Arthur Brooks’ Ultimate Philosophy Masterclass (PT. 2)

What did Epicurus, Buddha, and Viktor Frankl understand about meaning that most people never question? In Part 2 of this masterclass, bestselling author and Harvard professor Arthur Brooks joins Ryan to break down Epicureanism, Buddhism, Christianity, and other schools of thought, revealing what each one gets right (and wrong) about happiness, meaning, and how to actually live. Arthur Brooks is a bestselling author, Harvard professor, and one of the world’s leading voices on happiness, meaning, and human flourishing. Through his books, columns, and teaching, Brooks helps people build more meaningful, satisfying lives grounded in both philosophy and modern research.👉 Preorder Arthur Brooks’ NEW book The Meaning of Your Life now📚 Grab copies of Arthur Brooks’ books Strength to Strength and Build the Life You Want Follow Arthur on Instagram @ArthurCBrooks, YouTube @DrArthurBrooks, and X @ArthurBrooks🎥 VIDEO EPISODES | Watch the video episodes on The Daily Stoic YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos✉️ FREE STOIC WISDOM | Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

• 0:00Speaker 0

  His whole point was that meaning is everything. That if you don't know the meaning of life, there is no reason for life. And you know, that's one of the three pillars of happiness. There is enjoyment, there's satisfaction, but meaning is absolutely the most important. And that's of course the one that is most absent today.

• 0:15Speaker 2

  Arthur Brooks, New York Times bestselling author.

• 0:22Speaker 0

  You're not alive. That's the glory of God if you're actually not having a full range of human experiences. Give me something from Aristotle. Change isn't a distraction from reality. It is reality. That's a big deal. When

• 0:34Speaker 1

  his point that virtue is something not that you have as an essence, but it's something you are doing and getting better at doing.

• 0:42Speaker 0

  That has been super super influential in my own work. A man can bear any what as long as he has a why. His whole point was that meaning is everything. The human brain, the prefrontal cortex is designed for you to time travel retrospectively, prospectively, and mindfully. Those are the three time zones that are actually in your head all the time. Most people spend the least amount of their time here now.

• 1:04Speaker 1

  Yeah.

• 1:05Speaker 0

  That they don't spend their time mindfully. So the great trick, the great stoic trick, the great Christian trick, the great trick of life is not just to start each day and say I'm I'm grateful for the things that are gonna that are I'm gonna enjoy this day is to say.

• 1:26Speaker 0

  It's good to see you too. I think you've been on the most out of basically anyone. It's my third time. Is that right? Twenty-maybe four. Maybe

• 1:35Speaker 1

  I think you did one remote too. Yeah.

• 1:37Speaker 0

  That's right. We did a remote one during during COVID. Yes. That's right. We did COVID remote. And you're on today on my show.

• 1:43Speaker 1

  I know. Someone just messaged me. Yeah. It's a really good interview. Well, thank you. Well, so here's what I thought we should do. Uh-huh. What I'm noticing about your columns, tell me if I'm wrong. 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 are like, I'm a Buddhist, I'm a stoic, I'm a Christian, and you're just you kind of just stay in your lane. Right. And obviously there's something about going really deep into one school of philosophy. But what I like about the ancients is how familiar they were with all the other ancient schools. So I thought maybe we just kind of go through them and talk about what they can my favorite lines from Seneca is he says he'll quote a bad author if the line is good. Yeah.

• 2:28Speaker 1

  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 he can engage in the same thing. Yeah,

• 2:42Speaker 0

  there's a lot to take from all different ways of thinking.

• 2:45Speaker 1

  Yes.

• 2:46Speaker 0

  And then when it comes to philosophy, but by the way, it's the same thing with behavioral science. You need to you need to and and 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. Aaron Powell

• 3:10Speaker 1

  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

• 3:18Speaker 0

  have. No doubt. I mean, no doubt that there is something behind it. There's a a basic physics behind it. Yeah. But it's funny. It's kind of like uh what um that's what Schopenhauer calls villa, which means will in English. And what that means is 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 it. That's also what Hegel would call geist. You know, that's the ultimate truth behind, which means ghost. And for him, that was kind of God in its 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?

• 3:58Speaker 1

  So he just did it. You just give me like a five people saying the same

• 4:01Speaker 0

  thing. And we could look at whoceral or any of those guys or you know, any of those uh subjectivists who would say that actually there isn't that, but that the reality comes to exist at the moment and that the point of your perception.

• 4:14Speaker 1

  Yeah.

• 4:16Speaker 0

  That's I don't think that's right. I think there is an 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, it's through a grass a glass too darkly. Aaron Ross Powell

• 4:28Speaker 1

  Well, I've kind of likened it to uh 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 meet 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. What's that line about where it's all table scraps from the feast of Plato or whatever? So 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.

• 5:20Speaker 1

  Later, you're like, wow, it's very similar. And that's

• 5:24Speaker 0

  kind of the point. That's the point. So you just gave the biological metaphor for of the philosophical. And then there's of course the market metaphor. And the market metaphor is what 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'll emerge is a wisdom.

• 5:43Speaker 1

  Yes.

• 5:44Speaker 0

  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 at it from different angles. The biology will actually produce certain phenomena on the basis of congruent need.

• 5:58Speaker 1

  Yeah.

• 5:59Speaker 0

  And so it's the same basic idea. Sure. And that's why you have to be looking outside your tiny little worldview. Aaron Powell

• 6:06Speaker 1

  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 innovations.

• 6:17Speaker 0

  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 truth.

• 6:39Speaker 1

  Sure.

• 6:39Speaker 0

  And and

• 6:40Speaker 1

  you're a specialist in X. 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're you you have tunnel vision.

• 6:53Speaker 0

  Exactly. That's why I started my career over on the basis of not doing that seven years ago. Aaron Powell

• 6:58Speaker 1

  Okay. So let's let's start with some schools. Like what do you think? Should we start with Socrates who brings the wisdom down from the heavens? What do you think Socrates has to teach your average person about life? Where would where do we start?

• 7:12Speaker 0

  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 the that's the Socratic idea that I the only thing I know is that I don't know anything, that concept.

• 7:37Speaker 2

  Yeah.

• 7:37Speaker 0

  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 Sir Socrates would say, um, if you bring it forward to what a modern, semi-modern psychologist would say, with 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 say is

• 8:10Speaker 1

  going around asking questions, not making statements.

• 8:12Speaker 0

  He's plus, he's actually not reflecting on his own brilliance and rightness. Yeah. He's it'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. Aaron Powell

• 8:27Speaker 1

  One of the things I've been taking pains to point out about Socrates, though, is it's easy to see him as this intellectual figure. Like he's he's your academic, he's living off the the largesse of the success of Athens. He's you know, walking around in his toga. Life must have been simpler and easier then. 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 he's not everyone likes him. Like 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 it was scary and uncertain and

• 9:12Speaker 0

  not the past. Aaron Powell, yeah. 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 that psychologists call fading affect bias. Fading affect bias is that which you look back on pre prior times, strip out the discomfort from those times and only enjoy the learning that one got.

• 9:29Speaker 1

  Yes.

• 9:29Speaker 0

  And so fading affect 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 we were incredibly lonely and unhappy, and calling mom every single day. Um come pick me up, I hate it. And then they go back for their tenure reunion and 20 year reunion for college, and they sing their friends that they made that met in their first semester of college and the best years of my life. That's fading affect bias. Yeah. Because they learned a lot and made great relationships, and the discomfort of the moment wasn't there. The discomfort that was Socrates. Own life is stripped away and is completely irrelevant, even though it was the most important thing to him. Trevor Burrus, Jr. Yeah, he had a shitty marriage. Yeah.

• 10:07Speaker 1

  Like that's one of the things you hear him talk about all the time. And everyone knew it's like Socrates did not make a great marriage choice. They did not get along. Yeah. And he saw that even that though as a kind of philosophical practice.

• 10:17Speaker 0

  Right. And indeed, you know, there are things that each of us deal with all the time. You know, we have children and and and soon enough you're going to have teenagers. And let me tell you, super fun.

• 10:26Speaker 2

  Yeah.

• 10:27Speaker 0

  And these are difficult things that occupy most of your brain space. Yeah. The current difficulties and you know, the it's just it's a mess. 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 Holiday. And that's a lot about what you'll remember about these years for yourself as well.

• 10:51Speaker 1

  Yes. Okay. So Plato comes from Socrates. Right. What do you think Plato's main teaching for for people is? Aaron Powell There's so much. Sure. I mean, there's

• 11:00Speaker 0

  so much. Um for me, this is where we, 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 there's a there's a a transcendent truth. Yeah. You can't see it. But we're changing all the time. The changes are kind of a distraction from the ultimate truth. Yeah. 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. They're true Platonists because they believe 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 that came to all the way up to the 19th century existentialist philosophers and even an absurdists who said there's an underlying truth.

• 11:45Speaker 0

  I mean, Hegel, uh Schopenhauer, et cetera, they believed that true that too. And they were, they were highly Platonist in this way. Aaron Powell

• 11:53Speaker 1

  You mentioned the cave. I think that the allegory of 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. We're chained in a cave, he 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 where it's like. There

• 12:11Speaker 0

  is a reality, 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 case. Exactly right. But

• 12:19Speaker 1

  there is this truth,

• 12:21Speaker 0

  unchanging truth.

• 12:22Speaker 1

  Yes.

• 12:23Speaker 0

  And all we all the dynamics and things of it are what confuse us. And we have to sort of triangulate across the images as best we can.

• 12:30Speaker 1

  Yeah. And we discover what this truth is having left the cave. So Plato says you escape from the cave, you get some sense that, oh, what I was looking at before are only shadows. As I understand it, he believes that then the role of the philosopher of the human being is you're obligated to try to come back and communicate to the other people in the cave what those shadows were.

• 12:49Speaker 0

  Right. Your obligation is once you actually have greater enlightenment is to share 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 exactly. Well, this is super important. And so you know I've worked with the Dalai Lama for the last 12 years. And that 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 Buddhists, because they're doing it for the wrong reason. I said, well, it's the wrong reason, your 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.

• 13:29Speaker 1

  Yes. And yeah, Buddha wrestles with, should I just continue to pursue my own enlightenment, or should I teach enlightenment? Should 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.

• 13:50Speaker 0

  Right. And so the whole concept is what is the monastic life mean under the circumstances. And that's a really interesting medieval Christian idea. Actually from the time of St. Benedict and the sixth, seventh, eighth centuries early on. But then into the middle ages of the scholastics. You know, what is what are you supposed to do if you're actually a monastic? And the whole idea is teach other people, like St. Thomas Aquinas, or are you supposed to actually just pray for other people? Or are you just supposed to be a pure contemplative? Right. What is the right approach to that? And Plato would have a strong view. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

• 14:20Speaker 1

  Well, and I the Stoics and the Epicureans have this debate too. Should we participate in public life or not?

• 14:26Speaker 0

  Right. And what does it mean to participate in public life? Of course, there's another wrinkle on that. Yes, of course.

• 14:32Speaker 1

  We'll get to them in a second. Because

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  you

• 14:34Speaker 1

  are.

• 14:34Speaker 0

  Even though presumably you're not going to run for public office. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

• 14:37Speaker 1

  Yeah, I do I do think the ancients had a much more limited definition of public life because there were only so many ways to contribute. Running an enormous company that employs thousands of people might be making a far bigger difference than being a senator. And also running.

• 14:57Speaker 0

  You personally, you're doing the public intellectual gig. It's just that you have the means to disseminate these ideas way, way, way beyond anything he could have imagined. Aaron Powell

• 15:05Speaker 1

  Yes. Yes. And uh, although the irony is I had James Raman here and he wrote this book, uh Plato and the Tyrant. Plato's forays 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 Dionysus, uh, the tyrant. He goes and he 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 the reputation. Yeah, exactly. And and Plato is complicit in it in the way that you know, a generation or two later, uh many generations later, Seneca and Nero roll into the same. And in other words, intellectuals are easy to roll.

• 15:51Speaker 2

  Yes. Yes.

• 15:52Speaker 1

  Because you don't have the experience and you don't necessarily even understand what you represent to the people in power and how you can be a tool for that. Yeah. Yeah.

• 15:59Speaker 0

  Okay. So what about the cynics? I find the cynics

• 16:02Speaker 1

  to be fascinating, Diogenes being the most famous of them. But uh, I feel like they have a lot to teach us in today's very materialistic world. Aaron Powell To

• 16:10Speaker 0

  begin with, we don't understand them.

• 16:13Speaker 1

  Yeah.

• 16:14Speaker 0

  Because we cast aspersions of people who are cynical. Yes. I mean, the whole idea of the skeptics and the cynics, different schools, of course. Yeah. 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. How do you characterize this the school of cynicism? Trevor Burrus, Jr.

• 16:33Speaker 1

  I I say they're like the punk rockers of the philosopher world. They are transgressive and radical by taking it too far, actually providing us insights about sort of a moderate middle ground. If everyone lived as Diogenes lived, the world would be a horrible place. But if everyone live 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 uh dismissive. But but in sort of he's like the hippie sort of going, none of this matters, man. You know, like and and so doing that.

• 17:13Speaker 0

  He's saying this is stupid. Yes.

• 17:14Speaker 1

  So

• 17:15Speaker 0

  it's worse than what ev's. Yeah.

• 17:17Speaker 1

  But he's making fun of your

• 17:18Speaker 0

  suit and your tie and

• 17:21Speaker 1

  your fancy car. Right. I mean, the famous story about Diogenes that I love is he has very few possessions, but he he walks up to the well, he gets a cup of water, and uh uh young boy runs up and gets water from 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 snatches his cuff on the ground.

• 17:44Speaker 0

  What

• 17:44Speaker 1

  a piece

• 17:44Speaker 0

  of work. Imagine me marry that

• 17:46Speaker 1

  guy. Uh yes, I I don't think you want to. Although, you know, so Zeno, the founder of Sociism, his philosophy teacher was named Crates, and um, I'm forgetting Crates' wife's name, but she was a famous uh cynic philosopher too. So we we tend to think of it as this primarily male uh world, but there were fascinating cynical philosophers in marriages, which you know, if they were totally abstaining and rejecting all convention, they would have rejected even that. Yeah. So

• 18:18Speaker 0

  then the skeptics who just knew nothing. Yeah. I just I know nothing. Yeah. Who who just they they banked on knowing nothing. So no matter what, they say, I don't know.

• 18:30Speaker 1

  And sometimes the extreme cases tell us something. Like it's it's not that that is a it's not that it's an it's not exactly a defensible position or a scalable position, but in the extremeness of it gives us color and another angle to understand ourselves.

• 18:46Speaker 0

  Right. And there's a humility to it. Yeah. There's a real humility to it. So there's there's a kind of a pose with the cynics, and there's there's an anti-pose with with the with the skeptics. And so they're quite different in this particular way. The cynics are interesting because what they do is they can make you realize that life is hilarious. Yeah. You know, and and and by the way, you go fast forward in history and you find that a lot in Nietzsche. Yep. So there the whole competitive set of ideas between what the Greeks were doing, which is that that essence precedes existence. And then what the existentialists were doing in the 19th and 20th centuries, which is that existence precedes 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 that's the big conflict between ancient philosophy and Christian philosophy and all the things that that you and I are stalking right, yeah, and what the modern existentialists do.

• 19:39Speaker 0

  And Nietzsche's like, 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. Aaron

• 19:49Speaker 1

  Powell Well, the the humor of the philosophers is not something I think your average person is clued in on. Yeah. Right? Like because philosophy seems dry. Philosophy seems academic, philosophy seems confusing. And then you read it. It's all of the above in many cases. Trevor Burrus But you read Diogenes the Cynic and you're like, oh, this dude's fucking hilarious. Yes. He's a badass. Like 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 Diogenes looks at him having reduced his needs to nothing and says, you can stop blocking the sun. Get out of my way. And you know, that's like that's not just funny, but it's badass. Aaron Powell

• 20:33Speaker 0

  Yeah. And Nietzsche is hilarious too, by the way. And probably the best writer of all of the all the 19th-century absurdists and existentialists. Yeah. He's a beautiful writer, incredible writer. It's really, really worth reading Nietzsche, even in English. Well, it's fast forward. What do you think Nietzsche has to teach your people? Where would you go? Trevor Burrus To truly question your understanding of essence and existence. Okay. And it's really, really worth understanding it. Because we can't the biggest problem philosophically, and by the way, scientifically, and in terms of almost everything that we do is uh is an inability or unwillingness or just an ignorance about our own assumptions going in.

• 21:10Speaker 2

  Yeah.

• 21:11Speaker 0

  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 this fundamental algorithm of life, which is did your life have meaning before you were born, or or were you born and have to go find your life's meaning? And he breaks it all apart like you know, smashing his cup. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

• 21:41Speaker 1

  And he has a lot more to question, like Socrates has, you know, a couple hundred years of philosophy to question. Nietzsche has 2500 years and 2500 years of Christian teachings too. He so he's he's kind of inherited a stabler world. Sort of, although

• 21:59Speaker 0

  I strongly suspect that Socrates was relying on a lot that simply wasn't written down in oral traditions. Yeah, the priest and who were very sophisticated, but we don't know. Yeah. And what Nietzsche had was a lot of stuff that had been written down.

• 22:13Speaker 1

  Yeah.

• 22:13Speaker 0

  And so Soc the Socratic tradition was writing stuff down that had been preserved in the oral tradition.

• 22:18Speaker 1

  Yeah.

• 22:19Speaker 0

  And who who knows what's a bigger library? That's true.

• 22:24Speaker 1

  That is the interesting thing about the ancient world is we tend to compress it down into this period. We go, Socrates, Aristotle, uh 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 or it's like

• 22:43Speaker 0

  300 BC to 300 AD or something like that.

• 22:48Speaker 1

  The Roman philosophers would have come to Greece as tourists and

• 22:54Speaker 0

  said, look at these ancient ruins.

• 22:55Speaker 1

  I know, I know. You know, and and it's like

• 22:58Speaker 0

  going to look into the liberty bell in Philadelphia or something. Yeah, yeah. But much older in many cases, right?

• 23:03Speaker 1

  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 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 it's like we're all tourists going back to this period is kind of a uh beautiful. It is.

• 23:35Speaker 0

  And the 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 that he could chart back to the ancient Egyptians. Yes. And that was that that 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 the Hinduism is a six thousand-year-old religion. Lord Krishna lived in Mathura and in the you know the Hindi heartland six thousand years ago. And there's a little bit written, but the whole point is that the ideas 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.

• 24:19Speaker 1

  Yeah.

• 24:19Speaker 0

  It's the same basic idea. And that's actually obviously not true for all sorts of reasons. Aaron Powell

• 24:24Speaker 1

  Yeah, that that this is a thing that goes way back. And sometimes we'll read yeah, we 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 when you there's this play by Joseph Addison called Cato that was popular in the 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. It's a cultural

• 24:57Speaker 0

  touchstone of the time.

• 24:58Speaker 1

  We lose the illusions that they're riffing on. And in some cases, if you really go in, you go, oh, actually, okay, the footnote is telling me this comes from a play from uh a line from a play about by Euripides or whatever. But if if most of it was oral, we uh we wouldn't know that that actually Socrates

• 25:14Speaker 0

  is a recycler. Yeah, yeah. Of course he's a recycler. That's the point. And that's exactly the sort of the the whole point of what we're discussing here. You're not going to be doing good works 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.

• 25:33Speaker 1

  The starter.

• 25:34Speaker 0

  And that you the starter is the most important thing in sourdough. Yeah. That's the most important thing. And it can be really old. Or you know, the yeast and 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 and you know, the truth is that I mean it's probably, you know, you know, as you know, you and I, we do a lot of talks on the outside, is 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. If it's 100%

• 26:05Speaker 1

  new, it sucks. Yeah, because you're doing it by trial and error with a new audience. Yeah. And this

• 26:10Speaker 0

  is a profoundly conservative worldview, by the way. But it I think it has the virtue of being largely correct is that when somebody comes out of the out of left field with a completely new way of seeing human nature, it's always wrong. And it's actually destructive

• 26:25Speaker 1

  and dangerous. Trevor Burrus, Jr.: 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 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 humanity? That's just the problem with utopianism.

• 26:46Speaker 0

  That's the problem with utopianisms all throughout history. Yeah. Is that they've always been a failure and led to you know, large-scale destruction, death, and suffering, precisely because they're not sourduff. Old wine and new skins, as they say. Yeah. I mean, the problem with that is that that of course is from the gospels, and it says that old wine and new skins breaks the new skins.

• 27:05Speaker 1

  Okay, let's so let's go to the epic. Well, we skipped Aristotle. Give

• 27:08Speaker 0

  me something from Aristotle. Trevor Burrus, Jr. So, of course, Aristotle was almost forgotten until the Middle Ages and considered, you know, and also ran to Plato, because everybody was a Neoplatonist in the middle ages. So by the time you get to the 12th and 13th centuries, you know, have Averroes and you have Memonides, and of course Thomas Aquinas from the three great Southern European Abrahamic traditions. And they were all Platonists. They were all Platonists. But especially Aquinas, he rediscovered Aristotle and brought Aristotle to a what at the time was a modern audience. Yeah. And he said, This is the guy. This is the guy. I mean, Plato's okay. But Aristotle, he's a 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.

• 27:54Speaker 0

  It is reality. That's a big deal. That's the whole idea that dynamism is the essence of reality itself. And so that 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 Ryan-ness is the essence of Ryan-ness. And that's a that's a 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 is a lot to do with how we understand modern behavioral science. We I mean the underlying unchanging essence of ourselves is not very interesting to us. Well, we want to make it progress. Yeah. We're just like progress, progress. That's the essence of what a good life is really all about. Aaron Powell When his point that

• 28:35Speaker 1

  virtue is something not that you have as an essence, but is something you

• 28:40Speaker 0

  are doing and getting better at doing. That has been super super influential in my own work. Yeah. Which is this one-third philosophy, one-third neuroscience, one-third behavioral science is kind of 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 to happiness. And it's wrong because you can't be happy, but you can be as happy you're which is an Aristotelian notion as opposed to a Platonic notion.

• 29:07Speaker 1

  Yeah.

• 29:08Speaker 0

  You can get happier. And the the goal is putting yourself, your life on a on a jagged, messy path toward hap happier-ness.

• 29:17Speaker 1

  And his definition of happiness, uh, you daimonia, 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. Well, it's not that at all.

• 29:31Speaker 0

  Actually, so the the biggest mistake that the moderns make is thinking that happiness is a is an emotion. Happiness is a feeling. It's not. It's not even one of the basic emotions according to behaviorists 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.

• 30:05Speaker 1

  Yeah.

• 30:06Speaker 0

  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 derive satisfaction, which is joy that comes from accomplishment after struggle and meaning, finding the meaning of your life, the why of 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. Eudaimonia means a good life well lived. There's actually there's not an adequate translation. I mean, everybody, we all struggle with actually what is eudaimonia mean. It's the good life. Yeah. And the good life has lots of suffering in it. And so therefore the modern eliminationist strategy, which is to say that if you're feeling sad and anxious, you're broken and you need therapy.

• 30:56Speaker 0

  Yeah. That is profoundly anti-Aristotelian, but it's also an exercise and futility. Because you can't get enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning in it is unless you're like suffering. Yeah. Bring it on. Yeah. It's it's uh Which is stoic, by the way. Of course.

• 31:10Speaker 1

  Yeah. He's he's saying that you have to be doing the things that humans were meant to do. Right. And specifically what were you meant to do. So it's a lot of like when people say, I've got to find my purpose. Like that's what Aristotle is saying when you get there, you're a lot closer to happiness than anything else.

• 31:27Speaker 0

  Trevor Burrus, Jr. Which is why, you know, Aristotle was a great theorist, and the Stoics are very practical. I mean, they're working out eudaimonia. That's the Stoic philosophy is like, how do we do this thing? How do we get this eudaimonia? And and you know, a lot of it is like get the hell out of bed.

• 31:41Speaker 1

  Yeah.

• 31:42Speaker 0

  You know? Yeah. Which is this, and and is extremely Aristotelian in its way.

• 31:46Speaker 1

  Yeah, I think they 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 it? Like going for a run. You feel great after it's not that fun while you're doing it. Jumping in a cold plunge. 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.

• 32:06Speaker 0

  Yeah. Let me ask you a question. Do you love writing books or having written books?

• 32:10Speaker 1

  Well, they say that's the joke that painters like painting and writers like having written.

• 32:14Speaker 0

  Yeah.

• 32:14Speaker 1

  I try to make a distinction between writing and publishing. Um writing is in my control, publishing is not. Yeah. So like, sure, am I done? 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. Uh 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.

• 32:39Speaker 0

  Yeah. Yeah. And that's a really important thing to keep in mind because there is a lot of suffering. But in the dynamics of the whole thing, if there's nothing good for you in the journey, then you'll fall prey, sure as we're sitting here to the arrival fallacy.

• 32:56Speaker 0

  Yes. Which is it's axiomatically wrong. Aaron Powell,

• 32:59Speaker 1

  If if the whole thing is suffering, then you need external results to make it worth the suffering. Right. You have to figure out how actually you enjoy practice. Right. Like you enjoy the the

• 33:10Speaker 0

  doing of the thing. And then the question becomes, which is a very stoic and both Aristotelian, I kind of a stoic.

• 33:17Speaker 1

  Yeah.

• 33:18Speaker 0

  You know? Yeah. He shut he 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 they try to dichotomize. And they say the process hasn't 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 you'll win the Olympic gold and be depressed for six months because you're like, you feel like your life is over. The real trick here, the real stoic trick is enjoying the suffering.

• 33:49Speaker 1

  Yes.

• 33:50Speaker 0

  Do you enjoy the suffering?

• 33:51Speaker 1

  I do. I do. I I've had to work out. I don't think you're just naturally there because there's this part of you that wants to uh avert and avoid suffering wherever possible. But then I try to go, oh no, no, no, this is actually like a dream. Like I get to do this. This is my job. I'm very lucky, and I I try to enjoy it and then try not to rush through it also. Aaron Powell

• 34:11Speaker 0

  And this is probably the most profound Aristotelian point of all, which is because he was a he was a good biologist as well as a philosopher. And he asserted in many, many places in the writings that human beings have kind of two spaces that they can live in. There's animal impulse and there's moral aspiration.

• 34:29Speaker 1

  Yeah.

• 34:29Speaker 0

  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 that's astonishing in its complexity beyond any supercomputer that exists or will exist. I mean, it's one third of our 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.

• 35:01Speaker 1

  Yeah.

• 35:01Speaker 0

  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.

• 35:16Speaker 1

  Yeah.

• 35:16Speaker 0

  That's the point. This is this is I mean, this is a key point of Aristotle and everybody else, by

• 35:21Speaker 1

  the way. Okay. All right. So give me, I think we can skip the Stoics. This is enough of that here. Tell me about the enough here. They can't get enough. Tell me about Epicurus.

• 35:31Speaker 0

  Aaron Powell Epicurus, well, of course, who is way before Epictetus. Yes. I mean, it's what 250 years before. Greek Roman. Yes. Um, Epicurus predates a lot of this stuff. And Epicurus, um, who is completely misunderstood today. Yes. Because it's the whole idea of eudaimonia versus hedonia. Yeah. Right. And hedonia, which is hedonist and hedonic and all these words come from it, as if it's the pursuit of unbridled pleasure. That's actually not right in a bunch of different ways. Pleasure is a limbic phenomenon that occurs in the limbic system, an ancient console of tissue that's up to 40 million years old, predates Homo sapiens. That's what produces your emotions, negative and positive, which you need to survive and thrive, to be sure. If you hit the lever of pleasure over and over and over again, you're tapping the limbic system. Yeah. And you're being managed by those pleasures.

• 36:17Speaker 0

  That's the reason that, you know, that you your friends from high school that wanted to feel good all the time are still living in their mom's basements because they couldn't make anything in their lives because they were being managed by their limbic systems. Trevor Burrus, Jr. Delayed gratification is that other part. Yeah. Well, it's it among other things. I mean, the whole idea of that we're talking about here is is the other part. Yeah. So that's how we think of hedonism. That's not uh epicurus. Epicurus talked about enjoyment, not pleasure.

• 36:47Speaker 1

  Right.

• 36:47Speaker 0

  Pleasure and enjoyment are related, but pleasure is a component part of enjoyment. Enjoyment is pleasure plus people plus memory. And it moves the experience into the pre-frontal cortex, the executive centers of the brain where you can manage your pleasures and you can make permanent memories. And in so doing, that's why it's a component part of happiness, enjoyment. And so if you're doing something that's addictive and you're doing it alone, you're probably doing it wrong.

• 37:14Speaker 2

  Yeah.

• 37:15Speaker 0

  That's the whole idea. And that's really important to Epicurus because epicures is all about enjoyment, which means it's surrounding himself with people. And they were talking about pleasant, non-conflictive big ideas and living an extremely deep moral existence. This was not a like a constant drunken orgy that was going on.

• 37:34Speaker 1

  And I do think the best Stoics had a strong epicurean streak. Right. And

• 37:39Speaker 0

  we the first person who I mean Epictetus trashed Epicurus, right? And just it was a complete it wasn't anything to do with what it was just using him as a foil. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

• 37:47Speaker 1

  When I think, you know, Epictetus having such a life filled with profound suffering, like the thirty first 30 years of his life, he's a slave. Yeah. I think there's probably something about him just at a human level that's like, fuck that guy. Like a rich guy. That rich guy in this

• 38:01Speaker 0

  commune with his weird cult. Yeah, he doesn't

• 38:03Speaker 1

  know anything. Nobody broke his leg for sadistic pleasure. Epicurus never

• 38:08Speaker 0

  had to see Nero's court. Right. You

• 38:09Speaker 1

  know, like he probably looked at Epicurus the way some of us uh look at an academic philosopher or uh a guru or something. So you're gonna live in the real world.

• 38:18Speaker 0

  Or moral logo.

• 38:19Speaker 1

  Yes. Right. I mean, or

• 38:20Speaker 0

  something where you're like, really? Yes. You know, and so for sure, but that's not what Epicurus was all about. Epicurus, it was a very I mean, it's libertines, you know, the the Berkeley generation of 68, they couldn't have lived with Epicurus. No. They wouldn't be able to put up with the rules. Because the whole Epicurus's whole idea is if you're actually going to live in a state of of semi-permanent enjoyment, you better not reduce it to pleasure. Yeah. You better not reduce it to pleasure. And that's a really important distinction. And so what we can learn from him today is about this pillar of happiness. Yeah. Is epicurean enjoyment as opposed to epicurean pleasure is one of the best ways that you can become happier. It's incomplete. Yeah. Indeed, it's incomplete. That's why the Stoics are better on the meaning pillar of happiness. The moderns are better on the satisfaction part, and the epicureans are really, really good on the enjoyment part.

• 39:10Speaker 0

  No,

• 39:10Speaker 1

  and that's why I say you fuse them together and you get something really powerful. Because there's actually something pretty spartan about Epicurus, right? He's like, you know, there's a joke about the Spartans that uh

• 39:20Speaker 0

  hunger is the best flavor. Yeah. You know, like and

• 39:23Speaker 1

  and there's something about for him, he reduces his needs down pretty low. And then he's like, this is great. Everything's awesome. I don't have to reach for anything. I don't have to go without anything. Right. It's all very accessible and practical and realistic. He's not saying pleasure is is, you know, flying in a new gulf stream to have lunch in Paris. He's he's saying, you know, this small pot of cheese is miraculous if you think about how it was made and if you

• 39:51Speaker 0

  savor every bite of it. Aaron Powell That's right. And the whole the whole idea is I mean, uh on the satisfaction pillar, your animal impulse tells you that it's it's It's about what you have and having more, which is the Gulf Stream, et cetera. Yeah. Which leads to ruin, absolute personal ruin. Because you can never have enough. It's actually better described as what you what you have divided by what you want. Yeah. And the denominator is more important because a very efficient way to get greater satisfaction in your life is by d decreasing the denominator by wanting less. And so this epicurean notion of wanting less, wanting less, wanting less, wanting less, and watching your satisfaction rise and rise and rise, or enjoyment in this particular case. But of course, asymptotically, it doesn't work.

• 40:33Speaker 1

  Right.

• 40:33Speaker 0

  You can't go to wanting nothing. Yeah. Because if you want nothing, well, I mean, wanting for nothing, I suppose. That's a heaven, I guess. Right. Which is not what he was trying to create. I think about his garden and the simplicity and the beauty and

• 40:47Speaker 1

  the long

• 40:48Speaker 0

  evenings and

• 40:49Speaker 1

  it's a pretty

• 40:50Speaker 0

  simple thing. What it is is really in modern thinking and in Buddhist thinking, but really in modern thinking, it's really a lot about mindfulness. Yeah. And that mindfulness is a very hard thing to do because the human brain, the prefrontal cortex is designed for you to time travel,

• 41:04Speaker 1

  yeah,

• 41:05Speaker 0

  retrospectively, prospectively, and mindfully. Those are the three time zones that are actually in your head all the time. Most people spend the least amount of their time here now.

• 41:13Speaker 1

  Yeah.

• 41:14Speaker 0

  That they don't spend their time mindfully. So Marty Seligman, uh, you know, my great mentor in the in the in positive psychology business of happiness. He says that we shouldn't be called, we shouldn't be called a homo sapiens. We should be called homoprospectus because we live in the future. 20 to 50% of your cycles on average are living in the future. If you're an entrepreneur or a uh striver, like the whole audience for the show, it's more like 80% of your time is and and you're missing your life is the whole as Epicurus' point is don't miss your life.

• 41:43Speaker 1

  He's saying actually this is better than the vacation that you are pining for this present moment.

• 41:50Speaker 0

  Don't build castles in the sky. Yeah. Don't do that. And don't be wishing that you could go backwards in time. Don't be enjoying your memories and don't be enjoying your fantasies. Enjoy this now. Yeah. And that's super hard to do. As a matter of fact, there's all kinds of evidence that that our brain isn't even designed to do that very well. You know, when you put people in fMRI machines and you say, think about nothing, then you turn on the default mode network instead of structures in your brain. You'll start thinking about the future automatically.

• 42:18Speaker 1

  Well, there's a famous letter that Epicurus writes where it goes like on this, the happiest day of my life, the day of my death. And that's what the letter opens with. Like he's trying to he's trying he's saying, and again, for people who think that epicureanism is hedonism. He's trying to say you can be happy on the day that you die. Right. So it's definitely not related to what you have. And it's not because he has some delicious last meal or something. He's just saying this is the day that I have now, so it's the happiest

• 42:48Speaker 0

  day of my life. I'm alive right now. Yeah. And being alive right now is awesome. Yeah. That's the whole thing. And good. We should all try to do that more. I'm not very good at that. Are you?

• 42:59Speaker 1

  All right. So you mentioned the Buddhist, maybe. We're going back in time a little bit because Buddha was a contemporary

• 43:04Speaker 0

  of Socrates. Yes. Um, so that was about 500 BC. And this is, of course, a notion that this came out of the Vedic and Hindu traditions. And so Gautama, Prince Gautama, Siddhartha, Hindu prince, completely sheltered from ordinary life, very, very rich. Wonder what's outside the walls of my castle. He goes outside and he sees all this suffering for the very first time in his life and questions everything that he's ever been taught. This is, you know, approximately 500 BC. Decides to, you know, figure it out on his own, becomes a complete ascetic, right? Just like the mendicant ascetics, everything. It doesn't eat anything, starving, miserable, the whole thing. And he realizes that that in itself is a form of detachment. Yeah. That asceticism is a form of attachment. And under the Bodhi tree where he's setting, which is still, you know, famous metaphor for all kinds of enlightenment that we would get.

• 43:54Speaker 0

  He figures out the eightfold path of Buddhism. But fundamentally, that philosophy is based on these four noble truths. The first is that life is this is dukkha in Sanskrit. Life is suffering. That's actually not a good translation. It should be it, and you'll appreciate this as a stoic. Life is dissatisfaction. That's what it really should be. Because it is. It's not satisfying. That's not the way you want it to be. And there's a reason for that. We're aspirational creatures, which is why we're so unhappy and we're so successful. Yeah. Because we're in the hunt. Okay. So this is animal impulse versus moral aspiration. Okay. The second noble truth is that the that the the source of our dissatisfaction is attachment, attachment to worldly things. Yeah. The third noble truth is that the secret to actually breaking free uh from this dissatisfaction is detachment from these things.

• 44:42Speaker 0

  And the fourth, and you're like, okay, okay, okay, okay. And then the fourth noble truth is the eightfold path of Buddhism, which is the rest of your life and a whole bunch of other lives.

• 44:53Speaker 2

  Yeah. It's like, oh

• 44:56Speaker 0

  is what it comes down to, which is why Buddhism is hard. Yeah. It's a really, really hard thing. But this sets in motion this whole idea that and it's a fundamentally non-theistic religion, whereas Hinduism that it sprang from profoundly theistic. Yeah. And at its core, and this and what people don't really understand about Hinduism, it's not a thing. It's a family of related religions in the India some content, largely in the Indian subcontinent with a few other outposts like Bali that that that where they're related, but they're very non-trivial differences between the variants of it. Fundamentally, at its most esoteric forms, it's it's profoundly monotheistic. And it's very much like Christianity, insofar as that you have Brahman, which is the Godhead has Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva, which are the three manifestations, three in one, kind of a trinity, and then a whole bunch of other avatars and manifestations of God.

• 45:48Speaker 0

  The Buddhists are real different than that. Yeah. Really come out of a very different tradition than that. And that's why Christianity is much closer to Hinduism than it is to Buddhism. We think of the karmic religions as kind of all the same. Yeah. Big differences, as it turns out. And Buddhism took over almost the whole subcontinent for hundreds of years. Right. And then there's a Reconquista where Hinduism came back. And the reason that this India subcontinent is largely Hindu today is because of the claim, the argument based on sort of evangelists that were going through the countryside saying, don't you want God? Yeah. You want God, don't you? Don't you want to have a relationship with God who loves you, God who created you. And people are like,

• 46:30Speaker 1

  yeah, I want that. Again, that convergent evolution, that there is some part of the

• 46:34Speaker 0

  human

• 46:35Speaker 1

  condition that wants that.

• 46:37Speaker 0

  Yes. Needs it. Yeah. And and anthropologists have studied this whole con. And again, for those who are Hindus who are like, you know, throwing stuff at the throwing stuff at the at their laptop right now. Sorry, I mean, I'm this is a, you know, I'm a

• 46:48Speaker 1

  This is the religious studies interpretation. Yeah, well, this is you

• 46:51Speaker 0

  know, this is a Catholic who spent the last 12 years talking and studying with the Dalai Lama. Okay. So which is I I plead uh I uh appropriate humility, you know, um, on this. But this is a really interesting thing because today we we we lump the karmic religions together and the Abrahamic religions together. But in this case, Buddhism is super different than the Abrahamic religions, and especially different than Christianity, the goal of which is to live forever. Yeah. The Buddhist, you know, goal in its in its essence is to break out of the cycle of birth and rebirth, which because life is suffering and stay dead, man. Yeah, to embrace the impermanence of it.

• 47:28Speaker 1

  So the Bhagavad Gita is the Hindu is a hindrance. It's one of the

• 47:32Speaker 0

  Hindu holy books. And and it when and that's the epic adventure of Lord Krishna, who's an avatar of Vishnu, the god Vishnu. What is it? What do you think that teaches us? So uh a a lot because it's it's just huge. It's like the Odyssey. It's like the Odyssey, basically. And what it is is that it's supposed to teach you about life itself as the experiences of this guy who is an avatar who has got heavenly side. It's it's sort of kind of a what is it, the homeostatic union of of of metaphysical and physical in this guy in this Lord Krishna. And fundamentally, it's about him living this earthly existence, but a heavenly with a heavenly will.

• 48:09Speaker 2

  Yeah.

• 48:09Speaker 0

  And the the way I read it, and again, with appropriate humility, is that this is an opportunity for everybody to understand that they're spiritual beings living a living a physical existence that you are too. Yeah. You would say in Christianity, there's a Christ-likeness to Ryan. And that when to understand the metaph metaphysical essence of who you are, not to be Gnostic, not to say that the body falls away because it's unimportant. On the contrary, it's the fusing of these two things. That's the essence of life itself, and that you can have a profoundly metaphysical, spiritual, transcendent existence in your ordinary life of like going into battle and marrying a girl and having your kids and paying your bills and all that. That each one is each one of us is kind of

• 48:48Speaker 1

  a

• 48:49Speaker 0

  microcosm of this larger spiritual. Yeah. And so people see themselves in Lord Krishna. Yeah. That's that's they kind of see that they see themselves in Ulysses. Yeah. They see themselves. That's the whole point of a lot of these great epic. It's the hero, it's the hero's journey, but from India. Yeah. It really is. It really is. And that's because there's nothing new under the sun. Sure. But oh, back to the point that you were making a minute ago, though, that anthropologists have found that there are no civilizations ever found that that are not religious. That that and that what that suggests is that the that humans are built to worship. Humans are built. It doesn't mean every single person is religious, because there's a ton of different experiences and different, I mean, just physical differences between people, to be sure. And the psychology being the biology, you might not have a very, you know, strong religious tendency.

• 49:36Speaker 0

  You might or might not. Yeah. And different people do. But the whole point is in the main, humans are made to worship. That's the that's a very, very strong hypothesis. Supported by the day.

• 49:46Speaker 1

  It's interesting how easy it is to do the kind of religious studies interpretation of all the religions but your own. You know, you could be like, this is what they taught, this is where they live, this is how it evolved, this is what it meant. This is the technology in it. Like this way it worked. But it was fascinating to me. In in Athens this summer, you're standing at the painted porch, the stoop of Philia where stoicism comes, and you go, wait, wait. So Saint Paul came here, met with the Stoics, and then they walked up together next to the Acropolis, and he gave the one of the most famous speeches in all of Christianity. Right. And when you just read the Christian version, you're like, this is the Christian. You're not thinking that all these faiths and ideas are intermixing with each other and walking the earth. Like Jesus and Seneca are alive in the same time in the Roman Empire.

• 50:33Speaker 1

  For sure. They're both teaching philosophical teachings. One we come to call a religion and the other stays philosophy. But what do you think philosophically, the broad strokes Christian tradition can teach us? Trevor Burrus, Jr.

• 50:46Speaker 0

  So and that's harder for me because I'm in the middle of it. That's what I mean. I go to mass literally every day. And so yeah. So that's uh and so for me, that's for yeah, you're stoic. I'm I'm a Catholic. Yeah. I also grew up Catholics. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you've got some of that wiring. But I think

• 50:59Speaker 1

  that's why stoicism lines with them because they have the same cardinal virtues.

• 51:02Speaker 0

  Well, yeah, for sure. But also it's worth pointing out that one of the reasons I mean Catholicism, Christianity is unbelievably imperialistic. Yes. It just give me that that's good. I'll take it. Yeah. I like it. I like that.

• 51:18Speaker 1

  We

• 51:18Speaker 0

  invented this. It's sort of the America of religions. They like the Columbus thing. It's a melting pot. And which is not to say that it's not true. On the contrary, I actually believe I I really, really believe it as a person. But I recognize that the best way for you to understand it, even from the inside is by understanding the influences from the outside.

• 51:36Speaker 1

  Yes.

• 51:36Speaker 0

  That's a really important thing to do. And even in the ancient world, by the way, there was a lot of Eastern philosophy that was worming its way into it because there were a lot of people coming from all over the place. I mean, you look at what in the Acts of the Apostles, what was going on in early Christianity, and they talk about people meeting from all over the world. And so the idea that somehow because of the internet, we're able to see what's going on. No, no, no, then too. Yeah, we think

• 51:57Speaker 1

  of the Romans as being like blonde blonde with blue eyes or something. You know, and it's like Denmark or something, right? Yeah. It's like, no, no, no. There's profoundly influenced by Carthage and Turkey and you know, like I mean, the Romans land in China during Marcus Aurelius' reign. Right. And so you're like, this is they're all intermingling. Right. But anyways, what what what's the the main Christian philosophical truth that we do?

• 52:22Speaker 0

  The Christian philosophical truth, well, truth, the uh the the advance as far as I see it. And again, this is where my humility has to hit his apogee because you know, I'm only learning this for the rest of my life. And my wife's a theologian, by the way. So I mean, I'm getting the I'm getting it, you know, mainlining it at home all the time. So Christianity is purely about the space of moral aspiration, right? It doesn't deny that there is animal impulse. It doesn't say that animal impulse is evil, but it's all about getting as far into being the person that you're meant to be, which is in the image of God as you possibly can. And it's a worked out version of the entire method of actually how to do that. And so often, you know, people ask, okay, so what at its essence, what is it? Your animal impulse for you to live the best possible life is sort of three principles.

• 53:11Speaker 0

  Yeah. And the three principles are love things, use people and worship yourself. That's animal impulse. And the reason is because stuff out there is that's like I want I want a bigger cave, I want more animal skins, I want more buffalo

• 53:25Speaker 1

  jerky, or more use people

• 53:27Speaker 0

  in the ancient environment. We were we lived in bands of 30 to 50 individuals. Trevor Burrus, Jr. We own slaves and conquered and but even before that, I mean, in our environment. And so even in the time of you know, the ancient philosophers, they were still that was a graft from the brain that had the human brain that had been evolved 250,000 years ago, which hasn't changed very much. And we've had the more or less the same intelligence for the past since the beginning of the place the scene. Right. About a quarter million years ago. And and so we're designed to be a kin-based hierarchical species, and we want to rise in that. And that means that other people are there for our pleasure and advancement. Yes. That's how we see other individuals. And now, of course, we bond to them as kin and we have you know all this brain, this is this biochemistry that makes us you know, you see your kids in oxytocin goes, right, etc.

• 54:15Speaker 0

  But fundamentally, you're people are there for your for your pleasure and use. Yeah. And then you're the center of everything because you know, the the prefrontal cortex has got you in the psychodrama, right? Which in the psychodrama is, you know, it's Ryan's lunch and Ryan's money and Ryan's podcast and Ryan's and bookstore and Ryan, Ryan, right. It's so boring. Yeah. And so the result is the the animal, the world of animal impulse, it makes you animal successful and utterly miserable. And God, according to the Catholic church, according to the Christian religion, can set you free to your moral, to your moral aspirations. And that has a different formula. It's kind of interesting.

• 54:51Speaker 1

  I'm just thinking it's like this is kind of the transition from old Testament to New Testament, right? Like, right? It's like clans and families and people doing fucked up stuff to each other, then Jesus and everything after Jesus is is about this morality.

• 55:07Speaker 0

  The new covenant, which is that, you know, today I give you a new teaching. Yeah. Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. Matthew 54, the Sermon on the Mount sums it up, right? And well, I mean, the summary is a shema, which is Deuteronomy 5. You will love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your means in the original translation. That means all everything you got, yeah, you're gonna love the God, you're the Lord. And then Jesus says, and you'll love your neighbor as yourself.

• 55:32Speaker 1

  Well, that's what I was gonna say. Do uh Hillel's summary, he's asked to, you know, to define Christianity while standing on one leg, and he says, uh, love thy neighbor as thyself, all the rest is

• 55:42Speaker 0

  commentary. Yeah.

• 55:42Speaker 1

  Would you would you is that is you feel like that's a fair summary.

• 55:46Speaker 0

  Accept the shema is incredibly important, which is the love God. That I mean, okay, love by God, no, no, love God. And that's huge because everything in that is about faith. Right. Somebody you can't see with whom you have apparently one side of conversations, a lot of cumbersome rules. Love no, no, no. Love him. And that's really important. Why? Because Aquinas in 1265 defined love as to will the good of the other as other, notwithstanding your feelings. Which is super important. It's very stoic, very stoic. Love to love is to will the good of other people, whether you feel it or not, because it's not a feeling. It's an action. Yeah, it's an action, it's an action, it's a decision. It's a commitment. Right. It's a and that's huge. And that's really, really central to Christianity.

• 56:32Speaker 0

  And that really gets to the Christian formulation of a good life, which is the formula which is different. Remember, it's like love uh love things, use people, worship yourself. Yeah. You just kind of change the verbs and nouns around, uh use things. Right. Yeah,

• 56:47Speaker 2

  man, abundance. Yeah. Beautiful.

• 56:49Speaker 0

  Dominion over the Yeah, for sure. But it's just it's it's great. Yeah. It's great. Love people. Love people, because that's what we're made to do is to that's what we're just talking about and worship the Lord. Right. And worship God. Because only God is made for worship. Sure. And that's the Christian teaching for the life that we want to live, which is the life of the people we're supposed to be. That was sort of the that simple formula.

• 57:13Speaker 1

  Well, and and it's interesting that the Romans clash with the Christian so much, and you realize what a radically transgressive idea Jesus is bringing into the world by saying, love thy neighbor as thyself, good Samaritan, care basically care about love your enemies. Right. But but care about the people that the Roman Empire uses up and smashes and destroys when they get in. It's like when you read about the Roman Empire, it's fascinating as it is. You go, unless you're the emperor or a senator or one of the families, it's a shitty place to be. Right. And the and so what what what the Christian sort of invention is that no, no, no, it's actually you know, the meek shall inherit the earth. It's the little guy that actually matters. That's who this is all about.

• 57:59Speaker 1

  That's who you have to come. And

• 58:01Speaker 0

  the Roman philosophy of might makes right is then is articulated again, again and again and again throughout history, most notably with Nietzsche and then Ayn Rand. I mean, it comes back and it comes back and it comes back. The defense against that is always Christianity. Yeah. Christianity is always the defense. No, no, no, no, no, no. Read it again. Read it again. The truth of the matter is this and and you know, the whole concept of the enlightenment is problematic as it is for Christianity comes from the idea that if you and again, this is Matthew 544 in the Sermon on the Mount, where he says this like cr Jesus says this crazy thing. He says, You've heard that you should hate your enemies and love your friends. Today I give you a new teaching, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. The most transgressive teaching of all time, which is use things, love people, worship God.

• 58:48Speaker 0

  It's it's the gospel of love, notwithstanding your feelings, is what it comes down to. This stoic principle that comes through the, you know, this this the metaphysics

• 58:57Speaker 1

  of the stoic principles what it comes through. It's like fight against that lower part of your nature to aspire to the Christ-like part of your nature. That's what

• 59:03Speaker 0

  you want to do. And that will give you the best life. That will give everybody the best life. That's who you're supposed to be. That's how you get to heaven and heaven starts here. Yeah. Is the whole way. But by the way, this change back to philosophy. You know, the idea in in ancient Roman times and most of history forever, is it might make right. Yeah. That if you want there are people who disagree, coercion is the only tool. Negotiation and persuasion come from that idea that you can love your enemy. Sure. Well, then

• 59:33Speaker 1

  your enemy, yeah, even if they're wrong, even if they do bad things, you're

• 59:37Speaker 0

  equal in some sense. And you, by the way, if you persuade somebody, it's win-win. If you negotiate with somebody, it's win-win. If you coerce somebody, it's win-lose. We went from a world of win-lose into one that's largely win-win because of this idea. Trevor Burrus, Jr.: The crusades and religious wars not withstanding.

• 59:54Speaker 1

  Of course, because

• 59:54Speaker 0

  it's always the exceptions. Well,

• 59:56Speaker 1

  that's the human. Of course. So I let's that's

• 59:58Speaker 0

  the animal impulse that's puncturing. Its way into the moral aspiration again and again. And it will always be thus. We'll do kind of a lightning round with some

• 1:00:05Speaker 1

  of these other ones as we wrap up. Ayn Rand is interesting. I I always have loved Christopher Hitchens rejoinder to the idea of the virtue of selfishness. And he said, I'm not really sure humans need any help in that department. I know. And I've always felt that like there's an interesting parallel or contrast between the Allegory of the Cave, which we were talking about and Galt's gulch in Atlas Shrugged. It's like, hey, the little guys are parasites, they're taking from you, they don't appreciate your genius. They don't understand that you know truth, retreat to your fantasy world where only the smart entrepreneurs and the geniuses hang out. Fuck everybody else. That is the opposite of what Plato was saying you do with enlightenment. But it's

• 1:00:45Speaker 0

  quite n it's quite Nietzschean. Yeah. It's really quite Nietzsche. And there's a version of that in and in more modern America that I love. It's my favorite philosopher. Okay. Ralph Waldo Emerson. Yes. I love Emerson.

• 1:00:57Speaker 1

  You think he's in Randy? He's Randian.

• 1:01:02Speaker 0

  But

• 1:01:02Speaker 2

  not awful.

• 1:01:03Speaker 0

  Self-reliance is everybody, everybody should read self-reliance. Yes. Self-reliance is like a tall glass of cool water on the on a summer day in Bastrop, Texas. Trevor Burrus,

• 1:01:13Speaker 1

  it's Stoicism and Christianity mixed together. But with a little

• 1:01:16Speaker 0

  little

• 1:01:17Speaker 1

  Randianism,

• 1:01:18Speaker 0

  a little

• 1:01:18Speaker 1

  objectivism

• 1:01:19Speaker 0

  in there, right? It's like the sturdy lad from Vermont to or New Hampshire. Yes, yes. Who builds it, makes it, farms it, and always lands on his feet like a cat.

• 1:01:31Speaker 1

  Yes.

• 1:01:32Speaker 0

  That's a moral superiority as far as Emerson is concerned. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

• 1:01:35Speaker 1

  But the difference between Rand and Emerson is Emerson is that guy. Yeah. Right. Although most of his money comes from his dead wife. There's that. But he's funding the whole transcendental scene. He's paying for it. He's he's generous. He's helping slaves in the underground railroad. He's he's a good friend. He he is he is generous to a fault, right? I I think that's a good idea. The obligation is there. That's why

• 1:01:57Speaker 0

  the Rand stuff doesn't do it for me, but Emerson, but here's the problem that I have though. Here's my internal conflict. I'm a Catholic. Yeah. And Emerson's not, man. I mean, Emerson is like a Jesus. Well, he's a h he's a heretical Unitarian. Yeah. Right. Which, you know, we think of unitarians today as people who believe in up to one God,

• 1:02:16Speaker 2

  right?

• 1:02:19Speaker 0

  Um but and and it's all cool, man. But no, no, no. I mean, Unitarianism was a real was a real going concern, you know, in that part of the 19th century and the 1840s, et cetera. But the rugged individualism, which just speaks to me. I love it. I love it so much. That's the best part of what being American is supposed to be. Aaron Powell That's what it's supposed to be. But the truth of the matter is that it's very, very incomplete because we need community. We need people. I believe we need God. We need to transcend ourselves. And the only way we can transcend ourselves is to transcend ourselves toward the divine and transcend ourselves toward one another. What about nature though? Well, and Emerson would say nature is that form of transcendence. Sort of. I mean, but male basically he's an individual individual.

• 1:03:05Speaker 0

  Yeah. It's in and so I'm always my my inner conflict is the fact that I'm, you know, 75%, you know, right on board with, you know, the Pope. Yeah. But there's that 25% of Emerson that's called pulling it yellow. And you know, I have a big, big big strong libertarian streak in me. But it's an Emersonian libertarian streak. That's what it is. It's not that it's not that kind of mild creepiness that actually comes from the radical me only the weak are are cursed.

• 1:03:31Speaker 1

  If it's liberty fused with a strong sense of personal obligation and virtue, it works. If it's uh you're free to do whatever you want and fuck these guys, it's a pretty vicious place for everybody. Yes. Fuck

• 1:03:44Speaker 0

  everybody but me. Yeah. That's a problem. It seems to me, and and there is a balance in there, and this is actually one of the things that's really great about studying multiple philosophies, which of course you've done, is that you can live in multiple worlds at the same time. And you can understand yourself better. The problem is, and this is the academic problem is when you go in one particular direction, you're not actually going to be testing any of your ideas. Yeah. As a result of that. And that's how you can get more and more and more and more weird and wrong. And that's a lot of what's happened in academia, these weird, exotic ideas of the human person that lead to these fads and panics in American life and ruined universities. Yeah. Cancel culture and you know, radical activism and you know, the whole anger that actually that we see in in a lot of it today has to do with the fact that we're just we're just not good intellectuals enough.

• 1:04:30Speaker 1

  So speaking of a multidisciplinary approach, let's go back in time a little bit. He doesn't get a school attached to him. But I think Montane is a

• 1:04:40Speaker 0

  very

• 1:04:41Speaker 1

  little about

• 1:04:41Speaker 0

  Montagne. Really? I don't very I mean, I've read Montaigne, but I know very little about Montaine. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

• 1:04:44Speaker 1

  But I think it's interesting of all these guys, he doesn't get a school, but but has so much to teach us about intellectual humility. Trevor Burrus, Jr. Yeah,

• 1:04:51Speaker 0

  but epistemic humility. That's where that comes from. Right.

• 1:04:54Speaker 1

  So what do I know? Yeah. And that curiosity. I just think it's fascinating. And I have a book in the bookstore. I'll give you that. It's my favorite biography of him. But but like the idea of when you realize he was living in the middle of the reformation and the counter-reformation where thousands of people are being burned at the stake for having differing religious beliefs. And he's like, what do I know? And they're discovering the new world. And people are like, oh, it's filled with cannibals. And he's like, we draw in quarter people. We're not so great. And I I think there's something beautifully open-minded and yet based in very much in the c in the in the classics in Montagne that's worth knowing.

• 1:05:32Speaker 0

  Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean, every time I read Montaigne, I say, I wish I knew more. Yeah. You know, for sure. And you know, it's it's funny because there's a balance there too. I mean, you can become the cynic who says everything is every, you know, everybody's fat and stupid. Right. But that's not a good way to live either. I mean, it's a good thing to say to be to actually be able to recognize all the wonderful things that that your culture does well, maybe better than other places, and then want to share it as opposed to being triumphalist about it.

• 1:06:00Speaker 1

  That's right.

• 1:06:00Speaker 0

  And then also having an open mind to say there are other things that we can learn and we can be better at in the same time.

• 1:06:05Speaker 1

  Yes.

• 1:06:05Speaker 0

  Which

• 1:06:06Speaker 1

  he traveled a lot. And uh one of the lines uh about him is that he loved meeting anyone he came across on his travels except other Frenchmen. Because he didn't need to learn, he didn't need to meet another he was French. He didn't need to meet any friends. He wanted to meet people who are different than him. Yeah.

• 1:06:22Speaker 0

  Yeah. Yeah. That's that makes sort of makes sense. And you know, you see that a lot. You see that a lot with people who are really trying to learn about the outside world, but there's almost nothing more annoying, knowing the people from their own hometown. I don't want to talk about the Seahawks. Well, what about Camus? Oh, yeah. So the absurdist school often distinguished from the existentialists, of course. Camus is super interesting. I mean, Camus is sort of because his medium, he's kind of like Ayn Rand in the sense that he was a novelist. Trevor Burrus, Jr. But he's actually good at it. His novels are short

• 1:06:53Speaker 1

  and

• 1:06:53Speaker 0

  exciting and interesting. And there's no 90-page speeches. There's no 90-page species. There's that's that's absolutely true. If if we read one chemo, we'll read the mythosisyphus, right? Yeah. Because that's the one thing to read. I remember trying to read it in eighth grade. If we're talking happiness, that's the one we should do. That's the one to read. And I've written about the mythos of us, because there's one key idea in the mythosisyphist that I just I try tried to I mean, there's a lot of stuff that Camus says, but and it's basically this. So that everybody knows that something is Sisyphian is an exercise and futility. The whole idea is something's futile. He's pushing the boulder up the hill. He almost gets to the top and falls back down because it's, you know, the Greek myth of Sisyphus who's being punished for all time by never being able to accomplish his task, is the whole thing. And he goes through this and he he does a philosophical treatise on this, but here's the last part, the last point that Kim who makes.

• 1:07:40Speaker 0

  The most important point is what everybody misses because everybody's like, yeah, sisophists, that's suck. Yeah, life is like that. Life is kind of absurd and dumb, right?

• 1:07:47Speaker 1

  Yep. You roll it up and it rolls back down. That's just like

• 1:07:51Speaker 0

  another day, another day, another day. And Camus says in the end, one must suppose that Sisyphus was a happy man because he had something to do. But that's the point. Yes. That's the point is that he had he had a purpose. Was it a feudal purpose? Yeah, but welcome to life, man. I mean, just like feed yourself and keep your biological organism running and try to pass on your genes a little bit. And you're not, you're just actually just like everybody else and trying to pretend that you've got this unique goal and and it's got this mission, like unlike any, you know, a world historic figure here, you know. And and actually you're just like absolutely everybody else, and you're rolling the boulder up and it's rolling back down. But you know, God bless you, you got something to do.

• 1:08:37Speaker 0

  Lucky you.

• 1:08:38Speaker 1

  What I think is fascinating about Camus, and I I'm just starting to read about him more. He's supposed to be the the embodiment of these modern philosophers who like Nietzsche go, God is dead, it's all meaningless, it's stupid, absurd, silly. Then you look at his life, and here he is speaking out about the m moral issues of his time. He's in the French resistance in World War II. This is not a nihilist in practice. And he is in fact, you know, in the thick of it, he is involved in public life in the way that Stoics say you have to be involved in public life.

• 1:09:11Speaker 0

  Well, because you can't work out your ideas unless you're completely alive. Yes. Which is what they're but also

• 1:09:15Speaker 1

  they aren't ideas, they're ways to live. You have to the philosopher is not just a person who arranges them well on the page. Which is

• 1:09:22Speaker 0

  the problem with Epicurus. Yes. Because he was sitting in his garden. Yeah. Right. He was actually out. He wasn't out in the world. Yes. Most great religious movements, by the way, have been those that are in the world. I mean, these it's it's it's really interesting when you actually look at it in you know even in the Catholic world. You find these great movements that are trying to, you know, work for a better world at the individual level.

• 1:09:42Speaker 1

  Trevor

• 1:09:42Speaker 0

  Burrus, Jr. Catholic worker, but even some that are not not utopian and not even progressive at all. Yeah. What they're trying to do is to build a better world and they they're understanding their own theology, like Mother Teresa. Yeah through the way that they're lifting people up at the margins of society in the poorest places in the world, which is a really interesting thing. And an important thing to do. And that's kind of it's kind of Camus.

• 1:10:02Speaker 1

  You're right.

• 1:10:03Speaker 0

  In the way that he's actually living his life in a lot of the way, and which we don't remember, of course. But then you get, you know, like Sartre, you know, just sitting there smoking a, you know, camel straight and the no Galois and is, you know, sipping an espresso. And he was kind of living this intellectual's existence, this hermetically sealed existence, which is one of the reasons that when you read Camo, you're like, I can kind of understand life through this. And you read Sartre, or at least I read Sartre and I'm like, I don't get it. Yes. I don't get it. It doesn't, this is all theory. This is just theory, as far as I'm concerned. Aaron Powell Well,

• 1:10:33Speaker 1

  I think both the fall and the plague are too striking books for this moment. I mean, the fall is basically this smart guy's walking through the streets of Paris and he hears someone go into the river and he's busy. So he's like, not my problem. Right. And he's haunted by the idea later that he could have done some. It's a moral allegory about indifference to the suffering and uh pain of someone else. It's basically he's talking about World War II, but he's probably also talking about people like Sartre, who are philosophers in the this moment where the world is on

• 1:11:08Speaker 0

  fire, right? And they go, I've got some reading to do. I know. And we didn't even talk about the Russians who are contemporaneous to the Russian existentialists who are having this huge moment. I mean, you gave me the diary of wisdom from Tolstoy. Oh, calendar of wisdom. Calendar of wisdom. You guys last time I was here, as a matter of fact. But yeah, yeah. And Tolstoy and Dostoevsky are having this huge moment right now. This is the next big thing for young people. Think so for sure. I mean, it's like a lot of people that that are continue to be super interested in in stoicism. But the Russians, and apparently, and how do I know this? Because my publisher says that everybody there's manuscript after manuscript is coming in about the the about Russian existentialism. Largely on the Tolstoy Dostoevsky, who are contemporaries but didn't know each other. But a lot of what we're talking about here, you can learn just by reading the Brothers K.

• 1:11:55Speaker 1

  Well, what's interesting too about that Tolstoy book is that um calendar of wisdom. That's right. It's so good to read right before bed. And it's very, I mean, there's a lot of Catholic teaching there too.

• 1:12:03Speaker 0

  Well he was super religious.

• 1:12:04Speaker 1

  Yes. Well, what but what I thought was interesting is I I did a lot of research on Gandhi for the justice book. And it was actually so people know, you know, civil disobedience, so they think there's this through line from Thoreau to Gandhi, who were not that far apart in time. But actually, Gandhi finds out about Thoreau through Tolstoy. And you go, oh, okay, this is this is how it's all floating around. It was Tolstoy's religious thinking. Like, as far as we know, Gandhi doesn't read any of Tolstoy's fiction, but he reads his sort of spiritual and religious writings, and that's partly what inspires like the movement that changes the world. And then we get the civil rights movement from there. It's just incredible. And

• 1:12:42Speaker 0

  the Dostoevsky stuff that is really coming back right now. And by the way, probably the most interesting thing that informs a lot of the stuff from Tolstoy's autobiography. Yeah. Where he talks about his near suicide at 51 and he's looking for meaning. He's looking for meaning. I have a book coming out on meaning in March, the end of March called The Meaning of Your Life. And it one of the main first big chapter starts with the story of Tolstoy, where he says, I I I thought I could find meaning through my writing, and and I and and I couldn't. Yeah.

• 1:13:07Speaker 2

  And

• 1:13:07Speaker 0

  then I tried to find meaning. By

• 1:13:08Speaker 1

  the way, one of the best and biggest to ever do it.

• 1:13:11Speaker 0

  It's like it didn't work. He was he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in literature four times. Yeah. I mean, that's how, by the way, how new he is. Yes. It's like 1910. Yeah. You know, yeah. But he says, and then I looked to biology and science, which we're we were in this technocratic moment then, which Dostoevsky called the Palace of Crystal, which meant all a mathematically worked out world awful lot like AI. Yeah. And he said, I looked for in biology and science, and he studied assiduously and he couldn't find meaning there. And he concluded that meaning didn't exist. And since his mean his love, by the way, he had 13 kids. Yeah. And so he had a lot going on. And he said, I I concluded that life had no meaning. It was meaningless. And so I had nothing left to to kill myself. Right. And so he goes off to just like to a little village. This is a little tiny little village.

• 1:13:56Speaker 0

  And he just lived among the peasants who he he was a super famous rich guy. Yeah. Nobody knew who he was. Yeah. Like nobody knew who he was. And they were just going, they were they were illiterate and they were they were farmers and they were just going to church and saying their prayers and living their family lives and having their parties and having a good time and all that. He realized, oh, oh. Meaning is love. Yes. Meaning is love for God. Meaning is love for your family. Meaning is authentic friendship. Meaning is actually working for other people by sanctifying your work through what you do. If it's

• 1:14:28Speaker 2

  you

• 1:14:28Speaker 0

  know plowing the field. And and he said he understood meaning after that. And that's how he found meaning in his own life was by actually living his life in real life as opposed to using highfalutin ideas to try to find it somehow out in the ether. Interesting. Which is ultimately, man, that's that's us too. Sure. You know, it's it's us too. It's like, you know, your your grandfather, grandfather holiday, you know, he never I guarantee you never came home from work and you know said to your grandma, honey, I had a panic attack behind the mule today. Yeah. He's too busy. Well, because he was too busy living. Yes. And and he understood the meaning of his life. That's a very Tolstoy-esque idea, very Dostoevsky-esque idea that's that people are starting to rediscover in these in these Russian existentialists.

• 1:15:14Speaker 1

  Christian existentialists. So maybe to bring it to a close, talking about meaning, talking about the existential vacuum, maybe we conclude with Frankel. Victor Frankl.

• 1:15:24Speaker 0

  Man's Search for Meaning, his most famous book, of course.

• 1:15:26Speaker 1

  Yeah.

• 1:15:27Speaker 0

  Yeah. Well, he starts by quoting Nietzsche. In the introduction of the book, he quotes Nietzsche. And everybody says it's Victor Frankel because it's so sounds like Victor Frankl's Nietzsche. A man can bear any what as long as he has a why.

• 1:15:40Speaker 1

  Yeah.

• 1:15:41Speaker 0

  Nietzschean concept. But of course, Victor Frankel, his whole point was that meaning is everything. Yeah. That if you don't know the meaning of life, there is no reason for life. And you know, that's one of the three pillars of happiness. There is enjoyment, there is satisfaction, but meaning is absolutely the most important. And that's of course the one that is most absent today is meaning, the why of what we're actually doing. That's why I dare say, besides the fact that you're just an incredibly good writer, people want your stuff. Because they want meaning. They're looking for the meaning of their lives, and they can't find it in all the baubles and doodads and go-gas and nonsense that the distracting world is giving them. So this new book that I've got talks about how we've changed our brains that we've walled off literally physically the parts of our brain that we need to assess questions of meaning. And the only way he can do that is by going back and living more like Grandpa Holliday, but with Brian Holday's books.

• 1:16:32Speaker 1

  But but also I think maybe a through line between most of the philosophics was particularly the Eastern ones who talk about it so much more specifically. Victor Frankl is good is saying, and then uh of course his experience is confirming it. There is none of these things without suffering. You have to transform suffering into meaning. That's that's the

• 1:16:49Speaker 0

  trick of the human experience. And in fact, if you don't suffer, there is no meaning, which of course is one of the biggest mistakes that we make in a therapy industrial complex today, is to say that if you're sad and anxious, there's a pathology that needs to be that needs to be fixed. Yeah. You know, I tell my students they're studying at Harvard. If they're not sad and anxious, they need therapy. Right. You know, that's the truth of the matter. And unless they lean into it, I mean, the the great trick, the great stoic trick, the great Christian trick, the great trick of life is not just to start each day and say I'm I'm grateful for the things that are gonna that are I'm gonna enjoy this day, is to say I'm grateful for the suffering that will befall me this day, bring it on.

• 1:17:27Speaker 1

  Yes. I can handle it. That that's that's what resilience

• 1:17:30Speaker 0

  learn from it's not even just I can handle it. It's just that my life, it's like I will I'm not fully alive unless I have a versive experiences and I'm dealing with them like a responsible, grown-up, fully developed person. Yeah. And that's our goal.

• 1:17:47Speaker 1

  That's the goal. And and if meaning can be derived from suffering, then it means you can be happy and thrive in any condition in any kind of life. If happiness can only come from things going very well, then it's only available to a small percentage of people, a small percentage of the time. It's a much more resilient and robust

• 1:18:11Speaker 0

  formula. That's right. And that's why that's where epicureanism gets it wrong. Yeah. Is that it's got one pillar of the happiness formula. Yeah. And there are a lot of people who are really, I mean, it's like they they take what they see to be stoicism and they push it to the okay, if it's not hurting me, I don't like it anymore. But that's

• 1:18:28Speaker 2

  wrong too. Sure. I

• 1:18:29Speaker 0

  mean, that's uh that's incorrect too. That's also a misunderstanding of stoicism, of course. But that's why epicureanism is an incomplete philosophy for the human person, in my view, because it doesn't understand that core fact that we are, and again, this gets back to my Christianity. Why does God allow these things to happen? Because they must, because we actually can't become the people that we're supposed to be. We can't be fully alive. Who was it? It was Saint Irenaeus who said in the fourth century, the glory of God is a man fully alive. And today it would be translated as a person fully alive, of course. So there's no gender exclusivity about this. You're not alive. That's the glory of God if you're actually not having a full range of human experiences. And if your whole goal in life, your philosophy and practical life strategy is to eliminate the normal parts of life that you don't like.

• 1:19:16Speaker 0

  You're you're you're dead. Yeah. You're dead. And that's one of the reasons that people can't find meaning today, is because they're being told that.

• 1:19:25Speaker 1

  Well, I think we did it. We did about 2500 years of uh ancient philosophy in

• 1:19:30Speaker 0

  one hour and 22 minutes. I think this is uh quite a master class we just did. It's and you know, it's like a folk, sorry for all the stuff I got wrong. That's all I can say. I'm I'm uh I'm just a French horn player who got a PhD as a social scientist. There's a lot I don't know.

• 1:19:42Speaker 1

  Well, I don't even have a PhD. So this is just us, as we said, remixing things we've heard from other people. But that's I think that's what philosophy is. Philosophy is not specializing in an arcane or specific period, uh, right? Philosophy should be a survey course of all. All of the wisdom the sum total of wisdom of five thousand years of human experience. That's what it's supposed to be.

• 1:20:06Speaker 0

  Yeah, I think that's right. And we can title this Ryan and Arthur Make Sourdough.

• 1:20:12Speaker 1

  Well, you want to check out some books? I got some for you. All right.