas
I think it’s probably also hard to find submissions that really fit this kind of broader mission as well, that really kind of fit those sorts of values, especially because it can be really easy to put something forward that’s topical, and seems to be a hot take, so to speak, that I know those are really popular now. But this kind of slower process of reflection, it can be hard to cultivate that, and the thing I’ve actually been thinking about during our whole conversation is there’s a long history of what’s called didactic literature. So literature specifically dedicated to teaching people certain kinds of values, and that may not necessarily be all that straightforward. And I guess, do you sort of see yourself within that broader tradition of especially trying to help maybe younger people, I know you had mentioned teenagers earlier, of giving them that kind of outlet of Oh, like, this is something interesting you can read, and maybe it’ll challenge you a little bit.

 

Kolby Granville
Yeah, I hadn’t thought about it in the framework of didactic literature. But I understand what you’re saying. And I think that’s true. But I look at some of the sort of ancient philosophy, the idea of using stories and myths to build a moral foundation for the populace. I understand the reasoning for that, my own personal opinion is I don’t necessarily agree with it. Because then someone has to decide what the right and wrong things to teach are. I think I’m looking at it more from a meta standpoint, in the sense that I’m not trying to teach you a value, the magazine is trying to teach you to have a strong foundation for your values. And so if you’ve gone through the process, and you’ve come to the conclusion that you know, whatever, that racism is right, I’m not going to argue with you and tell you that you’re wrong, because maybe you’re not wrong. The best I could ever say was you’re wrong for me. And so I’m not trying to do it in the sense of, I think it was Plato or whoever was that said you use these stories to build social structure and value. I’m looking at it from a much more meta standpoint.

 

Seth Villegas
Great. I think those are the questions that I had. But I know that people definitely be wondering, how can they connect with After Dinner Conversations? Where can they find you and things like that?

 

Kolby Granville
Oh, thank you so much. Yes. So the magazine you can get from our website AfterDinnerConversation.com. It’s normally $19.95 a year. We normally, you know, typically do some sort of introductory thing where it’s like $4.95 for the first year, so it works out super cheap. So you’re getting three or four hours at least of reading a month for pennies. We also have the magazines on Amazon, if you’d rather just get them on a Kindle. We have them on Barnes and Noble. Nook. You can get them from the library, even, through the Overdrive app or the Libby app. We also have print books that will have 25 stories in them at a time along with the discussion questions. We sell a lot of the print books, and you can do that as well. You get those on Amazon as well and have it delivered right to your house. The podcast is available on every platform, as well as on our website. You just type in After Dinner Conversation, and it’ll show up on whatever, Apple, Spotify, Pandora.

 

Seth Villegas
Well, thank you so much Kolby. I really resonate with your mission. And I hope we can continue this process of not only kind of modeling what ethics looks like and the kinds of challenges in that but kind of forge a way forward for people to navigate this increasingly thorny landscape.

 

Kolby Granville
Great, thank you so much. Thank you for having me on your show.

 

Seth Villegas
All right. Well, thank you so much, Kolby.

 

Transcribed by https://otter.ai