Professor M.D. Usher on Living in Accordance with Nature

Ryan talks to professor M. D. Usher about his new book How to Be a Farmer: An Ancient Guide to Life on the Land, the philosophical contradiction of the ancients practice of slavery, what the Stoics mean by living in accordance with nature, and more. M. D. Usher is a University of Vermont alumnus and joined the UVM faculty in 2000. Before attending UVM as an undergraduate he apprenticed in Germany as a post-and-beam carpenter and later earned his Ph. D. in Classics at The University of Chicago. Watch the Stoic (and life) Lessons of Hunting video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9IBcoOit_4 Shopify has the tools and resources that make it easy for any business to succeed from down the street to around the globe. Go to shopify.com/stoic, all lowercase, for a FREE fourteen-day trial and get full access to Shopify’s entire suite of features. Grow your business with Shopify today - go to shopify.com/stoic right now. Talkspace is an online and mobile therapy company. Make your mental health more than just another New Year’s resolution, with Talkspace. Visit talkspace.com and get $100 off your first month when you use promo code STOIC at sign-up. That’s $100 off at talkspace.com, promo code STOIC. Reframe is a neuroscience based smartphone app that helps users cut-back or quit drinking alcohol. Using evidence-based tools, techniques and content, To learn more go to JOINREFRAMEAPP. COM/stoic and use the code STOIC for 25% off your first month or annual subscription. Download Reframe on the App Store today. Novo is the #1 Business Banking App - because it’s built from the ground up to be powerfully simple and free business banking that Money Magazine called the Best Business Checking Account of 2021. This year, get your FREE business banking account in just 10 minutes at bank novo.com/STOIC. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://DailyStoic.com/dailyemailCheck out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more. Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these Stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space, when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal,

• 0:46Ryan Holiday?

  and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. When I first got my farm out here in the country, six, seven years ago now, I had this little sign made. And it's a couplet from the poet and satirist Juvenal. And it says, "You ask me what I get out of my country place, the profit gross in net is never having to see your face." And I don't know, I like that. Part of the reason we moved out of the country was to have a quieter life, more introverted, philosophical, studious life.

• 1:31Ryan Holiday?

  And it's been all that and so much more. But it's also given me, paradoxically, a better connection to nature, which the Stoics talk about, and to other people and to humanity. There's something about working the land, interacting with nature, raising animals, just watching the sun rise and set on the same little tank we have behind our house, that gives you a connection to generations and generations and generations of...

• 2:04Ryan Holiday?

  People who've lived a lifestyle in that specific land, the farmers who owned it before us, or the ranchers who owned it before us, the Native Americans who traveled these plains before them, and the animals who lived here before, you know, Homo sapiens made it to America. There's just a sort of a profound connection. And as it happens, you know, the Stoics were often farmers, certainly outdoors. As I talk about in today's interview, Marcus Aurelius, some of his most beautiful passages are about nature. Cato the Elder, that would be Cato the Younger's great-great-grandfather, his essay on agriculture is one of the oldest

• 2:47Ryan Holiday?

  documents that we have in the Latin language. And it's all about how to be not just a farmer, but a profitable, successful farmer. It's a fascinating document. We've done a bunch of Daily Stoic emails about it over the years. So anyways, when this new book came out, this book, How to Be a Farmer: An Ancient Guide to Life on the Land, by the Princeton University Press, whose series I have raved about. I carry How to Be a Leader here in the Painted Porch Bookstore, their translation of Horace, How to Be Content, their Seneca and Epictetus series on anger and freedom and death. We carry all these books because

• 3:31Ryan Holiday?

  we love them. And if you haven't read them, you should. You can check them out at the paintedporch.com. I'll link them in the show notes. But this new one, I was really excited not just to read, but to interview the author. M. D. Usher is a professor of classical languages and literature at the University of Vermont, but he also happens to be a farmer. And they own and operate the Works and Days Farm, which is itself a little classical allusion you may or may not have got. They raise lamb and chickens, and they even make maple syrup there in Vermont. And I wanted to have a conversation about farming, about nature. Remember, the Stoics talked about living in accordance with nature. And I felt like

• 4:14Ryan Holiday?

  there was no one better to have this conversation with than Professor Usher. So I was very excited to have this and I am recording this the day after Thanksgiving, in between two days of deer hunting. First day, not so successful. I'm hoping tomorrow will be a little bit more successful, hoping to get a nice buck to get us through a good chunk of the year. And then I always like to have the deer processed and give out as much as I can to friends and family. You might not be pro hunting, but I do, and I did write an essay about this that we'll link in the notes as well, about the sort of Stoic connection to hunting, why I think everyone should at least do it once.

• 4:56Ryan Holiday?

  If you're getting angry about this, I totally understand, but, but read the essay first. I think you'll like it. And read this new book, How to Be a Farmer: An Ancient Guide to Life on the Land. There's a wonderful little chunk in here from Musonius Rufus. There's stuff in here from Cato the Elder and a bunch of other fellow travelers along with the Stoics. And I really enjoyed this conversation with Professor Usher, and I think you will too.

• 5:21Ryan Holiday?

  I loved the book. I live on 40 acres outside of Austin, Texas, so I'm always interested in what the ancients have to say about country life. I thought I'd start us in the most controversial place we could possibly start with, which is reading about Cato the Elder. He is this sort of fascinating, he writes one of the first essays on agriculture, one of the earliest things we have, surviving in the Latin language, books that is, seems to be this sort of frugal, efficient, down-to-earth guy. And then you're reading about him, and Plutarch tells us about his attitude towards his slaves, which I, I found that

• 6:06Ryan Holiday?

  to be striking, to say the least. Basically, that he would sort of wear them out, grind them down into dust, and then sell them to get rid of them, even, and Plutarch, who didn't seem to have much in the way of a problem with slavery, even he found this to be reprehensible. I was just, I thought we'd riff on that for a minute.

• 6:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, you're right about that. When they're worn out, you throw them away. And in fact, the kind of terminology he uses to talk about slaves is similar to the terminology that Calumella uses when he talks about donkeys in the in the book. So they're tools, right? They're the they're a useful tool on the on the farm. But no, it is reprehensible. And it's sort of a, you know, white noise running in the background of all these texts, because Roman farming was, you know, a slave industry, really, at all periods. However, if I can, you know, put in a quick however, you do see people decrying the practice. I mean, not only do you see, you know, bona fide Stoics decrying slavery as an institution,

• 7:13Speaker 01

  like Seneca's famous letter of, you know, they're serwe, but he says, "Im o hominis", they're they're, you know, they're men too, people too. But you find people like Pliny the Elder talking about these latifundia that were staffed by staffed, that were run by slaves, and and saying that, you know, they're the ruin of of the Republic, they're the ruin of the empire that we now live under. So, you know, there are voices that were of discontent to the institution. But, you know, there was no, there was Spartacus, but I mean, there was no, nobody to say definitively, we need to get, you know, get rid of this.

• 7:56Ryan Holiday?

  It struck me as as an analogous to the the founding of America. You sort of have these two agrarian societies that are deeply philosophical. And you have people sort of questioning the institution. And then, you know, Washington, just like Cato, sort of famously gets down and works in the field. So he knows how backbreaking the labor is. They all have this sense that, or often have this sense that there is something reprehensible about it. And and they would look at the people who were particularly cruel, and they would see that as a moral evil. And yet, sort of all, for 2,000 years, essentially leave the institution as it was.

• 8:40Speaker 01

  Well, thank goodness that the ancients had one up on us in that regard and that slavery was never a racial institution. It was never a racial issue at all in antiquity. It was a residual of war. And so, you know, you and I, Ryan, could find ourselves as slaves, you know, just by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Polybius, you know, was a slave and he worked for the Scipios and wrote a great, you know, piece of Roman history in Greek. So

• 9:08Ryan Holiday?

  It was conquest-based.

• 9:11Speaker 01

  It was conquest-based, but it was also universal. It wasn't just the Romans. I mean, I think slavery or slavers might be like the second oldest profession, if you know what I mean.

• 9:20Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 9:21Speaker 01

  It's been around since the dawn of, you know, Mesopotamia and before.

• 9:27Ryan Holiday?

  And, yeah, you look at the Spartans, right? And it's this sort of fascinating warrior culture, and it only exists because it sits atop a system of exploitation and plunder, effectively.

• 9:42Speaker 01

  Right. And they had, of course, they had a whole institutionalized form of slavery of their own.

• 9:46Ryan Holiday?

  That's what I mean.

• 9:48Speaker 01

  Right. It wasn't chattel slavery, but the helots that basically provided them, fed the war engine of Sparta.

• 9:56Ryan Holiday?

  All right. Well, yeah, I just thought, I thought it was fascinating because you have these people, and actually, I've talked about this before, but there's this fascinating letter that Jefferson writes about sort of comparing American slavery to Roman slavery. And he says, you know, where is, he's like, where is our Epictetus? Where is our Terence? You know, his rationalization was like that the Romans, they had like better slaves. Because, and he was sort of trying to rationalize the inferiority of African slaves to justify the horrendous cruelty of chattel slavery. It did, it did, it did feel like the Romans

• 10:39Ryan Holiday?

  were more of two minds about the slavery than, than, you know, 2,000 years later, the Americans were, that the Americans had sort of deluded themselves a little bit more about it. And maybe this goes into the New World and the diseases, and they seem to have made a more biological argument for it, which obviously does not hold up well.

• 11:00Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah, I mean, it's again, it's something that you can't, you can't shake, you can't deny, but thankfully we've outgrown it. Now we have woofers.

• 11:10Ryan Holiday?

  Yes. Yes. For people who don't know what that is, it's a magical way that anyone who owns a farm or property can get free labor by, by accepting volunteers on your, on your farm, which is actually how I got into it. My wife and I were thinking about doing it and, and she said, you know what, before we do something like this, I'm going to actually go work on a farm. And she ended up working on a farm that's now owned, that is now our neighbor out, out here.

• 11:42Speaker 01

  That's great. Wow. That was a smart, smart move and I'm glad it worked out.

• 11:47Ryan Holiday?

  Well, let's talk about the, something less negative than slavery. Let's talk about the philosophical magic of composting. That was one of my favorite chapters in the book.

• 11:57Speaker 01

  Good. Thank you. I liked that. It was fun to do. It was fun to think of it in those terms. So you're, you're referring to the passage of Lucretius from the De Rerum Natura, I think it's book two. No, it's book one. I can't even remember. Early on in the De Rerum Natura, where he uses the example of, you know, regenerative cycles of nature to illustrate the point that, that the philosophical point of atomism and epicureanism in particular, that nothing comes from nothing or returns to nothing. So the idea is that you've got just a whole big bunch of energy or stuff out there, if you want to look at it that

• 12:36Speaker 01

  way with atoms, small little bits of stuff, but that there's, nothing's lost or nothing's gained in organic transfer in this universe that we live in. So, you know, Lucretius uses that, that, that argument and he looks to farming in particular and to, you know, the soils and that, you know, things are just broken down into their constituent parts and becomes something new, just like you and I will be broken down into our constituent parts and be pushing up daisies later. That's essentially the argument. And it just dawned on me like, this is a philosophy of compost. It's a, you know, it's a closed loop, dynamic, but closed loop regenerative system that really represents what the biosphere is all

• 13:20Speaker 01

  about. And it's remarkable that, that I find remarkable that, you know, epicureanism, atomism in general. Kind of saw that, even if they were wrong, that, you know, everything was reducible to substance as opposed to energy. It was a pretty, it's a keen insight, I think, on their part. I think they trumped the stoics on that, in my view.

• 13:42Ryan Holiday?

  No, it's, it's pretty incredible that, yeah, we're talking about this slave society that's so backwards in so many ways, and without basically any scientific tools whatsoever, they're also writing poems about how the universe is made up of atoms. And they, they get, they get something so right, even though they, they weren't totally correct about it, but they were largely right, you know, thousands of years before we had any real way of proving it one way or another.

• 14:11Speaker 01

  Right, there's two ways to look at that. I mean, at least I find people look at it two different ways. Some people will say like, wow, they must have, you know, had some sort of secret insight or knowledge, you know, to have them think that way. But I look at it more pragmatically. A book I published just before this one for Cambridge was called Plato's Pigs and Other Ruminations. And essentially what it is, is a, is the backstory of sustainability and complexity science in ancient thinking, and not just philosophy, but also like, you know, religious systems, how they are sort of systems oriented. But, so the, the power of analogy, of, of thinking analogically, I mean, that just does not go away.

• 14:55Speaker 01

  I mean, analogies are not perfect, but if you have a analogic mind and you think that way, and you cultivate, you know, analogies, you can stumble upon something that is accurate. Because everything is, it's about a relationship and a ratio. And if everything is connected, you're bound to kind of stumble on something that's close to the truth.

• 15:19Ryan Holiday?

  Well, and that goes to the analogy you made, which is that the same thing that happens to our plants and food and, and, you know, a tree that falls in the woods is also what will happen to us. And so there's this sort of profound philosophical implication for coming to this idea of regeneration.

• 15:41Speaker 01

  Right, and it's a source of comfort for the Epicureans that, you know, you don't have to fear death because, you know, nothing bad's gonna happen afterwards. And it also is a positive value that, you know, you should enjoy life, you know, while you have it. Gather your rosebuds while you may. Do so temperately, right? Not, you know, it's not a pleasure-seeking hedonist viewpoint that, you know, we commonly associate with Epicureanism, but it's something that, that we can just enjoy our friends, enjoy the life and time we have, and we should, we must.

• 16:15Ryan Holiday?

  Has living out in nature and raising livestock particularly, has it changed your relationship with death? I have found, I think that was the thing that surprised me most, just like, even if you take really good care of everything, even if you're on top of it. I mean, I had to, I had to kill a possum like three days ago that was, you know, in my chicken coop in the middle of tearing some of my pet chickens to shreds. And just this sort of, the, the ordinariness of life and death in the sort of agricultural life, it's just so, I mean, obviously, it would have been commonplace in, in the ancient world as well, but, but it's, I think so, in such stark contrast to our antiseptic

• 16:58Ryan Holiday?

  lives in, let's say, the city, that I think it does force you to chew on some of this stuff a bit.

• 17:05Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And, and the only way you're gonna get it in the modern world is if you like, you choose it. I mean, because we are so technologically disconnected from nature and those processes, and it's almost like an ideological decision you gotta make that I'm going to experience this because I know that this is what it, part of what it means to be a human being, and I need this. You know, whether you become a farmer and it becomes your profession, that's another matter. But, you know, there's a day when everybody knew how to kill a chicken to eat it if you were gonna eat it.

• 17:34Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 17:35Speaker 01

  And, and a killing a possum, you know, over a chicken wouldn't bother. You wouldn't think twice about it. Of course you would do that. Um, you know, once upon a time, people were pragmatic and they lived much more, you know, closely to, again, the whole life cycle, um, life and death, both. Um, so to answer your, the front part of your question is that, uh, yes, uh, being, doing this, farming, uh, we raise sheep, um, you definitely see it all the time. Um, you, you, I mean, the moment when a lamb and a ewe, a mother ewe, is most susceptible to death is at that moment of birth, which is like hugely paradoxical, right? Sure. That's when they're both in, in. Talk about regeneration.

• 18:20Speaker 01

  Exactly. So, but, but it's also the most beautiful moment, right? You, you, you know, that ewe's got the genetic, uh, memory to, no, we call it instinct, knows how to lick that lamb off. The lamb knows how to respond and find the otter. It's like, you look at it and it's like a miracle, but it could all go south in like, you know, five minutes, right? Depending on, you know, whatever. And then sometimes things happen where, you know, uh, mothers reject their young. I mean, that's not like a freak thing of nature. That happens a lot. Right. And, and I've always thought like, hmm, is that just bad genetics? Is it just a bad mother? And do we have to call that ewe? Because, you know, she's just doesn't have that instinct well, good enough, well enough to, to, to, you know, to warrant keeping her. And I've come around to

• 19:05Speaker 01

  the, the view that actually I think, I think they know what they're capable of. I think that what happens when, when a, a mother rejects a, a baby, a offspring, is that she knows what her carrying capacity is. Like she's kind of aware, like, I don't think I've got enough milk for that. Or I'm like super exhausted after that particularly difficult birth. Yeah. And, and it's like, uh, it's, it's a, it's a calculation that she's making. So, um, anyway, when you're involved in farming, you, how would I else I have learned that? That's, that's just anecdotal. That's not a scientific, you know, statement that I just made, but it's, um, but it's something, how else would you come to it? And how else could you, you know, reorient your way, reorient your way of thinking about these things unless you were ensconced in it?

• 19:53Ryan Holiday?

  And then to go to the point about Cato and his relationship with the slaves, you then sort of get this weird insight into like, there's this financial component, right? You're like, how much am I going to spend? Like whether it's on veterinary care or time and energy, right? Like your decision of like, should we call this lamb because it's not a good mother? There's this sort of weird element where you're forced to make these decisions that are sort of matters of life and death in some cases. That, yeah, you know, outside of, I don't know, the army or the upper echelons of politics, people are just not ordinarily in a position to make, you know?

• 20:34Ryan Holiday?

  We've deferred that authority elsewhere and suddenly you're the one that decides, hey, is it worth? You know, I had a, I bought some cows. When we bought our place, that came with some cows that the person had, who had the property before us had run. And, you know, they sort of told us they were much younger than they actually were. And, you know, it turns out, you know, they're very, very old. And then you got to make a decision. Hey, are you going to spend? You're going to call a vet out to put this very old sick cow down? Are you going to let it starve to death? Or am I going to have to go out there and dispatch this animal who's eaten out of my hand? You know, personally? And suddenly, again, life and death isn't this abstract thing

• 21:17Ryan Holiday?

  or this thing that happens to you and you feel sad about it. But it's a thing that you're an active participant in. And that's a whole other element.

• 21:26Speaker 01

  Totally true. It sounds like you already know how to be a farmer. These are some of the things that really distinguish, you know, the hobbyist from somebody who, who really does it and must do it. And there's, there's a whole bunch of, you know, you know about the Stoics, there's a whole bunch of necessity involved in farming, you know?

• 21:42Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 21:43Speaker 01

  Like this massive, you know, oppressive necessity that you just, you have to face and you have to do. But the notion of profit, and you write that as perverse as it is to our way of thinking today and unacceptable as it is, you know, because Cato is looking at his slaves as, as tools and as, you know, instruments, instrumenti, instrumentum is what, instrumenta is what he calls them. Of course they're dispensable, you know, like any tool, once it's worn out, you throw it away. Now, that's, you know, that's, that's.

• 22:17Speaker 01

  That's awful way to think about it.

• 22:19Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 22:20Speaker 01

  But the thing about profit that you mentioned is also something people fail to see. And actually, frankly, I don't engage with myself to the same degree that a real farmer will have to. Because I have a day job, right? I write books and I teach classes. I'm really happy for that day job. But we're bigger than just a hobby farm. So we know doesn't. But the word for profit in Latin, you may know this, is fructus, which means fruit. So for a farm to be fruitful, fructuosus, means for it to be profitable. And the ancients were really down on bad farming. I mean, they were, I mean, you know, the modern Italians are already kind of food chauvinists and kind of like, you know, landscape chauvinists in some ways.

• 23:05Speaker 01

  They're very, very regional, particular about stuff. And that's a compliment, by the way, not a put down for Italians. But the Romans were the same thing. They looked at, they looked at property that was unused and they thought this is a waste. You know, in fact, that's, that's what they called it, a wasteland. And so we have, we have that kind of, that view on the part of the Romans that, you know, land is meant to be managed and used, not exploited, but used sort of in a cooperative way to produce fructus, which is food and profit.

• 23:40Ryan Holiday?

  No, to go to one, one other point about this life and death that I thought was interesting is so it's deer season here in Texas. And so my sister was visiting for Thanksgiving and, and I, I went yesterday. I didn't see anything. I'm going to go probably tomorrow. And I said, hey, you should, you should come with me. Just come sit in the deer stand. We'll spend a couple of hours together and maybe we'll get a deer. And she goes, ah, you know, I don't want to, I don't want to see like, I don't, I don't want to touch a dead animal is basically what she said. And I was like, you know, I just watched you spend three hours holding a dead turkey all day, you know, cooking it and prepping it as if it was very different than what I'm about to go do out in the pasture.

• 24:20Ryan Holiday?

  And in fact, you know, this deer, which, which roams freely and wildly on the property because they don't have high fence. Is probably, and certainly the way I'm dispatching it, is far more humane and natural and timeless than this factory-farmed turkey that we bought, even though, you know, we tried to buy something, you know, that checks the various boxes. And so it is interesting how we, it's not that we think we're above it, we just don't want to know about it, right? We just sort of detach ourselves from it and then act as if that sort of removes our culpability, but we're fine to have other people do it in our names.

• 25:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, this woman named Alexis Shotwell wrote a book called Against Purity, came out a couple of years ago, and I use it in the other book I just mentioned to you, Plato's Pigs, where she basically says, you know, that's like the Western European, white, Western European American problem, is that we think we can live a life free of, you know, toxins and a completely, you know, antisepticized life. And we, I mean, you kind of can with, again, with the technologies that we have, but it's a false life, it's a false consciousness, and it's not going to get you anywhere. In fact, it's going to be harmful in the end

• 25:47Speaker 01

  because you get, you know, defamiliarized from what makes us human. I mean, we're animal, people are animals too. And so, yeah, what you're describing is interesting. You know, I really, I think that, I've always thought this, but I'm thinking about it more recently, that, you know, the ancients were, you know, they were earthier than we are. They were closer to both the perils and prospects of their environments in pretty much every respect. I mean, you know, they saw death, they were agents of death, they, you know, they were closer to all these things, and they had a, just a...

• 26:30Speaker 01

  I think it yields a sensitivity in a strange way to describe it, a sensitivity. Once you know what that is, like having to kill an animal or dealing with death on the farm, which happens all the time, you actually don't become desensitized to it. You just kind of become, you realize it for what it is and it gives you kind of an outlook that I would just describe as, you know, just the ability to react sensibly and, you know, earnestly, carefully. I don't know what the right word is.

• 27:07Ryan Holiday?

  No, I agree. It's you sort of, when you feel it, it's like you're connecting with something that was always there. Like I suppose it's a very sort of primal or essential part of who we are. So like when you go hunting, let's say, or you have to dispatch an animal on the farm or whatever, there is this sort of unfamiliarity, this sort of, you know, the nerves of it or whatever. And then you also, I think as it goes on though, you're like, not that I'm meant to do this, but you're like, I'm more familiar with this than perhaps I would have imagined I would be.

• 27:45Speaker 01

  Well, there are people who say like, once a hunter gatherer, always a hunter gatherer. I mean, we just sort of sublimate that in other ways. So is it better to then be just a hunter gatherer? Probably, you know, at least to be, at least to know how to do it.

• 27:59Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 28:00Speaker 01

  And so that's, that's really interesting. But anyway.

• 28:04Ryan Holiday?

  Go ahead.

• 28:05Speaker 01

  I was just gonna say that that's, you know, we got into farming for ideological reasons. I mean, it wasn't just, we weren't born into it. And my wife's from Manchester, England. She's a city girl. I didn't grow up with that. But we, we were very intentional, like, you know, in a Beruvian kind of way, deliberate about wanting to make this connection that you're, we've been talking about for the past 10 minutes here. And, and that has been the, I think that's been the best takeaway from farming. I mean, you know, it's, it's, it's developed, it's kind of. It's been developmental for me as a person. I think I'm probably a better person for it. I'm certainly more patient than I ever used to be in my life because you can't make a donkey

• 28:49Speaker 01

  go anywhere that doesn't want to go, or even a cow, or sheep. Sheep will go the way you don't want them to go. So you just can't yell at them. You can't beat them with a stick. None of that works. And you just have to learn to cooperate with them. So this idea of man dominating nature, I think that's kind of a myth, too. You've got to cooperate with nature. Otherwise, you get nothing out of it.

• 29:15Ryan Holiday?

  Nature is sort of the logos. Nature is the rhythm, and you're connecting to it and going along with it. And maybe you can direct it a little bit one way or another, but it is a reminder of who's in charge.

• 29:29Speaker 01

  It's true. That's a good way to put it. Tracking is, we just talked about hunter-gatherers. Tracking is a great example of that. You have to kind of, like the Kalahari Bushmen or whatever, tracking an animal, you have to cooperate with all the signs that you're seeing, and put them all together, and you have to be patient. And this persistence tracking can take days before you get your quarry. So that is character building.

• 30:00Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I want to talk about donkeys in a second, but I think when people hear that you're operating this farm, I imagine one of the reactions is that that's somehow very different or unusual for a philosopher to do, which is, I think, an interesting, I don't want to say indictment, but it kind of is an interesting indictment, or at least statement about where philosophy has gone, because in the ancient world, they would have been seen as like this. One of my favorite chapters in the book, and I think it's one of the only ones that actually is directly from a Stoic, you have Musonius Rufus saying that, and for people listening, Musonius Rufus is Epictetus's

• 30:43Ryan Holiday?

  philosophy teacher. Musonius Rufus basically says, "There is no better profession for a philosopher than a farmer." Specifically, I think, talks about shepherds as being even down further in the types of farmers. But talk to me about the connection between philosophy and farming.

• 31:05Speaker 01

  Okay, well, let me just say about Musonius, the two main things he says that farming is good for you for is that, A, even though it involves physical work, even though, right, it involves physical work, it's not the kind of work that will distract you from ruminating and thinking about all the things you need to think about to be, become a better person, you know. So it provides that kind of time for self-reflection and cultivating the mind. You know, again, paradoxically, you work with your body, but that work is kind of frees you to work with, to kind of cultivate the mind. And the other thing he says that's

• 31:49Speaker 01

  good about it is that you're kind of on the spot, and you're also under, under somebody's watchful eye. In other words, usually farming is somehow a cooperative adventure, involves other people, and particularly, he talks about, you know, the teacher and the student working out in the fields together. Well, you know, if you get pissed off, or you show impatience, or you show lack of character, or if you show laziness, or intolerance of somebody else's faults, well, it's on full display, people are gonna see it. So it kind of holds you accountable, in a way. And I see this with my wife, I mean, she's a better person than I am. You know, she will, you know, I mean, she's, she's got the patience

• 32:31Speaker 01

  of Job, and she has that, just by nature, that kind of cooperative approach to everything. I'm more of a, let's just get this over with and fix it and do it and go on to the next thing, whatever it is. And, you know, I've learned really from her how awful, you know, some of my attitudes are. And where does it come out? It doesn't really come out in my human relationships, it comes out in, in interacting with the animals, when you get like impatient, or you-

• 32:57Ryan Holiday?

  Because they can feel the energy, right? They can, they react to the energy and the actions you're taking. And, yeah, I've driven cows through a fence because I wasn't taking my time, I got frustrated, and now it's like, now I gotta spend six hours fixing this fence.

• 33:12Speaker 01

  So yeah, anyway, so that's, that's one thing. The other thing that, and it's not, it's not even a Greco-Roman idea per se, though it does have some resonance with Stoicism, that I get out of farming is this notion of like dharmic detachment. So in other words, you do your, like in the Bhagavad Gita, right, Arjuna doesn't, doesn't, he's terrified, he's, you know, repulsed by the notion that he has to kill his cousins on the battlefield. And then Krishna comes down and tells him, you know, well, and he gives us a long discourse about you need to do what your duty is in life, whatever that is. For him, it's a warrior,

• 33:53Speaker 01

  Arjun is a warrior. And so you need to fulfill that duty in life, but you need to act with detachment. So in other words, you need to be kind of emotionally detached from the activity that you do, or maybe psychologically detached. Doesn't mean you're going to be a robot or anything like that, but you have to actively cultivate this notion of being detached from the results of action, you know, do it with all your, your might. Farming teaches you that like nothing else, because the outcomes are so unpredictable. Whether you're a crop farmer, depends on the weather, or you're an animal farmer, also depends on the weather, but it has so many different things. I mean, sheep 101 is like, whatever

• 34:35Speaker 01

  can go wrong, will go wrong. And a sheep wants to die. That's the first given. Sheep will want to die. I mean, so you're trying to prevent that. You do everything you can, but then still you come up short. So to be able to cope with that, you have to, I found that you just have to have this, you know, you do everything you can, you do it well, you do it to the best of your ability, you make sure you close that gate, you make sure you're thinking in the future, you're planning properly, you're not lazy, you're not forgetting, you're not forgetting, but you're not putting something off, procrastinating. But at the same time, you still just can't think that it's a guarantee that it's going to come out the way you want it to, because it won't.

• 35:15Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I think in the Gita, it says like you're entitled to the labor, but not the fruits of the labor, to go back to the thing you were saying earlier. And so, you know, at the core of Stoicism is this dichotomy of control. What's up to you, what's not up to you? You control if you do everything right, but you don't control if it rains. You don't control if they come down with this or that. You don't control if a coyote comes or a mountain lion comes. Or, you know, you don't control what your neighbors do. You know, that for me, the country life thing, the animals I'm OK with. It's the, you know, it's the other people who choose to live out in the country that tend to test my patience for the most part.

• 35:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I live in the People's Republic of Vermont.

• 35:57Ryan Holiday?

  You probably have it too. I mean, like, you know, I say this, the wonderful part about being in the country is you can do whatever you want. The worst part about living in the country is that everyone else can do whatever they want. And for some people, that means collecting, you know, broken down cars in their front yard or burning their trash or shooting an AR-15 off in the morning. And, you know, that just goes with the territory. And all you can do is accept it and try not to loathe the people that you live next to.

• 36:26Speaker 01

  Right. Well, it has that passage in there about good neighbors. You know, good fences make good neighbors, but you have to also cultivate that relationship as best you can. And

• 36:38Ryan Holiday?

  Have you found that farming has made you a better philosopher and classicist? Or is it challenge, is it fought for the same resources?

• 36:48Speaker 01

  Well, it certainly has changed the tack I'm taking in my thinking and research and writing. So when I wrote that book Plato's Pigs, that was the moment where I kind of put all the eggs in one basket. Up to that time, we've been farming for about 20 years. Up to that time, I had, I had kind of lived a double life, right? I was, I was classicist by day and farmer at home and never really thought about integrating, you know, them philosophically speaking, or in terms of like, you know, worldview. And, I mean, I had thought about it, but I never thought about doing it professionally, like writing about and being public about it.

• 37:27Speaker 01

  But with that book, I did merge the two, so I used my training and my aptitudes in, you know, in classics and my experience in farming to come up, you know, with basically an argument that, you know, the West is not, I mean, basically, the canonical literature of classics has a lot to say that speaks to us in contemporary terms about sustainability and about holistic, you know, interconnections of things in nature and how we need to be a part of that. And so, in that way, I think it has made me a better classicist because I think I'm more useful now. I mean, I think, I think, I actually think maybe that I feel

• 38:11Speaker 01

  like, you know, what I say and what I'm thinking and feeling about, you know, what I'm reading in these ancient texts matters because it's translatable. I mean, not, you know what I mean by that, you know, translatable into, into life choices, even into, you know, crazy, something as crazy as policymaking, you know. And so, the book I'm writing now is kind of about that. You'll like the title. It's called Secundum Naturum, and it's, you know, according to nature. And the overarching argument of the book is that, is that it's kind of like that Lucretius passage that, you know, if, if nature works this way, you

• 38:51Speaker 01

  know, as a closed-loop dynamic system, then the economy should work that way too, right? Or, and so should the decisions that we make that, you know, within that, within the economy. So, how are we gonna, how are we gonna power the grid? Well, solar energy is, makes sense. So does wind energy because it involves that same principle that exists in nature of a closed-loop dynamic system. So, there's analogical thinking that can take you a long way because, you know, we have the technology to actually implement these things. Do we have the will? No, probably not. And do we have the kind of economy that can tolerate it? No, not yet. But we need it. So, anyway.

• 39:36Ryan Holiday?

  But don't, don't you think, I've got to imagine that you have a set of skills and a certain self-sufficiency that's probably anomalous amongst your philosophical peers, right? That, again, in the ancient world, would have been

• 39:56Ryan Holiday?

  It would have been the exact opposite, you know, like Socrates is a soldier. Musonius Rufus is a political advisor and does all these other things. It is interesting how as philosophy has become more and more specialized, I do feel like the philosopher, man or woman, has become more of a sort of a, an academic figure than a sort of a real world person who is unlike you or sort of contrasting with you, not down in the earth, touching real things, doing real things in the real world.

• 40:35Speaker 01

  That's true. I mean, one of your guys, when I say your guys, was a Stoic sage, Klyantus, you know, used to be a gardener.

• 40:43Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, he was a water carrier.

• 40:45Speaker 01

  Exactly. And sometime a boxer, you know, so they did have life experience. You're probably familiar with Pierre Hadow.

• 40:53Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 40:54Speaker 01

  Philosophy is a way of life. You know, I read that when it first came out in English translation and I'm rereading it now, some of it in French.

• 41:01Ryan Holiday?

  One of my all time favorite books.

• 41:03Speaker 01

  Okay, well, it should be because it was revolutionary. And I'm kind of, I read it back then, but now I'm rediscovering it. I just love that because the argument that all ancient philosophy, even, you know, from the elites like Plato and Aristotle, was all about how to live well, how to live a full, truthful, you know, life that is in sync with the way the world really is. No holds barred, like, you know, whatever it takes to reach that point, that's what ancient philosophy was all about. Yes, there are these petty arguments within it, whatever, but ultimately that was the thrust of it. And so you're right, the ancients had it.

• 41:47Speaker 01

  It was a, it was a lifestyle, a way of life, and not just something taught in universities.

• 41:53Ryan Holiday?

  Well, it's like they all had, you said you have a day job. It's like the Stoics all had day jobs and then philosophy was the, was the secondary practice, right? Even in Meditations, Marcus Aurelius talks about how philosophy basically can't be your stepmother. Philosophy has to be your real mother and then you have this other thing that you do. But I saw, sort of saw it as a balancing act. You have Your your real world experience where you're interacting with real people and you're being challenged as a merchant or a soldier or a whatever. And then you also have your philosophical practice and the two are informing each other, just as you found that, oh, hey,

• 42:33Ryan Holiday?

  my my understanding of of a farm and philosophy now creates real insights that can inform, you know, policymakers and, you know, consumers and fellow farmers. Because I but but either one of those independently would not have been as fruitful.

• 42:53Speaker 01

  Right. That that's why I like the the whole generation of like the people, you know, the World War One, you know, poets and a lot of the people who served, you know, in either World War One, World War Two, that were, you know, people of persons of letters, you know, people who were literary or philosophically inclined.

• 43:12Ryan Holiday?

  The Brits especially.

• 43:14Speaker 01

  Who?

• 43:14Ryan Holiday?

  The Brits especially. Yes, it's like a whole generation of poets and writers.

• 43:19Speaker 01

  Exactly. And then there's just there's this it gives an authenticity to their work. For me, because of that life experience. I mean, it wasn't farming, but it was, you know, it was a life or death kind of experience. And it changed them and, you know, sometimes harmed them. But it was there's something that gives that authenticity to me. I mean, Wittgenstein wrote the Tractatus while he was like in the trenches of World War One, for instance. Even like go back a couple of generations, Rene Descartes wrote, you know, the Discourse on Method, when he was like serving as a mercenary in the Dutch Army. And he was like locked himself in a room for some quiet time and to think about what's really important. And he writes the Discourse on Method. So.

• 44:04Ryan Holiday?

  I think I think T Lawrence was talking about how to translate the the Odyssey or the Iliad, you have to have done, you know, a variety of things to be able to speak to Odysseus' experience. Yeah, the sort of the philosopher adventurer is an archetype that doesn't really exist as much anymore these days.

• 44:26Speaker 01

  So you get Lawrence of Arabia quoting Themistius, you know, when he's on trial. Someone or then, you know, he carries Apuleius' golden ass in his saddlebag when he's out there, you know, fomenting the Arab revolt. You know, anyway, that's a different generation and it had its own, it had its own problems, no doubt about it. But there's, there is something about the, you know, the, the, um, the Vita contemplativa and the, the Vita activa meshing that is really important, you know, now more than ever because we're, we're losing it.

• 45:00Ryan Holiday?

  But, and, and I don't remember the, the, the Latin expression, but also the sort of sound body in a, or sound mind in a strong body. The idea of like active body, active mind is, is also, I think, something that you can lose if you just sit behind a desk all day.

• 45:15Speaker 01

  True. Main Sana, incorpora Sano. That's, um, you do, and what, what do we do? We do sit behind a desk all day. What are we doing now?

• 45:26Ryan Holiday?

  Well, so, so talk to me about living with accordance of nature, living in accordance with nature, because I feel like of all the Stoic phrases that I hear people ask about the most, and that I probably, if I'm answering it, feel like I'm on the shakiest ground. This is one of those things that is repeated incessantly amongst the philosophers. And it's like, no one bothers to actually define what it is. Maybe it's just one of those things that gets lost. But what does it actually mean?

• 45:56Speaker 01

  All right. Well, I'll be on, I'll go out on shaky, shaky ground here too, on a limb. So, well, it means many things, even in antiquity, it, it meant many things because, because nature is a slippery concept. Um, you know, it can mean so many different things and it's, it's, it's, it's not a fixed entity that you, so.

• 46:17Speaker 01

  But like, I'll just give a couple of examples. So that we talked about Lucretius before. So, living according to nature for an Epicurean means that your ethics proceeds proceed from your physics. So in other words, the ethical system that you have is based on an understanding of how the world is strung together and how it works physically, like, no. So scientifically, we would say. That's what the Epicureans meant by living according to nature. You know, the Stoics had a different cosmology and a different picture of how the universe was strung together. But they still had that same idea that, you know, your ethic should proceed from your physics.

• 47:01Speaker 01

  You know, they fudged it a little bit. I think they kind of adjusted their physics to fit their ethics. But they use this image, you're probably familiar with it, of the egg. So like, you know, Stoic, Stoic, the Stoic philosophical system is like an egg. So you've got the outer shell is logos, is like logic, but logic not just like formal logic, but discourse as well, like just speaking. So the arts of logos are the shell. The ethics is the white part, the albumen, and then the physics are the yolk. So, so what does it mean to live according to nature for a Stoic?

• 47:39Speaker 01

  I have an idea. I'm gonna spring it on you now. So, yeah, the concept of oikiosis in Stoicism.

• 47:47Ryan Holiday?

  Our affinity for each other.

• 47:50Speaker 01

  Affinity for each other, but I'm gonna, I'm gonna say it, I'm gonna be even more general than that. Our affinity or our relationships to our environments. Because Stoic use this term, and many, many of the examples that they give come from the animal kingdom. So, an example is, you know, animals know what they're supposed to do by instinct. We say by instinct. And they, they never, they don't, they don't veer from that. I mean, they're, they're pretty consistent. They have this instinctual urge to do the right thing according to their nature. We call it, in modern scientific terms, it's called proprioception. They're aware of how, what they're doing bodily, physically, in the environment that they occupy,

• 48:34Speaker 01

  whatever that is. Could be an amoeba, could be a deer. Humans, the Stoics said, we have a problem, and the problem is reason. Now, the problem is also a tool, but the fact that we have the noodle means that we can deceive ourselves, or we can make... We have will, we have volition, we can choose the wrong course of action. So we have the capability of not living according to nature, and so therefore we need to fix it. And they had the whole solution of, you know, getting back to nature meant getting back to human nature, where virtue was everything and rationality was the access point for that thing.

• 49:18Speaker 01

  So this notion, I actually kind of think it's like the first environmental philosophy, where they argue that human beings and animal... Human beings like animals need to stay within the bounds and the confines of what they were created for, for lack of a better word, what they are by nature. And so, Secundum naturam, in that way of thinking, is knowing your limits and knowing your bounds, and knowing your proper reactions and actions, and how all those fit together with that environment. So I don't know if that's one end to that. So what's a modern application?

• 50:01Speaker 01

  Here's what I think about that. You've heard of the concept of biomimicry, right? Where, you know, you invent Velcro from the way, like, seed pods stick on the, whatever that's called. I don't know the technical terminology, but Velcro was invented that way. And they invent all sorts of gadgets, you know, based on how things work in nature, because I think, well, nature's got a good design. We can mimic that. Flight, etc. Yeah, I mean, I think that it's kind of like a form of biomimicry. So as the world works, so should we model, you know, to the degree that we can, the way human societies work, or the way our interactions with others work,

• 50:46Speaker 01

  on those sorts of relationships.

• 50:50Ryan Holiday?

  How does, so I have been a little curious, though, then, how does like, how does living in accordance with nature bump into what they call the naturalistic fallacy? Like, just because it's natural doesn't mean that it's right? Or just because it happens in nature doesn't mean that it's right?

• 51:09Speaker 01

  Right, no, that's, no, that's true. And I think the Stoic answer to that would be that we have, human beings have a soul, for one thing. They believe that, and we have rationality, which is a component of that soul. So, we have a dimension of experience, we also have recursive thought and consciousness. So, our interaction would be, would be different than other species in nature for that reason. And so that we would have to define what was, what was quote unquote "natural" for us, factoring in those, those elements as well.

• 51:53Speaker 01

  I think that would be what the Stoics would say about that. But, but it's not so simplistic as just because it exists in nature, go out and do likewise.

• 52:02Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 52:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't think that that's what they're suggesting and recommending. And that's not what I'm thinking and suggesting, recommending, too. There's something also qualitatively different about a human being, you know? You know, animals don't write books about us. We write books about them. There's something to that. But that's the mystery of consciousness is something, we're not going to solve that here today.

• 52:26Ryan Holiday?

  No, I mean, one of the things I, I think loosely connected to this, that I've always found the most compelling in some of the Stoic writings, particularly in Marcus Aurelius, just, you know, supposedly this sort of dour, depressive guy. I've always loved the observations about nature, which made me think he was much more agrarian or outdoorsy than we perhaps think. You know, he talks about the way that grain bends under its own weight, talks about the flecks of foam on a boar's mouth, the way that ripe olives fall from the tree. He clearly spent a lot of time outside, looking very closely at things, being very present. And then there's a great phrase from Seneca where he says, you know, "The whole world is a temple of the gods."

• 53:10Ryan Holiday?

  The idea of the farm, or life, or the outdoors is this sort of... Temple, this magical place, kind of in the way that John Muir talks about it. I feel like we don't talk about that enough, particularly with the Stoics, that they they were in love with the natural world.

• 53:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's terrific. I mean, you know, for Marcus, I mean, he wrote the Meditations while he was in a tent, you know, on campaign in Asia. So he was seeing plenty of the outdoors. And, and you're right. I mean, and both the Greeks and the Romans, they had great affection for, you know, their environs. And, and yeah, maybe you're right that we don't, we don't think about that enough from the, from the Stoics.

• 53:59Ryan Holiday?

  Which is sort of going through, I think, you know, like the transcendentalists, it's sort of like you go outside and you really look at what nature is, the canvas of nature. You're sort of looking at the, at the world through, through the eyes of a poet or an artist. Again, the Stoics are supposed to be seen as these sort of depressive, sort of resigned figures, but I, to me, that seems very at odds with the, the love of beauty that comes through in their philosophical writings.

• 54:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think you're right about that. And, and, and, you know, the Epicureans were that way too, because they, you know, the school of Epicurus was called, you know, the garden, because that's where they first met. And, and that idea of, you know, spending time together in nature. Yeah, it's resonant.

• 54:52Ryan Holiday?

  So do you have donkeys?

• 54:54Speaker 01

  We have donkeys.

• 54:55Ryan Holiday?

  How many have you got?

• 54:57Speaker 01

  Just two. They're called, they're called Turks and Caicos, because that's where we'd rather be in Vermont in February.

• 55:06Ryan Holiday?

  I've got two donkeys also. I bought one when someone was liquidating a petting zoo, which was about the saddest Craigslist I've ever seen in my life. And then I bought another one from, from, also from a lady on Craigslist. And they're wonderful. They're like, they're like big dumb dogs with a stronger opinion about how things should be.

• 55:28Speaker 01

  Good, good, good description. Ours came to us in a similar way. They were like hand me down from people who were horse people who had these, these animals and they were moving to North Carolina and they, they couldn't take them with them. And, um, and one of them actually was a therapy donkey. So it's like a certified trained therapy donkey. Um, that would be Turks.

• 55:52Ryan Holiday?

  And do you, what do you use them for? For us, they, they just hang out with the cows and they keep away like coyotes and mountain lions and stuff.

• 55:59Speaker 01

  Now, have you verified that they actually do that?

• 56:01Ryan Holiday?

  Well, so one day, one of them came back all cut up and the vet thinks that he, he, he got in a scrape with a mountain lion or some, something like that. We haven't lost anything to mountain lions, so it's hard to prove a negative, but it does seem like they, uh, they keep things away.

• 56:18Speaker 01

  You want to trade donkeys then? I had to, because the reason we got the donkeys were, were as for to be guard animals for the sheep. Now, because we have one pastor that's about, you know, it's on our property, but it's like across the dead, uh, dead end dirt road that we live on up in the woods and it's a big clearing up there. And it's fenced in, but you know, we always, we, we lost some lambs, you know, two years in a row up there because of that. Um, because of the, I think the distance from the, from the house. So we thought we'd get the donkeys to solve that problem. And they are, they think, they are supercilious. They think they're better than the sheep. They don't want anything to do with them. So they don't hang out with them. You know, wherever the sheep

• 56:59Speaker 01

  are, they, they intentionally go somewhere else. You know, they like to be on their own. So, you know, I think we have two donkeys that aren't really serving their purpose, but I tell you, they're my favorite animals on the farm.

• 57:11Ryan Holiday?

  They're so, they're so sweet. And, uh, there's, it's, it's this weird thing because they're very sweet and nice, but you also get this sense that it's like, they're still dangerous. Do you know what I mean? Like, uh, like, uh, don't push them. Uh, it's like maybe a pit bull or something.

• 57:27Speaker 01

  Right. Well, they do kick. They can kick.

• 57:28Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. Yeah, but, but, yeah. You can't make them, it, it's like, uh, it's like an egotistical person. The only way you can get them to do anything is to make them think it was their idea.

• 57:40Speaker 01

  That's a good way to, that's, that's correct. That's true. Um, I, I think they will teach you the farmer's patience more than any other animal, right? Um, because they, they, they don't move and they seem to have a way to like not move in a way that's even. You know, more grounded than even like a, a large bull or a cow.

• 58:00Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 58:01Speaker 01

  It's like they, they just won't move. You can't even push them to get them started.

• 58:06Ryan Holiday?

  I, I've always been like, sometimes I've told this story before, but you know, you sort of, you can come across a donkey. If the donkey doesn't know that you're there, you could just, it'll just stand there for like an hour. Like you're not moved, like the, the stillness of them is, uh, is something I've taken some philosophical lessons from the just sort of like the serene comfort with themselves and the, uh, not just the total obliviousness to time or urgency or anything, but what they feel like doing is kind of marvelous to watch.

• 58:43Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. Well, that's why probably Eeyore is a donkey, which may be like a depressive one.

• 58:49Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 58:50Speaker 01

  Somehow has come to terms with the, the way the world works and way it is and accepts it.

• 58:56Ryan Holiday?

  Well, my, my favorite Stoicism story is related to donkeys. Again, we see the Stoics as, uh, these very dour, uh, humorless figures, but supposedly Chrysippus dies laughing at a donkey eating figs.

• 59:11Speaker 01

  Oh, that's a story I did not know. That's a, that's a great one.

• 59:14Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. He's, he's sitting on his front porch and a donkey walks in and starts eating figs in his garden. And, uh, apparently Chrysippus said some joke, like, does he need some wine to wash down those figs? And begins to laugh so hard at his own joke that he, uh, shortly thereafter drops dead, which is quite a way to go, I feel like.

• 59:36Speaker 01

  Well, there are a lot of donkeys around. You may, you have many, many opportunities to see donkeys in ancient, ancient Greece or Rome.

• 59:43Ryan Holiday?

  Well, they, yeah, I mean, I, I feel like I'm dealing with that myself because, so we got the, we rescued these donkeys sort of late. And the, the vet told us there was too late to fix, uh, the male donkey that we got. He was already like six or seven years old. So we get like another donkey every 13 or so months and, uh, you can't keep them. So we're, we feel like we're in this, they're not worth anything, as you know, so we're in this. Constant mode of trying to rehome a donkey about once every eighteen months. That's been a, it's been both a burden, but also kind of a wonderful way to connect with people. Cause you're always like, hmm, I bet I could trick this person into becoming a donkey person. And that's the, that's our, our journey.

• 1:00:26Speaker 01

  Too bad you're in Texas, because I, I can't tell you how many times we've gotten a call from somebody saying like, where did you get your donkeys from? We can't find one, we want one.

• 1:00:34Ryan Holiday?

  Well, cause yeah, I think people do need them. Yeah. And then, uh, although I guess like in out in the West, there's just an enormous feral donkey population.

• 1:00:45Ryan Holiday?

  And Hawaii too, uh, you can see them just walking around in some of these, uh, places like, I guess in, from the West, it's from the mines. You know, they, they had them in the mines and then they just let them go. And now they're, they're, they're just there. And then in, in Hawaii, you know, people just let them go on the islands. And now they've got a, a wild donkey population.

• 1:01:05Speaker 01

  Oh, amazing. Anyway, yeah, I like them.

• 1:01:09Ryan Holiday?

  They're the best. They're the best. Um, let's see what else I wanted to ask you about, if there's anything else. Yeah, I guess, uh, the, the last thing, just cause it pertains to climate, and I do think it's important. How, where philosophically, uh, do, what do the philosophers have to teach us about? This sort of moment of time that we're in where, you know, years of neglecting or abusing the climate is coming back to haunt us. We're, we're sort of wrestling with, not just our obligations, but I feel like we're also wrestling with this massive collective action problem, which is, how do you do something about it? It wasn't totally your fault, but it is now the problem of our time.

• 1:01:54Ryan Holiday?

  So what, what do the philosophers have to teach us? And what does Farman have to teach us, uh, as well?

• 1:02:00Speaker 01

  Huh. Well, there is a passage in the book, as you know, from Plato. And it's not us, it's kind of a, an outlier passage because it's not directly about farming. But what it is about, it's about the construction of an ideal society. And it's, it's Socrates' first, first attempt to say what, what, what the ideal society would look like. And it's interesting, I kind of think of it as like he's engaging in playing SimCity. Maybe, you know, tongue in cheek just a little bit, but I, I think he's also earnest. Where, you know, he says that societies come, come together because of mutual need. You know, no one is self-sufficient by themselves, so we need each other.

• 1:02:42Speaker 01

  And so the idea of cooperation is at the root of, of city formation. And then he talks about how, how the people would live in this ideal city. And it would be an agrarian rustic community, ideally. And it would be a vegetarian community. It would be a community that was self-supporting, you know, with, by, through cooperation amongst themselves. It wouldn't, and the reason for that, it would, it would be happy, content with what it had within its, its territory, within its environment. Because otherwise, you would be encroaching on other people's property to get things that you want. Or that you think that you need or you want.

• 1:03:27Speaker 01

  So because the ideal society doesn't do that, there, there is no war. And because there's no war, there's no slaves. And Plato paints the picture, it sounds like, you know, Edward Hicks' Peaceable Kingdom, where people are, you know, they work by day naked out in the sun. And at night, you know, they, they sit by the fire, you know, and munch acorns and drink wine. And he says something to the effect, actually, let's see if I can get this close to right. He says, they will, they will have sex with one another. They will, they will, you know, they'll mate and they'll, they'll, but they won't produce children beyond their means. He says that specifically.

• 1:04:06Speaker 01

  And he says, they will ensure that they leave a life similar to the one that they've enjoyed for their progeny. So it's got all the ingredients that Plato's likes Plato was such a genius, really. You know, he understands like this systemic view of how society works and how it how it needs to think about its future as much as its present and that it has to live within limits. So, you know, with climate change, well, if anything, we've exceeded limits on every front and the biosphere, though, is the ultimate limit. So, I mean, we are living within limits, but we're living as if there aren't that isn't there isn't that limit of the of the biosphere.

• 1:04:52Speaker 01

  And I think, you know, something like Plato has a lot to teach us about that. The other thing about Plato that you just mentioned, like how to motivate people, how to get kind of collective action, you know, his analogy or his homology between the soul and the state that the republic is big on, right? That the tripart soul is equivalent to the tripart state and the cooperation amongst those the proper cooperation amongst those three parts in both soul and state need to be in order and that's like the definition of justice. All of that, I think, can speak to, you know, individual, maybe allegorically speak to it, but individual harmony or just living or righteous living in the world, the kind

• 1:05:37Speaker 01

  of choices that you make, things that you do, how you view things, do I need that new television? No, you don't. And how we make collective decisions, which, you know, were just a collection of individuals formed by mutual need, according to Plato. So we could we could think about that as that homology between soul and state, personal action and civic action productively, I think. I mean, it's not a not one for one correspondence, but we have to recognize, I think, the recognition of that that homology is important.

• 1:06:13Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, Marcus Realist in Meditations talks about how what's bad for the hive is bad for the bee. I think he meant, you know, other individuals, but I also the sense that the planet is our hive and that we owe an obligation to take care of it. And that this sort of idea of, uh, leave it, leave it as good or better than you found it is the sort of inherent obligation that we have as citizens, but also as philosophers and sort of students of wisdom and virtue. Like you can't, you can't abuse this thing and then hand the check to your children or grandchildren or, you know, literal or figurative. Um, that that's an inherently unvirtuous thing to do.

• 1:06:56Speaker 01

  Well, you're familiar with Heracles' circles of concern.

• 1:07:01Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 1:07:02Speaker 01

  And I think I've met a guy on your program before, or he's written for you, Kai Whitey.

• 1:07:06Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 1:07:08Speaker 01

  He's written, he sent me a couple of years ago, a really terrific article, really, on applying Heracles' circles of concern. He actually had this nice diagram that he drew to show how that idea, that Stoic idea is perfectly translatable and, and to the modern situation of, of resource use and allocation, how it all works. Um, and so there you go. I think, I think the ancients do speak to that, that problem. They don't have the science to solve the problem, but the problem that we face is really not a scientific one.

• 1:07:42Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, like if you're, if your neighbor was polluting your yard, you do something about it. And I think the idea of the circles of concern is how can you apply that same level of outrage isn't exactly a Stoic word, but how can you, how can you apply that same level of concern to some river that you'll never see in your life? Or, you know, the protection of a tree that you won't live long enough to sit in the shade of. But if you expand the circles of control, you get there pretty quickly. And that's why sort of preserving and protecting the land and the resources, it, it, it really matters. And it's, it's a philosophical pursuit, not just some sort of social justice, environmental pursuit. It's a philosophical pursuit.

• 1:08:24Speaker 01

  Right. And if you, and people could be convinced that you are connected to that tree on the other side of the world, um, in a very real way.

• 1:08:33Speaker 01

  You would, you would care about it.

• 1:08:34Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:35Speaker 01

  You know, if enough people feel that way, then maybe something will happen. I don't know.

• 1:08:40Ryan Holiday?

  I, I hopes, I hope so. I certainly hope so. We've made so much progress from the ancient world as, as we've talked about, you know, whether, let's say with the eradication of slavery, but there are certainly other things that 2,000 years from now, they're going to look back and be aghast at. And I think we have an obligation to try to tackle those things as much as we can in our own time.

• 1:09:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, indeed.

• 1:09:04Ryan Holiday?

  Professor, this was amazing. I, I loved the book. I love the Princeton University Press series. I've read like a dozen of these now. They're all awesome, but I was very excited to see this one and it was an honor to have you on.

• 1:09:15Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me. The next one's about the cynics and that's coming out next fall.

• 1:09:19Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I'd love to, I'd love to talk about that one, too.

• 1:09:21Speaker 01

  It sounds good. Me too.

• 1:09:25Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. I just wanted to say we so appreciate it. We love serving you. It's amazing to us that over 30 million people have downloaded these episodes in the couple of years we've been doing it. It's an honor. Please spread the word, tell people about it. And this isn't to sell anything. I just wanted to say thank you.