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- [00:00]
A
Shopping at Whole Foods is one of the things I do in our family. Like the grocery shopping is my job, so I was glad to be able to do that even on vacation. And then, you know, being here in Hawaii, it was the same Whole Foods experience we're thinking about, but then also a bunch of regional stuff too, that they only have at this Whole Foods. We love shopping at Whole Foods because there's always new flavors and foods to choose from. Whichever Whole Foods you are, like whichever Whole Foods you happen to be at. So save on regional flavors at Whole Foods Market and maybe I'll see you at the Whole Foods in Austin sometime. Three, four times a day I reach over and I grab my wife's phone and I check something not social media. I check the Shopify app because Shopify is how I see how the Painted Porch and the Daily Stoic are doing. We've been using Shopify for almost 10 years now. It's great. And we're not the only ones using it. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses and brands all over the world. They do 10% of the E commerce in the US from household names to Gymshark and Allbirds to little brands just getting started and little things in between like Daily Stoic. Everything is all in one place, making your life easier and your business operations smoother. And if you get stuck, Shopify is always around to share advice with their award winning 24. 7 customer service, which we have used many times at Daily Stoke. And with the Painted Porch. It's time to turn those what ifs in to sales with Shopify today. So sign up for your $1 per month trial today at shopify.com stoic go to shopify.com stoic shopify.com stoic welcome to the Daily Stoic podcast designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice and wisdom into the real world. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic podcast. The basic premise of Stoic philosophy to me is life is going to kick you around. It's going to kick your ass, it's going to go sideways. And you got to be able to handle that. You got to be able to not be broken by that. And then this is the most important part. You got to be able to turn it into something. You got to find meaning and purpose in it. You got to be able to rise to that challenge and then use that challenge to become better than you would have had it never happened. It's actually something I talked to David Kessler about. A few years ago, he's an expert on grief. He worked with Dr. Kubler Ross on the stages of grieving. And he adds a new step, a sixth step, which is about, how do you find meaning from grief and loss? Let me play a little chunk of what he and I talked about.
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B
There's some disconnection that I've heard over the years from people in grief. And as I started to talk about it, it became so apparent. Everyone was like, well, David, there's no meaning in a child's death. There's no meaning in a murder. There's no meaning in a betrayal, in a car wreck, in a divorce, in a pandemic. And I realized, oh, the meaning isn't in the horrible thing. The meaning is in us. It's what we do afterwards.
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A
And that is precisely what Arthur Brooks and I talked about in today's episode as well, how you transform suffering in to meaning. We did kind of a masterclass on all the different philosophical schools, the Stoics, the Buddhists, Catholicism, verse, Stoicism, Arthur's own inner conflicts and more. I think you're really going to like this episode. If you don't know who Arthur Brooks is, well, you should. He is a social scientist, one of the world's leading authorities on human happiness. He's a professor at Harvard, columnist with the Free Press, formerly the Atlantic, host of the podcast Office Hours. He's a contributor to CBS and a wonderful speaker. He did a book with Oprah called Build the Life youe Want, did the bestselling book From Strength to Strength, and a book called Love youe Enemies. All of those are available at the Painted Porch. But let's just get into it with Arthur Brooks. Here is part two of our masterclass on philosophy. All right, so give me. I think we can skip the Stoics, get enough of that here.
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C
They can't get enough here. They can't get enough.
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A
Tell me about Epicurus.
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C
Epicurus. Well, of course. Who is way before Epictetus.
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A
Yes.
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C
I mean, it's what, 250 years before Greek, Roman. Yes. So Epicurus predates a lot of this stuff. And Epicurus, who is completely misunderstood today because it's the whole idea of eudaimonia versus hedonia. Hedonia, which is hedonist and is hedonic. And all these words come from it as if it's the pursuit of unbridled pleasure that's actually not right in a bunch of different ways. Pleasure is a limbic phenomenon that occurs in the limbic system. An ancient consol Tissue that's up to 40 million years old predates Homo sapiens. That's what produces your emotions, negative and positive, which you need to survive and thrive. To be sure, if you hit the lever of pleasure over and over and over again, you're tapping the limbic system and you're being managed by those pleasures. That's the reason that your friends from high school that wanted to feel good all the time are still living in their mom's basements because they couldn't make anything of their lives because they were being managed by their limbic systems.
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A
Delayed gratification is that other part.
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C
Yeah, well, among other things. I mean, the whole idea that we're talking about here is the other part. So that's how we think of hedonism. That's not Epicurus. So Epicurus talked about enjoyment, not pleasure. Pleasure and enjoyment are related, but pleasure is a component part of enjoyment. Enjoyment is pleasure plus people, plus memory. And it moves experience into the prefrontal cortex, executive centers of the brain where you can manage your pleasures and you can make permanent memories. And in so doing, that's why it's a component part of happiness, enjoyment. And so if you're doing something that's addictive and you're doing it alone, you're probably doing it wrong. That's the whole idea. And that's really important to Epicurus because Epicurus is all about enjoyment, which means he's surrounding himself with people and then we're talking about pleasant, non conflictive big ideas and living an extremely deep moral existence. This was not like a constant drunken orgy that was going on.
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A
And I do think the best Stoics had a strong Epicurean streak, right?
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C
And we, the first person who. I mean Epictetus, trashed Epicurus, right? And just. It was a complete. It had nothing to do with it. It was just using him as a foil.
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A
When I think Epictetus having such a life filled with profound suffering, like first 30 years of his life, he's a slave. I think there's probably something about him just at a human level that's like,
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C
fuck that guy, that rich guy, that rich guy in his commune with his weird cult.
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A
Yeah, he doesn't know anything about. He, you know, he didn't, he didn't have to. Nobody broke his leg for sadistic pleasure. You know, Epicurus never had to see Nero's court, Right. You know, like there's. He probably looked at Epicurus the way some of us look at an academic philosopher or a, a guru or something. You don't live in the real world
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C
or Mar a Lago.
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A
Yes, Right.
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C
I mean, there's something where like really?
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A
Yes.
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C
You know, and so. So for sure. But that's not what Epicurus was all about. Epicurus, it was a very. I mean, it's very libertines. You know, the Berkeley generation of 68, they couldn't have lived with Epicurus.
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A
No.
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C
They wouldn't have been able to put up with the rules. Because the whole Epicurus whole idea is if you're actually going to live in a state of semi permanent enjoyment, you better not reduce it to pleasure. You better not reduce it to pleasure. And that's a really important distinction. And so what we can learn from him today is about this pillar of happiness is Epicurean enjoyment, as opposed to Epicurean pleasure is one of the best ways that you can become happier. It's incomplete. Yeah, indeed, it's incomplete. That's why the Stoics are better on the meaning pillar of happiness. The moderns are better on the satisfaction part. And the Epicureans are really, really good on the enjoyment part.
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A
No, and that's why I say you fuse them together and you get something really powerful. Because there's actually something pretty Spartan about Epicurus, right? He's like, you know, there's the joke about the Spartans that hunger is the best flavor, you know, like, and, and there's something about. For him, he reduces his needs down pretty low. And then he's like, this is great. Everything's awesome. I don't have to reach for anything. I don't have to go without anything. It's all very accessible and practical and realistic. He's not saying pleasure is flying in a new gulf stream to have lunch in Paris. He's saying this small pot of cheese is miraculous if you think about how it was made and if you savor every bite of it.
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C
That's right. And the whole idea is, I mean, on the satisfaction pillar, your animal impulse tells you that it's about what you have and having more, which is the Gulf stream, et cetera, which leads to ruin. Absolute personal talk. Anything else just personal ruin. Because you can never have enough. It's actually better described as what you have divided by what you want. And the denominator is more important because a very efficient way to get greater satisfaction in your life is by decreasing the denominator by wanting less. And so this Epicurean notion of wanting less, wanting less, wanting less, wanting less and watching your satisfaction rise and rise and rise. Or enjoyment in this particular case. But of course Asymptotically, it doesn't work.
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A
Right.
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C
You can't go to wanting nothing.
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A
Yeah.
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C
Because if you want nothing, well, I mean, wanting for nothing, I suppose that's a heaven, I guess, right? Which is not what he was trying to create.
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A
I just think, like, I think about his garden and the simplicity and the beauty and the long evenings. It's a pretty simple thing.
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C
What it is, is really in modern thinking and in Buddhist thinking, but really in modern thinking, it's really a lot about mindfulness. And that mindfulness is a very hard thing to do because the human brain, the prefrontal cortex, is designed for you to time travel retrospectively, prospectively and mindfully. Those are the three time zones that are actually in your head all the time. Most people spend the least amount of their time here now that they don't spend their time mindfully. So Marty Seligman, my great mentor in positive psych of business, of Happiness, he says that we shouldn't be called. We shouldn't be called Homo sapiens, we should be called Homo prospectus because we live in the future. 20 to 50% of your cycles, on average, are living in the future. If you're an entrepreneur or a striver, like the whole audience for this show, it's more like 80% of your time. And you're missing your life. As Epicurus. Point is, don't miss your life.
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A
He's saying, actually, this is better than the vacation that you are pining for this present moment.
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C
Don't build castles in the sky. Don't do that. And don't be wishing that you could go backwards in time. Don't be enjoying your memories and don't be enjoying your fantasies. Enjoy this now. And that's super hard to do. As a matter of fact, there's all kinds of evidence that our brain isn't even designed to do that very well. When you put people in FMRI machines and you say, think about nothing, then you turn on the default mode network, instead of structures in your brain, you'll start thinking about the future automatically.
- [11:09]
A
Well, there's a famous letter that Epicurus writes where he goes, like, on this, the happiest day of my life, the day of my death. And that's what the letter opens with. Like, he's trying to. He's. He's saying. And again, for people who think that epicureanism is hedonism, he's trying to say you can be happy on the day that you die, right? So it's definitely not related to what you have, and it's not because he has some delicious last meal or something. He's just saying this is the day that I have now. So it's the happiest day of my life.
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C
I'm alive right now. And being alive right now is awesome. Yeah, that's the whole thing and. Good. We should all try to do that more. I'm not very good at that, are you?
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D
No.
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A
All right, so you mentioned the Buddhist. Maybe let's.
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C
We're going back in time a little bit.
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A
Let's go back.
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C
Buddha was a contemporary of Socrates.
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A
Yes.
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C
So that was about 500 BC and this is of course a notion that this. This came out of the. The Vedic and Hindu traditions. And so Gautama Prince. Gautama, Siddhartha, Buddhist prince, Hindu prince. Completely sheltered from ordinary life. Very, very rich. Wonder what's outside the walls of my castle. He goes outside and he sees all this suffering for the very first time in his life and questions everything that he's ever been taught. This is approximately 500 BC decides to figure it out on his own. Becomes a complete ascetic, just like the mendicant.
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A
Shades of head.
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C
Everything. It doesn't eat anything is starving, miserable, the whole thing. And he realizes that that in itself is a form of attachment, that asceticism is a form of attachment. And under the Bodhi tree where he's sitting, which is still, you know, famous metaphor for all kinds of enlightenment that we would get, he figures out the Eightfold Path of Buddhism. But fundamentally, that philosophy is based on these four noble truths. The first is that life is. This is Dukkha in Sanskrit. Life is suffering. That's actually not a good translation. It should be, and you'll appreciate this as a st. Life is dissatisfaction. That's what it really should be. Because it is. It's not satisfying, it's not the way
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A
you want it to be.
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C
And there's a reason for that. We're aspirational creatures, which is why we're so unhappy and we're so successful because we're in the hunt. Okay? So this is animal impulse versus moral aspiration. Okay. The second Noble Truth is that the source of our dissatisfaction is attachment. Attachment to worldly things. The third Noble Truth is that the secret to actually breaking free from this dissatisfaction is detachment from these things. And the fourth. And you're like, okay, okay, okay, okay. And then the Fourth Noble Truth is the Eightfold Path of Buddhism, which is the rest of your life and a whole bunch of other lives.
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A
Yeah.
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C
It's like, ah. It's what it comes down to which is why Buddhism is hard. It's a really, really hard thing. But this sets in motion this whole idea that. And it's a fundamentally non theistic religion. Whereas Hinduism that it sprang from is profoundly theistic. And at its core, what people don't really understand about Hinduism, it's not a thing. It's a family of related religions in the Indian subcon, largely in the Indian subcontinent with a few other outposts like Bali, where they're related, but they're very non trivial differences between the variants of it. Fundamentally at its most esoteric forms, it's profoundly monotheistic and it's very much like Christianity and so far is that you have Brahman, which is the godhead, has Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva which are the three manifestations, three in one kind of a trinity. And then a whole bunch of other avatars and manifestations of God. The Buddhists are real different than that, really come out of a very different tradition than that. And that's why Christianity is much closer to Hinduism than it is to Buddhism. We think of the karmic religions as kind of all the same big differences as it turns out. And Buddhism took over almost the whole subcontinent for hundreds of years. And then there's a Reiki conquista where Hinduism came back. And the reason that this Indian subcontinent is largely Hindu today is because of the claim, the argument based on sort of evangelists that were going through the countryside saying, don't you want God? Yeah, you want God, don't you? Don't you want to have a relationship with God who loves you, God who created you? And people are like, yeah, I want
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A
that again, that convergent evolution, that there is some part of the human condition that wants, that needs it.
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C
Yeah. And anthropologists have studied this whole. And again, for those who are Hindus who are like, you know, throwing stuff at the, throwing stuff at their laptop right now. Sorry. I mean this is a, this is
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A
the religious studies interpretation.
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C
Yeah. Well this is, you know, this is a Catholic who spent the last 12 years talking and studying with the Dalai Lama. Okay, so which is appropriate humility on this. But this is a really interesting thing because today we lump the karmic religions together and the Abrahamic religions together. But in this case, Buddhism is, is super different than the Abrahamic religions and especially different than Christianity, the goal of which is to live forever. The Buddhist goal at its essence is to break out of the cycle of birth and rebirth, which because life is suffering and stay dead, man.
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A
Yeah. To embrace the impermanence of it all. So The Bhagavad Gita is a Hindu.
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C
It's one of the Hindu holy books. And that's the epic adventure of Lord Krishna, who's an avatar of Vishnu, the God Vishnu.
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A
What do you think that teaches us?
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C
So, a lot, because it's this huge.
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A
It's like the Odyssey.
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C
It's like the Odyssey, basically. And what it is is that it's supposed to teach you about life itself. It's the experiences of this guy who's an avatar, who has got heavenly side. It's sort of kind of a. What is it? The homeostatic union of metaphysical and physical in this guy and this Lord Krishna. And fundamentally, it's about him living this earthly existence, but a heavenly. With a heavenly will. And the way I read it, again with appropriate humility, is that this is an opportunity for everybody to understand that they're spiritual beings living a physical existence that you are, too. You would say in Christianity, there's a Christ likeness to Ryan, and that once you understand the metaphysical essence of who you are, not to be Gnostic, not to say that the body falls away because it's unimportant. On the contrary, it's the fusing of these two things that's the essence of life itself. And that you can have a profoundly metaphysical, spiritual, transcendent existence in your ordinary life of, like, going into battle and marrying a girl and having your kids and paying your bills.
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A
And each one is. Each one of us is kind of a microcosm of this larger spiritual.
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C
Yeah. And so people see themselves in Lord Krishna. Yeah, that's. That's. They kind of see that. They see themselves in Ulysses. Yeah, they see themselves. That's the whole point of a lot of these great epic.
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A
It's the hero. It's the hero's journey. But from India.
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C
Yeah, it really is. It really is. And that's because there's nothing new under the sun.
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A
Sure.
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C
But. Oh, back to the point that you were making a minute ago, though, that anthropologists have found that there are no civilizations ever found that are not religious. And what that suggests is that humans are built to worship. Humans are built. It doesn't mean every single person's religious because there's a ton of different experiences and different. I mean, just physical differences between people, to be sure. And the psychology being, the biology. You might not have a very strong religious tendency. You might or might not. And different people do. But the whole point is, in the main, humans are made to worship. That's a very, very strong hypothes.
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A
I don't know if you've seen a video or a talk from me lately, but you can tell I'm kind of on a sweater kick. I don't know why exactly that started, but the problem with this sweater kick is like finding ones that actually look good that I like. And I'm not paying like an absurd, let's call it unstoic amount of money on them. And that's where today's sponsor comes in. Quince. They've got great design, great styles, great fabrics, everyday essential that are effortless to wear. They're not too hot, they're not too cold, they're not too thin, they're not too thick. They work with top factories, cut out the middleman. So you're not paying for brand markup or fancy retail stores. Just great sweaters and clothes that you'll like. And you've probably seen me wear them in some of the daily Stoic stuff. I got this Mongolian cashmere sweater. I got 100% organic cotton sweater. They're comfortable, they're high quality. That's always the thing. Stop overcomplicating your wardrobe. You don't need a closet full of options. You just need some great staples that actually work. And right now, if you go to quince.com stoic for free shipping, you also get 365 day returns. That's a full year to build out your wardrobe and love it. And you will now available in Canada too. Don't keep settling. For clothes that don't last, go to Q U I n c e.com stoic for free shipping and 365 day returns. Q-U-I-N-C-E.com stoic so I told you I was at this Airbnb here in Maui on this trip we took and oh man, the mattresses were not good. I did not sleep well. The kids did not sleep well. I wish that they had Helix mattresses. If you've ever slept on a Helix, you will know why so many people love them. Basically, you take this Helix Sleep quiz that matches you with the perfect mattress based on your personal preferences and sleep needs. We've got the midnight mattress at our house. It's, you know, medium firmness, not too firm, not too soft. And that's probably why it is their top selling model. Helix is the most awarded mattress brand tested and reviewed by experts like Forbes and Wired. They've got free shipping, seamless delivery, and the whole process is super simple. They deliver the mattress right to your door with free shipping in the US and you can rest Easy with the Happy with Helix guarantee that ensures seamless returns and exchanges risk free customer first experience. The Helix guarantee is designed to ensure that you're completely satisfied with your new mattress and includes a 120 night sleep trial and limited lifetime warranty. Just go to helixsleep.com stoic for 27% off that's helixsleep.com stoic For 27% off. Make sure you enter our show name at checkout so they can know we sent you helixsleep.com stoic. It's interesting how easy it is to do the kind of religious studies, interpretation of all the religions but your own. You know, you can be like, this is what they taught. This is where they lived. This is how it evolved. This is what it meant. This is the technology in it. Like, this is why it worked. But it was fascinating to me in, in Athens this summer, you're standing at the painted porch of Sto Peculia where Stoicism comes and you go, wait, wait, so St. Paul came here, met with the Stoics, and then they walked up together next to the Acropolis and he gave one of the most famous speeches in all of Christianity. And when you just read the Christian version, you're like, this is the Christian. You're not thinking that all these faiths and ideas are intermixing with each other and walking the earth like Jesus and Seneca are alive in the same time in the Roman Empire. They're both teaching philosophical teachings. One we come to call a religion and the other stays philosophy. But what do you think philosophically, the, the broad strokes Christian tradition can teach us.
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C
And that's harder for me because I'm in the middle of it.
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A
That's what I mean.
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C
So that's some, like, I go to Mass literally every day. And so. Yeah, so that's. And so for me that's. You're a Stoic. I'm a Catholic.
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A
Yeah. And I also grew up Catholic.
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C
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you've got some of that happening.
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A
But I think that's why Stoicism lands with them, because they have the same cardinal virtues.
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C
Well, yeah, for sure. But also it's worth pointing out that one of the reasons, I mean, Catholicism, Christianity is unbelievably imperialistic.
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A
Yes.
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C
It's just, give me, that's good, I'll take it. I like it, I like it.
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A
Or you mean imperialistic in that they just take from anything and then absorb it and they go, we invented that.
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C
It's sort of the America of religions.
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A
They like the Columbus thing.
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C
It's a melting pot. Which is not to say that it's not true. On the contrary, actually, I really, really believe it as a person. But I recognize that the best way for you to understand it, even from the inside, is by understanding the influences from the outside. Yes, that's a really important thing to. And even in the ancient world, by the way, there was a lot of Eastern philosophy that was worming its way into it because there were a lot of people coming from all over the place. I mean, you look at what in the Acts of the Apostles, what was going on in early Christianity and they talk about people meeting from all over the world. And so the idea that somehow because of the Internet, we're able to see what's going on. No, no, no, Them too.
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A
Yeah. We think of the Romans as being like blonde with blue eyes or something, you know, and it's like, it's like
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C
Denmark or something, right?
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A
It's like. No, no, no, there's profoundly influenced by Carthage and Turkey and you know, like, I mean land, Roman explorers, land in China during Marcus Aurelius's reign. And so you're like, this is. They're all intermingling.
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C
Right.
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A
But anyways, what's the main Christian philosophical truth that we do?
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C
The Christian philosophical. Well, truth. The advance, as far as I see it. And again, this is where my humility has to hit its apogee because I'll be learning this for the rest of my life. And my wife's a theologian by the way, so I mean, I'm getting it, mainlining it at home all the time. So Christianity is purely about the space of moral aspiration.
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A
Right.
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C
It doesn't deny that there is animal impulse. It doesn't say that animal impulse is evil, but it's all about getting as far into being the person that you're meant to be, which is in the image of God as you possibly can. And it's a worked out version of the entire method of actually how to do that. And so often, you know, people ask who say what? At its essence, what is it? Your animal impulse for you to live the best possible life is sort of three principles. And the three principles are love things, use people and worship yourself. That's animal impulse. And the reason is because stuff out there is like, I want a bigger cave, I want more animal skins, I want more buffalo jerky, more animals. In the ancient environment, we lived in bands of 30 to 50 individuals.
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A
We owned slaves and conquered.
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C
But even before that, I mean, in our environment. And so, so even in the time of you know, the ancient philosophers, they were still. That was a graft from the brain that had the human brain that had been evolved 250,000 years ago, which hasn't changed very much. And we've had the more or less the same intelligence for the past, since the beginning of the Pleistocene, right, About a quarter million years ago. And so we're designed to be a kin based hierarchical species and we want to rise in that. And that means that other people are there for our pleasure and advancement. Yes, that's how we see other individuals. And now, of course, we bond to them as kin and we have, you know, all this biochemistry that makes us, you know, you see your kids in oxytocin, goes right, et cetera. But fundamentally, your people are there for your pleasure and use. And then you're the center of everything because, you know, the prefrontal cortex has got you in the psychodrama, which in the psychodrama is Ryan's lunch and Ryan's money and Ryan's podcast and Ryan's bookstore and Ryan, Ryan, Ryan. It's so boring. And so the result is the world of animal impulse. It makes you animal successful and utterly miserable. And God, according to the Catholic Church, according to Christian religion, can set you free to your moral, to your moral aspirations. And that has a different formula.
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A
It's like this is kind of the transition from Old Testament to New Testament, right? Like it's like clans and families and people doing fucked up stuff to each other. Then Jesus and everything after Jesus is about this moral aspect.
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C
That's the new covenant. Yes, the new covenant, which is that today I give you a new teaching. Teaching love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. Matthew 5:44, the Sermon on the Mount sums it up. Right. And. Well, I mean, the summary is the Shema, which is Deuteronomy 5. You will love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your means. In the original translation, that means everything you got. You're going to love the Lord. And then Jesus says, and you'll love your neighbor as yourself.
- [27:11]
A
Well, that's what I was going to say. Hillel's summary, he's asked to, you know, to define Christianity while standing on one leg. And he says, love thy neighbor as thyself. All the rest is common to. Yeah, you feel like that's a fair
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C
summary, except the Shema is incredibly important, which is the love God that I mean. Okay, love by God. No, no, love God. And that's huge because everything in that is about faith.
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A
Right.
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C
Somebody you can't see with whom you have apparently one sided conversations. A lot of cumbersome rules. Love. No, no, no. Love him. And that's really important why? Because Aquinas in 1265 defined love is to will the good of the other as other, notwithstanding your feelings. Feelings, which is super important. Very stoic, Very stoic. To love is to will the good of other people, whether you feel it or not. Because it's not a feeling, it's an action. Yeah, it's an action. It's an action, it's a decision, it's a commitment. And that's huge. And that's really, really central to Christianity and that really gets to the Christian formulation of a good life, which is the formula which is different. Remember, it's like love things, use people, worship yourself. It's kind of change the verbs and nouns around. Use things.
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A
Yeah, man, Abundance, beautiful dominion over the.
- [28:23]
C
Yeah, for sure. But it just, it's great, it's great. Love people, love people. Because that's what we're made to do, is to. That's what we were just talking about. And worship the Lord and worship God, because only God is made for worship.
- [28:37]
A
Sure.
- [28:38]
C
And once. And that's the Christian teaching for the life that we want to live, which is the life of the people we're supposed to be. That was sort of that simple formula when.
- [28:48]
A
And it's interesting that the, that the Romans clash with the Christians so much and you realize what a radically transgressive idea Jesus is bringing into the world by saying, love thy neighbor as thyself, Good Samaritan. Basically care about, love your enemies, Right. But care about the people that the Roman Empire uses up and smashes and destroys when they get in its way. Like when you read about the Roman Empire, as fascinating as it is is you go, unless you're the emperor or a senator or one of the families, it's a shitty place to be.
- [29:23]
C
Right.
- [29:23]
A
And so what the Christian sort of invention is that? No, no, no, it's actually, you know, the meek shall inherit the earth. It's the little guy that actually matters. That's who this is all about. That's who you have to.
- [29:36]
C
And the Roman philosophy of might makes right is then, is articulated again again and again and again throughout history, most notably Nietzsche and then Ayn Rand. I mean, it comes back and it comes back and it comes back. And the defense against that is always Christianity. Christianity is always the defense. No, no, no, no, no, no. Read it again, Read it again. The truth of the matter is this, you know, the whole concept of the enlightenment, as problematic as it is for Christianity, comes from the idea that if you. And again, this is Matthew 5:44 in the Sermon on the Mount, where he says this like Jesus says this crazy thing. He says, you've heard that you should hate your enemies and love your friends. Today I give you a new teaching. Love your enem, pray for those who persecute you. The most transgressive teaching of all time, which is use things, love people, worship God. It's the gospel of love notwithstanding your feelings, is what it comes down to, this Stoic principle that comes through the metaphysics of the Stoic principles. When it comes through, it's like fight
- [30:33]
A
against that lower part of your nature, to aspire to the Christlike part of your nature.
- [30:37]
C
That's what you want to do. And that will give you the best life. That will give everybody the best life. That's who you're supposed to be. That's how you get to heaven. And heaven starts here is its whole way. But by the way, this changed back to philosophy. The idea in ancient Roman times and most of history forever is that might makes right. That if you want, there are people who disagree. Coercion is the only tool. Negotiation and persuasion come from that idea that you can love your enemy.
- [31:05]
A
Sure. Whether your enemy. Yeah. Even if they're wrong, even if they do bad things, you're equal in some sense. And.
- [31:12]
C
And by the way, if you persuade somebody, it's win win. If you negotiate with somebody, it's win win. If you coerce somebody, it's win lose. We went from a world of win lose into one that's largely win win because of this idea, the Crusades and
- [31:26]
A
religious wars notwithstanding, of course, because there's always the exceptions. Well, that's the human, of course, that's
- [31:31]
C
the animal impulse that's puncturing its way into the moral aspiration again and again. And it will always be thus.
- [31:36]
A
We'll do kind of a lightning round with some of these other ones as we wrap up because.
- [31:39]
C
Are we almost done? How long are we going to go?
- [31:41]
D
Hour.
- [31:42]
C
Really? I thought it was like 15 minutes.
- [31:43]
A
We'll be here for five hours if
- [31:44]
C
we do every school.
- [31:45]
A
But I think Ayn Rand is interesting. I always have loved Christopher Hitchens rejoinder to the idea of the virtue of selfishness. And he said, I'm not really sure humans need any help in that department. I know, and I've always felt that, like, there's an interesting parallel or contrast between the allegory of the Cave, which we were talking about, and Ghalt's Gulch in Atlas Shrugged. It's like, hey, the little guys are parasites. They're taking from you. They don't appreciate your genius. They don't understand that, you know, truth. Retreat to your fantasy world where only the smart entrepreneurs and the geniuses hang out. Fuck everybody else. That is the opposite of what Plato was saying you do with enlightenment.
- [32:27]
C
It's quite Nietzschean. It's really quite Nietzsche. And there's a version of that in more modern America that I love as my favorite philosopher. Ralph Waldo Emerson. Yes, I love Emerson.
- [32:39]
A
You think he's Randy.
- [32:41]
C
Randy and in self reliance, but not awful. Self reliance is everybody, everybody should read Self Reliance. Yes. Self reliance is like a tall glass of cool water on a summer day in Bastrop, Texas.
- [32:54]
A
It's Stoicism and Christianity mixed together, but
- [32:57]
C
with a little Randianism, a little Objectivism in there, right? It's like the sturdy lad from Vermont or New Hampshire who builds it, makes it, farms it, and always lands on his feet like a cat.
- [33:12]
A
Yes.
- [33:12]
C
That's a moral superiority as far as Emerson is concerned.
- [33:16]
A
But the difference between Rand and Emerson is Emerson is that guy. Right. Although most of his money comes from his dead wife.
- [33:24]
C
There's that.
- [33:26]
A
But he's funding the whole transcendental scene. He's paying for it. He's generous. He's helping slaves in the Underground Railroad. He's a good friend. He is generous to a fault. Right. The obligation is there.
- [33:38]
C
That's why the Rand stuff doesn't do it for me. But Emerson. But here's the problem that I have, though. Here's my internal conscience conflict. I'm a Catholic. Yeah. And Emerson's not man. I mean, Emerson is like a Jesus. Well, he's a heretical Unitarian.
- [33:53]
A
Yeah, right.
- [33:53]
C
Which, you know, we think of Unitarians today as people who believe in up to one God. Right. And it's all cool, man. But no, no, no. I mean, Unitarianism was a real. Was a real going concern, you know, in that part of the 19th century, in the 1840s, et cetera. But the rugged individualism which just speaks to me, I love it. I love it so much.
- [34:16]
A
That's the best part of what being American is supposed to be.
- [34:19]
C
That's what it's supposed to be. But the truth of the matter is that it's very, very incomplete because we need community, we need people. I believe we need God. We need to transcend ourselves. The only way we can transcend ourselves is to transcend ourselves toward the divine and transcend ourselves toward one another.
- [34:35]
A
What about nature? Nature, though Emerson would say nature is that form of transcendence, sort of.
- [34:40]
C
I mean, but basically he's individualism. And so I'm always. My inner conflict is the fact that I'm, you know, 75%, you know, right on board with, you know, the Pope. Yeah, but there's that 25% of Emerson that's calling me and pulling at me all. And, you know, I have a big, big. A big strong libertarian streak in me, but it's an Emersonian libertarian streak. That's what it is. It's not that kind of mild creepiness that actually comes from the radical. Me only and the weak are cursed.
- [35:13]
A
If it's liberty fused with a strong sense of personal obligation and virtue, it works. If it's. You're free to do whatever you want and fuck these guys, it's a pretty
- [35:26]
C
vicious place for everybody.
- [35:27]
A
Yes, fuck everybody but me.
- [35:29]
C
That's a problem, it seems to me. And there is a balance in there. And this is actually one of the things that's really great about studying multiple philosophies, which of course you've done, is that you can live in multiple worlds at the same time and you can understand yourself better. The problem is, and this is the academic problem, is when you go in one particular direction, you're not actually going to be testing any of your ideas as a result of that. And that's how you can get more and more and more and more weird and wrong. And that's a lot of what's happened in academia. These weird, exotic ideas of the human person that lead to these fads and panics in American life and ruined universities, cancel culture and, you know, radical activism. And, you know, the whole anger that actually that we see in a lot of it today has to do with the fact that we're just. We're just not good intellectuals enough.
- [36:13]
A
So, speaking of a multidisciplinary approach, let's go back in time a little bit. He doesn't get a school attached to him, but I think Montaigne is a.
- [36:23]
C
I don't think very little about Montaigne, really. I know very. I mean, I've read Montaigne, but I know very little about Montaigne.
- [36:27]
A
But I think it's interesting of all these guys, he doesn't get a school, but. But has so much to teach us about intellectual humility.
- [36:34]
C
Yeah, but epistemic humility, that's where that comes from, right?
- [36:37]
A
Yes. What do I know?
- [36:37]
C
Yeah.
- [36:38]
A
And that curiosity. I just think it's fascinating. And I have a book in, in the bookstore, I'll give you that. It's my favorite biography of him. But, but like the idea of. It's when you realize he was living in the middle of the Reformation and the Counter Reformation, where thousands of people are being burned at the stake for having differing religious beliefs. And he's like, what do I know? And, and they're discovering the new world and people are like, oh, it's filled with cannibals. And he's like, we draw in quarter people. We're not so great. And I think there's something beautifully open minded and yet based very much in the classics in Montaigne, that's worth.
- [37:16]
C
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Every time I read Montaigne, I say, I wish I knew more, you know, for sure. And you know, it's funny because there's a balance there too. I mean, you can become the cynic who says everything is every. You know, everybody's fat and stupid. Right. But that's not a good way to live. I mean, it's a good thing to say to, to actually be able to recognize all the wonderful things that, that your culture does well, maybe better than other places, and then want to share it as opposed to being triumphalist about it.
- [37:43]
A
That's right.
- [37:43]
C
And then also having an open mind to say there are other things that we can learn and we can be better at at the same time.
- [37:48]
A
Yes. He traveled a lot and one of the lines about him is that he loved meeting anyone he came across on his travels except other Frenchmen because he didn't need to look, he didn't need to meet another. He was French, he didn't any friend. He wanted to meet people who are different than him.
- [38:04]
C
Yeah, yeah, that's. That makes, sort of, makes sense. And you know, you see that a lot. You see that a lot with people who are really trying to learn about the outside world, that there's almost nothing more annoying knowing the people from their own hometown. It's like, I don't want to talk about the Seahawks.
- [38:24]
A
Well, here we are well into a new year and it's worth taking some stuff. Who do you want to be this year? What changes do you want to make? How could you be better? That's where today's sponsor comes in and it's where something I have been doing myself now, I guess since college, which is working on myself with a therapist. And although I used to, when I lived in la, drive an hour in traffic to sit down in someone's office for an hour now. I do it on the phone. I do it while I'm walking. I do it in the car. I do my therapy online. And BetterHelp is the world's largest online therapy platform. And I'm not the only one. More than 6 million people have gotten help through BetterHelp. It's just easier to keep the appointment. It's less of an imposition. Cheaper, it's more efficient. And I honestly find it easier to just get into the stuff you're there to get into when I do it remotely. BetterHelp will match you with a therapist based on your preferences. You can easily switch at any time at no extra cost. You can click the link in the Description description below or you can just go to betterhelp.com dailystoak to get 10% off your first month of therapy. Today's sponsor is Chime, the fee free banking app Changing the way people Bank Chime isn't just another banking app. They unlock smarter banking for everyday people. With products like MyPay giving you access to up to $500 of your paycheck anytime, it can help you get paid two days early with their direct deposit. There's no overdraft fees, minimum balance fees, fees or monthly fees. And plus, Chime makes your everyday spending work harder by delivering real rewards and financial progress. And they just launched the Chime card. It's a cash back card that helps you build credit with your own money. And this is the kind of thing I wish was around when I was younger. It seems like a great way to build credit, which is intimidating. But as you know, very, very important. Chime is not just smarter banking. It's the most rewarding way to bank join the millions who are already banking fee free. Today. It takes just a few minutes to sign up. Head over to chime.com stoic that is chime.com stoic Chime is a financial technology
- [40:36]
D
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- [40:59]
A
What about Camus?
- [41:00]
C
Oh yeah, so the absurdist school often Distinguished from the existentialists, of course. Camus is super interesting. I mean, Camus, because his medium, he's kind of like Ayn Rand in the sense that he was a novelist, but
- [41:13]
A
he's actually good at it. His novels are short and exciting and interesting. And there's no 90 page speech speeches.
- [41:21]
C
There's no 90 page speeches. There's. That's. That's absolutely true. Camus. I mean, it's. So what's. If we read one Camus, we'll read the myth of Sisyphus, right? Yeah. Because that's the one thing to read. I remember trying to read it in eighth grade.
- [41:32]
A
If we're talking happiness, that's the one we should.
- [41:34]
C
That's the one to read. And I've written about the Mythicisophus because there's one key idea in the myth of Sisyphus that I just. I tried to. I mean, there's a lot of stuff that Camus says, but. And it's basically this so that everybody knows that something is. Sisyphean is an exercise in futility. The whole idea is, something's futile. He's pushing the boulder up hill. He almost gets to the top and falls back down. Because the Greek myth of Sisyphus, who's being punished for all time by never being able to accomplish his task, is the whole thing. And he goes through this and he does a philosophical treatise on this. But here's the last part, the last point that Camus makes, the most important point is what everybody misses because everybody's like, yeah, Sisyphus, that suck. Yeah, life is like that. Life is kind of absurd and dumb, right?
- [42:14]
A
Yep. You roll it up and it rolls back down.
- [42:16]
C
That's just like another day, another day, another day. But Camus says in the end, one moment must suppose that Sisyphus was a happy man because he had something to do. But that's the point. That's the point is that he had a purpose. Was it a feudal purpose? Yeah, but welcome to life, man. I mean, just like feed yourself and keep your biological organism running and try to pass on your genes a little bit, and you're actually just like everybody else and trying to pretend that you've got this unique goal and it's got this mission unlike any a world historic figure here, you know, and actually you're just like absolutely everybody else and you're rolling the boulder up and it's rolling back down. But, you know, God bless you. You got something to do. Lucky you.
- [43:04]
A
What I think is fascinating about Camus and I'm just starting to read about him more is he's supposed to be the embodiment of these modern philosophers who, like Nietzsche, God is dead. It's all meaningless, stupid, absurd, silly. Then you look at his life and here he is speaking out about the. The moral issues of his time. He's in the French Resistance in World War II. He is actively. This is not a. This is not a nihilist in practice. And he is, in fact, you know, in the thick. He is involved in public life in the way that Stoics say you have to be involved in public life or
- [43:42]
C
because you can't work out your ideas unless you're completely alive, which is what they.
- [43:45]
A
But also, they aren't ideas, they're ways to live. You. You have to. But the philosopher is not just a person who arranges them well on the
- [43:51]
C
page, which is the problem with Epicurus.
- [43:53]
A
Yes.
- [43:54]
C
Because he was sitting in his garden. Right. He was actually out. He wasn't out in the world. Most great religious movements, by the way, have been those that are in the world. I mean, it's really interesting when you actually look at it, even in the Catholic world, you find these great movements that are trying to work for a better world at the individual level.
- [44:12]
A
Catholic Worker, et cetera.
- [44:13]
C
Catholic Worker. But even some that are not utopian and not even progressive at all. What they're trying to do is to build a better world world. And they. They're understanding their own theology. Like Mother Teresa. Yeah. Through the way that they're lifting people up at the margins of society in the poorest places in the world, which is a really interesting thing and an important thing to do. And that's kind of. It's kind of Camus.
- [44:33]
A
You're right.
- [44:33]
C
In the way that he's actually living his life. And a lot of the way. And which we don't remember, of course, but then you've got, you know, like Sartre just sitting there smoking a Camel Straight and a galois in his, you know, sipping an espresso. And he was kind of living this intellectual's existence, this hermetically sealed existence. One of the reasons that when you read Kamo, you're like, I can kind of understand life through this. And you read Sartre. At least I read Sartre. And I'm like, I don't get it.
- [44:59]
A
Yes.
- [45:00]
C
I don't get it. It doesn't. This is all theory. This is just theory as far as I'm concerned.
- [45:04]
A
Well, I think the Fall and both the Fall and the Plague are two striking books for this Moment. I mean, the fall is basically this smart guy's walking through the streets of Paris and he hears someone go into the river, and he's busy, busy. So he's like, not my problem.
- [45:19]
C
Right.
- [45:20]
A
And he's haunted by the idea later that he could have done some. It's a moral allegory about indifference to the suffering and pain of someone else. It's basically, he's talking about World War II, but he's probably also talking about people like Sartre, who are philosophers in this moment where the world is on fire. And they go, I've got some reading to do.
- [45:42]
C
I know. You know, and we didn't even talk about the Russians who are contemporaneous to the Russian existentialists, who are having this huge moment. I mean, you gave me the Diary of Wisdom from Tolstoy.
- [45:52]
A
Oh, Calendar of Wisdom.
- [45:52]
C
Yes, Calendar of Wisdom. You gave it the last time I was here, as a matter of fact. But yeah, yeah. And Tolstoy and Dostoevsky are having this huge moment right now. This is the next big thing for young people.
- [46:01]
A
I think so, for sure.
- [46:02]
C
I mean, it's like a lot of people that continue to be super interested in Stoicism, but the Russians and apparently. And how do I know this? Because my publisher says that everybody. There's manuscript after manuscript that's coming in about Russian existentialism, largely on the Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, who are contemporaries but didn't know each other. But a lot of what we're talking about here, you can learn just by reading the Brothers K. Well, what's interesting,
- [46:26]
A
too, about that Tolstoy book is that Calendar of Wisdom.
- [46:29]
C
That's right. It's so good to read right before bed.
- [46:31]
A
And it's very. I mean, there's a lot of Catholic teaching, too.
- [46:33]
C
Yeah, well, he was super religious.
- [46:35]
A
Yes, well, but what I thought was interesting is I did a lot of research on Gandhi for the justice book, and it was actually so people know civil disobedience. So they think there's this through line from Thoreau to Gandhi, who were not that far apart in time, but actually, Gandhi finds out about Thoreau through Tolstoy, and you go, oh, okay, this is how it's all floating around. And that it was Tolstoy's religious thinking. Like, as far as we know, Gandhi doesn't read any of Tolstoy's fiction, but he reads his sort of spiritual and religious writings. And that's partly what inspired. Inspires the movement that changes the world. And then we get the Civil Rights
- [47:16]
C
movement from There, it's just incredible. And the Dostoevsky stuff that is really coming back right now. And by the way, probably the most interesting thing that informs a lot of the stuff from Tolstoy is his autobiography where he talks about his near suicide at 51. And he's looking for meaning. He's looking for me. I have a book coming out on meaning in March, the end of March, called the Meaning of youf Life. And one of the main first big chapters starts with the story of Tolstoy, where he says, I thought I could find meaning through my writing and I couldn't. And then I tried to find meaning,
- [47:45]
A
by the way, one of the best and biggest to ever do it. And he's like, it didn't work.
- [47:48]
C
He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature four times. I mean, that's how, by the way, how new he is. Yes, it's like 1910, you know. But he says, and then I looked to biology and science, which we were in this technocratic moment then, which Dostoevsky called the palace of Crystal, which meant all a mathematically worked out world, awful lot like AI. And he said, I looked for in biology and science, and he studied assiduously and he couldn't find meaning there. And he concluded that meaning didn't exist. And since his, by the way, he had 13 kids and so he had a lot going on and he said, I concluded that life had no meaning, it was meaningless. And so I had nothing left to kill myself. And so he goes off to just like to a little village, this little tiny little village, and he just lived among the peasants. He was a super famous rich guy. Nobody knew who he was. Like nobody knew who he was. And they were just going. They were illiterate, literate, and they were farmers and they were just going to church and saying their prayers and living their family lives and having their parties and having a good time and all that. He realized, oh, oh, meaning is love. Meaning is love for God. Meaning is love for your family. Meaning is authentic friendship. Meaning is actually working for other people by sanctifying your work through what you do, if it's, you know, plowing the feast. And he said he understood meaning after that, and that's how he found meaning in his own life, was by actually living his life in real life as opposed to using highfalutin ideas to try to find it somehow out in the ether.
- [49:18]
A
Interesting.
- [49:19]
C
Which is ultimately, man, that's us too. Sure, it's us too. It's like your grandfather, grandfather Holiday, I guarantee you never came home from work and said to your grandma, honey, I had a panic attack behind the mule today.
- [49:37]
A
Yeah, he's too busy.
- [49:39]
C
Well, because he was too busy living.
- [49:41]
A
Yes.
- [49:41]
C
And he understood the meaning of his life. That's a very Tolstoy esque idea, very Dostoevsky esque idea that people are starting to rediscover in these Russian existentialists, Christian existentialists.
- [49:52]
A
So maybe to bring it to a close, talking about meaning, talking about the existential vacuum, maybe we conclude with Frankl,
- [49:59]
C
Viktor Frankl, man's search for meaning. Of his most famous book, of course. Yeah, yeah. Well, he starts by quoting Nietzsche. In the introduction of the book, he quotes Nietzsche and everybody says it's Viktor Frankl because it sounds like Viktor Frankl. It's Nietzsche. A man can. What does he say? He can bear any what as long as he has a why.
- [50:19]
A
Yeah.
- [50:21]
C
And a Nietzschean concept. But of course, Viktor Frankl, his whole point was that meaning is everything, that if you don't know the meaning of life, there is no reason for life. And that's one of the three pillars of happiness. There is enjoyment, there is satisfaction. But meaning is absolutely the most important. And that's of course, the one that is most absent today is meaning the why of what we're actually doing. That's why, I dare say, besides the fact that you're just an incredibly good writer, people want your stuff because they want meaning. They're looking for the meaning of their lives and they can't find it in all all the baubles and doodads and goo gahs and nonsense that the distracting world is giving them. So this new book that I've got talks about how we've changed our brains, that we've walled off, literally physically, the parts of our brain that we need to assess questions of meaning. And the only way we can do that is by going back and living more like Grandpa Holiday, but with Ryan
- [51:12]
A
Holiday's books, but also I think maybe a through line between most of the philosophical schools, particularly the Eastern ones who talk about it so much more specifically, Viktor Frankl is saying. And then of course, his experience is confirming it. There is none of these things without suffering. You have to transform suffering into meaning. That's the trick of the human experience.
- [51:32]
C
And in fact, if you don't suffer, there is no meaning. Which of course is one of the biggest mistakes that we make in the therapy industrial complex today is to say that if you're sad and anxious, there's a pathology that needs to be, that needs to be fixed. I tell My students, they're studying at Harvard. If they're not sad and anxious, they need therapy. That's the truth of the matter. And unless they lean into it, I mean, the great trick, the great stoic trick, the great Christ trick, the great trick of life is not just to start each day and say, I'm grateful for the things that I'm going to enjoy this day. It's to say, I'm grateful for the suffering that will befall me this day. Bring it on.
- [52:09]
A
Yes, I can handle it. That's what, resilience.
- [52:12]
C
No, no, I'm going to learn from it. It's not even just, I can handle it. It's just that my life, it's like I am not fully alive unless I have aversive experiences. And I'm dealing with them like a responsible group, grown up, fully developed person.
- [52:28]
A
Yeah.
- [52:29]
C
And that's our goal.
- [52:30]
A
That's the goal. And if meaning can be derived from suffering, then it means you can be happy and thrive in any condition, in any kind of life. If happiness can only come from things going very well, then it's only available to a small percentage of people, a small percentage of the time. It's a much more resilient and robust formula.
- [52:54]
C
That's right. And that's where epicureanism gets it wrong, is that it's got one pillar of the happiness formula. And there are a lot of people who are really. I mean, it's like they take what they see to be stoicism and they push it to the, okay, if it's not hurting me, I don't like it. But that's wrong too.
- [53:11]
A
Sure.
- [53:11]
C
I mean, that's incorrect. That's also a misunderstanding of stoicism, of course. But that's why epicureanism is an incomplete philosophy for the human, human person, in my view, because it doesn't understand that core fact that we are. And again, this gets back to my Christianity. Why does God allow these things to happen? Because they must. Because we actually can't become the people that we're supposed to be. We can't be fully alive. Who was it? It was Saint Irenaeus who said, in the fourth century, the glory of God is a man fully alive. And today it would be translated as a person fully alive. Of course, there's no gender exclusivity about this. You're not alive. That's the glory of God. If actually not having a full range of human experiences. And if your whole goal in life, your philosophy and practical life strategy, is to eliminate the normal parts of life that you don't like. You're dead. You're dead. And that's one of the reasons that people can't find meaning today is because
- [54:07]
A
they're being told that, well, I think we did it. We did about 2,500 years of ancient philosophy in one hour and 22 minutes. I think this is quite a masterclass. We just did.
- [54:16]
C
And it's like, like a folk sorry for all the stuff I got wrong. That's all I can say. I'm just a French horn player who got a PhD as a social scientist. There's a lot I don't know.
- [54:24]
A
Well, I don't even have a PhD. So this is just us, as we said, remixing things we've heard from other people. But I think that's what philosophy is. Philosophy is not specializing in an arcane or specific period. Right. Philosophy should be a survey course of all of the wisdom. The sum total of wisdom of 5000 years of human experience. That's what it's supposed to be.
- [54:49]
C
Yeah, I think that's right. And we can title this Ryan and Arthur Make Sourdough.
- [54:55]
A
Well, you want to check out some books? I got some of you love. All right, thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on itunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it. And I'll see you next episode.
- [55:28]
D
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- [55:33]
A
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- [55:39]
D
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