Michael Schur on the Virtuous Life and Humor in Philosophy | It’s Pointing Right At You

Ryan reads today’s daily meditation and talks to television producer and writer Michael Schur about the importance of making philosophy accessible, the difficulty of living virtuously without becoming cynical, the power of expressing humor and positivity in entertainment, and more. Michael Schur created the critically acclaimed NBC comedy The Good Place and co-created Parks and Recreation, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and the Peacock series Rutherford Falls. He is also an executive producer on HBO Max’s Hacks and Netflix’s Master of None. He spent four years as a writer-producer on the Emmy Award-winning NBC hit The Office. His new book How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question is out now. Blinkist takes top nonfiction titles, pulls out the key takeaways and puts them into text and audio explainers called Blinks that give you the most important information in just 15 minutes. Go to Blinkist.com/STOIC to start your free 7 day trial and get 25% off of a Blinkist Premium membership. Shopify has the tools and resources that make it easy for any business to succeed from down the street to around the globe. Go to shopify.com/stoic for a FREE fourteen-day trial and get full access to Shopify’s entire suite of features. DECKED truck bed tool boxes and cargo van storage systems revolutionize organization with a heavy-duty in-vehicle storage system featuring slide out toolboxes. DECKED makes organizing, accessing, protecting, and securing everything you need so much easier. Get your DECKED Drawer System at Decked.com/STOIC and get free shipping. New Relic combines 16 different monitoring products that you’d normally buy separately, so engineering teams can see across their entire software stack in one place. Get access to the whole New Relic platform and 100GB of data free, forever – no credit card required! Sign up at NewRelic.com/stoic. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://DailySto ic.com/dailyemailCheck out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more. Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookFollow Michael Shur: TwitterSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

• 0:03Speaker 00

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast where each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are, and also to find peace and wisdom in their actual lives. But first, we've got a quick message from one of our sponsors.

• 0:42Speaker 00

  It's pointing right at you. As we've said before, Marcus Aurelius expected an ordinary life for himself. He was bookish, he was quiet. Then suddenly, he found almost literally the weight of the world on his shoulders. He was chosen to be king of most of the known universe. Destiny called. Was he special? Of course. But was he that different from you? No, no, he wasn't. Because we're all chosen for something. Perhaps our duty is not quite as heavy as ruling the Roman Empire, but each of us has a task, a calling. It's like that line from the Iron Maiden song, "Hand of fate is moving, and the finger points

• 1:24Speaker 00

  to you." The question is whether you will step forward and wear the purple, as it were, whether you'll shrink from it and hide. Marcus Aurelius was scared at first. We're told he wept, worried that he'd be as bad as the bad emperors before him. But Rusticus, his teacher, helped him. Antoninus helped him. His philosophy helped him. He dreamed one night that he had shoulders of ivory. That's how he knew. He was ready. He could bear the weight. The finger is pointing at you. Will you accept what fate has in store for you? Will you be extraordinary? Or will you hide? Will you shirk your duty? Will you not just accept mediocrity, but seek out being average or less than average? Will

• 2:08Speaker 00

  you be the person philosophy that destiny has tried to make you? That is the question.

• 2:17Speaker 00

  Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I don't know about you, but I readily accept that we live in a golden age of television. There's amazing series on every streaming platform you could possibly imagine. Who can watch them all? But I have just found, and I talk about this a little bit in today's interview, I just don't have the stomach for it. I mean, I don't have time as much as I would like to watch some of this stuff. But, you know, I just found, especially since I have kids, but, but especially as the world is what it is, I just don't, I'm tired of the anti-heroes. I'm also tired of a show being eight seasons.

• 3:01Speaker 00

  You know, every episode's an hour. It's just, it's just madness. But, but so when I do sit down to watch TV, you know, I end up watching like series, but, but like really formulaic ones. Like I love Law and Order, and I've watched every episode of Law and Order over the years, many of them, many times. During the pandemic, I rewatched The Office and Parks and Rec, two of my all-time favorite shows. I'd rather, I don't know, by the time I get to the end of the day, I'm going to sit down and watch something. I don't want, it's not that I don't want to be challenged, but I, I feel like I like something comfortable and something that's fun and ridiculous, but also real.

• 3:44Speaker 00

  And I just think The Office is one of the greatest shows of all time. Seinfeld's on Netflix now. So I've been rewatching some Seinfeld. And you've probably heard me quote all these different shows from time to time. We've done some pretty awesome stoic memes from The Office lately also. So when I got an email from the publisher of today's guest's book, I was like, are you kidding me? I'm on in two seconds. Michael Schur is the creator of The Good Place, and he co-created Parks and Rec and Brooklyn Nine-Nine. But my, of course, absolute favorite is The Office, where he was a writer and a producer for four years.

• 4:26Speaker 00

  But most importantly, he was Mo's, Dwight's brother on the show, which we do talk about. So I've always been a huge Michael Schur fan. I don't know if I expected such an amazing work of moral philosophy to come from Michael, but here it is. It's a new addition to The Painted Porch. I read the book, How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question. I loved it when I read it as a galley. I bought copies. We now carry it in The Painted Porch. You should check it out. I don't add a lot to the philosophy section, so this is as high a praise as I can give a book. I thought it really interesting. And then I really enjoyed this conversation. He and I

• 5:09Speaker 00

  got to nerd out about philosophy, about psychology, about the crazy world we're living in. And of course, I got to ask him some very important questions about The Office, which, if you haven't watched, I don't know what's wrong with you. And Parks and Rec, I don't know what's wrong with you. Two of the greatest shows of the last decade or so. And I also follow on Reddit, I follow R. Dunder Mifflin, which is always a good source of hilarious memes. In any case, and Brooklyn Nine-Nine, I really enjoyed too. So anyways, here's my conversation with the one and only Michael Schur. Check out his new book, How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question. You can pick that up at The Painted Porch

• 5:50Speaker 00

  or anywhere books are sold. I'm sure the audiobook is great. And enjoy this interview. You can follow Michael on Twitter. His handle is @KenTremendous. I have no idea why. I should have, I guess, asked him. But enjoy this interview.

• 6:07Speaker 00

  I wanted to start with a very important question I've long had about an acting decision that you made, a character choice. Why does Moe's run like that?

• 6:19Speaker 01

  You know, you're the second person in like three days to ask me this.

• 6:21Speaker 00

  Oh, no, I thought this was an original question.

• 6:24Speaker 01

  Well, the other people who asked me it were Jenna Fisher and Angela Martin from The Office. So, so.

• 6:33Speaker 01

  Moes was a character in The Office, if you're not familiar with the show, who was a sort of Mennonite or Amish-adjacent gentleman who lived on a farm and was sort of a little bit of an odd duck. And I was basically a sight gag, right? The writers were writing me into episodes in order to taunt me or haze me, your pick. So the very first episode that I was in, the stage direction was that I sort of like run into a room. And I was sort of, I'm not an actor, I don't know how to do it. I'm in awe of actors and their abilities to make choices and to inhabit characters. I'm not any of those things. So I was just like, what is this person? Who am I? And I just decided that he ran weirdly.

• 7:18Speaker 01

  So I don't know why, but I held my arms out and held my hands straight out and just ran just in the weirdest way I could think. I was just like, I don't know if this is right or wrong, I'm just gonna make a choice. And I did it. And then because everybody enjoyed it so much in the writers' room, they made me do it in 10,000 other episodes. And so now I was like, well, now I'm pot committed, I have to run this way every time they want me to run, because this is the way this character runs. So very little, you know, I don't know what you would say. It's not that no thought went into it, it's just that it wasn't carefully considered as a choice.

• 7:52Speaker 00

  Well, when I chase my children around, that's how I run, just to bother them. And it seems to make them deeply uncomfortable and makes the whole thing a lot more fun.

• 7:59Speaker 01

  Great. I'm glad that it could help someone in some way, shape, or form.

• 8:04Speaker 00

  Well, you know, I'm so glad to get the book, and I loved it. I read the galley of it, I thought it was fascinating. I'm gonna go another obscure question. One of my favorite parts of the whole book is your little footnote on Ayn Rand, where you talk about it possibly being a war crime to assign one's staffers to read Ayn Rand. But it brought up an interesting... I think I've also read Ayn Rand. I think she's fascinating when you're 19 years old, and if you don't grow out of it, there's probably something wrong with you, which is of course a slightly unfair characterization. But if you think about what she was trying to do, it's from an artistic standpoint, it's pretty amazing that she writes this

• 8:48Speaker 00

  long ass book that is basically propaganda for a philosophy or a viewpoint, that it it works. Like, it's not the most beautiful work of art, but like, millions of people have read it. Like, it's it's actually readable and people read it. It strikes me as you would have a unique appreciation for how impossible that task is, doing it essentially on The Good Place, and then with this book, to write about philosophy or big ideas and have them be entertaining and accessible is really, really hard.

• 9:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, she's arguably the most successful philosopher of the last, I don't know, 150 years or something. I mean, I don't even know who's comparable. So it is a it's a neat trick she pulled because she she buried, like you say, she buried her philosophy in novels. And and people, I think, are generally speaking, more apt to engage with philosophy through a different artistic medium than a than an intimidating philosophy book. And so she did a really good job. Like, she was she's a very effective spokesperson for her own ideas, and she and she laid them out in a in a way that was intended to be more entertainment. I don't find her books entertaining. I find her books soporific and miserable to read.

• 10:09Speaker 00

  You don't like 40 page speeches?

• 10:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, the other problem is, of course, it's like, you know, and one of her longest books is about the locomotive industry, which is like that not a thing that you can really engage with in 2022 or whatever. But I think that there is a lesson there, and it's part of the reason I wanted to write this book, How to Be Perfect, which is, I think that philosophers have so many things to offer us, and so much wisdom, and so many ideas, and just suggestions and And I don't know, just they have philosophies and yet they wrote such intimidating and dull at times works that nobody, the barrier to entry is so high.

• 10:55Speaker 01

  You know, I remember thinking when I was doing research for The Good Place, it's like, man, like, these are such good ideas and they're so hard to dig out. It's like, it's like someone had written a recipe for a chocolate chip cookie that was delicious and also somehow healthy, but the recipe was 700 pages long and written in German. And it was like, well, no one's gonna read it if it's 700 pages long and written in German. And so if you could just communicate these ideas in a different way, I think it's what you've tried to do with your books and your podcasts is say like, there is wisdom here. I know it's ancient, I know it's scary, it's Greek and Assyrian and Roman and it's scary, but, but the wisdom is real and helpful potentially to people.

• 11:38Speaker 01

  And so if you can just communicate it in a better way, it, it will improve the world. That's the bet we're all making, I think.

• 11:45Speaker 00

  It is weird though, because, I mean, you talk about a lot of ancient philosophers and then sort of the philosophers right in between as well, like Kant and so on. But it is kind of weird that like, when you go back and you read the ancients, in some ways, they're actually a lot more accessible than the people who came a thousand years later and way more accessible than the people who are 50 years ago or right now.

• 12:10Speaker 01

  Oh, by far. By far. I mean, part of it, I think, is that a lot of, a lot of ancient Greek philosophy specifically, and a lot of pre-Socratic Greek philosophy is very epigrammatic, right? It's like, everything is like a sentence. I think that's part of why Nietzsche was popular, because Nietzsche wrote sort of epigrammatically, like, his works are often, for first of all, they're very entertaining, but they're often just like bullet points. You know, little bits of wisdom that he had an incredible facility with, with communicating very short, very swiftly. There's a, there's a thing in one of his books, I think it's Beyond Good and Evil, where he talks about how he describes humans as looking at the world through frogs' eyes.

• 12:53Speaker 01

  And it's like a frog, and what he meant was a frog that pops its head out of a, out of a, a lake and can only see the world from this very low vantage point. So it doesn't understand anything that's happening in the big picture. Like, that's so evocative. That's so cool and like understandable. And so I think a lot of the ancient Greeks had that same instinct, which was, we gotta boil this down. Like, this is like one sentence at a time. And I think that really helps with the, the way they communicate.

• 13:21Speaker 00

  Yeah. You think about like a metaphor like Plato's cave, or the allegory like Plato's cave. And you're just like, man, that holds up like super well. That's incredible.

• 13:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yes. And then you read some contemporary philosophy and it's this, this endless web of, of discursive, you know, like people trying to get at, get at ideas by summarizing 10,000 other ideas and then formulating their theory out of those ideas. And granted, it's like, it's a little bit like, I don't know if you're watching that Beatles documentary, Get Back, that's on Disney Plus now. But like there, I think I have two thoughts when I, when I watched that Beatles documentary. One is, God, these, they were just so good. They were just such great songwriters. And then the second thought, which is linked, is like, also, no one else had been writing songs yet. So they, they had the advantage

• 14:14Speaker 01

  of getting there first in a lot of these ways. And also, they were geniuses. And I think that probably applies to philosophy too, right? There's probably a little bit of like, we're the first people who are putting down these thoughts or trying to understand the world in this way. And so they could be a little more precise and basic in their approach as opposed to now, where if you're a philosophy professor, you have to sift through thousands of years of stuff and summarize it and analyze it in order to get out whatever you're trying to get out.

• 14:41Speaker 00

  Well, it's kind of like the Simpsons did it thing. It's like, they did it for so long, so early, that they took all the low hanging fruit and a lot of the, the high fruit, but they took all the, Aristotle's like, yeah, it's, it's all wide open space and he's just claiming all of it.

• 14:58Speaker 01

  Well, I used to write at Saturday Night Live and this, and this is, this is 20, almost 25 years ago now. But you would come up with an idea for a sketch and you'd be like, oh, this is, this is gonna be really good. And you'd be like, oh, this has been done. But Jack Handy did this already, or, or Jim Downey did this already. And Eventually, what you have to do, and maybe there's an analogy here for philosophers, is you have to say like, okay, this is not a new idea because this idea has already been explored, but if you only engage with brand-new ideas, you're never going to write anything. And so you just have to say like, I'm going to put my spin on it, or my take on it, or my execution of it will be different, and that will be the reason it's worth engaging

• 15:41Speaker 01

  with and exploring, instead of just like, I can only write something if no one has ever written it before.

• 15:46Speaker 00

  I think that's right, although I would argue that if you take Plato and these analogies, or thought experiments that he comes up with, the fundamental difference between what he's doing and what it seems like a lot of philosophers have tried to do in the more modern era, it feels like he's trying to get to clarity, and they're trying to get to like, let me blow your mind with this. So the allegory of the cave is this thing, but it basically says like, look, you have an obligation to go back and try to help people once you experience truth. I feel like the trolley problem, which you talk a lot about in the book, it's sort of like, yeah, you're like fucked either way, there's just nothing you can do about it. Or like, how do we know we're not living in a computer simulation?

• 16:28Speaker 00

  That's an interesting philosophical question, but what am I supposed to do with this information? So it almost feels like the ancients were trying to get you clarity about the meaning of life, or what you're supposed to do as a human being in a complex world. It feels like a lot of philosophy today is like, let me just muddy the waters so much that you're just like, I don't know.

• 16:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think you're right. I think that there is a, here's what matters thing that the ancients were doing, right? What matters? Okay, well, here are the things that matters to the Stoics, here are the things that matter to Socrates, or whoever. And now, like, the trolley problem is a perfect example, because like you say, baked into the equation is, someone dies, right? You're just screwed, because someone is going to die, and you are going to be the one who is standing at the front of the trolley, making the decision. And it's fascinating, because someone is going to die. So the stakes of it, in the writing world, we would say, the stakes of this problem are enormous. It's life or death.

• 17:31Speaker 01

  And so that is a good way to tease out the differences in moral decision-making, when you know that in the best-case scenario, one person's going to be smushed by a trolley. All right, let's, let's ride, let's figure this out. So there's, there's obviously a fundamental difference between trying to lay out for people, here's what matters in life, and then, much later, laying out for people, here are the terrible decisions, the terrible choices that we have to make on a day-to-day basis. How do we make the best ones we can? That's like a huge difference.

• 18:03Speaker 00

  And I wonder if part of that is the ancient philosophers actually did stuff, right? Like, they were thinking about this philosophically, but then they had jobs. Like, you know, even Socrates is like, is in the army, right? And, and then is, you know, sort of faced with this life-or-death trial at the end of his life, contrasted with, I think, the more academic philosopher, whose job is just to think about complex things. So like, you talk about this guy in one of the footnotes, who's looking at the trolley problem, I think, and he's basically like, no, you can't kill anyone for any reason, because they all value their lives, whatever. And, and it's like, that is interesting, but I guarantee you, like, middle of the pandemic, if you were like, hey, should we give the shots to older people first or younger people? That guy would then have an answer, right?

• 18:48Speaker 00

  But it's like, sort of academically, you can come up with a reason why the, the question is infinitely complex, or can be reduced down to this black-and-white thing. But if you're actually a politician, or a teacher, or you're, you're creating a show, and you have to make character decisions, like, you have to cut through all the abstractions and just like, get to real life.

• 19:09Speaker 01

  Yes, and it's a key aspect of a successful philosophy, to me, that it has practical application. I don't much, I don't care that much about theory, because I, the goal of this book, and the goal of like, my own goal for myself, and engaging with this stuff, is like, what can I practically do, on a day-to-day basis, when I'm forced with all these decisions? So the guy you're talking about is this philosopher named John Turek, who wrote a piece called, Do the Numbers Matter? And what he essentially says is, that, like you said, everyone's life is maximally valuable to him or herself, which means, if you are, the, I think that, at one point in his paper, there's a thing where, you're, you're the, you're the captain of a boat, and you're

• 19:52Speaker 01

  off the coast of an island, and in the middle of the island is a volcano, and at the north end is one person, at the south end is like 50 people. And the volcano erupts and everyone's gonna die and you have to choose, do I go to the north end to save one person or the south end to save 50 people? And his thing is you flip a coin because you cannot, the sum total of people's lives does not matter. What matters is that each person's life is maximally valuable to him or herself. So you can't just, you can't just add them together, right? So where that takes him, if you extrapolate, is one person needs a million doses of a life-saving medicine to save him from a disease and a million people need only one dose of that medicine. You're still supposed to flip a coin?

• 20:36Speaker 01

  Like, that's not a practical decision. Like, put John Turek in that decision and see what he does. And I don't think he's gonna say, yeah, let's flip a coin and let a million people potentially die. So what I'm-

• 20:48Speaker 00

  Well, that goes to the cunt, right? Would you wanna live in a world where everyone acted that way? Of course not.

• 20:53Speaker 01

  Where everyone was John Turek.

• 20:56Speaker 00

  The world would cease to exist almost immediately because no one would ever make any decision that maximizes for outcome and we'd all go to war and die like very quickly.

• 21:06Speaker 01

  Right. And, and also, you know, you're, you're, you're, if there's any practical version of that situation, it's some kind of decision like the trolley problem where you look at where you are and you say, alright, I've got two choices and they both kinda suck. And so I'm gonna go with the one that I think is better, knowing that I'm still causing harm. And the philosophies I'm most interested in are the ones that say, here are all the tools you can use to analyze the decision and to say like, yes, this is gonna be a, this is a 55-45 situation. It's not black and white, it's not up or down, but here are all the tools you can make to make sure that you get the best understanding of the, of what the 55% is, you know?

• 21:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, and to me, that's where, where Rand fails particularly bad, is it's like- So the idea is like, because successful, brilliant people aren't appreciated enough by society, they're just gonna take their ball and go home. Like, it's just preposterous. Like, like, I just, it's so childish and so absurd that like, it's almost, you get to the end of the book and you're like, is this really your argument? Are you 11? What are you talking about?

• 22:19Speaker 01

  Yes, and that's the reason why, as you said, it's a thing a lot of people engage with and admire in like, high school. When the world of ideas is opening up and the kind of, you're, you're, you're feeling like a, you're a kid playing dress up as an adult, right? You're feeling very, I remember when I was in high school, um, my dad was a philosophy major in college, and he had all his old philosophy books lying around, and I started reading them, and I didn't understand them. But I loved the idea of being a high school kid who read philosophy. So I would walk around with Nietzsche or, or Heidegger or something in my bag, and like, or Kierkegaard, and I had Being and Nothingness, and I would like leaf through it. And I didn't understand a word I was saying, or reading, but I loved

• 23:01Speaker 01

  the idea of being the kind of person who did that. And I think that's a lot of what Ayn Rand appeals to, is like, this is a big idea. I'm filling your head with big ideas, and you get so swelled up with pride because you understand them, and they, and they're like, yes, of course, I am powerful. I am, I can do this. I'm, I'm on my own. I am an adult now. And then when you are 23 and you read it again, hopefully you say like, well, this is absurd. Like, the world can't function this way. This is ridiculous. So, yeah, I, again, it's, it's a little distressing. Like I say in my book, it's a little distressing that she is the most successful idea relater of the last 100 years, but I don't think it's really in dispute.

• 23:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, it's like, it makes sense if you have as arrested a worldview as Dwight Schrute, but like, if you're a functioning adult in society, like, the holes are so obvious that, what do you do?

• 23:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Yes, there is, there is a certain kind of person who still has a, an admiration for that, for her philosophy. And that kind of person is a person who, in my opinion, just isn't thinking enough about other people, or about the world, or about society, or about the town they live in, or just the concept of like, otherness is just lost on people who are fans of her work.

• 24:16Speaker 00

  Well, it's funny because the book is called How to Be Perfect, but I think actually the central question of the book is what you just said. It's really like, what do we owe each other? That's really, to me, the central thrust of the book, but also of most philosophy is just like, what are, what are our obligations to the right thing, to other people, to justice? Like, what are we actually allowed to do versus shouldn't do versus could get away with but aren't going to do anyway?

• 24:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's the goal, right? Is to find, I think of it as the ceiling and the floor, right? There's, there's a floor for how little we are allowed to help other people or to care about other people or other groups of people near us, around us, here, as Peter Singer would say, either here or over there. How, what's the, what's the minimum in any situation that you're required morally to care? And then there's also a ceiling. There's like, there's a, there's a, a danger in only caring about other people over there or nearby or whatever, because then you're not living a sort of full, inadvertent life yourself. You're not flourishing yourself, as Aristotle would say.

• 25:30Speaker 01

  And so the goal is to find the range and to just stay within that range, right? It's like, if, if you do things where you're like, man, this is a really selfish act and I have, I am, I am denying my responsibility to other people or denying what I owe to other people. That's bad. And if you get so lost in the concept of only caring about morality, then, as Susan Wolf would say, you're not like, you know, reading books yourself or practicing the, your tennis game or cooking or spending time with your family, and then you're not really a person. So it's, it's, there is a range somewhere in the middle there. And our goal is to find that range and really try to nail it.

• 26:11Speaker 00

  That's what I'm writing about now. I'm doing this book on temperance because I'm doing a series on the four cardinal virtues. And I found it to be a very difficult book to write about because it's such an unsexy topic. Like to say like, no, like you can't do it, or to say like, yes, do it, chase as much of it as you can. That's very simple. But the idea is like, some, but not too much, is like the perfect amount of unsexiness that it's hard to talk about, hard to get people excited about, and also hard to define. It's a moving target.

• 26:42Speaker 01

  It's an absolutely moving target, as all the virtues are, right? The mean of every virtue is a moving target. And one of my favorite things about Aristotle specifically is that he says to you, okay, here's the deal. There is a mean, and there's a perfect amount of every virtue that you need to attain. And, you know, courage, or temperance, or mildness, or whatever it is, there's a perfect amount. And if you go too high, that's bad. And if you go too low, that's bad. And our goal is to spend our entire lives, every waking minute of our lives, finding, chasing and finding that perfect amount. And then he says, what is that perfect amount? Nobody really knows. So like, so he's, and there's

• 27:23Speaker 01

  something kind of beautiful about it to me, because he's basically saying, all of life is trial and error, right? Everything about your life is, you make a choice, you see the results, you analyze how it went wrong, you maybe adjust, you make another choice, and you're, and you just get closer and closer and closer, asymptotically closer to these means. And the fact that he kind of can't really actually tell you, because nobody can, what that mean is, it's just very human to me. Like, it really feels very human and very, um, kind of lovely. And it's, in its, in its, it's essentially a flawed philosophy, because there's, he can't, Kant can tell you, like, here's what you do, right? Do

• 28:07Speaker 01

  this. If you do this, you win. And utilitarians can do that, too. They can say like, more good than bad. If you do more good than bad, you win the ethics contest. But Aristotle is kind of saying like, all of the human existence is trial and error. And I'm telling you, you're essentially never going to get there, because I don't even know where there is. And that's, I don't know, there's something kind of beautiful about that to me.

• 28:31Speaker 00

  To me, I actually think it makes it more perfect, or more of a usable philosophy, because it's like, welcome, welcome to reality. It's complicated, right? Like, I feel like Zen Buddhism does this well, where they're like, sometimes do this, sometimes do the opposite of this, you'll know when, you know? Because if you, if you actually think you can be like, here is the rule or law, follow this in your behavior always, you lose the ability to actually function in the real world. And where things are complicated or confusing, or you have imperfect amounts of information. Like, I love the way the Stoics cut through this, is they're like, okay, nothing that's not in our control is good

• 29:13Speaker 00

  or bad, right? So we're, we're indifferent. But then Seneca goes, but aren't there such thing as indifference you would prefer? Right? So he's like, he's like, obviously, if you're tall or short, you know, you'll be fine either way. But it is better to be tall, right? Like, if you, or he's like, if I, if you had to choose between being rich or poor, not that either one of those says anything about you as a person, it's obviously better to have more than less. And so I just like, it's like cheating, but it also makes perfect sense that like, yeah, like, too much money is obviously a problem, not enough money is

• 29:51Speaker 00

  a problem. Split the difference, some amount of money is good. But on, generally, you'd rather have more than less. Like, that's just life.

• 30:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know. And that, and I also can't help but think about the differences in the, in the life that Xeno or Seneca was leading and the life that we're leading now, right? Because the difference between when you say like some amount of money is right, well, that is an enormous range, right? Some amount of money is $35,000 a year versus $780,000 a year. The lives being led by those two people are enormously different in a number of ways, not just in what they have or what they can do, but the daily stresses that they're under because of the amount of money they have. And so sometimes those philosophies do a little bit break down

• 30:44Speaker 01

  when, when you're talking about a sort of generalized, hey, you'll just feel it out. You know, you'll, you'll kind of know one way or the other. Like, how will you know whether you should trade a job that where you're making $412,000 a year for one where you have to move to a different city to make $468,000 a year? Like, that's, eh, like, if, if, if it's just, it's, and that's why I think I admire the rough edges of something like virtue ethics. It's because even 2,400 years ago, there's an acknowledgement, I think, or there's a tacit acknowledgement that this is really hard. It's just hard. These decisions are hard. Life is hard.

• 31:26Speaker 01

  Figuring out how to exist as a, as a, as a citizen, as a, as a wife or husband or mother or father or son or daughter, and, and being, and an employee and a student and a traveler and a, and an enthusiast and a number of different hobbies. Like, figuring out how to spend the time you have and the resources you have is really hard. And so it's a little bit of a, hey, just keep trying. Just keep trying. Just do the best you can and keep trying, and that is the victory.

• 31:56Speaker 00

  Well, I think the money one is interesting, too, because it's like, what if you're just really good at what you do and therefore, and you happen to be randomly in a very high-paid profession, should one stop doing that because money is not a good, right?

• 32:10Speaker 01

  Right.

• 32:10Speaker 00

  Like, should, should one give it all away? Should one run in the opposite direction? It's, it's a, and I think, again, the Stoics are fascinating because like, they, like, there is something about being the Socrates or the Diogenes, the cynics or the Zen monk that sort of, like, I renounce all of this and I'm go, you know, I, I, I am interested, like, even Kierkegaard is this, like, weird, asocial person who's not able to function in the world, right? He's like your delicate flower artist type who's brilliant, but like, you know, the newspapers write something mean about him and he's like destroyed. I, I like that, I like the philosophers that were like, you know, just like in the mix of life, you know?

• 32:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, I think, yeah, and that's, that's sort of, sort of what I mean by practicality. It's like, I, I trust the people more who were living a life of engagement, of civic engagement and societal engagement than the sort of like, I'm gonna go off into a little corner and just imagine, use, that's why Kant doesn't appeal to me personally. Kant's thing is like, a situation arises and he is sort of asking you to like, press pause on the world, go into like a solitary confinement chamber, discern a rule using only your own brain and your ability to reason, come up with a maxim that then follows that

• 33:35Speaker 01

  universalizable rule, and then go back, hit play on life and then say, I am choosing to do X, Y, and Z. And it's just like, all right, man, like, yeah, in, in, in theory, that's, that's great. Because you, if you have, if you have a clicker that, where you can pause everything all the time and, and spend the resources to really figure out, tease out what the right maxim is, great. Most of us don't have that ability. In fact, no one really has that ability. So instead, it's a little bit like, you know, Aristotle says like, all right, try, get angry, but not so angry, you know? Don't get too angry, just get this, get the right amount of angry, at the right people for the right reasons and then you'll be okay.

• 34:18Speaker 01

  And sort of by extension, he then says like, afterwards, think about what you did. Think about the choice you made. Did you get too angry? Did you not get angry enough? Next time, modulate and get and try to get closer to whatever that right amount of anger is. And it's, you know, Kant is offering you this, um, this foolproof guide, right? He's offering you a like, these are the notes for the test you're gonna take. And if you study the notes and you memorize everything I'm telling you to memorize, you'll get an A on the test. You'll nail every question. But the actual test is your entire life, and it involves a lot of other people who are, who have other demands and other issues going on. And there isn't always, in fact, there very frequently is not ever

• 35:00Speaker 01

  the opportunity to really spend the time thinking about stuff that he wants you to spend.

• 35:05Speaker 00

  Well, that, that is an interesting other part of the book, which is, I think you talk about it pretty early on. You're like, you know, we hem and haw about these things. We're not sure what's the right amount. Should I do this? Should I do that? And then you're like, but some people don't think about this at all.

• 35:19Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I, it's that, that's one of the biggest problems, I think, in the world. Is that like, you, you can spend as much time as you want mulling these decisions and choices and coming up with different theories of how to behave based on different great writers and philosophers and everything else. And then you'll encounter mostly people who just don't care in the slightest bit about what happens. And then newspapers are full of people, very powerful people in every realm of society, who either don't care at all, or have read and thought about this stuff and have decided to actively fight it and like, and, and thwart it at every opportunity. And then, so it's like, well, what do you do?

• 36:01Speaker 01

  And this is actually the Stoic, this is where it comes back to the Stoic idea, I think. It's like, well, you can't control them, right? You can't control that. You control what you do. And it's a, it's very like, the thing I like about the Stoics is it's, it's almost like the way I talk to my kids. It's like, don't worry about him. Don't worry about this thing you can't control. You, you prepare, you do what you need to do. And then, one way or the other, you'll know that you did your best. That is a, that's a very, um, simple parental child.

• 36:32Speaker 01

  A bit of wisdom that is also a sort of stoic bit of wisdom, I think.

• 36:36Speaker 00

  I think where we struggle with it, though, is that it feels so unfair. You know, you're like, but they they're getting away with this. And you're telling me I have to pass up on this or I have to delay gratification or I have to willingly, you know, I have to willingly comply, even though no one would actually force me to. I think we struggle with the society with the idea that like, it's all voluntary at the end of the day. They're like, I think this is largely where the idea of God comes from. It's like, well, God's going to make you do it, right? Or you'll be punished at the end of your life. You just have to trust me, but there will be justice or karma for you at the end.

• 37:18Speaker 00

  That's how I think how we tell ourselves that they're not really getting away with it.

• 37:23Speaker 01

  And by the way, not just punished, but rewarded for the people who do the good thing, right? It's like that it is it is a thing that people on earth, human beings invented in order to answer the question of why is everything so unfair? It's like, well, don't worry. At the end, there will be a reckoning, right? And and so there that is a that's a tough thing to hold on to, especially if you're not a religious person. I'm not particularly religious. I wasn't raised in any religious tradition. And so I've never had the feeling personally that my life will be either rewarded or punished in the afterlife, which is odd because I made a whole TV show about it.

• 38:02Speaker 01

  But but that that feeling, I can 100% understand the comfort in it because it is incredibly unfair what happens in the world. You see people all the time, again, in positions of power, whether in politics or business or anything else, who are doing outrageously immoral things on a daily basis and are never punished for it ever. They never, there is no comeuppance. There's no justice. There's no retribution at all. People, one thing I've been thinking about recently, and I know this is a topic of of some political discourse right now, is why does any American politician allowed to own any stock in any single US company ever?

• 38:45Speaker 01

  It is absolutely absurd to think that the people that we elect to represent us have specific, personal, financial stake in specific companies because the government spends trillions of dollars a year and that money can so easily be misappropriated and allocated to companies that enrich them and they're supposed to be protecting us, not the other way around. And yet, you see all the time senators and representatives who steer our money, my money and your money toward companies that they profit from. That's an obvious ethical lapse at the highest level and those people are never punished.

• 39:24Speaker 01

  And so, when you're faced on a daily basis with stories and images of people benefiting from a lack of caring about ethics, not just like they don't care, but the fact that they don't care is better for them. They're winning the race.

• 39:44Speaker 00

  It's an advantage.

• 39:45Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly. They have figured it out and they are winning the race and you know that nothing bad will ever happen to them. It becomes very hard, even harder, to care about being ethical yourself. And that's why it's like, you just gotta put your nose to the grindstone and double down and just know that somehow or other, it is better to care than to not care.

• 40:08Speaker 00

  I mean, the Christian argument is like, yeah, you'll be rewarded in heaven or punished in hell. I think, I've always said that the Stoic argument is whether or not those things exist, you will live in hell now, or you will live in, like, your life will be hell. If you're like, it's not sin because God will be angry, sin because it will punish you. I think that's, I mean, obviously, that's why I believe, it's why I try to tell myself, and then, yeah, you watch, I don't know, Michael Scott, or you watch Donald Trump, and the question is like, is it fun to be them? Like, are they getting away with it? Right? It's, I'm not, it's, sometimes it feels like it's, the answer is obvious and then sometimes you're not so sure.

• 40:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, we, this is a very frequent writers' room debate, I'll tell you, in Hollywood. A writers' room debate is, would it better, this was a question that was posed to our, to a writers' room six, seven years ago, would you rather be who you are or Rob Gronkowski of the then New England Patriots and now Tampa Bay Buccaneers? So, Rob Gronkowski, if you don't know, is a six foot, six inch tall, just happy-go-lucky, he's basically a golden retriever that like a bolt of lightning hit him and he turned into a football player. He's just a rambunctious, kind of ding-dong, who just runs around and chugs beers and plays football and he's really rich and he's a, he's a total idiot, in the, in the best possible way.

• 41:34Speaker 00

  In the Michael Scott sense of the word.

• 41:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, like lovable idiot, just an absolute ding-dong. And, and everyone, everyone was like, oh, I'd rather be me, like, that guy is, I mean, first of all, forget about the injuries sustained playing football, whatever, but like, it's unclear whether he can string three sentences together without getting a headache, right? But then a lot of people are like, no, it's better to be Rob Gronkowski. It just is, like, he, because what, he is not tortured by anything. He does not appear to be conflicted, or tortured, or upset by the world. And the, the process of engaging with the world and of caring about the world means you are bound to be, on a daily basis, upset by it. You're, all of the injustice and all of the problems and, and the, and the seeming lack

• 42:20Speaker 01

  of interest on the, on behalf of all the Rob Gronkowskis in like fixing anything, means that you suffer a kind of pain that is outside of your control, that there's nothing you can do about. And I, I mean, I, I chose to be myself and not imagine myself as Rob Gronkowski, but I, by the end of the argument, I was firmly, I firmly understood the argument that it is better to be Rob Gronkowski.

• 42:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's like, nature is very merciful. In the same way that like, if you, your arm got bitten off by a shark, your body would go in this, you know, insane state of shock. So you would feel nothing. But when you get a paper cut, you don't get it. It's like, when you are stupid, or selfish, or awful, you, nature, it's like, well, I'm also gonna pluck away the self-awareness that would make you, like, there's that scene in The Office, where Daryl says, you know, like, "You're the bravest one in the office, because you, you wake up every day, and you're Michael Scott." But the reality is, it actually probably doesn't require any bravery,

• 43:33Speaker 00

  because he can't conceive of being anything other than himself. So by lacking the self-awareness, you know, he probably never gets the shame or the self-consciousness.

• 43:43Speaker 01

  Well, that's a really interesting point to make, specifically in light of that show. Because the premise of that show is that an unobserved group of people is suddenly observed by a camera crew. And we used to talk all the time in the writers' room there about when, when the characters looked to the camera, and why, right? So, very frequently on that show, if you've seen it, something would happen, and then one of the characters would glance at the camera, and they all had different relationships with the camera. Like, Jim would look to the camera like he was saying, "You're my friend, and you, you and I are on the same page. You see how ridiculous this place is," right? And Dwight would look to the camera like, "Yes, I'm awesome, and I just did something really awesome."

• 44:28Speaker 01

  But Michael would often look to the camera like, "Uh-oh, I just said something embarrassing, or dumb, or racist, or whatever, and I just remembered, oh my God, there's someone looking at me." And then he would quickly try to backtrack, or undo whatever he had done. And it's an interesting psychological experiment to say like, well, what happens when a person who is selfish or obnoxious or whatever, what if we put cameras on all those people? And that's in a weird way, that is what's happening in our world, right? It's like that now there's a camera on everybody all the time. The question is, do you, if you played back for people, there, some of their behavior and some of their decisions, would it matter?

• 45:11Speaker 01

  And obviously, I think in some cases, as we've seen in the last couple of years, like people go into a Taco Bell and they not wearing a mask and someone politely asks them to put on a mask and they lose their minds and they scream and yell and they stomp their feet and they break things and they talk about Nazis. And I don't think that those people, if you played the video of them doing that, that someone took on their iPhone, would go like, oh, boy. I really, I don't think they would have an Aristotelian, I think I got too angry there. I don't think that would occur to them. But I think there probably are some people who aren't totally aware of what they look like or sound like when they make decisions like that. And it's a kind of interesting thing to think about. If you could make a documentary about every living human being, like, how many of us

• 45:56Speaker 01

  would change our behavior? I think a lot of us probably would.

• 45:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, totally. I mean, it does feel like, you talk about that briefly in the book, and it is, I think, the part that's been most baffling to me in the pandemic. Like, it really hit me rereading Marcus Aurelius, realizing like, oh, wait, he wrote this during a plague that he probably died of, right? That killed like millions of people, but he talks about how there's two kinds of plagues. There's the one that takes your life and the one that affects your character. And it does feel like watching a lot of people who were filmed or unsolicitedly put these things on the internet themselves, people really do struggle with what you called like the bare minimum, doing like even the most bare minimum for other people.

• 46:44Speaker 00

  And they have, like, is that just like, they're like, oh, I never thought about it and I'm not going to think about it? It's almost like they really have thought about it. They're like, here's why I should not be inconvenienced, even in the slightest way to help other people. Like, I was talking to someone, I was like, who's very Christian, I'm like, look, love thy neighbor, right? Like, that's the most basic premise of Christian thought. And you're just like, well, I'm healthy, why should I get vaccinated or wear a mask? And it's like, Like I was trying to walk them through that contradiction and they were just like, yeah, but I don't, I don't need it. Like they just kept saying this over and over again. Like they could, I just couldn't get them to compute that they had an obligation to another person.

• 47:27Speaker 01

  Right. And you see that with whenever anyone with that attitude tries to draw an analogy, it's always the most revealing thing because it's like, hey, you know, a hundred thousand people die in car crashes every year. Why, that we still, we still wear, uh, you know, we still let people drive. It's like, well, yeah, car crashes aren't contagious. I don't know what to tell you. Like you getting into a car crash doesn't then potentially cause me halfway around the world to get into a car crash. Or it's like,

• 47:55Speaker 00

  But also speeding is illegal, uh, driving while drunk is illegal. All the ways that it could, you know, hitting pedestrians of the right of way. There are, there are like so many laws that limit what you're allowed to do to, so there's not negative externalities.

• 48:09Speaker 01

  And also like, even though, you know, we, we also still require you to wear a seatbelt. We still make it safe as, as safe as it can. Lauren Boebert, who's a congresswoman from Colorado, just tweeted out a thing the other day that was like, this many people die from cancer every year. And it's like, again, if you get cancer, it doesn't cause potentially me to get cancer if you and I eat in a restaurant together. And it, but like those arguments are always thrown back at them immediately and never once has any one of them gone like, ooh, good point. Like that's the thing that, the thing that the internet age has, has gotten rid of most effectively is the sentence, oh, that's a good point. Like you just never ever, oops, sorry. Yeah. I, I revise my

• 48:50Speaker 01

  opinion like that, that you just never see people take, put, put an idea into the world with that level of stridency, receive new information or, or have an argument come back at them that they maybe hadn't considered and then say like, you know what? You're totally right. And I, I rescind my comment. Like that's, if we could get better at that. As a society, that would go a long way toward, I think, curing a lot of what ails us.

• 49:14Speaker 00

  No, I think that's right. And it's like, if there's a thought experiment, so it's like, yeah, let's say 300,000 people die a year of cancer and like, everyone had, but if everyone wore glasses, it would cut that number by 25% or 10%, so 30,000 people. Well, wearing glasses is not fun. It's not cheap. Most of us don't need glasses. But if somehow everyone wearing glasses, even when it was dark outside, even when they fogged up in the, in the steam or whatever, that 30,000 people would, would survive. I mean, like, most people, if it not in a politicized environment, would be like, easy,

• 49:56Speaker 00

  let's do that right now. But for whatever reason, in the pandemic, and I think this is what Marcus was saying about something that infects your character, we've, we've decided like, no, this is different. I specifically don't give a shit about this thing or who it affects.

• 50:14Speaker 01

  My friend Megan Amram, who's a writer I've worked with a lot, said the smartest thing about COVID, which is basically it's a, it's a black light. It's a thing that was turned on and revealed all of these ugly stains that are all over the country and the world, really. And that's the biggest one to me, is that what it really revealed was this bubbling sense of, I don't care. Like, you're in trouble, I don't care. The woman, the old woman next to me, who lives next to me, might die if I don't do this. I don't care. And the analogy that I draw in the book is, like, you know, you're going to like a strip mall, there's pharmacy to pick up a prescription and you park and it's really hot outside and

• 50:58Speaker 01

  it's annoying and the crosswalk is a block away. And so you look both ways. You're an adult. We're all adults here. I can jaywalk. Now, technically, yes, it's a crime, but it's the most, arguably the most minor crime, right? And so you just jog across the street and you pick up your prescription and it's fine. If I told you that, hey, instead of jaywalking, if you just walk a block south, use the crosswalk and then walk a block north to get your prescription, 750,000 people might not die. I don't know why, but that's the case. We could save three quarters of a million people if we all agree to just go even. I know it's a hot day. I know you're late. I know that this is a, you just want to jog across the street.

• 51:39Speaker 01

  But if you just do this slightly inconvenient thing, we could save three quarters of a million people. To say no to that is just the most callous and awful decision. And I, and that, and yet, wearing a mask is roughly speaking to me as inconvenient as walking a block south and then a block north to the CBS. So it's just so disheartening.

• 51:58Speaker 00

  But then you add on top of that. The weirdest part is you add on top of that. It's, it's not like you're like, ah, but if no one's looking, I'm still gonna, I'm still gonna sneak across the street because like, not everyone has to do it, right? If you're like, 10% can still get away, you still, but then, then, so you're like, okay, maybe I get that. But then you're like, no, no, no. My position is not only am I going to do that, I'm then going to actively try to convince as many people as possible to also do it with me. Because, because I not only don't care, I just want to watch the world burn.

• 52:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're gonna, I'm gonna call the people who decide to go use the crosswalk Nazis and fascists. And I'm going to decide that they're the real problem here. Yeah, that is, it's truly, it's truly disheartening. I really, I find it to be the most disheartening part of this, to have it revealed through this pandemic, the percentage of people in America and in the world who, who not only don't care, but actively want to do the opposite of what a caring person would do. That's really been a hard thing for me to internalize.

• 53:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, so when we talk about virtue, then I think this is something I've just been struggling with. Like, so how do you continue to want to do the right? Like, how do you not just go? Fuck it, I'm a nihilist, right? Or like, you know, like, how do you, how do you not give up on people when people are giving you every reason to give, they're, they're not only saying like, yeah, uh, you can give up on me if you want, they're like, no, no, no, I'm irredeemable. Let me show you how irredeemable I am. To me, I think that's the pressing problem of our time. It's like, how, all these ideas of like, love thy neighbor, or, or serve the common good,

• 53:49Speaker 00

  or, or like, how do you keep, how do you hold on to those things when you have unlimited access to, as you said, the documentary of how awful everyone is? Or how many, how awful a lot of people are?

• 54:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's not easy. And, and that's part of the impetus of writing this book, for me at least. There's a quote from Bernard Williams, who's a British philosopher that I quite like, where he points out that we are especially responsible for what we do, rather than what other people do. It's, it was an attack on utilitarianism, where he said like, that, that basically, a lot of the, a lot of the attacks on utilitarianism, it basically, that it doesn't differentiate, it doesn't take seriously, as John Rawls said, the difference among people. It, it sort of coagulates all people into the, just like, little cogs in a machine who are creating good or bad. And you want to activate more cogs that create good than more, than the ones that create bad.

• 54:46Speaker 01

  And Bernard Williams says, look, we are specially responsible, we are uniquely responsible for what we do, and, and, and more so than what other people do. And that really is a very simple way of saying like, okay, there are all these other people, and you're looking around, and they're doing various shitty things, and it's really disheartening. But the answer can't be, I guess I should do those shitty things. Like, it just, that can't be the right answer. Like, you have to remember that you are more responsible for what you do than for what other people do. And as long as you keep that in mind, you, I, I hope, you can't get to a point where even as tempting as it is to just, to do whatever everybody else is doing that sucks

• 55:30Speaker 01

  and is giving them some, some potentially, like a head start in the race, or is helping them in some way financially, or socially, or whatever, that it just can't be the answer to say, I know that thing is bad, that that person is doing. But I'm going to also do it in order to attain whatever that person is attaining. And part of that, by the way, I think, is also keeping in mind, and this is obviously a stoic idea, is that, as well as this is an eastern idea, there's a lot of philosophy that talks about how, if you are, it's very Buddhist, right? If you are attached to things, if you are, if you have the wrong kinds of attachments, or you care too much about attaining certain things, you're on the wrong path, right?

• 56:13Speaker 01

  So if you're saying, if I'm looking at someone in a position of power, who is using his or her political influence to steer money towards a company that he or she owns stock in to gain financial wealth, and I say, well, I guess I'm going to do the same thing, because if they don't care, why should I care? The root of that is the idea that the thing that they're gaining matters, right? That it's like, oh, that extra $23,000 in stock appreciation is something that I should care about. And so if you don't-

• 56:46Speaker 00

  And it's worth what you're giving up to get it.

• 56:48Speaker 01

  Yes, that the price of your soul is that extra money. And so if you, if you start from a position where I'm going to make sure that I am attached to the right things, to caring about, that I'm mindful, that I'm focused on what actually does matter, you will start to see that the things that they're, the parts of their souls they're selling aren't worth it because their thing they're trying to attain is not something you should even care about attaining. And that's hard, like, it's hard to say that to people. It's hard to say to people, money doesn't matter, or a bigger house or a nicer car doesn't matter. Like, it's hard to believe in that sometimes. But that's, that's the deal.

• 57:29Speaker 01

  You got it, you got to start from that position, I think, and then, and then go from there.

• 57:34Speaker 00

  So changing gears slightly, can philosophy be fun or funny? Like, they seem like they would be very different. I'm just curious your take.

• 57:46Speaker 01

  Can philosophy as a discipline be fun? Is that the question?

• 57:49Speaker 00

  I think just the idea of comedy and philosophy, one might think they're complete opposite ends of the spectrum. Certainly, people who are not interested in philosophy probably have that view.

• 57:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I find it very funny personally, and that could be just because I was a comedy writer first. And so I tend to like, try to find whatever's funny about anything I'm doing. I think the trolley problem itself is deeply hilarious. There's nothing on paper funny about it. It was written in 1967 as an investigation of the doctrine of double effect, which goes back to St. Thomas Aquinas. And the paper that Philippa Foot wrote about was specifically about the problem of abortion. Not funny topics, right? But the situation she puts you in is objectively hilarious. To me, at least, it's like, everything about it is funny, and everything about it leads to a funny conclusion.

• 58:42Speaker 01

  And when you actually picture yourself on a barreling train with no brakes, and having a lever, and making life or death decisions, I find it to be, and that's why we did a whole episode of The Good Place about it, I find it to be a funny situation. A lot of the thought experiments that philosophers have come up with to talk about philosophy, I think are very funny. The discipline itself, is it funny? I don't think it is. Like, it's not intended to be, at least. And what's funny about it is often in the margins, or in the, if you take a step back, and you imagine the people really living their lives, living the lives that they have laid out as how one ought to live one's life. It often becomes funny, or reaches, you can reach some very funny conclusions

• 59:26Speaker 01

  about what it means to be a pure Kantian or utilitarian. But, you know, The Good Place was my attempt to say like, "Let's take this..." Fairly unfunny, dry thing and try to explain it through humor, which I think means it's going to be a lot easier for people to engage with it.

• 59:43Speaker 00

  It does feel like, like almost from an improv standpoint, like on the, the trolley problem, there's an element of like, well, how can I just keep escalating the stakes to make it funnier? Like the, and then you throw a fat guy off the bridge in front, you know, on top. And it's just like, how could it get more ridiculous as a premise?

• 1:00:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's, there's certainly, I mean, the trolley problem is, like I say in the book, it's, it's been the most talked about problem in philosophy for 50 years and a most academic philosophers are sick of it and they, they are so bored. I compare it in the book to stairway to heaven. It's basically the stairway to heaven of philosophy because it's like, yes, I recognize that it's a piece of genius, but also, God,

• 1:00:23Speaker 00

  I don't want to hear it again.

• 1:00:23Speaker 01

  We have to hear this again, like, right? So, but, but what's good about something like the trolley problem is that there has been a continual conversation about it for 50 years. People have been responding to it. There's whole books on it you can read. There have been TV shows like mine and others that have engaged with it. That it's a, it's a, it's like a very fast growing mold that, that has a lot of dimension and a lot of different aspects to it that now can be analyzed and discussed. And some of them are woof. Some of them are really hard to understand. It's now where you get into, at the far end of the spectrum, you get into like, you get into a lot of math. There's a lot of math that comes into philosophy that is just beyond my capacity for understanding. But what I,

• 1:01:08Speaker 01

  what I preferred on, in the show and in the book to focus on was just the nuts and bolts. Like what is, like, what is, what is this getting at? Like what is, what is this problem trying to get at? And in terms of how we can just practically speaking, make decisions that make us a little bit better than we were yesterday.

• 1:01:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, I was gonna, I don't know if you know the story of Chrysippus, the Stoic philosopher and how he died?

• 1:01:32Speaker 01

  No, I know Seneca, I know how Seneca died. I don't know how Chrysippus died.

• 1:01:36Speaker 00

  Seneca's death is pretty epic and there's almost a comedy to it. Like, he keeps trying to kill himself and none of it's working for Seneca.

• 1:01:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:43Speaker 00

  And then, and then he's like trying to bully his wife into doing it and they're like, "What are you do-" But, but no, Chrysippus is, uh, he's like the one of the most serious, one of the most academics or one of the most like, uh, like ardent defenders of Stoicism. So you wouldn't expect he'd go out this way, but he's an old man and he's sitting on his porch and a donkey walks up and starts eating the figs out of his garden. Uh, and he starts laughing and then he supposedly says something like, "Does, does he need some wine to wash down those figs?" And then laughing so hard at his own joke for an extended period of time, he drops over dead.

• 1:02:22Speaker 01

  That's a great death. Good work.

• 1:02:23Speaker 00

  I think so too.

• 1:02:24Speaker 01

  I mean, I, I think Socrates' death is extremely funny when you read the account of it because it's unintentionally so, but when you read the account of it, it's like, you know, he's on trial in Athens, basically for just being annoying. They basically put him on trial because he was annoying. And they're in, they, they, they say, you know, here's the crime you're accused of or whatever. And he gives this long and beautiful and eloquent speech about why he refuses exile and, and, uh, and why he doesn't think he should be killed. And it goes on for page after page after page. And then in the text, it's like, you know, they vote and he's gonna be killed. And he's like, "Okay, but before you kill me, just consider this." Long eloquent speech, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Here's why I did this and this and then blah, blah, blah, blah. They take another vote, he's gonna be killed.

• 1:03:09Speaker 01

  And he's like, "But hold on for a second." And he just keeps like making these long, beautiful, famous speeches about why he believes that he's innocent and then it's just like-

• 1:03:20Speaker 00

  And doesn't he propose that he be rewarded instead of punished?

• 1:03:23Speaker 01

  Yes, he does. It's a very ballsy move. He's like, "What about this? What if you give me a plaque?" basically.

• 1:03:30Speaker 01

  So yeah, I mean, there are certainly, look, all philosophers are human beings and human beings are hilarious. Like by their nature, we are flawed, ridiculous, absurd creatures whose lives are wildly varied, have massive ups and downs and unexpected twists and turns, who do ridiculous things that are indefensible by any ethical theory and also are capable of unbelievable generosity and kindness. And all of those things are true about all people. And so as a result, there, I mean, Seneca was a moneylender in

• 1:04:09Speaker 01

  in England. He was, he, he was like a wealthy man who, who had, was like a multi, multimillionaire by, by the day's standards. And when he died, didn't he say something like, I leave, I leave to you, he was trying to work out his will. And he was like, and I couldn't get it done in time because they were like, you gotta go, man. And eventually he was like, he said to his wife, something like, I leave to you something greater than money, which is the, the image of like a noble and perfect life. And meanwhile, he's been screwing people out of money in England for decades. Like, and he has the gall, like 30 seconds before he dies to go like, just be like me. I mean, that's amazing.

• 1:04:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, but what should we do with the money? Like, what should we do with the money?

• 1:04:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, there's a legal question here, buddy. So I, what is, what I think is beautiful and frustrating and wonderful and annoying about people in general, is that we are all, we all contain these multitudes. We are all capable of, of the greatest achievements and the kindest gestures and also the most callous and selfish and awful decisions. They're all inside all of us. And so the theories that I love are the ones that basically say like, yeah, we all suck, man. We're all imperfect. We're all monsters. We're all also potentially great. Let's just try to like minimize the bad stuff and emphasize the good stuff. And that is one way or the other. That's what they were all getting at. Like, that's what the utilitarians wanted.

• 1:05:37Speaker 01

  It's what Kant wanted to nail exactly. It's what the virtue ethicists wanted. It's what Tim Scanlon, who wrote What Do We Owe To Each Other? It's what they're all after. Derek Parfit, the contemporary philosopher, described all of the schools of philosophy as scaling the same mountain from different faces of the peak, right? It's like utilitarians are coming up on the east face and the Kantians are coming up on the north face. And that's, I love that image because it really is, the more you read from different eras and of different people, the more you realize they're all after the same thing. It's just like, what do we do? What the hell do we do? This is so hard. Life is so hard and complicated. What do we do? How do we try to get better at this, you know?

• 1:06:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, I think like, obviously Gladiator is a drama, but there is a humor to it where it's like, you have the only philosopher king ever in history and he just raises the shittiest kid. Like, he's just so bad, like the worst kid of all time. There's something just hilarious and also fitting and like human about that.

• 1:06:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:44Speaker 00

  And I love it.

• 1:06:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it's what like Succession is about too, right? At some level, it's like, this guy's a monster and he raised three monstrous, four monstrous children. And there's like a battle for their soul going on in every episode of like, do they, they're slavishly devoted to him, is any of them going to break free? Like, and every time they start to, he like draws them back and like, and it's what The Sopranos was about, right? The Sopranos is about a-

• 1:07:11Speaker 00

  Where the Trumps in real life.

• 1:07:12Speaker 01

  Yes, it's like these, like the depictions, it's what Breaking Bad was about, right? It's like this good guy who has a monster inside him and the whole show is a battle for his soul. Does he, does it, does he win or does he lose? And it's in The Sopranos, it's through therapy. It's like, I'm, I have, there's a potential that he can see the light here, but he's also so steeped in this awful behavior, it's unclear whether he's ever going to break free. Like, once you start thinking about- Once philosophy gets into your into your brain and into your soul, you start seeing it everywhere. You start seeing the depictions of characters and movies and TV shows and people around you. You see everything as a collection of philosophical decisions.

• 1:07:52Speaker 00

  So, and I'm sure you have to run. So my last question for you would be like, speaking of the stuff we're talking about in the world, and then obviously the TV shows we're talking about. I have found that lately, like, all I can really watch are like reruns of The Office, or, you know, like Parks and Rec, or her. Like, I can, like, I can watch like Law and Order, because Law and Order is like so self-contained. But like, I just found like, I can't do these like 40-hour Netflix dramas, or even like great stuff, like, anything like basically post-Breaking Bad. I'm like, I just don't, I feel like I don't have the emotional or the cognitive ability to just like put up with more, like, another awful world.

• 1:08:37Speaker 00

  So I just return to like the same shows over and over again. What is that?

• 1:08:42Speaker 01

  Well, it's probably a couple of things. The pandemic, I think, was a, was like the global equivalent of like a cold rainy day, where a lot of people's impulse was like, I have to be in my house. I can't leave my house because it's cold and rainy. And I want to eat a big bowl of mac and cheese and watch Friends. That's what I want to do on a cold rainy day. Like, I think that, the fear and the unknowability of the world, I think, caused a lot of people to go back and just revisit things that bring them comfort and joy, which I think is completely understandable and frankly, probably healthy. I think there's also the global political situation,

• 1:09:24Speaker 01

  the existential threats that we face from things like global warming and Russia amassing forces on the Ukrainian border, and all of the depressing stuff that you read every day, and the gerrymandering of the US congressional districts, and the impending doom of the midterms and all that sort of stuff. I think all of those things have led us, at least I'll speak personally, they've led me to try to draw a line between

• 1:09:52Speaker 01

  The engagement that I have in the world, which I think is a civic duty that we all share, and my personal, private life. And in my personal and private life, what I want to do is sit on the couch with my wife and watch something that's entertaining. And I have found the same difficulty with grappling with dark, sad, downbeat depictions of human beings, because I think I'm trying to get away from the reality of the dark and brutal depiction of human beings that we see in the real world every day. So it's some combination of those factors. It's also probably just, I don't know how old you are, I'm 46. You get to a certain point in your life, and you think, you start doing triage in your

• 1:10:37Speaker 01

  mind, like, how many, how many days, months, weeks, years do I have left? How do I want to spend them? And I mostly want to spend them being happy, if I can possibly. And that doesn't mean, by the way, that there isn't happiness and joy to be found in a brilliant depiction of Tony Soprano or Walter White. Like, of course, there is. Like, that's a specific kind of joy. And I hope that I never get so afraid of dealing with like, human psychology on, through entertainment, that I don't, that someone says, like, this show is incredible, and I run away from it because I don't want to engage with that kind of depiction. But I also think that the more, the older you get, the greater

• 1:11:17Speaker 01

  your impulse is to just try to share in a joyful experience with other people, and to have that be the thing that you, that you pass your time with, you know?

• 1:11:26Speaker 00

  I think that's why Ted Lasso's worked, for sure.

• 1:11:29Speaker 01

  Sure. Yeah, I think that's a perfect example, like that Ted Lasso coming along at that moment in the pandemic, like, it's exactly what everyone wanted. They just wanted radiating positivity and joy, and it really hit a nerve.

• 1:11:44Speaker 00

  Did you, did you see that question? It was, this was on Twitter a couple of months. Uh, this is, I guess, in 2020, but it was like, what beloved television character would have voted for Trump? And so you had to like, you had to ruin them. What, what beloved character in your universe do you think would be like one of the anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers that we're, maskers that we're talking about?

• 1:12:06Speaker 01

  From a show I have actually worked on, you're saying?

• 1:12:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:12:09Speaker 01

  Uh, boy, um, cause like, I was gonna say, well, you know, Archie Bunker obviously would have voted for Trump.

• 1:12:15Speaker 00

  Sure, of course.

• 1:12:16Speaker 01

  Uh, I'm not that old. I didn't work on the whole family. Um, that's a good question. Uh, I mean, well, Jeremy Jam was a, a

• 1:12:25Speaker 00

  Oh, yes.

• 1:12:25Speaker 01

  character on, on Parks and Recreation, played by John Glazer, who was a city councilman, who was also a dentist. And he had moved to the town of Pawnee, Indiana, because he was a dentist in Pawnee. Pawnee's biggest industry was a candy factory and they didn't put fluoride in their water.

• 1:12:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:12:40Speaker 01

  So he was like jackpot, right? And so his, his sole intention was to profit from his position as a city council person. There's no que, he would have been campaigning for Trump. I mean, he would have been, he would have yard signs and, and floating a boat around a lake. He's the first one that comes to mind. I don't know that any of the good. Yeah. I don't know if any of the good place characters would have, I mean, even sometimes you get into the situation where you're like, when you, with a question like that, where you say like, well, what about Eleanor, Kristen Bell's character, where she voted for Trump? And my answer usually is sort of like, well, she probably didn't vote. Like she doesn't care. Like she doesn't care one way or the other. Like she probably thought Trump was funny, but she was also like, he's gross. I don't wanna, like she would just wouldn't vote in the election, you know?

• 1:13:22Speaker 01

  So I don't know. There's, I'm sure there are more, but Jeremy Jam is the, is basically is, he's Donald Trump Jr. Essentially, in the, in the show before Donald Trump Jr. Was a thing.

• 1:13:32Speaker 00

  No, that's a great one. Yeah. And he'd, he'd have a, a no mask policy at the dentist's office for sure.

• 1:13:38Speaker 01

  A hundred percent. Yeah. Yeah. He wouldn't even wear a mask. And then he would, he would, there's no question that Jeremy Jam was infected with COVID early on. And also passed it on to like 700 other people.

• 1:13:53Speaker 00

  No, and I got to imagine Dwight's probably going down a pretty dark internet rabbit hole. And then Ron Swanson, that's the big danger there.

• 1:14:03Speaker 01

  Well, Ron, Ron, a couple of people asked me what, who I thought Ron would vote for. And Ron is a libertarian, but he's an actual libertarian, like he's a 19th century libertarian. He lives on his own farm and he hunts his own meat. He's not a fake contemporary American political libertarian. And I think that the things that he admired above all other characteristics were things like integrity and honesty. And I can't imagine he would have voted for Trump. He wouldn't have voted for Biden, certainly, but he wouldn't have voted. He would have written in like Teddy Roosevelt or something, you know, like he wouldn't, but he wouldn't have voted for Trump. And Dwight's possible because Dwight was very Klan-ish and he was very impressed by

• 1:14:48Speaker 01

  wealth and status. And I think that it's possible that Trump's whole deal would have sort of appealed to him. And you're, you're definitely right. He was also something of a conspiracy theorist. So there's.

• 1:15:00Speaker 00

  He's taken horse dewormer for sure.

• 1:15:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, but he was taking it also 10 years ago before, long before he was rubbing it on his gums for some completely unrelated reason. So he thinks he's inoculated against it because he's been eating ivermectin for, since he was a child, you know? So yeah, there's, there's definitely a dark potential path for Dwight Schrute through contemporary America. I hope, as someone who has affection for him as a character, I hope he didn't go down that path. That would be depressing if he were like a QAnon guy or something.

• 1:15:32Speaker 00

  Well, no, I think to connect to where we are in the world and the issue, the moral philosophy you're talking about in the book, that's really been the hardest part is you watch people who you know, deep down have good hearts, who you are fond of, who would, like I live in rural Texas. These are people who would, you know, rebuild my house if it burned down or change my tire or, or, you know, come pull my truck out when it gets stuck. But then, you know, even of the Ron Swanses of the world, you can watch how easily a person can become susceptible to misinformation, can be radicalized, can be deceived. It's almost using the identity, like we see this with masks and vaccines, where it's

• 1:16:15Speaker 00

  like, they had this idea of courage. So resistance feels like courage, but if you're resisting the wrong thing, you're missing the point. And you can watch how good people can end up doing profoundly immoral things and still maintain their identity as a moral person.

• 1:16:30Speaker 01

  Yes, there is a default setting amongst a significant part of America. And the default setting is no. Like, when asked to engage in something, or to be a part of something, or to make a sacrifice, the default is no. And it takes a lot to get those people to say yes. And that's deeply baked in the history of the country, into the settling of the country, into the frontier celebration of the country, into the cowboy imagery that we all, that everybody grew up on. The default setting is take care of yourself, defend your land, sit on your porch with a shotgun and make sure nobody takes your stuff. And I spend

• 1:17:13Speaker 01

  a lot of time in Texas. My grandparents lived in Texas my whole life. And it is truly wild, because Texans, in my experience, are the friendliest people I have ever met. I have never once had a bad interaction with a Texan, really, in a grocery store, my grandfather used to play golf at his retirement country club, and everybody was kind and generous, and they would remember your name, and they would pat you on the head. Guys used to slip me a quarter and say, go get yourself a gumball. And it is one of my favorite places in the world to visit is Texas. I love Texas. If the subject of

• 1:17:56Speaker 01

  politics came up, I would never be invited back. And so, it's hard, it's a real, it's just a lot of cognitive dissonance between the kindness and the essential goodness, what I see as the essential goodness of people, not just in Texas, but all over the country. And like you said, the generosity, like you're, you're, you're, there's a flood, or there's an earthquake, or there's something, there's any kind of problem, communities rally around and they help each other out. And this is no different. Like, wearing a mask is no different than helping someone bail out water out of their basement. It's the same exact thing, but it has been politicized to the point where it, where it is received as different. And that's a real bummer, because it's not different. Bailing water

• 1:18:39Speaker 01

  out of your, out of your neighbor's basement after a flood is no different in its essential instinct from wearing a mask. And yet, people think of them as different.

• 1:18:49Speaker 00

  Very well said. Well, Michael, I absolutely love the book. It's great. This will go up when it's out. And I really appreciate you writing it. And I hope the sequel has more Stoicism in it.

• 1:19:01Speaker 01

  Yes, I know. When I was coming on here, I was like, oh shit, I should have written more about the Stoics.

• 1:19:07Speaker 00

  We, we got, we got one footnote.

• 1:19:09Speaker 01

  You did, you did, about Kant. Yeah, I remember. Well, thank you for having me on. This was really fun. I really enjoyed the, I really love your podcast and I really enjoyed the conversation. Thanks for having me.

• 1:19:22Speaker 00

  You know, the Stoics in real life met at what was called the Stoa, the Stoa Pochyle, the Painted Porch in ancient Athens. Obviously, we can't all get together in one place, because this community is like hundreds of thousands of people, and we couldn't fit in one space. But we have made a special digital version of the Stoa. We're calling it Daily Stoic Life. It's an awesome community. You could talk about, like today's episode, you could talk about the emails, ask questions. That's one of my favorite parts, is interacting with all these people who are using Stoicism to be better in their actual, real lives. You get more Daily Stoic meditations over the weekend, just for the Daily Stoic Life members, quarterly Q and As with me, cloth-bound edition of our Best of meditations, plus a whole bunch

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