Arthur Brooks’ Ultimate Philosophy Masterclass (PT. 1)

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Their team of product specialists vet everything by hand using a 10 point quality inspection so you know you're getting a great piece no matter your budget. Get prep for patio season for way less head over to Wayfair.com right now to shop all things home. w-a-y-f-a-i-r.com Wayfair every style every home. Wayfair every style every home. 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. Maybe you can hear that. I am in my office and my kids are stomping around upstairs making quite a bit of noise. So I will keep today's episode short because I want to get right into it. It's one of my absolute favorite people to nerd out about philosophy. Someone who has done a whole hell of a lot to bring practical philosophy of all different types from all different schools to a huge audience, mostly through his column at the Atlantic and then through his bestselling books, including one he recently did with Oprah called Bill the Life You Want. Arthur Brooks came out to the painted porch here in Bastrop. I think he's been on the podcast more than anyone else or at least close to. He's close to being inducted into what the Four-Timer Club or the Five-Timer Club. I don't remember exactly. But I do remember this conversation because we talked about Socrates, we talked about Plato, we talked about the Sinek's, we talked about Nietzsche and what we can learn from these ancient philosophers about living a good life today. Arthur has a new book. It comes out on March 31. It's called The Meaning of Your Life, Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness. And if you're feeling lost or struggling, you want to find purpose, which is what we're here to do. I think Arthur is a great resource in that regard. It's also going to be doing a free live workshop on March 27. You can listen to him talking with Rain Wilson and Hota Cobb, Chip Conley Simon Sinek, Andrew Yang, Maria Shiver, Dan butiner and Chris Williamson. And you can also grab his books here at the painted porch from strength to strength, Bill the Life You Want. And his new book The Meaning of Your Life, Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness. Here is me, Arthur Brooks digging in on ancient philosophy. What I'm noticing about your column, something from Ron, but I feel like you are going through the philosophical schools one by one and saying like here's something from each one, which I think people don't do enough, right? Because people I'm a Buddhist, I'm a Stoic, I'm a Christian and you're just you kind of just stay in your lane. And obviously there's something about going really deep into one school philosophy. But what I like about the ancients is how familiar they were with all the other ancient schools. So I thought maybe we would just kind of go through them my favorite lines from Seneca as he says he'll quote a bad author if the line is good. And he quotes Epicurus more than he quotes any of the Stoics, which I always thought was really interesting. That he that he was not just familiar with his quote unquote opponents, but he really liked their ideas and you could engage with. So there's a lot to take from all different ways of thinking. Yes. And then when it comes to philosophy, but by the way, it's the same thing with behavioral science. I can talk about the whole approach that I've taken to the study of happiness for the past seven years. Yeah. I started off by figuring out what was wrong with it. And then I rebuilt it in a particular way that required that I have more than passing familiarity across a bunch of different disciplines and then within the different disciplines as well. Do you find that they're all saying really similar things though? Like at the core when they boil down that that there are some essential truths that all the schools have? No doubt. I mean no doubt that there is something behind it. There's a basic physics behind it. Yeah. But it's funny. It's kind of like what that's what Shobin network calls villa, which means will in English. And what that means is that that's the ultimate truth that you can't actually see. And so you can get at it. Yeah. You can get at it. That's the shadows on the cave wall from Plato, of course. That's what Hegel would call guiced. You know, that's the ultimate truth behind which means ghost. And for him, that was kind of God. Yeah. And it's way. But you can only get it through a glass darkly as St. Paul put it. Yeah. And so this is all this whole thing. Right? You just did it. You just there you go. Yeah. Yeah. And we could look at who's the role or any of those guys are or or you know, any of those subjectivists. Yeah. Who would say that actually there isn't that. But the reality comes to exist at the moment and at the point of your perception. Yeah. That's I don't think that's right. I think there isn't underlying objective reality. But you only get it by coming at it from many different perspectives because when you're sitting only in your home is to regress a glass too darkly. Well, I've kind of likened it to a convergent evolution where like different animals have similar adaptations. So you go, oh, it must have descended from a common ancestor. Right. And it's like actually the common ancestor is just the need. Like it's helpful to have an opposable thumb or flying is is a is a great way to escape from things that are trying to get you. And so different species bats and birds and you know, apes and different animals have similar things. But you can't actually trace it back to like some one animal one person figured it out and then everyone's a branch. Obviously, what's that line about where it's all table scraps from the feast of Plato or whatever. Sometimes it's that. Right. But a lot of times like we actually don't have much evidence of the Buddhists and the Western philosophers overlapping at least when the ideas were being formed later, you're like, wow, it's very similar. That's kind of the point. That's the point. So you just gave the biological metaphor of the philosophical and then there's of course the market metaphor. And the market metaphor is what Hayek talked about, which is the called emergent order. Emergent order says you need lots and lots of people doing lots of different things in different ways in different places for different reasons. And then what will emerge is a wisdom. Yes. The wisdom emerges from the micro decisions of people all over the place. The truth emerges as you see the similarities between different philosophers coming out of from different angles. The biology will actually produce certain phenomena on the basis of congruent need. Yeah. And so it's the same basic idea. Sure. And that's why you have to be looking outside your tiny little worldview. Yeah, they're they're trying to navigate ships at sea and they're figuring out different ways of doing it. But there's only so many ways to do it. And it turns out they come up with kind of similar. That's right. Innovation. And that's why academics are often so radically wrong, while so unbelievably smart is because we are trained when we get our PhDs not to do that. Precisely to not do that. And so you can be just like as great as you could possibly be to try to be right, but going in the wrong direction, you're getting better and better and better at walking 180 degrees off the truth. Sure. Sure. And but you're a specialist in X. Yeah. And so that's the fullness of your domain. You're not going, well, what if what if there's something totally the opposite of X or in a totally different discipline or domain, you have tunnel vision. Exactly. That's what I started my career over on the basis of not doing that seven years ago. Let's start with some schools. Should we start with Socrates? Yeah. Bring the wisdom down from the heavens. What do you think Socrates has to teach your average person about life? Where do we start? So the average person can learn from Socrates, the basic idea of humility, that your knowledge, that your enlightenment will come when you're not blocking that truth with yourself. Yeah. When you're not standing in the way with your own shadow of the truth. That's a that's a secratic idea that I the only thing I know is that I don't know anything that concept. Yeah. And which is of course a contradiction in terms, but it's a beautiful contradiction in terms because when you basically say, I don't know man, then what you can do what you're actually doing. So what Socrates would say, if you bring it forward to what a modern semi-modern psychologist would say William James, the father of modern psychology, is that Socrates helps us go from the me self to the I self. The me self is that which I'm thinking about myself and my rightness. The I self is that which I'm just looking at the world and learning. Right. And that's humility. The I self is going around asking questions, not making statements. He's plus he's actually not reflecting on his own brilliance and rightness. Yeah. He's sort of a non-defensive understanding of the world. It's an openness to the rest of the world. It's a beautiful kind of outward focus on actually trying to learn things. One of the things I've been taking pains to point out about Socrates though, is it easy to see him as this intellectual figure? Like he's He's your academic. He's living off the largest of the success of Athens. He's you know Walking around in his toe. A life must have been simpler and easier than but I think you point out No, he's in the middle of a great power conflict. He serves in a war He lives through the time of the 30 tyrants like not everyone likes him. He lives in Athens as Athens is going through incredible turmoil and like we think of it as classical antiquity Right to him. It was the most advanced time in human history Right, and and it was scary and uncertain and not the past. Yeah, and that's because we weigh in and after any one of these phenomena We have what's called what what you have in your own life what we all have is something is a call just called fading Affect bias fading effect bias is that what you look back on prior times strip out the discomfort from those times and only and only enjoy the learning that one got Yeah, and so fading effect bias in your own life is for everybody watching us right now is that they went to college when they were 18 years old and they were Incredibly lonely and unhappy and calling mom every single day I've so come pick me up I hate it and then they go back for their 10 year reunion and 20 year reunion for college and they're seeing their friends They made the met in their first semester of college and say it was my life. That's fading effect bias Yes, because they learned a lot and made great relationships and they just comforted the moment wasn't there The discomfort that was Socrates's own life is Stripped away and is completely irrelevant even though it was the most important thing to him He had a shitty marriage. Yeah, like that's one of the things you hear him talk about all the time and everyone knew is like Socrates did not make a great marriage. Yes, they did not get along. Yeah, and Part of what allowed him he saw that even that though as a kind of a philosophical prize Right and indeed, you know, there are things that each of us deal with all the time You know, we have children and soon enough you're gonna have teenagers and let me tell you super fun. Yeah, and And these are difficult things that occupy most of your brain space. Yeah, the current difficulties and you know It's a mess. Yeah, your life is an actual mess But the things that you're doing that will be passed on are not the current mess It's the salient truth that you'll be able to uncover from time to time and that's what people remember about Ryan Holliday And that's a lot of what you'll remember about these years for yourself as well. Yes Okay, so Plato comes from Socrates. Right. What do you think Plato's main teaching for for people is? There's so much. I mean, there's so much Yeah, for me as we were talking about a little bit earlier This is the first time that we start to see There's a truth There's a transcendent truth. Yeah, but we're changing all the time the changes are kind of a distraction from the ultimate truth But there's an ultimate truth that underlies all of this stuff and a lot of people by the way are true are true Platonists their true Platonists because they believe that that change is extraneous and the unchanging is actually the reality And that's a very very platonic ideal of what's going on and that's the whole idea they came to you know all the way up to the 19th century existentialist philosophers and an even absurdist who said there's an underlying truth I mean Hegel, Shobinhower etc They believe that true that too and they were they were highly platonist in this way and Let's you mentioned the cave. I think cave is the the allegory the cave is one of Plato's most interesting concepts Which is the idea that there is this truth, but most of us are Looking at shadows were chained in a cave you said and we can sort of see out on the outer parts of the cave light Being reflected and we see these shadows We don't know what they are. It's a reality Yeah, and all we get is the shadows and we have to do the best that we can with the shadows to figure out what's going on Yes, right and then we escape from the cave exactly right, but there is this truth Unchanging truth. Yes, and all we are the dynamics and things of it are what confuse us and we have to sort of train Galaid across the images as best we can yeah, and we discover what this truth is having left the cave right our obligation Yeah, what is what Kato says is it played us cave cave or Kato's plays? Yeah So so played us as you escape from the cave you get some sense that oh What I was looking at before are only shadows right as I understand it He believes that then the role of the philosopher the human being is your obligated To try to come back and communicate To the other people in the cave what those shadows were right your obligation is once you actually have greater enlightenment Is the share of that particular enlightenment? Yes, which goes forward into all sorts of schools that people don't aren't even aware of Well, Buddha wrestles with this exact thing. Well, this is super important And so you know, I've worked with the Dalai Lama for the last 12 years and the Dalai Lama says That you can't actually benefit from meditation until you stop trying to get the benefit from meditation I say whoa he says this is why I tell westerners not to become Buddhist because they're doing it for the wrong reason I said what's the wrong reason you're holiness and he says you want to meditate so you feel better You need to meditate so the whole world will feel better. That's an incredibly platonic idea Yes, right the whole idea for you to find enlightenment is so that you can bring it to others Yeah, Buddha wrestles with should I just continue to pursue my own enlightenment or should I teach enlightenment? I take on students and there is this kind of obligation and I think you could trace it to this idea in Plato but but in all the schools of thought that that With insight and understanding and wisdom comes responsibility right right And so the whole concept is what is the monastic life mean? Yeah under the circumstances and that's a really interesting Medieval Christian idea actually from the time of saint Benedict and the you know six seven to eight centuries early on But then into the middle ages of the scholastics you know, what are you supposed to do if you're actually a monastic and and the whole idea is Teach other people like saint Thomas Aquinas or are you supposed to actually just pray for other people? Yeah, and or are you just supposed to be a pure contemplative right what is the right approach to that and play to it would have a strong view When the Stoics and the Epicurians have this debate too should we participate in public life or not right and And what does it mean to participate in public life? Of course there's another wrinkle on that. Yes Yeah, of course, because we'll get to them in a second because you are Yeah, even though presumably you're not gonna run for public office Yeah, I do I do think the ancients had a much more limited definition of public life because there were only so many ways Yeah to contribute running the an enormous company that employs thousands of people might be making a far bigger difference than being a senator and yeah Also, and yeah, you're a lot more in public life like Plato You personally, hmm, you're doing the public intellectual gig It's just that you have the means that the seven eighties ideas way way way beyond anything he could have imagined Yes, yes, and although the irony is I had James ramen here and you wrote this book Plato and the tyrant with Plato's for raise into politics are a cautionary tale against Thought leaders and intellectuals sometimes participating in public life because you're well, he was an easy mark Which is interesting easy mark for a Dionysus The tyrant he goes in the advises a king who is making pretensions about wanting to be a philosopher king But really wants to be a tyrant with the propaganda and reputation Yeah, exactly and Plato is complicit in it in the way that you know a generation later Many generations later Seneca and Nero fallen and in other words intellectuals are easy to roll Yes, yes, because you don't have the experience and You don't even you don't necessarily even understand what you represent to the people in power and how you can be a tool for that Okay, so what about the cynics I find the cynics to be fascinating Diogenes being the most famous of them But I feel like they have a lot to teach us in today's very materialistic world to begin with We don't understand them. Yeah, because we cast as Persians people who are cynical. Yes. I mean the whole idea of the skeptics and the cynics different schools Yes, that there's something that's kind of suspect about the character You know, we don't you don't want to be a cynical person because you're you're just negative all the time And that's exactly getting it wrong. Yes. How do you characterize the school of cynicism? I say they're like the punk rockers of the philosopher. They are transgressive and radical and they are by taking it Too far actually providing us insights about sort of a moderate middle ground like if everyone lived as Theogenes lived the world would be a horrible place But if everyone lived according to ambition and trying to you know make as much money and get as much power and valued all the wrong things you also get a really bad society and he's the Not the court gesture because that's almost too dismissive but but in sort he's like the hippie So I'm like none of this matters man, you know like and in so doing that you say no matters He's saying this is stupid. Yes, so it's worse than what? Eves. Yeah making fun of your suit And your tie and your fancy car, right and I mean the famous story about diogenes that I love is you know He has very few possessions, but he he walks up to the well He gets a cup of water and a young boy runs up and gets water with his hands and Diogenes realizes that even here having Reduced what he thought his needs were to nothing Actually has one more that he can get rid of and he snatched his cup on the ground Put a piece of what you mentioned me marry that guy. Yes. I don't think he wants to although you know So Xeno the founder of sowsism his philosophy teacher was named Cratees I'm forgetting Cratees wife's name, but she was a famous Cynic philosopher too, so we tend to think of it as this primarily male world, but there were Fascinating cynical Philosophers in marriages, right? You know if they were Totally abstaining and rejecting all convention. They would have rejected even that. Yeah, and then the skeptics Who just knew nothing? Yeah, I just I know nothing. Yeah, who just they they banked on knowing nothing. So no matter what, is that, I don't know. (laughing) - And sometimes the extreme cases tell us something, is that exactly a defensible position or a scalable position? But in the extremeness of it gives us color and another angle to understand ourselves. - Right, and there's a humility to it. - Yes. - There's a real humility to it. So there's a kind of a pose with the cynics, and there's an antipose with the skeptics. And so they're quite different in this particular way. This is a signature interesting because what they do is they can make you realize that life is hilarious. - Yeah. - By the way, you go fast forward in history and you find that a lot niche. - Yep. - So the whole competitive set of ideas between what the Greeks were doing, which is that essence proceeds existence. And then with the existentialists were doing the 19th and 20th centuries, which is that existence proceeds essence. In other words, meaning either comes before you're born or you're born and then you find your meaning. That's the big conflict between ancient philosophy and Christian philosophy, all the things that you and I are stuck in, right? - Yeah. - And what the modern existentialists do. And niche is like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. There is no essence. There is no meaning. It's like, so how am I supposed to live? Just to have a good laugh, man. - Yeah. - Just have a good laugh. - Well, the humor of the philosophers is not something, I think your average person is clued in on. - Yeah. - Because philosophy seems dry, philosophy seems academic, philosophy seems confusing. And then you read-- - It's all the above in many cases. - But you read Dijonis the cynic and you're like, oh, this dude's fucking hilarious. - Yes. - And he's a badass. He goes up to Alexander, or Alexander the Great comes up to him as he's sunbathing. And Alexander the Great says, "I'm the most powerful man in the world. "What can I do for you?" And Dijonis looks at him, having reduced his needs to nothing and says, you can stop blocking the sun. Get out of my way. And that's not just funny, but it's badass. - Yeah, and Nietzsche is hilarious too, but why? - And probably the best writer of all of the 19th century absurdists and existentialists. He's a beautiful writer, incredible writer. It's really, really worth reading Nietzsche even in English. - Well, it's five four. What do you think Nietzsche has to teach people? Where would you go? - To truly question your understanding of essence and existence. - Okay. - And it's really, really worth understanding it because we come with the biggest problem philosophically and by the way, scientifically. And in terms of almost everything that we do, is an inability or unwillingness or just an ignorance about our own assumptions going in. That's a huge problem because it garbage in, garbage out effectively. But that doesn't mean that your assumptions are garbage, but if you don't question them, you actually it's very, very hard to grow because you're constrained to the philosophical outline that you've been given based on your assumptions. And a lot of what Nietzsche is talking about is questioning the fundamental algorithm of life, which is did your life have meaning before you were born or were you born and have to go find your life's meaning? And he breaks it all apart like smashing his cup. - And he has a lot more to question. Socrates has a couple hundred years of philosophy to question. Nietzsche has 2,500 years and 2,500 years of Christian teachings. So he's inherited a stable or world. - Sort of all the life. - Strongly suspect that Socrates was relying on a lot that simply wasn't written down. - Yeah, the presocratic philosophers. - And who were very sophisticated, but we don't know. And what Nietzsche had was a lot of stuff that had been written down. - Yes. - And so the Socratic tradition was writing stuff down that had been preserved in the oral tradition. - Yeah. - And who knows what's a bigger library? - That's true, right? That is the interesting thing about the ancient world is we tend to compress it down to this period. We go Socrates, Aristotle, Plato, they're all kind of around the same time. Diogenes is in there. And you're like, Zeno to Marcus Aurelius is like 600 years. You know, or. - That's like 300 BC to 300 AD or something like that, that's a pretty good idea. - Swath of time, like they would have been like Marcus, the Roman philosophers would have come to Greece as tourists and said, look at these ancient ruins. - I know, I know. - And. - It's like looking to Liberty Bell and Philadelphia or something. - Yeah, yeah, but much older in many cases. Like it would have gone through, it would have been built and rebuilt and then destroyed by an earthquake and then ravaged by the Persians and then rebuilt. They would have just seen generation after generation and generation, they would have experienced it. And differently, they would have been still polished and shiny in some cases, but like they would have, they would have come and gone the smartest people who ever lived centuries ago, walked where I'm walking. And then it's like we're all tourists going back to this period. Is kind of a beautiful. - It is. And the thing, however, that's worth, I think it's always worth remembering is that no doubt in the time of Socrates, he was looking back to philosophies that have been, that he could chart back to the ancient Egyptians. - Yes. - And so Socrates was as far ago from us as the Egyptians were to him. And that's a long time ago. And if we move over to India, for example, I mean, that's a Hinduism, it was a 6,000 year old religion. Lord Krishna lived in Mathura in the, you know, the Hindi Heartland. - Yeah. - 6,000 years ago. And there's a little bit written, but the whole point is that the idea has reached us. And for us to say, knowledge is limited to what's been written down in books, is like for our kids to say, knowledge is limited to what's on the internet. - Yeah. - It's the same basic idea. And that's actually obviously not true for all sorts of reasons. (soft music) - So generally I get to wear whatever I want, which is usually if you see me, it's running short and a heavy metal t-shirt. But you know, sometimes we have a fancy guest on, I don't want to dress up or I'm giving a talk and I've got to dress up or I'm going to be on TV and I've got to dress up. And lately I've been wearing a lot of quince. I've loved their sweaters. 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Maybe you've been here in the buzz about live shopping lately. I know I have and it makes sense. Like people are already on their phones or hanging out, they're looking for stuff to do. So why wouldn't business want to meet people where they're at? If you're hoping for people to find your listing or waiting for them to walk into your store, might know a little bit about that. You're setting yourself up for disappointment on what not you can go live and sell directly to people in real time. They see what you've got. They ask questions and they buy and they keep coming back. What not is the largest dedicated live shopping platform whether it's beauty, collectibles, electronics, luxury fashion, even cookies. Sellers are building real thriving businesses on what not. What not buyers spend more than an hour a day on the app and they're not just browsing, they're bidding and buying and coming back. So you can go live, show off your projects and turn that into real income. People selling on what not sell 10 times more than on other major marketplaces. And that's because you're not just listing products, you're building real connections with buyers. For a limited time, what not will match your first $150 sold in the first month? You just have to visit whatnot.com/sell to start selling WHATNOT.com/sell. Whatnot.com/sell. Yeah, that this is a thing that goes way back. And sometimes we'll read something from Socrates or you read something in meditations and you go, that's a beautiful idea. And you don't realize that that is them riffing on things. Like what I love is when you, there's this play by Joseph Attisit called Cato, that was popular in the 18th century. And once you read it, you go, oh, like 80% of what the founders were saying was just them quoting this play, like we might say immigrants to get the job done or like you quote the godfather or something. Like it was so-- It was so much-- It touched on at the time. And the illusions that they're riffing on. And in some case, if you really go and you go, oh, actually, okay, the footnote is telling me this comes from a play, from a line from a play by Euripides or whatever. But if most of it was oral, we wouldn't know-- There's no way. That actually Socrates is a recycler. Yeah, yeah. Of course, he's a recycler. That's the point. And that's exactly the whole point of what we're discussing here. You're not going to be doing good work unless you're mostly recycling. So the body of knowledge when it's actually useful is like sourdough bread. Right? Sure. And that means it has this old thing in it. Yeah. And the starter is the most important thing in sourdough. That's the most important thing. And it can be really old. Or the yeast in bread can go back literally the ancient Egyptians is what it comes down to. And if you don't have it, you don't have bread. And the truth is that it is probably-- As you know, we do a lot of talks on the outside. It's kind of what we do for a living. and you know 20% of a has got to be some old stuff that you've been working on and the jokes that you know that work and the big ideas and that's the spine of your talk of your new talk. Yes. It was 100% new, it sucks. Yeah, because you're doing it by trial and error with a new audience. Yeah, and this is a profoundly conservative worldview by the way, but I think it has the virtue of being largely correct is that when somebody comes out of the battle left field with a completely new way of seeing human nature, it's always wrong and it's actually destructive and dangerous. Well, it hasn't been tested in actual human experience yet and it hasn't been through boom times and depressions, wars and like, yeah, if you came up with some totally new philosophy, it might sound really great. It might work great in a TikTok, but does it have a thousand years of human experience? That's the problem with utopianism. That's the problem with utopianism's all throughout history is that they've always been a failure and led to large-scale destruction, death and suffering precisely because they're not sourdough. Yeah, you got to take something old wine and new skins as they say. Yeah, I mean, the problem with that is that of course is from the gospels and it says that old wine and new skins breaks the new skins. Well, we skipped Aristotle. Give me something from Aristotle. So, of course, Aristotle was almost forgotten until the middle ages and considered, you know, and also a random plate because it was a neoplatonist in the middle ages. So by the time you get to the 12th and 13th centuries, you know, I have Avarose and you have Memonides and of course Thomas Coinus from the three great Southern European Abrahamic traditions. And they were all platenists. They were all platenists. But especially Coinus, he rediscovered Aristotle and brought Aristotle to what at the time was a modern audience. And he said, "This is the guy. This is the guy." I mean, Plato is okay, but Aristotle is the guy. Why? Because he was a full spectrum scientist. But there was also this one weird thing that he did that Plato didn't do. He said that change isn't a distraction from reality. It is reality. That's a big deal. That's the whole idea that dynamism is the essence of reality itself. And so you know, you as a person are different than who you were and who you're going to be. And that change, that first derivative of Ryanness is the essence of Ryanness. And that's a pretty big deal when you think about it because that's just the dynamic understanding of oneself. And to be celebrating the change, and that has a lot to do with how we understand modern behavioral science. We'd, I mean, the underlying, unchanging essence of ourselves is not very interesting to us. Well, we want to make it progress. We're just like progress, progress. That's the essence of what a good life is really all about. When it's point that virtue is something not that you have as an essence, but as something you are doing, and getting better at doing, that has been super, super influential in my own work, which is this one third philosophy, one third neuroscience, one third behavioral science is kind of the three pie, the three parts of the pie, as I'm putting it in there, that I started off doing this work years ago saying, I want to find the secret of happiness. And it's wrong because you can't be happy. What you can be as happy you're, which is there's the tealine notion as opposed to a platonic notion. Yeah. You can get happier. And the goal is putting yourself your life on a jagged messy path toward happierness. And his definition of happiness, you diamond thea, maybe give us that definition, because it's not, I think when people think happy, they think grinning from ear to ear, living your best life. And it's not quite that old. It's not that at all. Actually, so the biggest mistake that the moderns make is thinking happiness is a, is an emotion. Happiness is a feeling. It's not. It's not even one of the basic emotions according to behaviors who do work on emotions, the basic emotions, researchers. Happiness has feelings associated with it like Thanksgiving dinner has a smell. So feelings are evidence of happiness, which is really, really important thing to keep in mind because if you're actually looking for the feeling per se that you're searching for a vapor, you're going to be about as nourished as if you were trying to get the ultimate smell experience on Thanksgiving day. Yeah. Happiness is enjoyment and satisfaction and meaning. That's what happiness is all about. And that experience of going from pleasure to enjoyment, which is what it means to grow up and be a responsible person, but also to be a happier person to have drive satisfaction, which is joy that comes from a accomplishment after struggle. And meaning, finding the meaning of your life, the wife, your existence, there's tons of suffering in that. Yes. Tons of suffering in all three of those bins, which is, you know, and that's very Aristotelian. Eudimonia means a good life well lived. There's actually, there's not adequate translation. I mean, everybody, we all struggle with actually what is Eudimonia mean. It's the good life and the good life has lots of suffering in it. And so, therefore, the modern elimination of strategy, which is to say that if you're feeling sad and anxious, you're broken and you need therapy, that is profoundly anti-A Aristotelian, but it's also an exercise and futility, because you can't get enjoyment satisfaction and meaning. And unless you're like suffering, bring it on. Yeah. Which is stoic, by the way. Of course. Yeah. He's saying that you have to be doing the things that humans were meant to do. And specifically what were you meant to do. So it's a lot of like when people tell I got to find my purpose. Like that's what he's Aristotle saying when you get there, you're a lot closer to happiness than anything else. Which is why, you know, Aristotle was a great theorist and the Stoics are very practical. I mean, they're working out Eudimonia. That's the, the Stoic philosophy is like, how do we do this thing? How do we get this Eudimonia? And you know, a lot of it is like get the hell out of bed. Yeah. Yeah. Which is this and is extremely Aristotelian in its way. Yeah. I think that like this is more stoic than Aristotelian, but it's like, what are the things that I'm glad I did after that I hated while I was doing? Like going for a run, you feel great after. Right. It's not that fun while you're doing. Jumping in a cold plunge. You're not, you don't love the period of jumping in. You don't love as you come up for it. But you love 20 minutes after. Yeah. Let me ask you a question. Do you love writing books or having written books? Well, they said that's the joke that painters like painting and writers like having written. Yeah. I try to make a distinction between writing and publishing. Writing is in my control. Publishing is not. Yeah. So like, sure, am I glad to be done with a book? And is there, is there something about that? Because books involve suffering and as all projects do. So I get that, I do make a distinction though. Like, I actually try to work on enjoying doing the thing because it's the only part of it that's up to me. Yeah. And that's a really important thing to keep in mind because there is a lot of suffering. But in the dynamics of a whole thing, if there's nothing good for you in the journey, then you'll fall prey. Sure, if we're sitting here to the arrival fallacy, a very well-known phenomenon that says, when I get to the end, then I will feel pure bliss, which is, it's axiomatically wrong. If the whole thing is suffering, then you need external results to make it worth the suffering. You have to figure out how actually you enjoy practice. Like you enjoy the doing of the thing. And then the question becomes, which is a very stoic and both Aristotelian kind of a stoic. Yeah. You know, he's set the ships in motion. I guess. Yes. Is how much did you enjoy the suffering? Yeah. See, this is the thing. People are like, they try to dichotomize. They say the process has, and should have enjoyment, but it also has a lot of suffering. And if you only suffer, so you can get to the enjoyment of the end, the arrival fallacy will hunt you down and kill you like a dog. Right. Which means you'll be more, you'll win the Olympic gold and be depressed for six months. Because you're like, you feel like the life is over. The real trick here, the real stoic trick is enjoying the suffering. Yes. Do you enjoy the suffering? I do. I do. I've had to work. I don't think you're just naturally there because there's this part of you that wants to avert and avoid suffering wherever possible. But then I try to go, oh, you know, this is actually like a dream. Like I get to do this. Yeah. This is my job. I'm very lucky. And I try to enjoy it and then try not to rush through it also. And this is probably the most profound Aristotelian point of all, which is because he was a good biologist as well as a philosopher. And he asserted in many, many places and writings that human beings have kind of two spaces that they can live in. There's animal impulse and there's moral aspiration, animal impulse and moral aspiration. And now we know why the reason that we actually have a choice of living in one of these two spaces is because we have a prefrontal cortex that's that's astonishing in its complexity beyond any supercomputer that exists or will exist. I mean, it's one third of our brain by weight. And you know, your dog's prefrontal cortex is way for thin, which is why it has only animal impulse. Yeah. But if you follow what Mother Nature is telling you, which your urges are, all you'll do is the things that will immediately slightly raise your odds of survival and passing on your genes. Yeah. Aristotle points out as do all the good philosophers and religious traditions that you can actually choose to stand up to Mother Nature, to stand up to your animal impulses and live in your moral aspirations. And when you're making that choice, the suffering is sweet. Yeah. That's the point. This is, this is, I mean, this is a key point of Aristotle and everybody else, by the way. 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. [Music]