ramble hey nicole hey josh are we really second guessing our clearly stated title for our moderately successful food podcast i think we are josh this is a hot dog as a sandwich or is it ketchup is a smoothie yeah i put ice in my cereal so what that makes no sense hot dog is a sandwich a hot dog is a sandwich welcome to our podcast of hot dogs is a sandwich the show we break down the world’s biggest food debates i’m your host josh shearer and i’m your host nicole inaudible and nicole we are now on part two of us doing the damn thing trying to officially end the debate of is a hot dog sandwich that’s right josh that’s exactly what’s happening um there are a couple things that i’ve learned after what’s that one my beliefs are more flimsy than i’d like to think they are okay there’s uh my favorite spoken word artist anisse mojigani once said beliefs are like naps we leave them behind the minute someone touches us and i kind of feel i’m worried that we’re going to fall into that trap where somebody says one convincing thing and i’m going to leave everything behind well i took a nap before this podcast yeah i really did and i don’t know i feel like the conversation with ken really made me double down on my beliefs that a hot dog is not a sandwich yeah so when we spoke to when we spoke to historian ken albala last episode um he came out swinging so so hard that a hot dog is not a sandwich and for a moment i was convinced but then we just had an incredible conversation that you’re about to listen to with dr calvin normore he is a real life philosopher and i mean this dude is a philosopher’s philosopher he has the long beard and everything and i had actually spoken to him seven years ago when he was a professor of philosophy at ucla very cool and i was a student there and so this was an incredible throwback to me but i feel like we got more to the truth like the capital t truth of the matter as opposed to someone like ken who is incredibly passionate about the subject but when you come into a debate nicole with passion you’re leaving yourself open to bias that’s true and the thing about philosophy is you’re constantly searching for the truth but i think what he touched on that i thought was interesting was people have different truths there’s multiple which is why a hot dog might be a sandwich to you might not be to suzie lee it might not be the susie and you know it’s crazy you know how i know a hot dog is a sandwich nicole how because i have a super sweet t-shirt that says a hot dog is a sandwich oh what a coincidence i have one that says a hot dog is not a sandwich we both look down at our shirts to physically read them which is hilarious uh and you can and depending on what you believe you can go to mythical.com right now and buy the t-shirts uh the designs are awesome i’m absolutely obsessed with this but that said i might trade this t-shirt in for your t-shirt by the end of this because i feel like that’s gonna happen it’s gonna happen because i clearly don’t know where this is going uh one thing we talked a lot about the idea of socratic forms in the episode and didn’t really get in to what they are so socrates right og philosopher that like kind of may or may not have actually existed he’s only written about from plato’s perspective that’s one of the things i remember from philosophy in college uh but he yelled that the world of forms transcends the substantial world and is the basis of reality so nicole that’s pretty sick it’s pretty metal right so the idea of say like a triangle right is a socratic form if you were to draw a triangle on a white board you’d say that is a perfect triangle i’d say no because you could measure that right whatever you drew you could measure that at any angle no matter if you used a ruler or whatever and you would see some sort of deviation right the wind blew the chalk just a micrometer so that would not be a perfect triangle a perfect triangle exists outside of space outside of time it is a concept right it is a form what is perfection just mathematical is it spiritual is it emotional what is it what does perfect even dramatic just exists in the ephemera and so that’s what we’re talking about uh but turns out there ain’t no socratic form of a hot dog unfortunately for us the most important part of this conversation though is that dr normore called us smart yeah that was sweet which is incredible our guests should call us smart it would really help us uh but truly this is one of the most fascinating conversations i’ve ever had i can’t wait for y’all to listen to it yeah are you ready to get into it totally let’s do it dr normore thank you so much for joining us from half a world away it’s my pleasure uh perhaps a little later is the day would have been a greater pleasure but it’s a pleasure it is 7 a.m where you are correct that’s right wow you’re you’re in brisbane australia i am yeah uh which i hope to be on a paradisical island but but i’m in brisbane you’ll settle for queensland uh and this is incredible because the last time we met we were in the same room together we were actually in your office later the courtyard at uh ucla because this is not the first time that we’ve talked nice that’s true and um the birds were singing and the uh the leaves were blooming right it was truly idyllic i was younger i was dumber and this is when nicole i was an amateur hot dog sleuth so i wrote a piece for first we feast before they launch hot ones the show on youtube they were but a lowly food blog that would pay people like the likes of me while i was still in college and i wrote an article that wanted to philosophically dissect whether or not a hot dog is a sandwich and dr normore this podcast wouldn’t exist without you this that was literally the genesis of this whole idea so thank you for contributing to that again that’s an astonishing that’s an astonishing fact but it’s a pleasure to join you and i think you have unknowingly made thousands of listeners a little bit dumber by forcing them to listen to us so i’m also sorry for that i feel like that’s the opposite of everyone’s clicking on it there’s no force we’re giving him the contract yeah that’s right so like i said back then i was an amateur and now nicole and i we are truly setting out to end the debate of whether or not a hot dog is a sandwich we just spoke to a food historian and a fellow academian like yourself for about an hour and i mean he had a lot of points but i feel like they were all sort of shrouded in personal feeling and bias dr normore i’m hoping to get to some capital t truth via the powers of philosophy and metaphysics here to finally end it do you think that’s achievable yes it’s not easy though but dr normore i don’t know if i want philosophy in my hot dogs when do you want hot dog in your philosophy i mean when you spin it that way now my mind has been opened all right so dr norma i’m hoping you can break down like the actual act of philosophical argumentation and how that relates to the question is a hot dog a sandwich like what are we actually arguing about here well we’ve got a concept right the concept of a hot dog actually we start we’ve got a word the word hot dog and but presumably we think there’s a single concept that underlies that word uh maybe there isn’t and we think we have a pretty good grasp of it and maybe that’s not true either and there are lots of concepts that we use all the time that we don’t have a very good grasp of can you give us an example sure um if i ask you what an electron is you’ll be able to talk no give us an easier word i don’t know say like a peanut okay okay if i ask you what a uh what um an elbow joint is i know what that is yeah you’ll be able to say something but there’ll be lots of things about the about that you won’t know right correct don’t know the elbow for example does it carry water does it have to carry water oh and in my elbow joint i have no idea well i’d say if oh you see now you were thinking of your elbow joint i was thinking of the elbow joint in a pipe underneath my kitchen you stop right there you silly man that’s incredible they’re both elbow joints is it unfair to characterize philosophers as sort of modern day leprechauns who are all about to trick you not maybe to trick you you can’t call our guest a leprechaun josh that’s rude i’m sorry please explain no just wanted to point out that um you know that elbow joint is used in all sorts of contexts and we don’t we don’t uh typically grasp all of them true i don’t think it’s an ambiguity actually i think it’s probably the same sense of elbow joint maybe maybe the same sense of elbow i’m not sure about that so anyway but so the thought was that that there are lots of concepts that we that we use we only have a partial grasp of and um and the question is whether a hot dog is one of them and of course whether sandwich is another one um and so that’s going to be that’s one of the issues we have to face and i’m glad that you said that you’d talk to a historian about this because one of the ways that we can that we can trace this is by trying to look at the history of the development of the concept but we’ll come back to that you were going to ask me about argumentation yeah please i mean uh do you have any tips because i think we found with our historian that you know we don’t have the bare bones tools enough to really discuss this efficaciously oh election i that surprised i can yell at people all i want but i mean like even down to say like you said we all think we have an idea of what a hot dog is sure but when it comes down to truly defining our terms right like we found that we kind of struggled yeah yeah and uh and we often do because we we use these these words and these concepts in lots of contexts we get by perfectly well uh but uh but there are gray areas penumbra around central uses that we don’t grasp very well and one of the things philosophers try to do is to work out of how those concepts work and how they’re related to one another and so you know argumentation is partly a matter of that it’s part it’s not entirely a matter of that but it’s partly a matter of tracing out the relationships among concepts you say that okay then you’re committed to this right and you see that you’re committed well let me show you if you don’t if you’re not committed to this when you say that what about this other case doesn’t that look exactly the same and don’t you agree that you’re committed uh to you know x if you say y in that case okay and so on right so there are lots of cases like that where we we attempt to trace out the relationship among concepts and hot dog is one of them hot dogs a concept it’s a word that picks out we think a concept and we’re trying to trace out it’s not only its history but its relationship to others that’s really interesting because we we got into the idea of the concept of a hot dog versus a current hot dog in practice because sausages have been made for thousands of years correct they’ve been put in bread rolls for at least hundreds of years but the term hot dog doesn’t come into the english language documented until earliest we could find was like 1843 and so dr normore would you say that there is a socratic form of a hot dog that exists outside of space and time gosh ah so this is a special case of the general question are there forms of artifacts right because a hot dog is an arc it’s an artifact it’s something that we make there’s no or no there are no hot dog trees hot dog is an artifact okay got it yeah okay so now the question is when we make up an artifact let’s suppose we make a new one uh maybe uh something like a microphone say do we discover something or do we invent it that is is there out there in the you know logical space somewhere of something the microphone that we’re we’re developing we get on to and we we make a copy of it let’s say in in the physical world that’s one way of thinking about it the other is no there’s nothing out there in logical space there are various bits and pieces that we put together and lo and behold we get a working microphone and now we can apply that concept in other places and blah blah now my own inclination is to just to think the second right that there if there aren’t any forms of artifacts waiting to be discovered but that’s not obvious i think interesting and so is it a little bit like the idea of invention versus discovery like if you were to put a monkey in a room with a typewriter with an infinite amount of time he would eventually type the works of shakespeare similarly if you put a monkey with a knife next to a cow he would invent the hot dog yeah yeah well it might take more than one monkey and the cow would probably die but but uh but yeah that’s the question right i mean and and but it’s a but it’s even a slightly slightly different question because let’s go back to the works of shakespeare for a second okay if the monkey typed out all those things on a say an old-fashioned typewriter uh it’s not at all clear they would have typed the works of shakespeare the reason it’s not clear that they would have typed the works of shakespeare is you’ve got all these marks on the page you are come in and assume they’re english how do you know this it’s not built into the marks that they’re in english and you assume that the the monkey was somehow writing english and what’s more wasn’t writing a new works that just happened to look like the works of shakespeare but were the works of shakespeare and and probably not none of that’s true there’s a wonderful borges story called pmnr author of the quixote in which this um french 19th century french guy attempts to write out a new novel using exactly the words of cervantes don quixote in exactly the same order and for his argus he can do it it’ll be a different novel what because it’s written in the 19th century yeah because it’s because it’s written in the 19th now he only got a pager to it but uh but but because it’s written in the 19th century right not the 16th uh it’s written by a frenchman working in who knows the background of cervantes novel where savannah’s wasn’t doing anything like that so boris gives a good argument i think that it’s it is a different novel so the monkey might not actually produce the works and a copy of the works of shakespeare the monkey might just produce something that looks like mom and that bears on the question of the hot dog right because because one might think well look anything that looks like a hot dog and tastes like a hot dog is a hot dog but it might not be i mean if we if we found people on mars uh who had invented something and put something into it let me give an example of a weird example they thought that you could take something that wasn’t bread but let’s say it was um something like a corn meal or something you could bake it and put inside of something that wasn’t a sausage at all you could make something that they were prepared that they even say to use the word hot dog for and they were also prepared to use the word hot dog for everything though we do right so now would we think that they had hot dogs or would we think that they had i don’t know schmut dogs right that included hot dogs but were a little bit wider they sell the schmott dogs for a dollar fifty at costco um they would charge extra because because of because of their exotic origin you can market that well no this this actually i think speaks especially i’m fascinated by the quixote example because that kind of speaks to i don’t know the convergent evolution of certain foods right like if you look at sausage has been being made in china like la chong for several several hundreds of years right um lemon bread you know showed up in originally in like mesopotamia but then now we’re looking at that through uniquely american lens and so if we call a hot dog a sandwich we can only examine that through our own like very uh ethnocentric terms i think you know like but is there any can we draw a universal conclusion from our own like ethnocentric ideas because for instance you go to jerusalem or damascus and they’re stuffing pitas it feels weird and you know almost xenophobic to call that simply a sandwich yeah it it does but i mean we can call it we can’t we get to decide i think how we’re going to apply our concepts to things going forward right i mean but we don’t get to decide how to apply them to things going backwards so were there any sandwiches say before the earl of sandwich yes well that’s that’s a loaded question i’m sure there were because bread bread has existed for 10 000 plus years people have been putting meat inside that bread but before the term sandwich was invented but does language equate invention or discovery i don’t know right right so so let’s imagine the following sorry personal victory so there’s all there’s all this bread and there and and and people are are putting things in it uh but they don’t think about as any particular kind of thing right i mean different people do put different kinds of things in different kinds of bread and different kinds of ways and so on along comes the earl of sandwich and people began to identify a particular kind of putting in of stuff in particular kinds of bread as a sandwich and going forward they sort of extend that bit by bit by bit and now they look back into the 15th century in mesopotamia let’s say and they ask are those things sandwiches well they look a lot like sandwiches they work like sandwiches let’s call them sandwiches and i see nothing particularly wrong with that as long as we understand that what we’re doing is we’re taking a concept a 20th well by now a 21st century concept and we’re seeing how if we applied it to things that we do apply it to and we applied it to things that were sufficiently similar to what we do apply it to then we would call them sandwiches right see that i think that’s fine that’s something that i fully agree with and that’s what informed so just to let you know where we stand real quick nicole is a staunch a hot dog is not a sandwich person i have always been a staunch a hot dog is a sandwich person uh strictly because a sandwich to me seems very simple you could define it as uh yeast it well maybe not yeasted because the biscuit’s not yeasted but a biscuit still sandwich any whom like a risen bread that has filling and is meant to be eaten with the hands at least primarily on a common sense definition you know and so to me a hot dog very much fulfills that but that is why the question as it’s phrased is a hot dog a sandwich there’s no like to me is a hot dog a sandwich from my perspective because if you were to ask this question to somebody in you know xinjiang china you know is a hot dog it’s a sandwich they might just be like uh yeah or they’re just like of course it is i don’t know i don’t know what the answer is but so i mean does that does that add a tricky layer to this dr normore like a certain you’re implying a universality when you say the word is yeah yeah and uh yeah so if you’d if you’d i mean until mcdonald’s uh arrived in china right i i doubt that um i doubt that if you asked somebody in shanghai whether a hot dog was a sandwich they would i mean i don’t know if you translate it into one of the chinese languages i don’t even know what words you would find maybe you wouldn’t find words right for for that would naturally translate and so you might have to do exactly what you were just doing there josh you know say okay here’s what i mean by a hot dog right i mean blah blah blah here’s what i mean by a sandwich now do you think one of those is one of those right um so yeah so all that’s true but we perfectly well could say looking at say something that had been made in the chinese bakery oh that is sufficiently similar to what we call hot dogs that we will call them hot dogs and now there’s the the question that you raise uh are the things that we call hot dogs sufficiently similar to the other things we call sandwiches that we want to call them sandwiches um so i think in a certain sense that’s partly up to gr up for up for grabs for us and it’s partly up for grabs for us because because they’re artifacts because they’re things we make okay and so we can yeah i mean we wouldn’t be able to do that with with trees trees are whatever whatever kind they are and if we if we want to carve nature at the joints so to speak then we have to find out what the different species of trees are with hot dogs we don’t have to so much find out what they are as what we intend them to be i see which is a different thing so i say so so say my so if our human hands make something it is up to us as specific humans to give it its name and its definition and where it belongs so to say within within our universe yeah that’s what i’m inclined to think there isn’t so that goes back to your original question is there a socratic form of hot dog i say no i say no this isn’t a socratic form what i think about that because i mean you know thinking about the secret and i’m not an expert on the socratic forums lady means the thing about the socratic form of a triangle existing outside of space and time a drawing of a triangle is not i just imagine this perfectly shaped hot dog dr normore just floating you know as an idea and a nebulous concept and to me it’s beautiful and i want to eat it the only thing that i can imagine in nature that is equivalent to a hot dog is a cattail yes is a cat tail a hot dog are you trying to find no come on give me one man no [Music] we’ve told you about monk before and we’re excited to tell you about it again that’s right moiq that’s moo plus oink it’s a meat subscription box company on a mission to fight for the family farm they’re located in rural america run by an eighth generation female farmer their animals are raised humanely their employees are paid a living wage and the quality of their product is 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every order for a year holy smokes that’s one year the best filet mignon you’ll ever taste but for a limited time spelled m-o-i-n-k-box dot com slash hot dog that’s moicbox.com hot dog i have a general question about dr norma why do you think that people strive to put things into categories which is to say why the heck are we doing this why why do we find it so necessary to find definitions and to ask questions like this like why do we need this to be answered well i mean one thing one reason is simply practical i mean just imagine what things would be like if you had to have a a single name for every single object that you encountered and and anyone you talked with had to know that name in order for you to communicate with them at all right so you go into a shop and you say i want james james they say well yeah we don’t have james we have we’ve got susan will susan do uh let me look well susan’s a lot like james but i don’t know right so but whereas now we can just go in and say you know i want a pair of shoes okay not what size what kind right i mean but we don’t have to pick out the particular pair from that long list so that’s one reason right we need to categorize because otherwise we have to uh to literally uh think in terms always of the particular objects of which there are more than anyone could possibly you know count or imagine but there’s also this this deeper question i think which is does the world come in kinds and and that’s the deeper question is the world structured in a certain way and of course what where what our science tries to do and i guess what we do in daily life too is we try to we think yes the world is structured and we try to find out what the structure is right um and that’s exactly what we’re doing when we categorize and we can make mistakes right we can we can make up categories that don’t offer for things that turn out not to be so there’s a for example there’s a philosophical debate about whether phlogiston is oxygen what is that logistin is a uh an olympic 100 meter dash runner she broke the world record flo justin no that’s flojo uh oh yeah that that’s not look there was a time when people thought that what happened when things burned okay was that they gave off something which was flogista okay it turned out of course that what happens when you when you burn stuff is you consume oxygen right and you give off uh various kinds of carbon compounds so there turns out to be no such thing as flu distance now that it was part of the scientific theory that just didn’t work right there is still the question though something happens in burning right and and something’s given off might we extend the term likely say that they didn’t get it completely wrong but you know blah blah blah so you can go down that road right but but but but the thing that you’re really trying to do always is get the structure of the world what is there really and what differences make a difference so the difference between james and susan if right if these are the names for let’s say two hot dogs right doesn’t make a difference you don’t care which one you you forget and so you’re happy to go into a shop and get a hot dog you might care you know about the the way the hot dog is but you don’t care if it’s james or susan um so so categories help us there and of course with natural things where we’re discovering what there is we get at the structure of the world by getting the right categories for them with artificial things it’s more complicated of course and we certainly have to break down why somebody would be motivated to categorize things right like of course in in the hot dog versus sandwich dichotomy that we’ve set up here yes like when talking to the you know historian uh ken albala he mentioned you know a common thing that people will say is if we stopped at a gas station and i asked you to get me a sandwich and you got me a hot dog i’d be disappointed i’d be disappointed and i fully understand that and he also said nobody would ever call it a hot dog sandwich or put it on a menu as a sandwich but that’s simply not true right i’m thinking of a diner like if you are say at a 7-eleven they have no reason to categorize a hot dog it’s a sandwich because they simply put it on little rolly bars and you put it into a bun yourself but if you’re at a diner say that has a 200 item menu as most fantastic diners do and there is a sub header on the menu that says sandwiches and you see a hot dog you will see hot dog you will see hamburger you’ll see a ham and cheese on rye you’ll see wet beef and so they have a reason to do that because for them it matters most who are we to tell lancer’s diner in burbank that that’s not a sandwich but as the consumer and i see that there it causes a little bit of a like a question yeah it’s like does it belong there does it belong to be categorized there shouldn’t it be in miscellaneous there should be more mis side no there should be more miscellaneous uh categories someone who wants like loose cottage cheese yeah yeah it’s called the sides you know so i mean i mean why do diners have to be the the ones that name it why do they get to be the authority well that’s a good question and dr norma i’m hoping you can uh sort of elucidate um philosophical what are they called hold on i wrote it in my notes hold on hold on hold on hold on maggie cut this don’t make me look stupid don’t make me one philosophy class at santa monica college i did two oh a good college yeah she was great my instructor was incredible uh dr david spiwak at ucsb philosophy 101 he was obsessed with the idea that we’re all in a simulation and that is all we learned about i can tell you all about nicole if post humans exist i’m sorry all right i found what i was talking about dr norma i hope you can help us break down some like philosophical fallacies and how they would relate to this right here because one i believe after some cursory googling is called the appeal to authority fallacy right yeah so you want to find out if a hot dog is a sandwich you go and you ask a hot dog expert now what makes them a hot dog well it’s that people go people go and ask them right now if that’s all that’s going on then they have they might have a certain kind of authority because people will obey them and obey them not because of their power but just because they they defer to them but they’re not expert right they’re they’re if they’re expert only because uh people are prepared to to follow them then they are not they they haven’t any insight into the nature of a hot dog so if you just settled the question that way then you’d be settling it by authority and that would give you no reason to think that you had gotten things right let’s put it that way so that’s why it’s a fallacy i think that’s really pertinent in this debate especially because the biggest authority that people will defer to is the dictionary and i think people fundamentally misunderstand what the function of the dictionary is and how it reacts there’s the famous case of the word literally where the dictionary changed the definition of literally to uh include a facetious use of it for like you know bombast and emphasis as opposed to what people previously thought it meant so society is responsible for the dictionary i believe it’s uh prescriptive versus descriptive okay or sorry descriptive prescriptive language and so if you look at the definition of a sandwich in uh the oxford english dictionary it specifies two slices of bread but do you think that that is too narrow of a definition of sandwich i do think it’s too narrow but but let me just say a quick word about dictionaries so so as you say they can either try to to make us speak a certain way and putting a word in a dictionary often does uh for example bring it about that people who weren’t prepared to use the word before are now prepared to use it right that kind of thing and taking it out conversely so that’s one thing a dictionary can get us to speak a certain way or can also just describe the way we do speak right so one of the things that a dictionary is supposed to do i think is capture what you might call central uses of of a word and that that are actually there and then by making those salient for us by putting them before our minds encourages us to go in certain directions rather than others with the case of the the sandwich well does it does it have to be two slices of bread could it be one gigantic slice that we fold it over and if so with the gap you know with the fold have to be a fool that could easily be broken and i thought who knows right i mean that would be a a proposal that you could have a sandwich that was that had a single slice of bread and of course there are open-faced sandwiches always a question whether they’re sandwiches right etc etc so i’m inclined to think that that there’s nothing in the concept of a sandwich that requires that it be exactly two i mean consider a three slice sandwich oh a club sandwich if you will oh a club i’m hungry i will consider a three-slice sandwich i mean so there’s nothing in the concept of a sandwich i think that requires that it’d be exactly two but notice that we we gravitate to it right we think okay we so we have a stereotype of a sandwich it’s got two pieces of bread it’s got maybe maybe some tomato in australia they they’ll put beet root in something yeah they do beetroot burger yeah yeah so we’ve got the stereotype and we’re imagining things that are similar to it and now the question is always how similar does it have to be so similarity plays this really crucial role in extending these concepts i think in the case of a sandwich no reason to think it stops it two i’m certainly inclined to believe that i to me it’s almost absurd that people think that the bread needs to be fully sliced in half to me it’s such a meaningless distinction for how both hot dogs and sandwiches actually affect our day-to-day life and to me we spoke about this in the last episode but subway subway is the largest restaurant chain in the history of the earth it has a a genghis khan sized impact on the way that we eat food it is like almost 50 000 locations across the globe they serve sandwiches anybody could tell you that nicole you go anywhere in the world you ask what subway sells and they say sandwiches and it is one contiguous piece of bread but what if they introduce a hot dog in the little trays then what do we do they’re still serving sandwiches because a hot dog is a sandwich nicole they have not deviated from their core business model i’m i’m faltering on my on my stance now right because if subway could sell a hot dog and put it in their italian herbs and cheese that’s the same way it’s a sandwich it is a hot dog and and i mean conversely if you were to take a hot dog bun and simply replace the meat tube with something with the stereotypical you know fillings of what you consider to be the quintessential sandwich stressed out to me i just i don’t see a world in which that is not a sandwich as well i cannot see the bun and i mean dr normah especially with a hot dog bun it’s literally the fact that it is quote unquote one piece of bread and not two it is held by sometimes a quarter centimeter of bread your argument is held on by a quarter centimeter nicole a zephyr blows in zephyr what about a crepe what’s a crepe what’s i put ham and cheese in the crepe and i fold it up there i just fold it there’s no opening there’s no closing it’s folded all up is that a sandwich well i mean i think this is that a hot dog a question for dr norman dr norma answer my help how far away from the stereotype can you get like of course we must draw a line but then who is the arbiter of that line and it scares me yeah yeah well there isn’t anyone who’s the arbiter we have to rely on our own devices gosh so much responsibility so so what would you think i mean you’ve got two shops side by side one of them uh one of them puts the uh the crepes let’s say under a special category crepes and the other puts the crepes under this wider category sandwiches now uh is one of them making a mistake well i think if time passes we could in retrospect think one of them had made a mistake because it turns out let’s say that everybody else now starts to to put crepes under um under the sandwich category or doesn’t right but right now what they’re doing is they’re making a proposal about about the extension of the word sandwich the proposal will either stick or it won’t stick right and there’s no telling typically there’s no fact because it’s an artifact there’s nothing to discover here right there’s a decision there’s a decision yeah and nobody’s has the authority to make that decision so we make it in this kind of loose collective way it’s our jobs to take their suggestion and determine whether this suggestion is true or not to us individually that’s exactly before this she was like i’m nervous he’s going to be so smart he’s going to start talking about socrates and i don’t know what to do and i’m like he’s just normal fiddlesticks [Music] you probably have a lot of priorities in life that you place higher than having fun like your career school running errands and more but you can’t forget about having fun exactly add some joy to your daily routine with best fiends the puzzle adventure game you won’t be able to put down after playing 350 levels that’s right be impressed i’m confident knowing that it’s super easy to pick up and play a few levels at a time whenever life slows down or heck whatever i need life to slow down best fiends is a free to download mobile puzzle game with so many levels we’re talking thousands to keep you excited every time you play yeah and there are dozens of unique fiends to collect so you can customize your team of fiends to defeat the menacing slugs you can also upgrade your team through brand new events and challenges that pop up all year round leaving you with a chance to win 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actually next episode this is part of a whole large series dr normore we’re talking to a lot of people trying to really cover all our bases and we’re actually speaking to a lawyer next because we know the legal system has gotten involved in this to determine whether or not a hot dog is a sandwich i mean do you do you see that as like kind of falling under the appeal to authority fallacy do you think the legal system has any right to be involved in our hot dogs well it’ll have to probably yeah because because the borderlines of these of these uh concepts are uh can have serious legal consequences i mean there’s a famous famous legal case about whether uh roller skates in central park count as wheeled vehicles there was a prohibition no wheeled vehicles in central park in new york so somebody skates in now have they violated the law or not they’re too fast consider cars and driverless cars i presume nobody will doubt that they’re cars but there’s a whole set of regulations about cars and if they don’t count as cars those regulations will not apply to them right so it’s crucial in a way that that we uh for legal purposes that we settled the border lines of these concepts that doesn’t mean of course that the law so to speak does it reasonably or gets it right right there there can be weird cases but again because they’re artifacts uh if they’re the kinds of things that that we collectively some institution or other do get to settle and the law might be able to settle many of them for us just decide of course what happens typically is if the law gets too far out of sync with what we ordinarily think then you know it just begins to not work as law and i believe we find that case nicole in the case of miracle whip dr norm talks about i am familiar with miracle whip is it mayonnaise yes a good question very good question let’s see if i can spread it on a sandwich and it’s squishy white and delicious that’s a mayonnaise in my book but yeah i mean the government really they laid down a hard line of what constitutes mayonnaise and i believe it’s a certain percentage of oil by weight miracle whip was simply watering down their mayonnaise too much and they got their distinction taken away yeah i am glad you brought up cars earlier because so i think one analogy that people draw myself included is that you know um a car car is to sandwich as convertible as to hot dog no right it’s like a convertible the car is the overarching or even say truck right nicole do you believe a truck is a car yeah i do too but i i can also see people a convertible is a car it just doesn’t have a top no that’s what i’m saying though i believe a hot dog is simply a subset of the over our overarching order of sandwich which is something that ken argued fully against okay that sandwiches are lateral to hot dog okay and sandwiches are two people i think i think that car is to sandwich as a mobilized scooter like a lime scooter is to uh uh do you see what i’m saying thanks doctor but now look you we can get very so let me let me generate a a series of cases right so on the one side you got i don’t know let’s say uh a brand new a brand new lexus and on the other side you’ve got a pair of roller skates in line perhaps okay now we got scooters we get motorcycles we get three wheeled motorcycles we get golf carts we get things that are like golf carts but they have a bigger engine it was called a gem yeah i know the thing you’re talking about it’s like a golf cart that old people drive on the street at my nana’s community living center they drive it’s called a gym sorry to disrupt no no that’s good now keep going what do we have to add to the gems to to get a car a door or have we already got there a door ah does the door have to be a permanent door or can it be a be something like a curtain um well the door serves as safety for accidents well oh no no hold on we’re pulling down the windows my italian roommates who did not have driver’s licenses drove a jeep wrangler that had no doors no doors detachable doors detachable doors i don’t believe doors can be essential to car hood because my italian roommates being they would hand roll cigarettes driving with no license no doors hands-free and they were ucla students mind you should have been smart [Music] wouldn’t surprise me at all so you can see that that that the the borderline is is is delicate right at some point where it’s it’ll be uncontroversial that these are cars at some point it’ll be uncontroversial that there aren’t but in the middle because and i think this is especially true because they’re artifacts there isn’t any answer that is given you by the the the original concept and so the the borderlines of the concept are themselves blurry they’re they’re they’re vague and part of what the law has to do for example is settle them and but also you know that’s part of what shops have to do when they classify part of what we have to do when we sort of go go into things right go we have this to decide whether this counts for us as uh as a as a one kind rather than another and if our ways of doing it are so out of sync with other people’s ways of doing it then communication breaks down so we have to come come up to some consensus and new cases constantly come up i mean think about these electric scooters are they scooters well yeah but now they can go much faster they can do all kinds of things that ordinary scooters can’t do and so uh and so we have to treat them differently from the way we treated scooters and more like the way we treated motorbikes right that’s interesting and i mean that speaks to say like the ubiquity and popularity of the hot dog something that i i think is really fascinating uh dr normore you brought up earlier mcdonald’s entering into china you know and we now view the hamburger as like i would say the most important food stuff outside of say commodity grains that has affected more people across the world right we think of the hamburger and the hot dog as being things that sort of have always existed but they are but a blip in time oh yeah they’re more like new inventions i mean it’s you know in the history of of world food development it’s it’s so so so new and so i’m thinking now whatever podcasts look like in 250 years you know the hot dog could not even be a thing or maybe the hot dog is transformed into something else maybe the need for a sandwich isn’t even there people are eating the little hot dog flavor hot dog flavored pills yeah and people will argue is that a hot dog and people say well it contains the same macronutrient breakdown and flavor of a hot dog down to the molecule and i will be sitting there saying no hot dogs used to be at the costco and the schmott dogs cost 25 cents more because they were exotic and from mars oh man dr normore i have to ask you finally do you believe that a hot dog is a sandwich or not hmm um well let me put it this way okay no philosophical funny business dr norman no i wanted nothing particularly funny funny here so like like you nicole i think that if if i said bring me a sandwich and somebody brought me a hot dog i’d be disappointed on the other hand i wouldn’t think that i had cause for complaint because because i think there’s a sufficient gray area here that uh that while if you asked me to bring you a sandwich i wouldn’t bring you a hot dog if somebody brought me a hot dog as a sandwich i would think they’re just using the term slightly differently in that gray area and neither of us has any authority to settle that that’s beautiful can i also say anyone who just asked somebody to quote bring them a sandwich just tell me what kind of sandwich you want yeah i’ve this has happened too many times where i’ll go to a gas station and say you want anything and someone says give me a soda and i go no no tell me what kind of soda i don’t know if you like diet dr pepper and so i think that’s the idea of like specificity you know yeah no that’s a that’s actually a very nice example because because if somebody did bring you uh let’s suppose you don’t like diet sodas did bring you one would be so much right but you wouldn’t think you had cause for a complaint you hadn’t told them yeah but if i’m going on a car ride with someone they should already be aware of the fact that i don’t drink diet soda if you’re close enough they should know my preferences if you’re asking me to get you something or the other way around we should know each other’s preferences like don’t if you bring me a diet dr pepper i will raise absolute health the artificial sweetener gives her digestive troubles and you don’t want to be stuck in a car with her but if someone brought me a hot dog in lieu of a sandwich i also wouldn’t be upset i don’t maybe so maybe a hot dog is a sandwich possibly maybe maybe not to you maybe not to you i’m just pointing at random people in the room maybe it just is what it is and it’s a sandwich yeah cool i’m more confused now but it’s not a toasty no it’s not nothing is a toasty a toasties are toasty we love a good toast dr normore thank you so much thank you i feel great about it oh thank you i’m somehow sweaty again i keep sweating doing this you are sweating my brain’s working so hard yeah uh doctor or please i mean do you got anything you want to plug anything you want to tell people about no i just want to tell them tell them that i’ve loved this and you guys are really smart and that’s the greatest compliment yeah what a compliment you thank you so much doctor take care take care of yourself [Music] nicole you ever talked to somebody about a song and you’re just like i like that song and they’re like yeah well when they went to the downbeat tempo on the third eighth the happy and they start breaking it down and yeah quickly realize like oh you’re a musical genius and i’m just somebody who listens to something at the gym correct that’s how i felt with dr norton sure yeah he was he was like incredible he’s on a different plane just a vat of information in that brain also y’all couldn’t see him but his eyes were closed as if he was like living it was like he was it was like he was conducting a symphony as he was speaking to us that’s incredible really really interesting and also i love the fact that philosophers exclusively speak in riddles i mean even i love it at the end of all this i mean he waxed philosophical for dang near an hour it was awesome about whether or not hot dog is sandwich and all this and when we finally asked him to just hit us with well in this scenario if you did this and i did this then i would not have a reason um but i think that’s beautiful and i mean i i certainly learned a ton yeah i feel like i have expanded my mind and my theories and i i i don’t know i don’t know where i stand i need to like sleep on it i need to talk to some other people god yeah we need to talk to some more people to find out i mean we got part three coming up but like right now has your opinion changed from episode one to two i’m swaying i’m swaying i was double i was doubling down with ken and now dr normore’s making me sway doctor i mean he definitely made me sway in that way too ken it really shocked me how much i was willing to say that a hot dog is not a sandwich but then after talking to dr normore it was like this idea that truth can only live within you in that sense that there is never going to be a fully universal definition never there can be to like a large in group of people right yeah you know what i mean um murder is bad murder is bad right like yeah oh man we should have asked him about that we should have gotten into moral relativism with it next time but i mean god that was incredible uh another thing that i learned is i just sweat when talking about whether or not a hot dog’s a sandwich i guess you just get nervous or something i think it’s my brain is working on overdrive yeah i touched your forehead you were sweating you really got a lot of my sweat on you i did um but i mean this makes me really excited uh for episode three talking about legalistic definitions of a hot dog oh it’s gonna get so juicy i’m gonna throw so many legal terms maybe it’s corporate i object badgering you’re badgering badgering oh man nicole should we do some opinions you like casseroles yeah but we have to sing it we have so okay fine you lead it off i’ll follow opinion opinions [Music] that was abhorrent i’m so sorry maggie you are listening to that closer than anyone in i’m sorry if your ears are bleeding i am not financially liable for that i feel like you’ve placed it on your hr directory i feel like if we were on american idol you’d just get an instant no from she’s like poland so sorry you’re probably good at other things i think katy perry is not out all right first up first up first up we got at rafa conrad beef hot dogs are better than poor hot dogs agreed here’s where it takes a turn nicole but turkey hot dogs are better than beef hot dogs so turkey better than beef better than pork yeah that was what the hand signals i don’t know if you saw yeah i mean i’m not the biggest fan of turkey hot dogs i’m just all beef all day turkey hot dogs as somebody who grew up eating so much ground turkey because some idea of health right uh turkey burgers on the grill turkey meatloaf turkey meatballs and somebody who still does that to this day so i’m like well mine’s a little bit healthy yeah um no i like resent turkey hot dogs but that said maybe i just haven’t had a good one because like turkey hot like hot links if i cut up a turkey hot dog and i put it in some huevos with some oh yeah so i would enjoy it i agree but on its own like in a bun with a little bit of a condiment no and i do find it fascinating how like all beef hot dogs are fantastic national all beef is great but that said like a beef sausage as opposed to a pork sausage you’re doing a coarse ground brat or something pork sausage is the way it is but there’s something about like the aggressiveness of the spicing of a hot dog that to me lends to the beefiness or maybe it’s just the fact that that’s what i grew up on but like all beef hot dogs man nothing better shout out hebrew natty light josh before we get to our next opinion we gotta chat a little bit about something what yeah you ever heard of good mythical evening i have oh my gosh it’s happening again again how crazy uh the show is live on september 1st to jump start labor day weekend tickets are on sale right now at goodmythicalevening.com i’m super excited this is one of my favorite things that mythical does this is raw this is x this is the after dark raunchy version of mythical x xx maybe all right rated r rated r uh it’s at least 17. pg-13 for visible male nipples i believe that’s how you get the pg-13 rating my nipples were incredible they were hyper visible last time because they were shined up with olive oil and really under the bright lights uh but really good mythical evening’s gonna be an incredible time go get you tickets uh you’d see raven we’re now on to the opinions on that casserole’s part now um wait hold on did you pronounce it yitzi revenge because you assumed that they are jewish and that very much sounds like a hebrew name no is it raven look at my favorite but yitzi revenge sounds like the name of a rabbi okay at yeti revenge says for the longest time i didn’t like my hot dog in a bun i hate condiments only ketchup for fries and nuggets as i grow up i do eat a i do eat with a bun sometimes but it’s not my preference that was a lot okay so i read this right no i also they’re saying they they they didn’t josh no i fully understand this because i also grew up not eating hot dogs and buns but it was for a very specific reason so my grandma no no no i wasn’t on like a low carb diet from a child like i wasn’t anywhere no my grandma who is from south africa british commonwealth country um i would like come home from school when i was living with her and she’d be like josh do you want some sausages and i go heck yeah granny i’m a portly young man i want some sausages thinking that it would be like either an actual sausage on a plate or a sausage sandwich or maybe even i don’t know but what came to me was instant mashed potatoes with two hebrew national hot dogs gosh bangers and mash it’s bangers and mash but you know she is jewish so doesn’t eat pork and so what’s the most accessible beef sausage hot dogs for national hot dogs baby and that said i will still sometimes the snack just microwave a hebrew national hot dog and eat it covered mustard and hot hot dogs are a delicious standalone sausage yeah hot dogs fresh out of the microwave yup is one of my favorite things but i always put ketchup or hot sauce or mayo on the side is that okay just for dipping yeah did you just dip it in mayonnaise no i like josh come on i’m a woman of class i do a squirt of mayo i do a squirt of hot uh hot sauce and i do a squirt of ketchup and i kind of just oh you mash it no no i go through it like drag it through the garden that’s what they call it and yeah yeah my garden is mayonnaise my garden mayonnaise my garden is mayonnaise is the worst memoir title i’ve ever heard but it’s kind of beautiful all right at finley jane costco hot dogs have the prime bun to sausage ratio fluffy bun without drowning the sausage but no sausage overhang that that’s a nice thing when there’s no sausage overhang i like biting the tip off sometimes doing a little little action yeah i just spit it out right into the trash can spit it into that kid’s eye this i i do love costco hot dogs only thing i might say is that i think it’s too big to be the ideal golden rule to be the fibonacci sequence of hot dogs it’s a little too girthy of a wiener that’s a you thing my i love costco hot dogs and another thing that i love about costco hot dogs is the wheel that the onions the onion wheel keeps all turning that’s my favorite thing for people that don’t know uh costco has they have a litany of condiments they have ketchup they have yellow mustard they have spices they have relish that’s in like a pump yeah yeah but then they’re onions they could just have chopped onions in a bowl no fresh fresh they put whole onions in a device that you hand crank and it spits onions willy-nilly all over your hot dog it’ll get on your hand and you don’t care you have to like hold it like down like by your thigh and like lift it up a little bit and then of onions i love the onion wheel like costco for my birthday i love it can you buy one from my brother i know i’m not gonna buy you an onion wheel also there’s no way that’s a specialized tool right like that has to be used for other it’s probably a meat grinder that they like change the thing just retrofit it’s just an onion grinder i’m guessing i love that god bless costco hot dogs okay uh dj cereal sauce says you guys you guys have gone on recording don’t quote uh don’t no no don’t put us on the record this is all on background okay doctor cereal i forgot his doctor dj cereal sauce says you guys have gone on record saying you like long dogs over thick ducks in my enjoyment of a hot dog is a nice mixture of both thin hot dogs don’t feel satisfying but full brats if those are in the equation are simply too much to handle so you’re trying to find the goldilocks of hot dogs and let me tell you you know what you gotta try all the hot dogs try all the wieners that fits in your bun and you just gotta find it and you keep trying dj cereal sauce you keep trying to find your magical goldilocks the right wiener size exists for you and for a lot of people which is why i don’t like when places brag about size they’re like we have a quarter pound hot dog a full foot long hot dog i’m like size everyone has different buns and this is absolutely true you know and it’s only it’s science to prove this that women over five nine don’t feel that sonic’s foot long coney dog are you kidding me that’s no that’s real i’m saying the sizes of all buns are different we think we we we know that weiner sizes are different but the size of buns are also different that’s just math what are you talking about [Laughter] i can’t believe so early on i started hyperventilating oh god nicole our brains are turning to absolute mustering this by the end of it we’re just going to be shells hot dogs is hot sandwich i’d like to eat damaged god well thank you for listening to a hot dog it’s a sandwich thank you for listening to a hot dog it’s a sandwich nicole i’m sorry i thought you’re just gonna respond you’re welcome you’re welcome if you want to be featured on opinions or like casseroles you can hit us up on twitter at mythicalchef or anthony’s author with the hashtag opinion casserole and for more mythical kitchen check us out on youtube where we launch new videos every week and of course if you want to share pictures of your dishes hit us up on instagram at mythical kitchen if you don’t want any more of us don’t go to any of those no no go talk to a phone call we’re your friends we’re your grandma now oh god all right stay tuned next week where we talk about hot dogs again and we got a lawyer and god i hope we beat a lawyer in an argument nicole likely story [Music] you