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Quillette contributor Robert Lynch spent about ten years on Wall Street before addiction derailed his career. He got clean, earned a PhD in anthropology and held postdoctoral posts in Finland and at Penn State, fully expecting a tenure-track job at a top university. Instead, he now teaches one class at High Point University in North Carolina and spends three days a week as a substitute teacher.

He wrote about that fall in status in “What an Eighth Grader Taught Me About Status,” the story of the ancient fossil he brought to class and what one eighth grader did to it. The narrated version has been watched more than 215,000 times.

Robert joins Zoe to discuss how recovery made him more resilient, why chimps and even mice laugh, why comedy without risk isn’t really comedy, and why he believes America’s national religion is “You think you’re better than me.”

For more from Robert, read his recent Quillette essays “The Ape in the Basement” and “Naked in America,” and his Substack, The Laughing Ape.

Transcript

This transcript has been edited for clarity.