The Daily Stoic - Arthur Brooks on Stoicism vs. Epicureanism | You Don’t Know What’s Going On With People

Episode Date: April 7, 2021

Ryan reads today's Daily Stoic email and talks to Arthur Brooks about the differences and similarities in Stoicism and Epicureanism, the obligation we have to each other as human beings, the importance of virtue in modern society, and more.Arthur C. Brooks is Professor of the Practice of Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School and Professor of Management Practice at the Harvard Business School. Brooks is the author of 11 books, including the national bestsellers Love Your Enemies (2019) and The Conservative Heart (2015). He is a columnist for The Atlantic and host of the podcast The Art of Happiness with Arthur Brooks.This episode is brought to you by Seed. Seed’s Daily Synbiotic combines 24 clinically and scientifically studied probiotic strains with non-fermenting prebiotic compounds concentrated from Indian pomegranate. Start a new healthy habit today. Visit seed.com/STOIC and use code STOIC to redeem 20% off your first month of Seed’s Daily Synbiotic. This episode is also brought to you by Public Goods, the one stop shop for sustainable, high quality everyday essentials made from clean ingredients at an affordable price. Receive $15 off your first Public Goods order with no minimum purchase. Just go to publicgoods.com/STOIC or use code STOIC at checkout.This episode is brought to you by LMNT, the maker of electrolyte drink mixes that help you stay active. Right now you can receive a free LMNT Sample Pack for only $5 for shipping. To claim this exclusive deal you must go to drinkLMNT.com/dailystoic. Get your FREE Sample Pack now. If you don’t love it, they will refund your $5 no questions asked.This episode is also brought to you by Athletic Greens. Athletic Greens is a custom formulation of 75 vitamins, minerals, and other whole-food sourced ingredients that make it easier for you to maintain nutrition in just a single scoop. Visit athleticgreens.com/stoic to get a FREE year supply of Liquid Vitamin D + 5 FREE Travel Packs with subscription. ***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better.Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow Daily Stoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicFollow Arthur Brooks:Homepage: https://arthurbrooks.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/arthurbrooks Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/arthurcbrooks/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ArthurBrooks/ See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic Podcast early and add free on Amazon Music. Download the app today. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast where each day we bring you a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength, insight, and wisdom every day life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2000 year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us at dailystoward.com. Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Wendery's podcast business wars. And in our new season, Walmart must fight off target, the new discounter that's both savvy and fashion forward. Listen to business wars on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts.

You don't know what's going on with people. Those of us who are not celebrity gossip addicts missed it. But a few weeks before the tragic and premature death of Chadwick Boseman, pictures showed him to be alarmingly thin and haggard. In common sections, and meme accounts, people joked at the effects of a few months of quarantine. Others called him crack panther, implying that drugs were to blame for his radical change in appearance. Of course, we know now why he looked that way. He was dying of stage 4 colon cancer. He had only a few more days to live. Even if you did not see these

pictures or jump to those conclusions, the lesson is a sobering one. We have no idea what people are going through. The famous singer who puts on weight, the co-worker who is messing up over and over again, the new person you're dating who seems to be suddenly preoccupied, the rude person in traffic, even the Karen who is melting down on video at the grocery store. We have no idea about their private struggles. We have no idea about their pain. Marcus Aurelius tried to remind himself that people and events are not asking to be judged by you. You have the option of having no opinion. He said, so somebody gained weight, so somebody seems differently. Unless you're providing sympathy or help,

why don't you mind your own business? Nobody asked for your criticism. Nobody needs you to make fun of them. They're struggling. They've got more than enough on their plate and they don't need you adding to it. Remember that because every time you forget you risk ending up like the people who got their kicks mocking a guy dying of cancer. You end up missing what was actually quiet and profound heroism. May he rest in peace. Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of The Daily Stood Podcast. Sometimes you get a surprise email out of the blue and it just makes your day. In the surprise

email I got a few months ago came from Arthur Brooks. He was asking me if I wanted to be on his podcast. And he said that he read The Daily Stoke and he liked my stuff. And he wanted to talk about philosophy and modern life. And the reason this this made my day is I'm a huge Arthur Brooks fan. I read everything he publishes in the Atlantic. There's even a Daily Stoke email I think a year or two ago about his fantastic piece on professional decline. But Arthur Brooks is just, I think, one of the great philosophical and political thinkers of our time. He's a professor of leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Business School. He was previously the president of the Enterprise Institute, but he's a I think a great social scientist, a prolific author. He's given hundreds, thousands of speeches all over the world. He mixes

science and ancient wisdom, philosophy, music art. He was even previously a world-class professional classical musician. He played the French horn. We really get into it in this episode. We nerd out about stoicism, epicurianism, our obligations to each others as human beings. We talk about virtue. It's a great conversation. I didn't want it to end. I'm really looking forward to you hearing my conversation with the one and only Arthur Brooks. You can check out his stuff. He's at Arthur Brooks on Twitter and you can just go to Arthur Brooks.com. He's got some great books as well that are worth reading. Love your enemies, the conservative heart, the road to freedom, gross national happiness, and his first book, Who Really Care, which is about charitable giving. So a fascinating writer and thinker, and there's also the Arthur Brooks podcast,

which you can listen to my episode of, and many other illustrious guests. So here is my interview with Arthur Brooks. I loved your piece on professional decline. It was fascinating, but I do feel like in a way you are a walking contradiction of it. I feel like you've been absolutely on fire lately. Your Atlantic pieces have been in a sort of hit after hit in sort of deep, thoughtful, provocative pieces in a time of mostly disposable sort of deep, thoughtful, provocative pieces in a time of mostly disposable sort of partisan hot

takes. Yeah, thanks Ryan, I appreciate it. And coming from you, that means a lot because it's near as I can tell you, but I'm fire since you've about 14, you're about 14 years old. But the key thing about that piece about professional decline is not that you're going to inevitably decline, inevitably decline and go away or become unproductive. It means that certain skills decline, but other skills are behind them. So this is the really important thing to keep in mind. People who get good at something, particularly in knowledge industries, idea industries, they have this thing called fluid intelligence.

Now fluid intelligence is analytic capacity, the ability to figure stuff out to invent things from nothing. And that ability increases through your 20s and stays high in your 30s and then declines like a rock in your 40s and 50s. And most people see that as they're decline. And that's when they panic, to get into their early 50s

like I don't have my groove and they see what got them to be really good at what they do is no longer in abundance if they're a lawyer or you know whatever but here's a good news Ryan there's another curve behind it the fluid intelligence curve has you know is not it's treating you bad. I mean, it's living you behind, but there's a crystallized intelligence curve, which is one where there's synthetic knowledge, the ability to assemble stories, the ability to figure out what things mean to teach, basically.

And so what I've been able to do in my career, I'm 56 years old, a lot older than you are. I've been able to convert my career early on.'m 56 years old, you're a lot older than you are. I've been able to convert my career early on. I was an analyst, I was writing math theory, I was an academic economist. And now I'm writing for more popular audiences. I'm harvesting material that other researchers are using. I'm putting it together in stories

and titling people that I think you use their lives. Two curves. Yeah, I think you see this in sports, most starkly where the raw athleticism declines, but the athlete gets smarter, wiser, better at deception, better at strategy. You know, Jared Goff and Tom Brady meet in the Super Bowl. Goff has all the athleticism that Tom Brady doesn't have, or you can look at this at Patrick Mahons as well, but it doesn't work as well.

But what Tom Brady has is the ability to perform under pressure, the understanding of the game, the ability to pace himself. And so I think you see this in athletes as sort of a microcosm of what we all go through which is you get worse as you're saying you get worse at some things but much, much better at perhaps even more important things. Yeah, and it sort of depends on the industry to be sure. Professional athletes all can't just use their brains and continue to go on and on and on. But you and I sure can in the idea industries, but we have to know how to get from one curve to the other.

And there's this very uncomfortable, liminal state when you're declining in one and increasing in the other. And some people just don't want to jump off their flu intelligence curve. They want to stay at what made them really good, but that's always a mistake. It's worth pointing out, you said something important

in the middle. And it makes sense because you're the captain of the stoicism ship and modern times. Nobody ever says that a virtue is intelligence. Everybody says that wisdom is a virtue. And that's really what the first curve is. It's your brain's curve and your second curve is your wisdom curve. So you can actually go not only from one skill to another, they're not morally equivalent.

You can go to a superior skill morally, as you get older. I think about that as a writer. I've been lucky enough to be successful early. You know, I put out my first book when I was 25, but one of the things that struck me, I think this is starting maybe with stillness, maybe before, but it struck me one day that this pace was not sustainable. When I look at the writers that I really admire, they do it not just into their 60s, but

sometimes they're writing up until the very day that they die. There's that famous line from Da Vinci, like the last thing he ever wrote, you know, he's working and then he just says, ah, my soup is getting cold. And then he dies. Like, he's working up until the last minutes of his life. And if that's what you want,

it strikes me that not only do you have to make this transition you're talking about, but also pace and sustainability are important virtues to figure out. Sure. And as actually an equivalent or a similar story to the Da Vinci story, which is the story of Johann Sebastian Bach, which is kind of instructive. So early on, he was this incredible innovator in the Hyber Oak. And people sought him out. I mean, he was doing stuff that nobody else was doing. He was the master inventor. He was an entrepreneur musically. And then about the time he was 50 years old,

he got left behind in a big way stylistically because his own son, Carl Philip of Annual Bach, ushered in this newfangled style of music called Classical Music, goes taking Europe by storm. And nobody wanted to hear broken music anymore. It was like disco, man, I mean, it was just completely passe.

And so he rededicated himself to being an instructor of the hybrote. He was way less famous and way less rich. He just was hanging out with his family. He was an organist at the Thomas Caretooka in LifeSig. He was the greatest teacher of his time known as such. And he was writing a textbook when he died. It was called the Kuhn-Szerfuga, the art of fugue,

which was based on 20 fugues and canons to demonstrate the greatest of the Hybro even no one to care about anymore for future prosperity, prosperity. And he was writing one of his famous contra-punktuses, which is one of the fugues. And over, it stops literally mid-measure, when he's 65 years old, stops mid-measure

and his son, the one who overtook him, writes in the margin of the score at this moment, the composer put down his pen and died. Strong finish, man, but the point is, you can continue to be productive, but you have to stand productive, but you have to stand your lane, you have to figure out what your curve is, you have to figure out what you're uniquely suited to, and you have to be able to, have to be willing and able

to jump to the new curve when it's time. Yeah, and there's, there's something about writing to, like I'm, I'm, I'm a huge fan of Michael Lewis, and I, what I think about when I think about his career, he writes all these, you know, he writes his first book, Liars Poker, which is this sort of young memoir, does these other books, all very successful, but you could also argue that sort of his development as a writer perfectly intersects with the financial crisis in 2007, 2008, and you get the big short. So there's also this, I think, element of, you stay in the profession as long as you can, you work on the skills, and then you're also hoping that you meet your moment, that your skills become perfectly suited for some future moment that you really can't even anticipate

yet, and that's where really great profound work comes from. Indeed, although we have to be careful not to mistake that profound work with worldly rewards and adulation accolades. So it's perfectly possible that anybody listening to us right now has not, you know, is a fantastic writer and is doing things great intrinsic creativity and importance and won't get that moment. That window won't open up. And that's got to be okay.

I mean, the key thing is, and this is nearest to tealian distinction between telekin atelic activities. And you know all about this too, but not everybody in the audience is going to be, you know, thinking about telos, because this is actually pre-stolic in a lot of ways. But the atelic activities are those that have telos that have a goal, have an end in mind. They're instrumental. They're incomplete per se. You do them for something else. In other words, I'm going to write this book because I want it to be a huge bestseller. I don't know about you, but I've never written a book. I guess I wanted to be a huge bestseller.

I write these books because there's like bursting out of me, like the alien out of my chest in the beginning of that movie. It's like I can't not write these books. And the point is that what Aristotle says, if you want a complete activity, it will bring you joy, that will bring you fulfillment,

that will make your soul complete. You need to do atelic things, things that are useless in and of themselves that are complete and that brings satisfaction without being instrumental to something else. And so we got to be careful about that. I mean, sure. You and I have written books that people have read, bought, and you, I mean, it's like unbelievable, certainly when you're 25 years old.

But that can't be the reason you do creative work. That's a mistake because you won't find satisfaction. You'll get on the hedonic treadmill, you'll run, run, run. You'll actually, your wants will outstrip your halves and you'll become less satisfied paradoxically the more you have. No, that's a great point. I think Michael Lewis is a good example of that as well.

He did a book and I'm forgetting the title, which itself is illustrative, but he published a book about sort of the future of the internet and technology in like the day that the tech bubble burst. Like he'd been working on this book for years and years and then it turned out to be exactly what people did not want to read about. So there is this element of luck

and I think what's great about the big short is not that it sold extremely well and then, and then, you know, got turned into this great movie. I think the point about external, internal rewards, which is that the years of mastery happened to line up perfectly with the right story. And then on top of it, it was also successful. But I think what gets you going, maybe through the start of the professional decline.

And again, you see this with athletes where they were the star of a team. And then actually the role of their life was being a backup or a mentor to some future athlete. Like, you don't know what the future holds. There's this great Marcus quote where he says, you know, it's really a shame for the soul to give up before the body. And I think what he's saying, before the end, I think what he's saying is that even as the body starts to fall apart, you have to have this kind of determination and this commitment, this love of the craft or the profession. And that's what keeps you going. And, you know, I think is ultimately the source of your best work.

I agree. I agree. There's another thing that happens, however, and maybe you're starting to encounter it or maybe not. I mean, you live a pretty simple life down there in Austin, Texas, out on your little ranch with your little bookstore. I mean, Ryan Holliday is kind of like going on, but in a good, simple way. And this is something that I learned some years ago that I think is probably useful for the audience as well. I was touring this museum, the National Palace Museum in Taiwan,

which is the world's largest set of artifacts of Chinese art. It's incredible from paleolithic stuff to the Qing Dynasty, the beginning of the 20th century. And I was actually a hired a guy because I wanted to know, I didn't, it's another Jade Buddha, right? I wanted him to, and then all it's so vast, all you remember at the end is like the gift

shop or something. So I said, no, no, no, no, I want you to explain the difference between Eastern and Western art to me because this guy had been trained in both. The Chinese guy had been trained in both. And so he's showing me this enormous Jade,, you know, country side, seen three-tonne boulder from, you know, from the Ming dynasty or something. And I said, and he said, I said, so what's the difference between this fundamental philosophically and Western art?

He said, he answered with a question because that's how, you know, that's the most curious way to do it. He said, what do you think of when I say a piece of art that has not yet been started? I said, oh, no, Nempi Canvas. He said, right, we think of a boulder of jade that is yet to be uncarved. And I said, why? He said, because for you art is something that you make from nothing. From us, art is something that we take away to reveal. And then he said something that was really profound to me. It really changed my life a lot. He said, that's how you think about success in the West too. It's getting more, more, more, more. We think of actual success

at the, by the end of life is taking away all the parts of your life that aren't you. Because you need to reveal yourself, that's success is to actually understand who you truly are. And the debtor of excess possessions and material things and relationships and experiences. And by the way, and political opinions, which are just chunks of jade to chip away until you can actually find, you know, deep ryan within the Buddha within the, that's within the piece of jade. But that really helped me out a lot because as I'm moving from my fluid to crystallized intelligence, I'm finding I'm just shedding stuff like crazy.

I've gone from slapping paint out of my canvas to chipping away my boulder. Got a quick message from one of our sponsors and then we'll get right back to the show. Stay tuned. Today is the thing all. Check one, two, one, two. Hey y'all, I'm Kiki Palmer.

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So I decided I want to be a podcast host. I'm proud to introduce you to the baby Mrs. Kiki Palmer podcast. I'm putting my friends, family, and some of the dopest experts in the hot seat to ask them the questions that have been burning in my mind. What will former child stars be if they weren't actors? What happened to sitcoms? It's only fans, only bad. I want to know. So I asked my mom about it. These are the questions

that keep me up at night, but I'm taking these questions out of my head and I'm bringing them to you. Because on Baby This Is Kiki Palmer, no topping is off limits. Follow Baby This Is Kiki Palmer, whatever you get your podcast. Hey, prime members, you can listen early and at free on Amazon music. Download the Amazon music app today. I think the last year has been illustrative of that. Just how little the Stoke say this, just how little is actually needed for the happy life, you know, as your life gets radically simpler, the amount of things you're able to do is forcibly reduced. I'm sure there are some people who become much less happy, but

almost everyone that I know that's busy or successful has really reconnected with what they want to do with their life and who they are over the last 12 months. Obviously this comes from a position of privilege to a certain degree. Of course, if you're having to show up every day to work at a grocery store, there's a additional set of challenges. Or if you lost your job or your house or something. So I'm not trying to be flip about it. But I think the massive winnowing, this forced lifestyle experiment we're in, is this idea that actually you don't need all the things that you think you have to work so hard to accumulate? Yeah, the thing about the coronavirus epidemic, I think, is instructive.

We talked about the time between the curves, which is just a transition. The coronavirus epidemic, no matter where we are in our lives, is a transition. It's a forced transition. It's an involuntary transition. Therefore, it's an unwelcome transition. But transitions per se is a lot of research on this, especially when they're unwelcome. They're the most fertile periods in our lives. This is called, what psychologists call the liminalinal state to be betwixt in between.

And when you're in the liminal state, you actually are profoundly uncomfortable and as such, you can learn more and gain new skills in ways you would otherwise wouldn't be able to. So what I'm finding is that there are two kinds of people during COVID. Those that are resisting the transition, and so therefore are not learning. And those who have stopped resisting the transition, and so therefore are not learning. And those who have stopped resisting the transition, and so therefore they're writing a lot about themselves. And so this is the key thing. Look, we're not done with this thing yet.

Everybody has an opportunity to. And none of us is like, yeah, hooray, I hope it lasts forever. No, we all want this thing to be done. And some people have, as you correctly point out, have endured a tremendous amount of hardship and even tragedy. Most people, thankfully, have not. But they're like, ah, can't wait for this thing to be over. So I can get back to traveling.

So I can get back to waiting in a TSA line and are sitting in traffic. Are you kidding me? What are you learning about yourself? This is going to be in retrospect, if you're doing it right, one of the most verbal periods of your psychological and creative development, but you gotta let it happen. Yeah, this is the stoic idea of a more foxy,

do you sort of love it and accept it or do you spend your time resenting it, trying to make it otherwise, waiting it out? And I think, yeah, especially for creatives, because it really is much closer, the last 12 months, it really been much closer to what our lives should be like if we were as disciplined and focused

as we'd probably ought to be. Yeah, for sure. It's interesting. It coincided for me. It was real serendipity. I retired from my job as a president of the think tank in Washington DC And you know, I had been doing 175 speeches a year. I was doing a hundred, you know trips per year because I had to raise 50 million bucks and sort of be out there all the time and I was always regretting the hit that I was taking to my creative life.

It was brutal. And I was like, oh, at least I had time, at least I had time. And so I retired in the middle of 2019 and I came to teach at a university, which is what I do now. So I could write a column and finish my books and do my research and do a podcast.

And then the world stopped, the world said, okay buddy. Yeah, it's like you ask for it, you're gonna get it, I tell you, this has been, there's this one image that I keep getting in my head, Brian, that might be useful. It's actually, it's a funny, it's a memory from when I was a kid, I used to go fishing a lot. And I remember the first time I went fishing

in the off the Oregon coast, I grew up in the Pacific Northwest in Seattle. And the fishing in the ocean is actually like no other kind of fishing because you have to know the tides. And I was first day I'm on the rocks and I'm casting out, I'm catching nothing. And it's like, wisdom old mariner comes up to me and says, he can't catch anything. I'm like, no, he says, you get any bites? Like, no, he says, because you're doing it wrong.

So what he's talking about, he says, you can't fish now. You can only fish in a falling tide. Now, falling tide is when the tide is going out really fast. And you think that there are no fish because they'd all be going out to sea. He says, no, no, no, no. In a falling tide, the plankton and baitfish aren't all stirred up, and so the game fish go crazy.

Watch this. We wait for 45 minutes, throw it in our lines, and we're pulling out one fish after another right next to each other. And for like a half hour, it's great lines, and we're pulling out one fish after another right next to each other. And for like a half hour, it's great. And then we're sitting on the rocks and he's kind of contemplative. We're sort of relaxing afterwards.

Me and this old man, he lights up a cigarette and he says, hey kid, you know, during the falling tide, you can only make one mistake. I said, what's that? He says, not having your line in the water. And I remember that right now because Ryan were in a falling tide. The coronavirus epidemic is a falling tide. It feels like everything is going away.

But what's really happened is the bait fish are stirred up. Get your line in the water because that's when things are really going. That's when magic can happen. It's beautiful. That's really beautiful. That's when magic can happen. It's beautiful. That's really beautiful. And I think one of the things I've talked about is that as you become successful at whatever it is you do

writing, running a thing tank or whatever, you get more and more inquiries to do things that are not quite that thing, or the things that are related to that thing that take you away from whatever it is that you actually wanna be doing. And so you have to have quite a bit of discipline, but also what the mind does is, opportunity costs are very hard for us to wrap our heads around.

So I think one of the things that pandemic really revealed for me is, I thought I was being productive before. I thought I was being productive before. I thought I was fishing with the tide, you know, I thought I would, but I wasn't aware of what I was not doing. And so the last 12 months, as I've seen my productivity go up, my happiness go up, my connection with my family go up, it's now very clear to me what obstacles in my old life were preventing that source of connection. It's clear to me what obstacles in my old life

were preventing that source of connection. Yeah, I know I agree. And it's funny because the world be rewards, bunny power, pleasure fame. I mean, they come crowding in. And we know in our hearts that they're really only four things, faith or philosophy, which is one, family life, friendship,

and meaningful work in which we can earn our success and serve other people. Those are the only, and literally, and I teach this, I teach this class in the science of happiness to the Harvard Business School, and I can tell you, those are the only four in your happiness portfolio. Those are the only accounts you need to put something in every single day, and super stoic, I know. I mean, it's like, because we knew everything before we behavioral social scientists

even had the data. But the problem is that those things get crowded out, the good for it get crowded out by the bad for, money, power, pleasure, and fame. And so the result is, you know, and what I worry about is the current of our epidemic finishes. And we're like, oh, look at all this opportunity,

these speaking engagements. And everybody's got their equivalent of that. Not mean, that's like you and I are, you I are two guys who write books and give talks and do podcasts and such. And most people are not doing it, but they have their own version of that. So the key thing is, what can I learn and what can I retain, notwithstanding the fact that the worldly idols are not singing to me as loudly, right? Because this is the key.

These are all idols. I mean, money is an idol and we need a certain amount of it, but it satiate really quickly. You know, fame, you know, fame literally, if you look at the data, is the only of the world rewards. You can only be happy in spite of, it can't make you happy, but you can only be happy in spite of it, despite the fact that we want it for evolutionary reasons, power, et etc. I mean, you feel in the blank. So we have to basically be asking ourselves so that we're not, so that we're living metacognitively. What am I learning right now that I'm going to resist when the idol comes back?

You talked about philosophy, and I know you did this piece recently on sort of some of the differences in similarities between the Epicurians and the Stoics. I do feel like weirdly the last year has been, it's drawn on a lot of stoicism in the sense that one had to be, one had to endure, one had to manage their perceptions, one had to care about how one's actions affect other people, One had to have some wisdom to to wade through all the insane contradictory information out there. But there's also been the sort of the the quieter life that we're talking about. There's an Epicurian flavor to that which I've enjoyed.

I'm wondering, I'm wondering though, like which of those lives are you drawn towards? Are you the active participant in public life, or are you more of the sort of quiet introvert do my meaningful work? Are you a mix of both? Well, I try to be a mix of both, but my natural state is to be out there. I'm at the 99th percentile of extroversion. And for the more, I have this very, very strong stoic disposition. I was a classical

musician for the first 12 years of my career. So you were published in Trent Jordan, right? Yeah, exactly. So I was when I was the age that you were getting your first bestseller. Congratulations. I was actually playing in this Symphony Orchestra in Barcelona. Because all the way through I dropped that at college when I was 19 until I was 31, I made my living as a professional French Whorn player. And to be a classical musician is an absolutely stoic lifestyle.

I mean, you think a professional musician is being sort of epicory and soft, giving into every whim. It's, no, no. I mean, it is super hardcore. It's like being a professional athlete. You practice your scales when you dull on or practice your scales. You do that.

You do your duty without any questions and you do it privately as well as publicly with no loopholes because that is the integrity that makes the person who the person is supposed to be, which is a very stoic way of thinking, the idea of moralism and naturalism. And I'm very, very drawn toward it. I mean, I think that any success I've been able to have as, you know, in the intellectual world publishing books and writing and being a professor now, getting through my PhD in my 30s was because I had played the French horn. It's because I had like this hardcore stoic boot camp as a classical musician early on.

So that's my natural disposition. I married an Epicurean. You know, my wife is from Barcelona and the Spanish are very Epicurean in their outlook. There's not very much stoicism. Ironically, Senaqa was Spanish. Did you know that? Right, I did.

Yeah, so... From Cuba. Yeah, exactly right. And so he was, I mean, he was Roman, but no, he was Spanish. But anyway, but my wife, you know, she's, she's disciplined about all of the right things, disciplined in the soul. But she also understands that one has to enjoy one's life in a way that I just don't, I mean, I will defer my gratification until like, it's like I have a time horizon that goes to a thousand years after my death. It's absurd. How much I will actually defer my gratification.

Am I actually like, no, I'm absolutely going to end today. It's cold outside the bed. It's nice here and there's nothing wrong with it. No, I'm not doing what I need to do. I'm like, no, you understand. You got to get up and lift. It's time to get up and lift. No, it's funny. I have those same discussions with my wife and our,

I think part of being together so much over the last year has helped us sort of realize areas where the different sides of our personality are bumping into each other. I remember she was saying like, this is, let's say there's 40 days left in the year. She was like, I wanna do 30 Peloton rides before the end of the year.

So I know that's interesting, okay. And then like two days later, she wasn't riding. And I was like, are you gonna ride today? And she was like, no, I don't think so. And then the next day, I was like, are you gonna ride today? Was we making a schedule? She was like, no, I don't think so. And I got this feeling inside me,

this is I couldn't, and then I realized I was like, if for the first time, I usually would have just argued about it or something. And I said, you know, you not writing is giving me anxiety. Like I'm so organized, and I was like, it's not, it has nothing to do with you being in shape or not. It's that you set a goal, it has nothing to do with you being in shape or not.

It's that you set a goal. You were trying to do a thing and you have 10 days that you're not going to do it. And you've just eaten up two days at the beginning. And now that means you only have eight days. And so there's a part of me that if I said I'm going to, you know, I would do it, I would I would somehow do it all 40 days and then also probably some extra days. And so I think it's interesting, I wonder how much of it is philosophical and how much

of it is our natural disposition. And the philosophy is there to kind of give you awareness of the assumptions that your mind is, and then realizing like oh this is totally insane. Why do I have anxiety about somebody else's made up goal that doesn't matter that has nothing to do with me. This is basically just OCD in some form. It was a question. But I think for sure and Stoic's tendency to look down at Epicurians. That's just as old as the hills. I mean, you actually look at what what Epicetus said about Epicurians.

I mean, and you know, it said, basically, that he was feminizing the culture of his time. They said, because you know, Epicurians, he had, you know, he had this, basically a cult. You know, he had these people living in a commune and they would have peace and they would have quiet and they would talk about the importance of Finding happiness by remembering pleasant things and all the stuff that you know

Epic to be like you kidding me are you kidding me? And so the result is that people who have less fun Because they're holding they believe they're holding themselves to higher standards That is a very dubious proposition But they also try to hold the people they love to those standards because they believe it's not admirable to not be stoic. And so that's the key thing to keep in mind. So those of us who are stoics, married, depacurians, we need to let them guide us a little bit more. There's a key thing, a key point that those of us who do the science of happiness talk about. You know, happiness has a lot of happiness is like a meal. Subjective well-being is like a meal.

And it's got a bunch of dishes in it and a bunch of ingredients in making it, but it basically has three macronutrients. So just as food is fat, carbohydrates and protein, the macronutrients of happiness are enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. And what what stoics are all about is purpose and meaning. What Epicurians are all about is purpose and meaning. What Epicurians are all about is enjoyment. Now everybody's trying to get satisfaction, which is incredibly elusive. The way to get satisfaction, of course, as we talked about before, is to manage your wants as opposed to expanding your halves.

That's the secret, actually, is that middle macronutrient, that elusive satisfaction. But the key thing is if you're naturally, and if you're naturally epictetus, if you're a stoic, not epicurus, then you need to work on your skills in the other department because a balanced lifestyle is really important. The truth is, if you're all purpose and you're no enjoyment, you'll be like the American Gothic, you know, that Grant Wood painting with that part, with a pitchfork standing next to his grand wife. And if you're all enjoyment and no meaning,

even it was called that, I don't know, your undergraduate experience or something. It's just not sustainable. You need all the macronutrients. It's actually, I don't think we're married to somebody different than you. Got a quick message from one of our sponsors, and then we'll get right back to the show.

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and a claim this, you just go to drinkelement.com slash daily still at that's drinkelement.com slash daily still. that's drinkelements.com slash daily stoke. Totally. And my wife likes to joke that one of us writes about stochicism and the other one is stoic. Because I think actually thinking in the epicureanism there can actually be a profound stochicism.

Seneca obviously quotes Epicurus quite regularly. I suspect one of the things that bothers Stoics about Epicurians and why there's this conflict and there was actually a Stoic named Dio Timus who I write about in Lives of the Stoics who forges all these fraudulent letters, accusing Epicurus of all these crimes, which is partly why his reputation is so extreme to this day.

But I suspect that the part of it is this sort of insecurity or fear where it's like, you know, so like, let's say you work very hard, you assemble your success and your your, your net worth over your life. And then you meet somebody who, you know, in three months makes everything you've ever earned in Bitcoin, you know, there's a part of you that feels almost attacked, that what you did wasn't necessary. I think the stoic fears that the person who's enjoying themselves that's not holding themselves to such a high standard, it's not that they're getting away with something.

It's that you are perhaps doing something living in a more difficult way than you actually have to be, which is probably true. For sure. And one of the things that Stoics should understand, they don't always, is that the way you live has to be intrinsically satisfying per se. This is really important to keep in mind. It is that the discipline is part of the reward. If you're not getting that, then you're gonna be stoic in an unhappy way in a way that doesn't actually give you

the satisfaction that you seek, that it's not rewarding, and that's a big problem. You're simply denying yourself stuff. Look, the essence of what you write about as an expert in stoicism, and if you look deeply at what Marcus Arrailius writes in his meditations, it's not a chore to be a stoic. It's a joy to be a stoic.

It's great to live according to your own principles, to live up to your own standards, to effectively pray the serenity prayer every day, to look for a good life well lived, to understand the essence of eudaimonia. That stuff is great. If you're only doing it because you want to be somehow morally superior or you're trying to punish yourself, then you're not going to enjoy it.

Then some epicurean is going to come along and will be living the soft life and you'll resent it. But that's a mistake. That's a mistake. Be a stoic because being a stoic is great. I think that's very well said, right? If you think that they're going to throw you a parade at the end of your life because you were disciplined

and temperate, you're not only going to be rudely surprised, Marcus really reminds himself of the worthlessness of posthumous fame. I think about this when you take a president like Harry Truman. Almost no one was more unpopular in office than Harry Jimis fame. I think about this, you take a president like Harry Truman. Almost no one was more unpopular in office than Harry Truman. He makes all these incredibly difficult decisions, tough decisions, but we're almost universally

unpopular at the time. The fact that he's vindicated several generations now and is now considered to be a consequential great president. He's vindicated several generations now and is now considered to be a consequential great president. He doesn't get any of the, he doesn't get any of the posthumous satisfaction of that. Obviously, depending on your belief of what happens after you die, perhaps you could make some argument. But I think we could say that he's not getting him any pleasure after the fact that he

did the right thing. And so my point is not that he should have been a more epicurian president, that he should have done the easier, more expedient thing. It's that you have to get to a place where you do the right thing because it's the right thing and you enjoy it because it was the right thing. Even if you are criticized and disliked for it, that has to be irrelevant to you. Totally. I mean, this gets back to Aristotle's concept of atelic it, that has to be irrelevant to you. Totally. This gets back to Aristotle's concept of atelic experiences, which have to be intrinsically

and completely rewarding in and of themselves. And indeed, that's the case. Doing the right thing is incredibly intrinsically rewarding. The idea that Carl Jung had a very interesting theory that the essence of unhappiness is having a set of moral standards and not living up to them. So basically, Jung in this way was very stoic. He said, you need to know what you believe, and then you need publicly and privately with no loopholes to live up to those things that you actually believe.

And then you'll actually be happy. And not just like, you know, the ancient idea of, you know, your dimonia, which is happiness axiomatically, even if you're clinically depressed, you'll actually feel happy too. You'll actually get satisfaction from living that way, and I'm completely sure that's the case. Now, one in defense of Epicureans, which I find really interesting, I mean, it's true. I mean, you were talking about this ancient historian that was trashing Epicurus all the time. Trashing his reputation.

There were reasons for that, because these were warring philosophical camps, but Epicurus was not leading orgies. He was not a drunk on the contrary. Heedonism, which comes from hedonia, which was a concept that's profoundly Epicurian, had nothing to do with living an unbalanced or an out-of-proportion life bereft of morals in the contrary. He believed

that it was only when you tame the appetites, could you really enjoy life? And so he would say, for example, you're really familiar with this, his cure for the fear of death. He had these four rules, right? Don't fear the gods, don't fear death. What's pleasant is easy to get and what's unpleasant is easy to avoid. Those are his four rules, Epicurus is for living a happy life. And the part about his, the fear of death was completely cerebral. You know, his basic formula was just say this, just say this. When I'm here, death isn't, and when death is here, I'm not. Case closed. It's done. And then just contemplate that,

or no, no, no. Now, that's not emotional, that's not feeling, that's, that's complete brain power and it's muscling it through. And this, I think it's an admirable way, I don't know, it's successful, but it's admirable nonetheless. He was not a headness in the modern. He was not woodstock. If it feels good to do. My summation of pleasure for Epicurus is if it gives you a hangover, it wasn't pleasurable.

So it's, you know, does it cause regret, pain? Do you feel disgusting or full or afterwards? Then you probably had too much. To me, Epicurus is really about pleasure in the temperate sense, the sense of moderation. What's just the right amount and no more? Right. And actually, we would think of it in a slightly different way today. So pleasure is largely based on appetites.

When you take your appetites and you add human capital, learning, thought, you know, when you add your own brain power to it, it becomes enjoyment. So, you know, that we talk about Epicurus as if he was all about pleasure. He wasn't. He was really all about enjoyment. And enjoyment is a higher art than pleasure. Netflix brings you pleasure reading, you know pleasure reading any of your book's brains enjoyment because it actually requires brain power, requires thought, it requires self-reflection and that's really, but so for example I'm getting tons of enjoyment and an Epicurian says from our conversation right now and in point of

fact from my career now I get tons of Epicurian pleasure because I just you know it's so enjoyable, it's fun, which is pleasurable, but it adds all this intellectual work to it. So I think that's what Epicurus was getting at. One place that I definitely agree with the Epicurians, or I think Epicurian Logic serves one well, and this is something you wrote about recently and I really enjoyed it. The idea of like finding a place that you love that makes you happy and living there. I feel like there's a, you know, Marcus are realist.

You can tell he hates his job. He hates Rome. He hates his job. He wishes he could do anything else. And look, there are some of us who are called to certain levels of leadership or certain situations where we'd rather not be there, but we know we have to. And I think there's a time and a season for that. But one gets the sense that Marcus really would have rather

done just about anything else. And this burden was voiced upon him. That was a time of a lot less social mobility. There was a broken governmental system as well, but I think I talk to so many people and it's so obvious to me the root of their unhappiness is that they feel obligated to live in New York City or live in Los Angeles or live in,

if not in one of those cities, in a fashion or in a lifestyle that is just at odds with their personality or sustainability or just any form of human happiness. Yeah, that's a key. So when it comes to where and how you live, it should be an adjunct. It'll never be intrinsically satisfying per se.

It'll never be anything more than an adjunct to the happiness that you seek. And that can only come from faith, family, friendship, and work that satisfies you because you serve others and because you earn your success. That's it. When I say faith, I also mean philosophy. Okay. So it can be secular, philosophy as well.

Transcendental. So it gets you out of your own little boring TV show. This is why when people are crazy about the daily stomach, right? Because it gets them to a 40,000 foot level. But they're, you know, they're not five feet off the ground looking at their boring life, a 40,000 foot level. And this is when you read the Meditation of Marcus Aurelius. It's like, wow, I'm part of this big adventure out there.

And so the problem is that people will live in a place that's not an adjunct to faith family friends work. It'll be an adjunct to faith family friends work. It'll be an adjunct to money, power, pleasure, and fame. In other words, it'll be serving the wrong foremasters, the idols that are making us walk 180 degrees ultimately away from our happiness. Why do people live in New York? Some people really love it.

Some people think it's really awesome and it's great and more power to them. But I know that too, all these people who live in New York or LA and they're barely able to make their mortgage and they're stuck in traffic all the time and you'll ask how come. Well, it's because of one of those idols. What's the main idol in New York? What does everybody talk about in New York? Money. What does everybody talk about in LA?

Fame. What does everybody talk about in DC? Power. What does everybody talk about in Las Vegas? Pleasure. Those are the four idols and some people who are living at, they're good reasons to live in those cities. And we're going to get, you know, a cake man, all because people say,

why'd you trash my beautiful city? A lot of people live in those cities, frankly, for the wrong reasons. And they should be maybe in a, you know, a suburb of Austin, Texas. Or, you know, where I live in a suburb of Boston, Massachusetts? I think what I found living in outside Austin and first moving to Austin in the first place is you're also surrounded by people who are not motivated by those things. And so I think, Joseph Epstein said something like, you know, of all the seven deadly sins, envy is the only one that's not any fun.

You know? And you didn't say that, right? That's a wonderful little book called envy that he wrote. Yes, it's amazing. And, but the less you're, like, I think envy, obviously looks, sobriety, let's say, take something like sobriety. You got to work on your own sobriety, and that's your job.

At the same time, you don't want to be around a lot of other drunks, or a lot of temptations that make you want to drink or do drugs. And I find envy is one of those things where yes, you have to work on it, but also the more you can create or design a life that doesn't subject you to the stimulus or the shock of things to be envious of or people to compare yourself to, the easier it is to focus and the easier

it is to do what you're doing. Mark Maren has talked about this on his podcast where the last year, the fact that nobody is doing anything has allowed a lot of us to get more in touch with what we want to do because we're not using what other people are doing as our rubric for what we should be doing. I agree completely. Now, N.D. is an adjunct to pride. And we use pride in a way that makes it sound like a virtue. Like, I tell my kids, you know, my kids are brought up and they're doing phenomenal things, ones in the military, and, and one's a high school math teacher, and one's going off the couch.

I'm brought to you, I'm so proud of you. That's not the original intent, it's a deadly sin. Pride is the idea is an incessive love of one's own excellence compared to others. I mean, it's just like, there's nothing. We need to pride on guys at the ego. Yeah, and envy comes out of that. So envy is something where it's completely

about social comparison, which Teddy Roosevelt called the thief of joy. Now, the key thing to understand about all of this and this gets back to a lot of the stuff that you write about about the Stoics, pride and NV are fear-based motions. They're fear-based and they're not love-based at all. And the problem is that fear and love are opposites.

Hatred and love are not opposites. Fear is the ultimate negative emotion. And so if you want less fear, you need to surround yourself with more love. You need to surround yourself with more family and with more friendship. You need to surround yourself with ideas that really light you up on love for God. You need to love more. And that's the ultimate way that we can cure this. But if you're in a fear-based polarity in your life,

you're simply not gonna be able to attain any of these things that we're talking about, which really is the only secret to happiness. I've connected that to another thing you wrote, which I've written about too. I find not only am I happier, not living in a major city, but I'm also, I feel like I'm happier. I'm more connected with my fellow human beings. I'm more charitable. I'm more

understanding and empathetic. The less political news that I consume. So the more I read history, the more I read fiction, the more I talk to actual human beings, the more I read fiction, the more I talk to actual human beings, the more connected I am, the more I want to participate in the world, the more understanding I am. And then the second I turn on CNN or Fox or MSNBC or the second I just see what people are saying on Twitter, the more the exact opposite of all those emotions kick it. Yeah, totally. And the problem with politics is that it's become this sort of national entertainment mechanism

where people get really, really into it. It's the same sort of thing that people who are, it's like you got to England and pubs that make it so you can't talk about soccer. Because if it's a pub on the cuss between two teams, people will literally come to blows over it. And we treat entertainment or politics like entertainment or sport in a big way. And it's also supplanted a lot of religious differences that we have.

So as the country becomes a lot more secular, if you go back to 1963, a percent of people your age would say they have no religious affiliation. And now it's close to 40 percent of people of your age have no religious affiliation depending on the day that you want to look at. And so there's a place that has to be held for, you know, what is the ideology, what is the container for all this stuff that I believe morally, and national politics has filled that, and it's utterly inadequate. It's not up to the task.

Religion is good for that. Philosophy is good the task. Religion's good for that. Philosophy's good for that. Politics is terrible for that. So we get this conceit of tiny differences. Like, oh, you want a flat tax? I want a fair tax. We can't talk. What do you think?

That's insanity. And so when you're living out in Austin, Texas and you're talking to people who are not very political, it doesn't even come up. I said, I find it so refreshing. You know, because I read a thing, I could DC for 11 years. You know, I was at the vortex of these debates. And when I talk to people who literally, they're like, I don't know, I don't care.

I don't know anything about politics. It's so refreshing to me because that's an attitude, not of being, you know, checked out in life. That's not somebody who needs to do something, that's somebody who's usually or frequently modeling instead of characteristics that I kind of admire. And I've got a lot of research on this. It's abundantly clear that the more you think about politics,

the more your happiness is going to decline. It's just an inverse correlation between attention to politics and your life satisfaction. Got a quick message from one of our sponsors and then we'll get right back to the show. Stay tuned. Yeah, I was, I've talked about John M. Barry's book, The Great Influenza, which is an incredible book that I think everyone should have read it at the beginning of this pandemic. But what struck me as I'm reading this book is, you're reading about a pandemic that comes from nowhere, overruns hospitals, overruns, medical understand. It mirrors what we're experiencing right now in so many ways.

But when you're reading it, you're not like, what were the Democrats doing? What were the Republicans doing? You know, it doesn't matter to you what party would draw Wilson is, we have the ability to look at history as human beings doing human things. Sometimes they're good people, sometimes they're bad people. Oftentimes you find the really good people also have really bad sides, and the really bad people also have really bad sides and the really bad people occasionally did

really good things. And so I think I think if people people say they don't have time to read books they're like, when am I going to make my way through Thucydides? And it's like, well what if you just stopped watching Rachel Maddow and you sat down with a book published 2,000 years ago, you know, you say you don't have time to read, but then actually look at your habits, you're doing lots of reading. You're just reading the wrong things. You're reading, you know, breaking news alerts. Yeah, you're basically eating potato chips when you should be eating your vegetables. And so you're filling up. And it's equivalent, by the way, to social media instead of having

a real in-person friendships. It's not nutritious. So you can be both morbidly obese and malnourished simultaneously with junk food. The junk food of social life and social media and intellectual life is exactly what you're talking about, right? You get a very nice post on this day for yesterday, I think. We talked about the importance of stretching yourself with things that are a little too hard for you to read.

And then you gave this example, actually instructions, this stuff is so useful because you say, how do you do that? How do you read the Peloponnesian War? I mean, it is good, I mean, the Peloponnesian War, like you can, any it has can. Being in nothingness by Jean Paul Sartre, it's like a billion pages long and it's hard.

Can you read it? Yes, yes you can. You simply need to make a commitment to not doing something else that's more trivial and less useful to you. And that's sort of commitment per se, by the way, that's a very stoic thing to do. It's an incredibly stoic thing to do, right? Of course, no, and I think the funny thing is the more history you understand, the more psychology you understand, the more philosophy you understand, the more you understand about human nature, the easier it actually is to get to the bottom of whatever the current issue of the day is without having to read a lot of stuff because you know you've seen this before or you have some sense of you're a better judge of character,

you see when you're being bullshitted or not. I tend to find that I can pretty quickly get to where I think about this issue or that issue in the current day based on not the 50 articles that I read about it right now, but my understanding of the human experience general. Yeah, for sure. And one of the things that I do, one of the great things

about being a social scientist is that relying on research about humans is something you can learn an awful lot about. And I teach this class at Harvard that introduces people to the science of human flourishing and relates into leadership and all the things that we're doing. And they ordinarily, they come into my graduate students, these are MBA students, at heart, they're really smart and motivated, but they've not read very much academic literature of the social science literature, the social science, the behavioral economics, the stuff, because

they're intimidated by it. We academics, what do we do? It's like putting a gun on the table. Start the conversation, but putting your gun on the table. It's like you start the conversation by putting your gun on the table. It's like, who's gonna argue with you under the circumstances? What I try to do in my class is I make a read 25 to 30 academic journal articles

and help them understand that understanding how the hypothesis testing, how the coefficients in the regression analysis, how they're related, all this technical stuff, is way less important than the arguments, whether they line up, whether the sample sizes are legitimate. You get a feel for actually what these things say,

and everybody listening to us, they can actually read research. And I do that every day, I read a couple or three research papers every day for my job, and I'm just learning, learning, learning, learning all the time. And it's so fulfilling. And it's not just because I'm some nerd with a PhD. I happen to learn some of those statistical techniques,

but everybody can do it. So it's not, you can even do something that's more modern than a pillow, a panesian war. You can read the journal about personality and social psychology and learn a whole bunch of stuff about the humans. When what I recommend too is print the paper out and go to the table in your living room

and sit down and read it with a pen or a pencil. Read it, you know, 30 or 40 years ago, you wouldn't have even been able to search for this in a database. You would have gotten it when it was printed out and mailed to you as a journal. And so for hundreds of years, that's how humans have interacted with these complicated, distilled bits of data or insight that you're just going to browse this as a PDF.

It is not to me a great environment to engage in a big idea. Surely. And the idea of just harvesting information is not the same thing as absorbing the information, such that you can use it. It won't help your repertoire of ideas and the synthesis of the concepts that you're trying to put across. But the bottom line is what we're saying here is that we can greatly enhance our lives by doing something that's kind of this We can greatly enhance our lives by doing something that's kind of this weighted sum of stoicism and Epicurianism to get greater enjoyment to add to the pleasure of knowing things. And when I say pleasure, I mean that, one of the primary positive emotions that's processed

by the limbic system of the brain believe it or not is interest. Finding things interesting is inherently uniquely a pleasurable experience, but adding knowledge to that is actually raising the level of enjoyment and hence an Epicurian virtue. And then doing something that stretches us because stretching us is inherently a good thing to do. It's intrinsically a good thing to do. It's not just morally, it makes us more interesting, and that just makes us a better factory for the Epicurian and Jove and that we're trying to get. So basically, Epic Titus can make Epicurus more effective in this way. I love that. So one last question for you, this is less sort of science of happiness and philosophy and more, some of your earlier work on sort

of free enterprise. I think the last year has been so interesting in that it is illustrated to us what government is supposed to do, what it does well, what it does not do well, what the flaws or weak spots of the free market are. How do you look at the last 12 months, some of the successes, some of the failures, as far as the interplay between the private market and then the state? There's nothing surprising that's come out, but it reminds us of a lot of truths.

The first fundamental truth, by the way, is that we all have to recognize that the free enterprise system has pulled more billions of people out of poverty than any of the system in the history of any system in the world ever. That's actually a quote from, more or less a quote from Barack Obama, not some right-wing philosophy. But at the same time, the markets aren't perfect. The thing that markets aren't perfect at doing is making us moral individuals. The first thing that I think the last year has taught us is that morals have to come before

markets. You already understand what markets are all about. Adam Smith said that. He wrote the wealth of nations in 1776, but in 1759, he wrote the theory of moral sentiments. And his work was a translator of Epic Titus. Exactly right, exactly right. So morals must come before markets. Your heart actually has to come before anything else.

You have to get your ideas, your ethics in order. That's much more important than anything that we're trying to do economically, because your economics will simply magnify your morals. And if your morals are bad, your economics are going to make it worse, especially when you have the accelerant of the free enterprise system of capitalism. Although, you know, that said, I've seen just as much vice and selfishness that our socialism is any other system. People or people, is the pipeline. So that's the first thing, morals before markets. The second thing is we have to remember

that one of the greatest accomplishments of capitalism, maybe the greatest accomplishment of capitalism is the social safety net. The fact is that we're able for the first time in human history because of the large S that that capitalism brings to our society to help take care of our brothers and sisters You know, the fact is that we're able for the first time in human history because of the large guess that Capitol was bringing to our society to help take care of our brothers and sisters

that we've never even seen or met. It's unbelievable. You know, if it weren't for capitalism, there'd be no welfare state. And if it weren't for the welfare state, a lot of people would be literally starving to death right now. And what this tells us is that it's just not appropriate to trash the welfare state or to

trash capitalism. We have to find the lanes, the roles that the government in the free market is supposed to play. And what I really want, the country I want to live in is one where iron sharpens iron, where you have people on the left who are saying, no, more welfare state and people on the right saying, no, more market. And I want people to duke that out. I want that rumble so that we can see the dynamics of how that goes back and forth as opposed to right now, not right now, certainly before the coronavirus epidemic, where the politics were basically my way or the highway. You give me everything that I want, or I've unilaterally lost, which is wrong. And by the way, that violates a great story for Choo-2, which is humility, epistemic humility,

that I might not know everything. I might not be right. As a matter of fact, I'm pretty sure I'm not right. At least in everything. Well, no, I had Charles Koch on the podcast. I don't think it's run yet, but we are sort of talking about this. And the idea, to me, the vaccine, as we're seeing it roll out now, and some European nations fail at it, and even some of the Asian nations, which did a wonderful job locking

down, you're sort of better than the West, or preventing the spread of the virus to begin with, this sort of the hybrid of public governance and private enterprise coming together to accomplish an extraordinarily difficult thing to me is one of the few things that that gives me some hope about the future. Yeah, no, I agree with that. And it's not just to speak more to your point, even more directly to that. It is true that some of the Asian nations were better at the lockdowns because they're much better with big government and social control than we are. We're chaotic. We don't take directions very well in the United States, especially you guys in Texas.

Are you getting me to tell me what to do? I'm going to do the other thing, basically. And that's part of the spirit of the pioneer of the immigrant, of the ambitious riffraff. The holiday family didn't come over here as landed gentry. I mean, they're probably scratching out potatoes in Ireland and, you know, barely making it. It's something along those lines. I would argue though, I think it's true. There's the pioneer spirit. It's also that same sort of, you don't get to tell me what to do, spirit that's responsible for some of the grave injustices in our country. Of course. Who is the government to tell me I can't own another human being and with them?

Well, yeah, I mean, look, there's good and bad from all of these characteristics. As you'd expect, you'd be shocked if there weren't. And anybody who's saying that one policy or one ideology is all good or all bad is trying to sell you a Buick. You know, it's like, you don't believe it. Nothing wrong with Buicks. But there's something wrong with that argument. Okay, so these Asian nations that have a much larger degree of social patrol are good at

lockdowns. Who's good at vaccines? Right. We are. I mean, why? Because we have an tremendously entrepreneurial economy. We have a set of incentives, even beyond the money, to do new stuff, to try incredible things, to be unbelievably creative. And so this is a kind of an interesting juxtaposition

of worldviews. You know, we can lock down forever and never find a cure. And it's only because of this interplay that we have in our society between, you know, the cultural characteristics of the United States and the free enterprise system is instantiated in our economy, that's going to make it possible for us ultimately to get out of this mess. That's true, although I think what's so fascinating and I think you talked about humility, what's so, it's like we did, we invented the world did, but primarily driven by U.S. companies, invents this incredible vaccine, this miracle, this unprecedented breakthrough in science, which is going to ripple through generations to come.

Then the actual pudding of shots and people's arms, which is not quite social control, but it is governmental competence. It's boots on the ground logistics. We've failed that. You could argue what was great about America in the Second World War, boots on the ground logistics, we've failed that. And you could argue what was great about America in the Second World War is that we had both. We had the economy that drove it, but we also had the organizational competence and the

logistics that allowed us to be the arsenal as well. Well, I also rye in the public spirit spiritiveness, you know, it's interesting. Yes. We're going to mobilize the war effort and at the same or more or less the same era, it took 18 months to build the Empire State Building and, you know, a year and a half to build a Pentagon. And it takes 26 years to put down one extra runway at, at the Atlanta airport because of NIMBY problems.

We can't get, we still haven't even built a memorial to Eisenhower yet. Yeah, we just opened the eyes and hour and a more. Yeah, we can't get the shots into the arms here in Massachusetts of people who are really old and at greatest risk because the teacher's union has muscled their way into the queue because they have pure, unmitigated political power. I mean, God love them, but still,

this is the is that's the pro-abshare. It seems to me as we're not all in it together. Yeah. No, no, it's fascinating. And I think your point that this is, I'm not sure you can't mandate public mindedness. Ultimately, this has to come from faith or philosophy. This has to come from your own sense of virtue and obligation. Yeah, that's right. And it's up to us to improve ourselves and to raise the next generation of people,

to hold each other. And primarily, the stoic idea is holding yourself to account. That's the most important idea, as opposed to holding other people to account. And it's interesting. It's also the way that we argue with each other. You know, this is a great virtue. I'm going to call this campus.

And people think a great virtue is standing up to people with whom you disagree. That's not morally virtuous at all. It might be necessary. But real moral virtue is standing up to the people with whom you agree on the half of those with whom you disagree. That's a hard thing to do.

You actually lose friends by doing something like that. And that's, you know, and again, we're in a period right now, I think, between waves of enlightenment, between the waves of moral enlightenment. And I think we're due for it. I mean, there's a reason that a lot of people are so attracted to the daily stoic

and just the stoicism that you're propagating in general, because they want something that's truly good, they want something that's better, they want to hold themselves to account. That's a huge opportunity for traditional religion and for virtuous philosophy to try to make a more public spirited and more internally coherent, virtuous and ethical set of individuals. Yeah, and I know I told you I'd let you go, but there's this great Cicero quote where, not Cicero, I think it's Flo Bair, he says,

you know, between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius before, when the God's had ceased to be and Christ had yet to come, man stood alone in the universe. Now, he's wrong in almost every part of that timeline, like none of it lines up, but the idea of the old systems falling away and not being replaced by something, I think that's where we are now. Patriotism seems silly to people.

As you said, almost a majority of people are not religious. School is almost anti those things, right? School is building up some sense of civic mindedness. It's pointing out all the silly people who were civically minded before you and all the mistakes that they made. And so it really leaves people with either a choice between like sort of defaulting to nihilism or having to go find something new or old. And I do hope philosophy can be one of the things that fills that hole. For sure, I completely agree. And once do hope philosophy can be one of the things that fills that whole. For sure. I completely agree. And once again, the coronavirus epidemic is pointing a lot

of this stuff out where me first, me first, me, me, me, me, me, about the vaccine. Yeah. Kidding me. Where does that get? Old people and people who have come on, man. I mean, that's, and the philosophical traditions of the 20th century did a whole lot of harm. And the most anti-stobic of the law, of course, was existentialism, which said existence precedes essence. In other words, your idea is born. You know, you're born. Then you just got to create some reason for why.

You create it. And you have to figure, it's like, it's like, it's like, uh-uh, essence precedes existence. And my job is to figure out that essence and live according to it. And for my money, that's the way to live. That's, I mean, that's where the joy comes in, that's where the happiness comes in, that's where the belonging comes in, and that's where we can serve each other best as sisters and brothers. And that's what I want to do. Yeah, General Mattis says, cynicism is cowardice. And I think there's a cynicism that I contrast with

earnest belief in something other than yourself. Yeah, I agree with that. I absolutely agree with that. And that's what we can bring. That's what people are going to get by reading your books and listening to your podcasts. And I hope the work that I'm doing as well. Let's start.

No, I hope they're reading your Atlantic pieces. I love them and I'm a huge fan. I'm so glad we have this conversation. Thank you for taking the time. Thank you, Ryan. I'm a huge fan too. Let's stay at it. Let's create the next great and light one.

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