Philosophy – Page 3 – Julian Wise

Clown School Break Day 28: Statistical Cheese

December 19, 2025 JulianLeave a comment

In which Our Hero ages in a cave for 24 months.

This has so far been my favorite Christmas season.

Why?

Is it the general chillness?
The presence of a 16-month-old nephew (our activities constrained by nap windows like a benevolent dictator)?
The absence of sprinting – from task to task, from obligation to obligation – so that family time feels calm instead of stolen?

No running and only a little work means I’m easy and jovial. I like this version of myself.

Part of this is the skill clown school taught me: the ability to choose fun instead of waiting for it to arrive accidentally.
And part of it is contrast: the calm after an absurdly intense storm.

January looms.
I’m buying an apartment.
Interviewing for a job.
Considering family visiting me in France.

For now, though, the assignment appears to be: do less. Enjoy more. Taste the cheese.

—

Tonight we performed a statistical analysis on cheese.

Ten cheeses. France, Spain, the UK.
Who liked what. How much. Whose tastes clustered. Who outlied in what ways?

My partner started a masters in statistics during her genetics PhD. This is her preferred form of play: turning pleasure into a dataset. Not just “which cheese did everyone enjoy the most” but “what were the standard deviations” and “who had the most similar taste in cheeses? The most divergent?”

It occurred to me that this – thinking carefully about what we like – is a behavior often poo-pooed.

Anti-intellectualism runs rampant. In part because it’s easier to form a mob than to compete on precision. If you can’t articulate why something is good, it’s comforting to declare articulation itself suspicious. If you can’t relate to someone who knows 1/7th in percentages, it’s comforting to outgroup them as mad scientist-y.

And yet:
Some of our favorite cheeses were cheap, mass-market cheeses from France and Spain.

Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.
It’s funny how the everyday object in one country becomes a delicacy in another—just by crossing a border and being paid attention to.

Maybe this is also a clown lesson.

Attention is not seriousness.
Analysis is not joy-killing.
And play doesn’t require intensity—sometimes it requires rest.

All in all, a very chill day.

Which is nice.
Especially
Because
I’m not in charge of the toddler napping
🤡

Clown School Break Day 27: Beards and Bouffons

December 18, 2025 JulianLeave a comment

In which Our Hero chuckles at a mistranslation, then engages with the point itself.

The question was posed earlier today: “How much of your feeling of lack of social fitting at clown school comes from your grooming, or lack thereof?”

A fair question.

I last shaved my face in October. I last cut my hair in 2021.

(To be concrete: at clown school, I showered daily, wore deodorant, and washed my clothes weekly. This topic is about aesthetics, not hygiene.)

I’ve never grown facial hair before. It was always patchy. Now, since July, returning to my endogenous testosterone production with a little bit of external boosting via a doctor-prescribed chemical called Clomid (a 10/10 experience, but a different story), I have finally been able to grow a beard. It’s nice. My partner enjoys the softness. I enjoy the newness and the exploration (and the scritches).

And then, on the hair front, it’s long. Sometimes (3 or 4 times in the last 4 years) I get it treated at a salon to make it simple and easy to manage. Others, I wear hats or put it in a ponytail.

I’ve heard I have split ends. I don’t care.

So:

Do clowns?

The first answer is: probably. Clowns are an immediacy-focused group. One that cares about emotional presence and current experience. They also therefore care about appearance and presentation. And they should: performers are perceived based on their appearance. A comedian who either gains or loses a lot of weight will need to adjust their behavior and performance based on their new perception. (For a biting and sad example, see either this article about Chris Farley or how many Chris Farley bits involve his size.)

So yes, my grooming has probably had an impact.

I mentioned something like this to my interlocutor, to which they replied: “Not because you don’t look good, but because you look like you aren’t taking care of yourself.”

This comment seems worthy of analysis.

Like.

I am taking care of myself.

I’m just not doing things with my body that you (the collective “you”) want me to.

“Not taking care of yourself” is often a polite mistranslation for something else. What it usually means is: you are emitting social signals I don’t enjoy.

I’m enjoying the beard growth. I’m curious where it goes and what it’s like. I’m enjoying the new experiences, even some of the difficult or disgusting ones. (The presence of my mustache means I have to re-learn the skill of using a napkin.) I like my hair as it is: I’m enjoying it growing out.

It’s less “not taking care of myself” and more “not playing others’ game”.

Grooming isn’t just maintenance; it’s signaling. And one of the signals I was sending – intentionally or not – was: I’m not optimizing for your approval.

Which is

perhaps

a fair point.

I’ve opted out of a bunch of life’s societal games. The 9-5 job (or employee status more generally). Living in a fixed location. Dating via specific social rituals. Following a prescribed gender behavior.

It limits who likes me. It limits who spends time with me. But the people who do like me really like me.

I’m thinking about this with clown school. My goals were 80% spiritual and 20% clown-y. That already separates me from the crowd. I’m not the only one in clown school for spiritual reasons: a classmate shared that her motivation was to re-learn how to play so she could enjoy playing with her children again. The majority of my classmates are professional actors.

My clown-y goals were 1) learn the practice of clowning; 2) learn the theory of clowning; and 3) make friends.

If my spiritual goals are not most clowns’ main focus, and most clowns aren’t interested in the theory, then I’m already pretty limited in topic interest overlap.

Add to that the fact that I don’t find fun many things that other clowns do – drinking alcohol; socializing in groups; group texting conversations – and my pool becomes even smaller.

Clowning is about finding games and playing them. It’s about being open and connective and sensitive with others. My first few weeks, when my facial hair looked good rather than just a lot, I was more in flow. Is that a coincidence with the fact that I also enjoyed the class subject matter (Le Jeu) more? Is it true that my focus turned more inward over time, and this didn’t jive with the peers? Complicité is a two way street, and maybe I was blocking the other lane. (As a friend put it: “maybe your flow comes partially from the interactions with others and maybe your appearance changes their interactions with you, which compounds”.)

The most generally-liked clown who I met at clown school was a person who’s constantly generous. Not especially generous with time, resources, or skills, but extraordinarily generous in emotional and social dynamics.

And I

just

don’t value that

as much

as the other

clowns do.

Emotional generosity is the local currency. I value it, just not always above curiosity, theory, or truth. That difference matters more here than I expected.

This isn’t a critique of emotional generosity. It’s a recognition that I underweighted how central it is to clown school, and that mismatch had consequences I’m still understanding.

So I write a daily blog about clowning.
And others
are better
clowns
🤡

Clown School Break Day 26: Clowning as Emotional Oddity

December 17, 2025 JulianLeave a comment

In which Our Hero ends on an unusual question.

Clowning is an odd emotional experience.
Clown school is an odd emotional context.

Where else is one assigned the task: be emotionally open, vulnerable, generous, light, and kind?
Where else is one given an explicit assignment to manipulate their own emotional state in service of others?

One place that comes to mind is politics.

I recently happened upon a (¿state?) senator. I was coming from a friend’s birthday, and the senator commented on the hat I’d given my friend. The senator exhibited genuine-seeming curiosity about what it meant, then delight in the silly inside joke it represented.

And,
like,
he wasn’t being inauthentic.

But,
like,
that is his job.

I don’t believe he was deeply interested in the game itself. I doubt he’d want to watch it or play it unless it came packaged with votes or fundraising. And yet: the delight was real.

I suppose clowns are the same way.

It isn’t inauthentic to change your emotional state and then share that state with others.
But it is contrived.

It’s not inauthentic to manipulate someone at a poker table either.
But it is manipulative.

So what’s the point?

Is this the core function of most people-leadership roles? From CEO to politician to parent to clown: are they all versions of the same act?

If behavior flows from emotion, is a leader’s primary job internal emotional manipulation, followed by broadcasting the result?

I’m reminded of LBJ amping himself up – working himself into a righteous frenzy – before speeches and political events, especially if it felt like he was behaving in ways antithetical to his values. He told himself he was doing it for people he cared about. That the moral sacrifices were worth it.

And then he sent those people to die in Vietnam.

I’ve known a CEO who practiced a similar kind of self-amping. His former employees now, at a remarkable rate, despise him.

So what’s my point? The connection to clowning?

Is it bad to manipulate your own emotional state? Obviously not. But when does it become bad? Under what conditions? In service of what ends?

What’s my point?

I don’t know. I’m musing.

That’s what this blog is. Thinking out loud. Marking where my thinking currently sits and letting it evolve. I don’t endorse everything I’ve ever written. That’s part of being a writer.

But today I’m reminded of how strange an emotional experience clowning is.
And how much people hate politicians.
And I find myself wondering whether – or more precisely, to what degree and in what ways – they should also hate clowns.

🤡

Clown School Break Day 25: Ridicule, Moi?

December 16, 2025 JulianLeave a comment

In which Our Hero pokes fun at poking fun.

A college friend and I were at dinner with his new girlfriend. We were playing a silly word-association game we’d been playing for years. At some point she said, “Stop making fun of me.”

We weren’t making fun of her. We stopped immediately.

But something interesting happened. By misidentifying play as ridicule, the game collapsed – and a contradiction surfaced on its own. No mockery was applied. None was needed.

Play is fragile. When it is misnamed as ridicule – or when the target of ridicule is misidentified – it stops being play at all. And in trying to prevent harm, one can sometimes create the very harm one fears.

—

I find this behavior socially corrosive. Constraint masquerading as protection should be ridiculed and scorned.

Societally, we accept it. Because its harm is not as apparent. It is stifling, restricting, and just plain un-fun. It is stopping someone else’s kid from climbing up the slide because we don’t want our kid to climb up the slide.

—

I laugh probably 3x more than the average person. I find humor probably 3x more often than the average person does.

Infrequently, it’s for a reason undesirable. (Someone has a name that sounds funny to me, so I’m implicitly outgrouping their culture.)

Generally, it’s because 1) they’re doing something that reveals a contradiction between their goals and their behavior, or 2) they’re doing something “silly” – i.e. something that reveals a comic underpinning to existence.

—

When we let people police down to the lowest common denominator, life is duller and weaker.

And that’s how the terrorists win.

🤡

Clown School Break Day 24: Clowning is for Babies

December 15, 2025 JulianLeave a comment

In which Our Hero shares a lack of pain.

My sister’s sixteen-month-old child has not yet learned that life is more pleasant when one defecates intentionally in prescribed locations. Instead, he saves time and effort (and I admire his efficiency) by pooping wherever and whenever inspiration strikes.

After completing this task, he begins to smell.
It is not a pleasant smell.
It gives one the impression that all disgust responses originate here.

To rectify (pun!) the situation, one generally places him on his back and swaps out his undergarments for fresh ones, with some cleansing wiping in the middle (pun!).

He does not enjoy being on his back.

Would you enjoy being held on your back by beings eight-plus times your size?

In response to this dissatisfaction, I’ve learned to change his undergarments while he’s standing. This satisfies the basic needs. But sometimes the environment is not conducive.

Such was the case this afternoon at the park.

We – my father and I – flopped the nugget onto his back.

His face screwed itself into a pre-wail.

I noticed something in myself: calm. Comfortable ease. I found it, then sent it his way. His pre-wail ceased. He looked at my face.

I knelt above the boy-child’s head, my face upside-down over his. He gazed at my scruffy visage; I gazed down at his soft, pudgy one. It didn’t take effort. Just a gentle internal returning-to-the-calm.

He did not find this enchanting. (For roughly four seconds during the change, he looked away.) But it was sufficient.

I am not, perhaps, more entertaining than a stubbed toe is painful.
But I can be more engaging than a sudden flop onto one’s back.

—

At clown school, the second-years play a warm-up game with a baby.

They appear on stage one by one. They make a face or a sound or some small action. The teacher plays either a baby crying or a baby laughing. They continue. The question is simple:

How long can you keep the baby laughing?

I’ve wondered for a while whether that’s the goal of clowning: reach some pre-culture, fundamental-to-all-humans level where your pleasure arrives into any audience, underneath their higher-level reasoning.

I do not yet have the skills to make this baby laugh on command. (Except via the super-secret hack of foot tickles.)

But I do have the ability to Turn On The Calm.

And that

can be

enough.

Clown School Break Day 23: Chill vs. Sprint

December 14, 2025 JulianLeave a comment

In which Our Hero wonders whether ease is wisdom—or just comfort.

My life is much nicer when I’m chiller.
Easier. More relaxed. Less intense.

I’m also fifteen pounds heavier than I like to be.
Running not daily. Not even weekly. (#brokenfoot.)
Accomplishing little in the category of “obviously beneficial to myself, my family, or society.”

Is this… good?

When I was young and zealous, I worked hard to be the best.
I picked a category where being the best seemed possible. I sprinted at it.

At some point in the last nine years, I stopped obviously caring.
Preferences shifted. Priorities shuffled.
What mattered then matters less obviously now.

Sure: do your best on your chosen path.
But also: life is nicer when you chill out.

Is that a lesson of the clown?

There’s a clown I love – an incredibly successful one – who, to my eye, misses mass-market success because of over-intensity. Over-try-harding.
I brought two friends to his show. They left overwhelmed.

“That was a lot,” they said.

I adored it. I went back the next night.
I am a comedy lover.
They are mass-market comedy dilettantes.

My partner says: try hard at what you want.
Sprint at it with intensity.
Relax on the rest.

I like this.
I do this.
I also wonder:

How much of my life is currently nice
because I’m just so chill?

How much would change
if that chill went away?

Am I just
fat
and
happy?
🇺🇸

Will I soon be
fat,
happy,
and bored?
👀

Clown School Break Day 22: The Quiet After the Honk

December 13, 2025December 14, 2025 JulianLeave a comment

In which ease arrives.

The clown school term ended yesterday.
Not with a bang, but a nose honk.
(Editor’s note: only second-year students currently wear red noses.)

My presence there is mostly absence.
I followed the group texts a little, from afar.
I learned the gossip – and how that gossip spread.
A gossipy bunch, the clown schoolers.

I don’t regret missing the most recent course. It was my least appealing (or second-least appealing) of the term. I think I’d burned through my capacity to take in more. Over-exhausted the intake valve.
I’ll be glad to return at the end of January.

—

The past three weeks have held a lot of joy.
Poker: played and studied.
A friend’s birthday.
Time with my family.
Snuggling with my girlfriend and tiny chihuahua.

Today I fixed a door lock, installed new lightbulbs, and upgraded the curtains – all in my parents’ house.

What’s strange is how easy this felt.
(The activity being: doing household tasks.)

Why?
Pent-up doingness from a broken foot?
The return of baseline testosterone?
A heightened ability to find pleasure thanks to clown school?
Or the simple fact that after sustained intensity, everything else feels light?

I don’t know.

I like it.

—

Note: I edited yesterday’s post to add a video of the Egg slot machine discussed at length. That video is also linked here.

Clown School Break Day 21: The Egg Game

December 12, 2025December 13, 2025 JulianLeave a comment

In which Our Hero encounters an eggregious machine.

Walking through the casino today, I saw a brilliant game.
A perfectly engineered one.
A real bad egg.

It’s a slot machine called something like The Egg.

You put in your money. You slap the button.
Standard procedure.
Nothing shell-shocking.

But instead of reels to spin, there’s just an egg on the screen.

Every time you slap, the egg cracks a little more.

And when the egg is fully broken –
crack –
you win a jackpot.

The jackpots (at the $1 play level) range from about $3 to just over $10,000.
All of them are progressive.
They grow the longer you play.

The egg takes a variable number of slaps to break.

It’s a well-made game.
Eggsactly balanced.

Here’s why.

1. It redefines winning.
You will win.
The only question is when.
Just keep putting money in until the egg hatches.

Winning doesn’t feel like if.
Winning feels like eventually.

2. You feel progress.
Every slap cracks the egg a little more.
You’re getting closer.
A chip here, a fracture there.

Are you actually closer?
Who knows.
But it looks like you are, and that’s all your nervous system needs.

3. Everything is a jackpot.
I watched a man spend $70 chasing one $10 jackpot and two $3 jackpots.

He won three times.
He lost $54.

But emotionally, during the process?
Sunny side up.

After he left?
Fried.

4. It’s intelligible.
Most modern slot machines are incomprehensible.
You don’t even know what the rules for winning are until you’ve played for a while.

That confusion creates a false sense of mastery:
“I’m learning the game.”

You are—but learning doesn’t help.

The Egg is different.
Egg → crack → jackpot.
No shell game.
No mystery meat.

Immediate understanding.
Immediate hook.
Egg-ceptionally approachable.

A game egg-zactly positioned to attract newbies.

5. It creates tension – and guarantees release.
The egg will break.
That’s the promise.

When that suspense releases, however,
the yolk (“joke”) will already have been on you.

6. Your action feels causal.
Slap the button.
The egg jiggles.
A crack instantly appears.

Your body doesn’t care about RNGs or payout tables.
Your body says: I did that.

7. You can mash.
On a normal slot machine there’s a pause between spins.
The Egg?
You can mash the button 30 times in 30 seconds.
(I saw a guy mash 70 times in under 3 minutes.)

So if you spend $40 and win $20, you feel frustrated.
And to relieve that frustration:
Have you considered mashing the button?

The feedback loop is tight.
The illusion of control is strong.
The design is…
let’s be honest…
eggstraordinary.

That’s it.

I’ve cracked it.

And now I’m walking away, before I get completely scrambled. 🥚

(Author’s note: I did not actually play the game. I am not a fan of slot machines. I did, however, admire it from afar. Here’s a video of someone playing it.)

Clown School Break Day 20: The Dealer Doesn’t Care

December 11, 2025 JulianLeave a comment

In which Our Hero recalls, yet again, that feelings are weather, not climate.

Poker.

I don’t like poker.
It fucking sucks.

The intensity, the swings, the way it presses you between two stones: your own decisions and the randomness of the universe. As one poker TV show once put it, “It’s a hard way to make an easy living.”

There was a time I stopped playing altogether because I believed poker was net-negative for the world. You take money from people who can’t afford it. Addicts. The lonely. The poor.

And what do you give in return?

Entertainment?
A distraction?
A slow-motion morality play about risk and consequence?

These were my thoughts after losing two big pots tonight.
One I played fine. Just ran into the top of someone’s range.
The other I played poorly preflop in a $50 splash pot and donated my stack like a confused philanthropist. (“Splash pot” = the casino added $50 to it for free.)

Woof.

So I asked myself, as one does after being spiritually hit by a train:

Why do I do this?
Why are we attracted to what we’re attracted to?
Is it genetics? Happenstance? Praise when we were eight and wanted to feel special?

Clown school has taught me one brutal, luminous thing:
You will be pummeled on your chosen path.
Mocked, rejected, flattened, ignored.
And that’s just by the teachers!

Your path should therefore be the thing you continue doing despite the punishment.
What’s the thing you’ll walk through hell for?

I’m deeply dissatisfied with poker tonight. But here’s the truth:
Poker is a game of millions of hands.
Variance is a dragon that only bows after thousands upon thousands of repetitions.
This hand doesn’t matter.
This session doesn’t matter.

Clowning, on the other hand, is both slower and faster.
Yes, the craft takes years, maybe a lifetime – but the feedback is instantaneous.
You step out, you try something, and either the audience lights up now, or it doesn’t.

Steve Martin once asked himself:
“What happens if I never release the tension?”
Instead of setup → punchline → laugh from tension relief, he just stacked more and more absurdity.
If someone left the show emotionless and burst out laughing in the car ride home, he considered that a victory.
(His memoir is worth a read.)

Here’s the thing about Cards.
And the thing about Clowning.

The C’s don’t care about your feelings.
The dealer doesn’t pause because you’re tilted.
The audience doesn’t laugh because you’re sad.

The next hand came.
My body was buzzing with frustration.
But I played fine.
And that was what mattered.

Ugh.

—

It’s now an hour later.
The frustration is gone.

How astonishing, how liberating, how funny it is to remember how fleeting feelings are.

And how little they matter to the game.
Any game.
When the next hand is already being dealt.

Unless you let them play instead of you.
And they are both bad cardplayers and bad clowns.

—

We’re now an hour after that.
I quit the live game because it wasn’t profitable enough.
I wasn’t having fun.
I asked myself the question “If I lost my stack in the next hand, would I rebuy and keep plying?”
The answer was no.

So now I’m at the deli, eating dinner with my father…
While we play online poker with a different group.

🤡

Clown School Break Day 18: More than Flavor

December 9, 2025 JulianLeave a comment

In Which Our Hero Eats Theater for Dinner

“What do you plan to do after clown school?”

Gonzo theater in NYC
Play with children
Live a damn good life

That’s about it.