Grudges
History is replete with infamous grudges. Invasions launched by Julius Caesar, political rivalry between Gladstone and Disraeli and musical enmities that turn tragic in the case of Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur. But are grudges good or bad? What is the best way to deal with them and why do we have them in the first place?
In this week’s episode, we discuss grudges. We define the key characteristics of a grudge, compare them to feuds and vendettas, explore the notion of a good grudge and touch upon the animal kingdom, first impressions and justice. Finally, we reveal our favourite and longest-held grudges.
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Transcript
Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast produced by me, Fraser McGruer, for Aleph. In this series of podcasts we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm here with Nick Hare and Chris Wragg of Aleph and this week we're discussing grudges. I want to know why you want to talk about grudges. I think you're both pretty grudgy kind of people and I have to say a large part of my social interactions essentially are grudges and my activities around them so I'm very interested in this topic. Okay, go for it.
Speaker B:Yeah, well I'm not actually. I'm really not a very grudgy person. I've got a few really good ones but don't generally form them. Usually quite easy going. Anyway, I'm a big fan of Werner Herzog and so I've seen most of his documentaries and I like him as a director. Quite prickly, isn't he? He is. He had a very, very strained relationship with his kind of leading man stroke muse Klaus Kinski and I saw a YouTube video the other week where he was describing an argument he'd had with Klaus Kinski who was absolutely going nuts because his coffee wasn't hot enough and Werner Herzog then went away and got his revenge.
Speaker A:Sorry to interrupt your anecdote. I mean, this was in the middle of a jungle.
Speaker B:Yeah, they're in the jungle.
Speaker A:On a film set and there'd been a helicopter crash nearby.
Speaker B:Yeah, but the key issue is that he then formulated his revenge plan, which was to get his last bit of Toblerone and then take it to Klaus Kinski and eat it in front of him. Apparently, Toblerone was the gold of the jungle. So anyway, there are histories actually with examples of interesting grudges, some even more dramatic than eating a Toblerone in front of someone. There's the story of Julius Caesar, who was kidnapped by pirates and after being ransomed by his friends, he raised an army, went to the island where the pirates lived, captured them all and had them crucified. Enrico Dandolo, who was an emissary, I think, who went to see the Byzantines. I can't remember where he was from, probably Venice or something. Blinded by the Byzantines. I don't know, they were cross with him for some reason. So 30 years he became king of, I think it was and then 30 years later went back with an army and sacked it as part of the fourth crusade. Alfonso IV of Portugal. He had his son's lover assassinated. And so his son eventually became king. Sorry. Yes. So his son, Peter, eventually became King Peter I. And he, to get his revenge on the assassins, he ripped their hearts out with his bare hands.
Speaker A:Oh, good Lord.
Speaker B:Yeah, it's quite. That's quite difficult to do. It is. I mean, it's a lot harder than eating a Toblerone. But anyway, the point is, isn't it, that people obviously could be motivated to go to quite some lengths when they have a grudge against someone. And so I think what we want to talk about is what is going on with grudges? Are they are they good or bad? You know, what's the best way to deal with them? And, you know, so on. Why have we why do we have them in the first place?
Speaker A:So, OK, yeah, nicely framed. I think you've got an idea or some definitions of what a grudge might be. I think you do as well, Nick. Let's see how they compare. Chris, what's a grudge?
Speaker C:Well, I think the first thing is that to me they're distinct from some other similar related and irrational negative type interactions between human beings. So I think they're distinct from feuds and vendettas and rivalries. Right. So and and the way I think they're distinct is that for a grudge to be a grudge, a classic grudge, it has to be enduring. Right. So so it has to be long running. And often that means that the the satiation of the grudge comes decades after the the initial instance or initiation of the grudge. I think that they're deeply personal. So so they they are deeply personal and they're emotional. So there's a there's a strong emotional and maybe irrational, seemingly irrational element to them. Right. I think where they're distinct from feuds and vendettas is that they're they're generally non escalatory. Right. So it's not about things getting worse and worse and worse. It's about storing something up, executing revenge at the right time, or maybe even just, you know, quietly simmering on it for a long period of time. But I also think that a grudge can can either have a minor cause. So so or more more accurately, the they have a disproportionate impact. So so the the desire to do something about it outstrips what the initial slight was in the first place. So that's my sort of that's my kind of starter for 10 of how to what the parameters for a grudge are. Yeah. And also, I think you sort of nailed it
Speaker A:when you say the difference between feuds and vendettas, for example, is it feels like incredibly
Speaker C:personal, incredibly emotional. Yeah, it's not clan against clan. It's although we'll talk a little bit about that in due course, but but yeah, they don't they don't continue to spiral. I think that becomes then a feud and a vendetta. Right. I am. I don't really agree. I think a feud is the logical
Speaker B:outcome of a grudge. If you accept what Chris and I agree grudge can turn into a few. Yes. Yeah. Right. So so what I'm saying is they're not it's not really just so Chris was saying there has it has this kind of I think the desire for vengeance, the desire to satisfy your grudge is often for a worse to inflict much worse hurt on the on the person who aggrieved you. Right. The kind of two eyes for an eye kind of kind of revenge, I think, is what you is what you want. Definitely. I mean, we you know, when I when I've been sort of someone's been rude to me on the tube or something and I think, well, I'd happily murder that person right now. So I just think that's what happens. Then then that that person feels aggrieved because they've been given an unjust punishment. And that then leads to a spiral of grudges. Right. So I don't I don't think it's. But but to me, the defining the defining feature is that it is about a perception of unfairness. I think there has or being wrong of being wrong. So it's not just someone doing something bad to you. It's someone doing something unfair to you. Yeah. Or, you know, humiliation, which which I think would be kind of counted as a in the same bracket, really. So so I just so that's to me is it's almost like a mental judgment about how fairly you were treated. And if you were treated very unfairly, hey, presto, we're in grudge territory. And you want to get your own back. Yeah. Yeah. But it's got
Speaker A:that sense of smouldering resentment about. Yeah. And not necessarily activity like you might get in a bed debt or a feud. And actually, it can just be a one off thing because I suppose. Right.
Speaker C:I suppose what I'm sort of what I'm thinking of is a grudge is more restrained. So so there's so so yes, if somebody were unrestrained with themselves, it would immediately develop into a feud. But I think a grudge is more where they're able to sort of keep a lid on it for longer and therefore it doesn't go to tit for tat and massive escalation. Internally nurture it. Yeah. Something quite internal about it. It feels. Yeah. Yeah. Because you bear a grudge. Right. Which has this sense of this thing on your shoulders that you're carrying round with you. That's eating away at you. And you're you're waiting to waiting for your moment. Yeah. Grudges can be I think are often just
Speaker A:unsatisfied. And maybe that's the nature of them. Anyway, anyway, if we if we covered it in terms
Speaker B:of define you reckon. Yeah. Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think that's the gist of it. Okay. All right. So the question is, are grudges good or bad? Or can they be either? So I've looked online and most of the most of the kind of self help, you know, but they say it's bad. Yeah, they all think it's bad. Right. So so universally agreed, as Chris was saying that a grudge is a kind of weight that eats away at you. And it's harmful. And you should therefore I guess, you know, well, forget about them, attempt to just not let them intrude on you anymore. But, you know, whether that is the same as forgiving the person who wronged you, I don't know. But But anyway, that the sort of universal agreement is that they're bad. And I guess and I guess from a sort of, you know, 21st century point of view, where negative emotions are just bad. That's true. But I'm not
Speaker C: came to came to a head in the: Speaker A:So in the arts, you may be going on to talk about sports. I don't know. Yes. But then we're in Steve Cram and Sebastian Coe.
Speaker B:Exactly. But I mean, are we just talking about rivalry?
Speaker C:I think we are talking about rivalry, but I think under some circumstances where the other party is just so so take, for example, artists producing something based on a grudge that the where the, you know, like Carly Simon's You're So Vain, where the the person the grudge is about is is anonymous and not involved in the in the in the tit for tat, that that grudge can be harnessed in a positive way to positively affect the individual. They can make money from it,
Speaker B:for example. So I think it seems a bit of a niche. I mean, you know, if you have to be an international pop star in order to make a grudge work, you know, I feel like there should be a better justification.
Speaker A:No, but hold on. Hold on. Hold on. So I mean, but no, I do want to revisit to talk about this thing of sports, for example. So, you know, grudge match. It does happen all the time. And it's not just a rivalry. So, I mean, there is a rivalry involved usually. Right. But if we think, you know, I know there's football, for example, but think about boxing. If we think of Muhammad Ali and George Foreman. And there was a smouldering resentment there, especially from Foreman. And then with Joe Frazier as well. And Joe Frazier felt very slighted by Muhammad Ali. And so between those two, you had a series of great, I mean, some of the arguably the greatest boxing matches of all times, which were very much framed and influenced by these grudges that existed. So that's, you know, good stuff, the audience and great sort of, I guess it pushes people along, right, whether it's artistically or within sport or whatever. And surely there must be, you know, I know we're talking about sort of famous examples, but is that the case in personal
Speaker B:stuff as well? I don't know. Well, I think, I mean, you're using boxing is slightly an edge case, but I mean, in general. So there is an argument that which I read, which was quite interesting from Robert Solomon, where he says, actually, for something to be a grudge for something to which he says is basically a form of resentment. Resentment is basically anger directed at someone higher status than you. Whereas contempt is anger directed at someone lower status than you. Now, I think that's really interesting. And I'd like to drill into that in a bit. But if you just take that simple model, because which I think works pretty well, the way that you can get your own back on someone who's higher status than you is either by raising your own status, or by lowering their status. And so you could say, and this isn't so much about grudges themselves, but how you actually deal with them. You could say that the first kind is good. That's about improving yourself, right, improving your own standing. And the second time is bad, it's about harming someone else. So I think that gives you kind of one way to think about it. There's another
Speaker C:dimension. I just think that that is quite an interesting theory, because I think it does fit with my intuitive sense of what a grudge is, which is that it's not acted upon immediately. And why is that? If there's a status imbalance, it's probably because you don't have the power to act on your grudge at that point. So you store it up. And that's, back to my point of a positive element, if it drives you to move yourself up to a stage where you can actually exact justice on this person, then it is potentially a positive thing. Yeah, I mean, I think the classic lion
Speaker B:who's just been bested by another lion, who's stolen all the lionesses, would be a good... You imagine that lion, the one who's just been booted out, he must have a grudge. And I guess that sort of feels to me like a really well distilled example of what it's like when you have a grudge. You're retreating because you've lost or you are... And you're going to go away... There's an impotency about it. Exactly. You're going to go away and you're going to work out what you can do to get your own back.
Speaker C:And I think this touches on the natural aspect of grudges. And in fact, there's a chap called Vladimir Markov, who was a poacher. So we talked about lions. I'm going to talk about tigers now. And he was hunting a Siberian tiger. He was Russian, obviously, out somewhere in the Siberian tundra. And he shot the tiger, but he only wounded it. And a fatal mistake. But he then... And he stole some of its kill, crucially, as well. He took away his gnawing at a deer or something. And he took that for himself. And this tiger effectively followed him back or took his scent and then destroyed everything that had his scent on it in location. And then hid and waited for him to return to his cabin or whatever. And apparently waited for up to two days, waiting for him. And then as he came back, it ate him. And in a sense that doesn't make any sense in the context of if it were looking for something to hunt, why would you go after a human? And so that exists in nature as a sense. But you've also got this imbalance. At the point at which he's got his gun and he's the one hunting, the tiger has to slink away. But at the moment that it's got things in its favour and it's stalking him and he's unaware, that's when it can exact retribution.
Speaker B:And I think it's fair to say that that's a grudge. Animals have grudges. I'm happy with that. And I think there is an interesting paradox, which is I think having grudges is so natural for us. We don't ask, we don't notice that actually it's quite an odd thing to do in the sense that it's actually harmful for us in the short term, at least. And it's certainly potentially risky as well. Right. Because it'd be much better if this tiger just said, all right, I'll chalk that one up to experience. I'll go and hunt a deer. Much easier than waiting for two days for this guy to come back. But the tiger didn't do that. So why have we evolved a very desire to do something which is superficially very costly? There's a bit of a game theory puzzle there. Well, I mean, it's actually in a sense, you know, the fact that it's hardwired and intrusive and the fact that it isn't a rational desire in the sense that we don't sit down and go, will satisfying this grudge, you know, make me better off? We don't ask that question. We merely want to satisfy it. That's it. That's an end in itself. And the well, the rationale would be, I think, the same reason that those kinds of things appear in nature all over the place, things that are kind of costly and not really beneficial to you, because it's better, you know, animals which are hardwired to have grudges that acts as a as a as a big deterrent on, you know, belittling them and a motivator to go back and try and, you know, become high status. If you see it as a status thing, status is very important. So it's a deterrent against against slighting people in one regard, but also, you know, is it, you know, in the same way that being highly motivated by sugar and fat makes us, you know, really work hard to get food. You know, a desire to to to raise your status against someone who slighted you is obviously beneficial to your survival. But but it did. Sorry. Go on, Chris.
Speaker C:Well, I was just going to say sort of picking up on that that idea of, you know, why why from an evolutionary strategy point of view, we might bear a grudge. I think there's also the formation of the grudge and the maintenance of the grudges is sort of I'm going to argue is is to some extent hard hardwired. I mean, if you look at what why they exist and why you know why sometimes a fairly small thing can lead us to want to have a disproportionate impact on somebody and why grudges are so hard to shake. Right. Once you've why you can't get rid of it, why it's sort of constantly reinforced. And I think there's a number of sort of things going on there. So so there's the idea that if somebody somebody slights you, this this idea of sort of once bitten twice twice shy that you you know, we're built to have loss avoidance. So, you know, a near fatal occurrence or a negative occurrence anyway, will has to have a lasting effect on us. You know, it's very difficult to say, oh, well, that person wasn't very nice to me. But never mind. Next time maybe they will will be nice. You're like, no, there was a negative thing happened. And that's going to disproportionately weigh in in my evidence sort of kind of catalog. And and subsequently, you know, we're then subject to confirmation bias about, oh, God, they did that other thing. You forget the other 15 things that they did that were totally innocuous. And you just remember the second thing that they did that wasn't that was annoying or, you know, that adds to the to the grudge. So so there's an element of s sort of aggregation that isn't necessarily objective when when you're building up a building up a grudge. But I think the slight is vital,
Speaker B:because just thinking someone's an arsehole is not the same as having a grudge against them. Like, I think the concept of a grudge involves a an imbalance in the cosmic accounting that needs to be addressed that something that person needs to experience something negative. It's very karmic. Yeah. And yeah, so. So, you know, we were earlier saying this sort of good and bad ways of dealing with grudges. But I think there's also, you know, good and bad reasons to have a grudge in the first place. Right. So which which essentially comes down to if you if you think that it's about injustice, which feels very plausible to me, whether or not you actually were the victim of injustice or whether you were, in fact, justly treated. Right. And I think this intersects with the sense of entitlement, like someone who who thinks they're entitled to something and doesn't get it is going to see that as an injustice, potentially have a grudge. Right. So so I think that some people have a greater sense of entitlement than others. So it's sort of those two things put together, logically imply that there are some people who go round feeling, you know, feeling feeling more aggrieved because they feel like they're not getting their due. And those people are likely to have a greater sense of of injustice, i.e. have have more grudges. Right. And so I think there's a sense in which, OK, if you were actually unfairly treated, it's OK to have a grudge. And in fact, in a sense, you could argue I think it's very plausible that our justice system is a way of systematizing grudges. It's a way of saying, look, we don't want to have feuds. We don't. That's destructive. We're going to take that off everyone's hands and deal with grudges in a systematized, rational, evidence driven way, you know, as a kind of safety valve. It's like we're letting the state do that on our behalf. Right. To deal with the grudges. So if you're the victim of injustice, I'd say it's OK to have a grudge. But, you know, so if you but if you have an inflated sense of entitlement so that you perceive more injustice being served your way, then, you know, obviously you're going to be forming grudges which you're not allowed to form. And in fact, you know, the feeling of resentment is associated with psychopathy. And I think for that reason, because psychopaths are very, have a very keen sense of their own kind of entitlement and and their own sort of status. So, yeah. It was interesting, though, the the etymology there,
Speaker A:because, I mean, if we look into the Greek there, because psychopathy, I mean, that literally means the suffering of the mind or something like that. Yeah. So it's the individual who's suffering. But also it makes me think because I'm quite a grudgy person. Right. Not sure if I agree about this entitlement thing. But anyway, I think one of the things about being like. It doesn't apply to Fraser. No, he's genuinely been very unjustly treated by the whole world. But I think if you think about that kind of person who's constantly peeved and aggrieved, and actually it's not a very, you know, it'd be nice to, you know, I'd like to sort of be more magnanimous. Right. And I think it's a more attractive trait. But on the other hand, how boring, like how bland and going back to at the beginning when we talked about like the Internet thinks is a bad thing, grudges. Well, of course, it bloody does, because the Internet is so bloody preachy these days and it's just all a bit dull and bland. So thank God for people like me charge around the world with their grudges. Well, but I mean, if what we've said is true,
Speaker B:which it feels plausible to me, then, you know, the thing is that having grudges is inherently low status. You can't have a grudge if you're high status. We've had so many episodes where
Speaker C:it turns out my character is really low status. Yeah. So low status and entitled. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker B: his, if you think back to the: Speaker A:We need to wrap up shortly. However, before we do, perhaps more, Chris, anything to add before we just finish it off?
Speaker C:Well, no, I was just going to say, I think I think that that that's an interesting observation. And I think it kind of tallies with if you look at the the way the media that represent those different groups operate. And if you think about the Daily Mail is full of outrage material. And and I think and I think this shows why grudges maybe don't scale very well, or they can be harnessed by political movement to great effect. Because essentially, a grudge is supposed to be a personal thing, right? You have something happen to you. But nowadays with mass media and social media, you can see somebody else slighting someone a bit like you. And you you you you inherit that that sense of the of the slight, even though it was so. So you then tar whoever that group is that, you know, the individual slight some individual. It's on YouTube. You observe that and you go, oh, well, all the people like that, they hate me. So I don't like all the people like that. And, you know, we're this we're this group over here being slighted. Our group has a grudge against them. Now, of course, that was one incident. Right. So in our old school mind, that would have been the one incident. And it would have been a weighty example because you only had five incidents of, you know, in your in your evidence catalogue. But now you see the one instance of that happening. I mean, amongst gazillions of incidents that were totally harmless and you you latch in on that and form a grudge based on it. So so that's why I think there's a great sort of a huge creation of outrage type things is always, you know, cyclist gets cut up by by van. And all the cyclists are like, yeah, van drivers hate them.
Speaker A:And it's tremendously validating if there's other people joining in with your group judge group grudge.
Speaker C:Yeah. Yeah. So so I think that transferring of of of judge of grudges, grudgement of grudgement is is is something that is facilitated by the media we have at the moment and which is probably fueling more of a sense of grudge interactions, grudge politics.
Speaker A:Yeah. Yeah. All right. Let's wrap this up. Got a question. Either. I mean, what would you reckon we can either say, tell us a grudge, your own grudge, your favourite grudge that you've nurtured for so long could be personal. I think you could have yours, your favourite grudge in general. But I think the personal nature of grudges makes it. Yeah. What's your longest held grudge? I mean, I find it really difficult to nail this one down because I've got so many. I really do. Yeah, I've got I've been developing every day. I've got a new one recently, you know, and also, you know, I'm married. Right. So you're going to have lots of grudges building up for two decades.
Speaker C:How much space in your memory is is filled up with with grudge.
Speaker A:Right. And also how much my emotional capacity. Yeah. My bandwidth is. How much more productive you could be. I know. If you listen to the Internet and you share.
Speaker C:Well, perhaps it's motivating him, though. Yeah, that's true.
Speaker A:But that's why I've gone on to be such a brilliant individual. Right. And achieve so much. Yeah, right.
Speaker C:You've such high social status. Yeah, exactly that.
Speaker A:Yeah. So let me think about that and what and be careful. I might be developing a new grudge right now when you say those kind of things. Who wants to kick off?
Speaker B:Well, I've got one. Right. Go for it. When I was about 14, a biology teacher called Mr. Cook took over the class for one lesson because our normal biology teacher was away. And he just said, right, you're going to sit in silence and do your homework or something. There was no teaching of biology or anything like that. And I at one point asked Ali Ahmed, who sat next to me for rubber. American listeners, that's an eraser. And and Mr. Cook overheard, made me stand up in front of the class, spent about 10 minutes like a like a drill instructor telling, telling me that I was, you know, just how deeply flawed I was and how, you know, everything was good until eventually he made me cry.
Speaker A:Oh, good Lord.
Speaker B:Yeah. Jesus at 14. That's quite. Yeah. I mean. Well, because he just wouldn't stop until and I that's I Mr. Cook, if you're listening or if any of you knows Mr. Cook, who's a biology teacher, I want you to let him know that he's not safe. He's not safe. One day, one day someone's going to come and find him one day. He's going to, you know, be too close to a window. I'm not I'm not going as far for legal reasons. I'm certainly not going as far as to make a death threat or anything like that. I'm just saying Mr. Cook needs to needs to watch out.
Speaker A:Just saying.
Speaker B:So that's that's probably that's let me do the math. 30, 35 year old grudge, which is not going away. I like it. I like it.
Speaker C:But it hasn't it hasn't been satisfied yet. No, no. But it's still there. And that's the most that's the most powerful kind of of grudge. I think the one that hasn't yet been.
Speaker B:Yeah, I just but I'm really not very grudgy. I don't tend to. And I think maybe it's just because I, you know, tend to look down on. It's because you're so magnanimous. Well, I think it's probably just an inflated sense of self-worth, which means that. But I don't feel slighted when someone on the bus, you know, it's rude to me. I just think, well, who are you? It must be lovely to be so high status.
Speaker C:I do know that you do possess a number of grudges, though, against people.
Speaker B:So maybe I do. Maybe I'm kidding myself.
Speaker C:Chris? Well, yeah, I think mine is. So I have to be a little bit careful about phrasing this one. A friend of mine and their erstwhile partner, the first time I met the partner, we were basically. This is 20 odd years ago, 25 years ago, perhaps. And we were attending a party at the partner's house. And they basically expelled us from the party. Entirely justifiably, it should be said. Right. So we turned up with no provisions and gate crashed effectively on the sort of steer of the friend whose partner this was. And so, you know, retrospectively, the action was completely justifiable. But at the time, I perceived it in some way as a slight. It's sort of like, oh, I don't think you can do that even under these circumstances. And and it's been impossible to shake that that sense of something not quite right there, even though this person has gone on, you know, this friend of mine has gone on to have a relationship with this person, had children and for four decades. And they're obviously a perfectly decent person. But I can't. But one day. Well, no, no, not one day. It's more that sense of I just can't. One day, the brakes will mysteriously fail. Yeah. I can't overcome that sense of not being right on the first impression, regardless of loads of evidence to the contrary.
Speaker B:Well, that invites lots of questions, but I don't think they're for the podcast. Fraser, limit it to one, please. Well, I've actually got.
Speaker A:Are you going to? It's actually got. This is doing it again. I've actually got a top 10. Well, no, of course I do. But what I've got, you're going to like this is a kind of trilogy within one grudge.
Speaker C:OK.
Speaker A:OK. Which is when I was about 11, I got my English exam marked by someone actually a few years older in the school I'd never met. And I was I was so I did.
Speaker C:I had the temerity not to give Fraser a hundred percent. I came.
Speaker A:I think I came top in the exam. Right. Yeah. However, what really got my goat then and still now, 35 years later or something is I lost a mark because we'd been asked to look for Americanisms within a text and I'd been marked down or lost a point because I said that the word candy was an Americanism. Yeah. Right. Sweets. Right. And and.
Speaker C:Was it used to mean chocolate or was it mean used to use sweets?
Speaker B:It was meant it definitely meant sweets. If it means specifically hard boiled sugar candy. Don't you. No, no, no. I'm on your side here. Calm down. Trying to help you. No, but there's specifically like a candy cane. Yeah. Like rock. You remember rock, you know, from the seaside. Or boiled sweets. That is that. I would count that as candy.
Speaker A:How often do we use the word candy in Britain? Never.
Speaker B:But it refers to one very specific type of sweets, whereas Americans use it for all these sweets.
Speaker A:Yeah, right. It was a general thing. Right. I'm giving this to you. I think you're on the wrong side here. Anyway, and what really annoyed me was this person had a doctorate, a PhD from some posh university in American and Russian studies. Right. American and Russian literature. You should know better. Right. So that's the first one. OK. But that same person, then years later, in a report they wrote about me in the A-levels, he said, because I had he said, McGruer has all the intellect of an aging Lemange. And I have not received one piece of work from him this term. OK, I must admit, I've got a sneaking regard for what he wrote. I think it was beautifully. I like the aging bit. An aging Lemange.
Speaker B:That's better than just a Lemange.
Speaker A:And as you know, I do not have the intellect of an aging Lemange. It's, you know. Fresh Lemange, maybe. Fresh Lemange, maybe, yeah. And that sort of has sat a while burning with me. And then also he was preparing me for some exams once. And I was talking about. Is this trilogy all the same individual? It is, it's the same person. I was talking. I was having a mock interview with him and I started talking about exegesis or something like that. Right. Which was, oh, yes. And I said to him, oh, do you know? Because I was talking about, you know, the Gospel of Mark or something and the exegesis of it or something like that. I said, oh, do you know what exegesis means? And he goes, yes, I do know exegesis means. And I also know how to pronounce it. Ah, good. I was like, you, you, hmm. You know, so that person. So those grudges have been held there. Now, in a sense, my grudge was satisfied. But I don't, I'm not proud of how it happened, which is where he died, you know. And.
Speaker C:By your hands?
Speaker A:Not by my hand. OK. But that, as you can tell, just now, this has sat with me.
Speaker C:Yeah, I don't think there's anything wrong in getting. Revelling in someone's death. In revelling in someone's death, provided it wasn't caused by you. I definitely don't revel in his death, just to say.
Speaker B:No, but also, but in a sense, it's unsatisfying because you never got the chance to. He didn't die with his last image being you laughing in his face, saying this will prove.
Speaker C:Eating, eating candy. Yeah.
Speaker B:You're going to get assassinated by Blancmange, aren't you?
Speaker A:Yeah. All right, we're going to stop there. I quite enjoyed that sort of the end of it. I feel, yeah, there's something about grudges I like, actually. Yeah. We'll stop there. Thanks, as always, for listening to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast. I'm Fraser McGruer. We've been here with Nick Hare and Chris Wragg of Aleph. Until next time. Goodbye.
