The Daily Stoic - Author Robert Wright on Buddhism vs Stoicism

Episode Date: March 31, 2021

Ryan speaks to the author and journalist Robert Wright about the Stoic obligation to being involved in politics, staying creative while controlling your own destiny, the temptations and distractions of social media, and more. Robert Wright is an author and journalist who has written five books including The Moral Animal and Why Buddhism Is True. He has also written for The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Magazine. His weekly newsletter Mindful Resistance is sent out every Saturday.This episode is brought to you by Box of Awesome from Bespoke Post.  They have a huge number of collections no matter what you’re into: the great outdoors, style, cooking, mixology, and more. To get started, you just take a quiz at boxofawesome.com your answers help them pick the right Box of Awesome for you.Get 20% off your first monthly box when you sign up at boxofawesome.com and enter the code STOIC at checkout.This episode is also brought to you by Scribd, the e-book and audiobook subscription service that includes one million titles. Scribd uses the latest technology with the smartest people to recommend you content that you’re going to love. We’re offering listeners of The Daily Stoic a free 60 day trial. Go to try.scribd.com/stoic for your free trial. That’s try.scribd.com/stoic to get 60 days of Scribd for free.This episode is also brought to you by stamps.com, a secure Internet mailing solution to print postage using your computer. Stamps.com allows you to mail and ship anytime, anywhere right from your computer. Send letters, ship packages, and pay a lot less with discounted rates from USPS, UPS, and more. There’s NO risk. Use the promo code, STOIC, to get a special offer that includes a 4-week trial PLUS free postage and a digital scale. No long-term commitments or contracts. Just go to Stamps.com, click on the Microphone at the TOP of the homepage and type in STOIC.***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 @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicFollow Robert Wright:Homepage: http://robertwright.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/robertwrighterYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/MeaningoflifeTv 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 Stood Podcast early and add free on Amazon Music. Download the app today. Welcome to the Daily Stood 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 dailystoward.com. Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Wundery'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. Hey, it's Ryan Holliday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoke Podcast. If you would ask me 15 years ago, would I be doing a podcast with today's guest? I probably would have said what's a podcast, but I would have been very excited because this book, The Moral Animal by Robert Wright, was a total

quake book game changer for me. It introduced me to the concepts of evolutionary psychology and so much more. I didn't know that many years later he'd write another favorite book of mine, Why Buddhism is True. Robert has been a long time influence of me. I think a modern philosopher and a political thinker of great value. He also has a newsletter that I strongly recommend. It's one of the few that I get every day called Mindful Resistance.

You can check that out, MindfulResistance.net. The idea being that, and this is a very stoke idea, we have to be politically engaged, we have to be civically involved, but how do we do that rationally? How do we do it courageously? But also how do we do it without making ourselves miserable and unhappy and giving into despair? So I don't think, we don't get particularly political in today's episode. We do talk about the idea of being involved in politics, which of course is essential

to the Stoics, Mark Srelius and Seneca, most of all. And we talk about being a creative controlling your own destiny and the temptations and the distractions of social media. I loved this interview almost as much as the book. It was weird preparing for this interview. You know, here's like, I'm gonna have these little flags here. Here's some highlighted passages. Here's an arrow. Note I made to myself. It was like having a quick, as I prepared for the interview, having like a quick little conversation with myself 15 years ago, which felt surreal. And I feel lucky to be in this position. I feel lucky that you guys are listening. Enjoy this interview with the great Robert Wright.

Check out mindfulresistance.net and you can follow him on Twitter at at Robert W.R.I.G.H.T.E.R. and enjoy. I wanted to start this by going way back. This is my copy of the moral animal, which I bought in 2005. Wow. That looks, it looks as if someone's actually read that. It, it, look, I'm going to go, not only am I going to go through it, I'm going to, I'm going to pick some sections that I highlighted 15 years ago, because as I was going back

through it to prepare for this interview, something, I found a passage that I think one might think what does the ideas in the moral animal, which is my favorite book of yours, connect to your work on Buddhism, but I thought this passage ties to something I just had someone on the podcast talking about. You say, we are built to be effective animals, not happy ones. Of course, we're designed to pursue happiness

and the attainment of Darwinian goals, sex, status, and so on often brings happiness, at least for a while. Still, the frequent absence of happiness is what keeps us pursuing it and thus makes us productive. Darwin's heightened fear of criticism kept him almost chronically distanced from serenity, and therefore kept him busy trying to reach it. Yeah, it's kind of the problem that Buddhism highlights. I think, which is that we always want more. We always want things to be a little better than they are. I mean, you know, gratification happens, and that's part of the engineering of natural selection is that we do feel good upon attaining goals. It's just that the gratification is designed to evaporate so that we will keep pursuing

goals. Yeah, I was, I've used this example of someone like Elon Musk. If Elon Musk was happy at PayPal, that would be good for Elon Musk, but probably bad, both for capitalism and for the world. So that the system, it's almost as if we've designed the perfect system to optimize for achievement and accomplishment, and the exact opposite of the system that you would want for human happiness or contentment? Pretty much. I mean, I guess the exact opposite would be for us to always be depressed and anxious and it's not quite that bad.

Sure. We do get these little rewards doled out to us, but it's true that I think people of high achievement very often are people For whom the gratification is particularly fleeting and so You know, that's kind of bad news for them in a way And I guess good, you know often good news for the rest of us depending on on what you think of Elon Musk and You know in his tweets and the whole package. But anyway, let's stipulate that Elon Musk is good for the world for

purposes of this analysis. Yeah, now there are people who seem pretty happy and say they're pretty happy and get a lot done. But I don't know. I don't know. What drives you? What do you keep doing stuff? Yeah, it's, if you and I were happy just putting out one book, what would we have done after that? Life would have been emptied in some ways. Life would have been different in some ways.

I guess the place to get to, and I'm not sure if it's possible, but I think it's worth striving for, is can you get to a place, and this is I think both Buddhist and Stoic, where you're driven, but not by the external rewards. So you actually enjoy whatever it is the thing that you're doing.

If Elon Musk is in this example falls apart, I'm sure. But if he's actually just enjoying the process of starting companies and making a difference and so on and so forth, that's different than the DNFL player who's motivated by the trophy. You know, do you actually enjoy showing up every day in the practice and the game and the strategy and it doesn't come at the cost of other things, that's philosophically a better place to come from. Yeah, and I think to get back to Buddhism a little, I think one idea behind mindfulness meditation

is it helps you get better at experiencing and enjoying the day-to-day just journey as opposed to only the destination? On the other hand, it does sometimes lead people to reduce their level of achievement as conventionally measured. And which is fine. I mean, it's up to them. I would personally ideally like to have it both ways. And that's the trick.

Well, I would like to have it both ways too. And I sometimes I question myself like, am I, is it actually more, is it a sign of enlightenment or philosophical progress that say you are less motivated by the external rewards of a book like you say, Hey, I don't care how many copies this book sells. I don't care whether it hits the best those. Is that enlightenment or is that fear or laziness masquerading as enlightenment? That's a question that I often ask myself. Yeah, well, I think on the one hand, the, you know, the hypothetical kind of enlightened person by the lights of Buddhism, um, would not particularly care. Um, but, uh, at the same time, I'm sure there, there are a lot of people who manage to not care or convince themselves that they don't care and are not enlightened. It's such a challenge because so many of the rewards

offered by the world are not worth paying attention to. I mean, you see this on social media, you know, it's like if you look like these days in a highly polarized society, what does it take to get a lot of Twitter followers? You know, it takes making the problem worse. That's what you get rewarded for, is making the tribalism problem worse.

That's the easiest thing, the easiest way to pick up followers. So I encourage people not to, not to obsess with conventional rewards, I guess. Well, I want to talk about politics towards the end, but I think that that is an interesting point, which is like, I think you and I both know people who maybe a few years ago they were in a similar place than us,

you know, sort of in the hierarchy of author, intellectual, whatever, who really decided to get into the political social media game, and they've been rewarded. They have a lot of followers, maybe they get in the news a lot. But you I've also seen how it's transformed them as a human being. It's almost turned them into a machine that does nothing but tweet when you when you look and you go, my God, did that person tweet 78 times today? And then you think about how impossible it would have been to do any other work while doing that

or to be present with their family. You think about how much news they would have had to watch to generate these hot takes. So it's not just, you know, is the accomplishment worth the reward, but also is the accomplishment worth the cost and the transformation that one has to undergo to get it. Yeah. And it's, I mean, it's tough.

We, you know, we're, I mean, one thing we're built to like is social affirmation. I mean, as much as any other single thing. And, you know, especially during a pandemic, you go online to get it. And what are the forms of social affirmation available online, not all of them are healthy, you know? So we can blame the circumstance for some of that, I guess. But I do think, I mean, again, I think mindfulness is a good tool

to try to bring to social media, try to pay attention to the way you're reacting to tweets and things and and and if you're tempted to retweet something, ask yourself why you are. I mean and and and that that question, you know, the answer to that can be informed by just paying attention to what's going on in your body when you're as you're experiencing the thing. Well, this is a little bit epicurion and I tend to think that Epicurus, it's right in the middle between the stoics and the Buddhists on the spectrum of philosophy, but he says, ask yourself, what will you feel after you get the pleasure? So, you know, you're lusting after something, he goes, what will it feel like right after

the orgasm, right? Which I think is, so evolutionarily, all evolution needs you to get to is that thing. Evolution doesn't need to have an answer after because you've already done it and you can't take it back. And so there's this, what the mind can do is sort of rise above some of these desires and go, I'm going to put out this retweet and there's a part of me that's telling myself it will feel good. I'll be rewarded for doing it. But how typically do I feel after I retweet something

where tweet whatever pops into my head? Usually you feel disappointment or self-loathing or frustration. You feel some non-positive emotion. And that's what makes you do it again and again for some insane reason. Yeah. And the disappointment always comes sooner or later.

If nobody retweets it, it's immediately disappointing. And if there's a flood of retweets, there's still that moment where they quit coming. You know, you just kind of can't win. And it's so easy, I don't know, maybe I'm, maybe I may typical and most people are better than this. It's easy if you're not careful. I don't know, maybe I'm, maybe I'm a typical and most people are better than this. It's easy if you're not careful. They'll really spend a lot of time monitoring the feedback in real time. I mean, I've started to make a point of kind of like, if I haven't been tweeting that

often, but like I tweeted something this morning that was kind of critical of the way the Wall Street Journal presented a vaccination story. And I just made a point of putting my computer in airplane mode after that. So I just wouldn't be aware of the short-term reaction. Which is, in a way, one of the healthiest things, one of the, I think it's almost like being an author is the most healthy way to produce stuff

because there's no immediate gratification. It's not instantaneous. And you don't really have a relationship with the people who buy the stuff because there's so many intermediaries. It's almost the most psychologically sound way to be a content creator. Yeah, it's funny.

I hadn't really quite thought of this before, but I used to think of myself as ideally suited for my career. Because I would write books. And I'm an introvert. I don't need a lot of social interaction. I find with being alone and thinking. And I think I was well suited to writing books, but then, modernity arrives.

I mean, if you define modernityity as the post internet age, and increasingly part of being, you know, a journalist, a writer of not, you know, just gets kind of in the game, is being on social media. And in fact, you know, it used to be that back in the golden era of physical magazines, people would whether they were paying a write a piece or actually hiring you to be on staff. The understanding was your job is to produce the content, then you magazines, people would, whether they were paying to write a piece or actually hiring you to be on staff, the understanding was your job is to produce the content, then you can go home. Our job is to promote it. We bring the audience, we produce the stuff, and now you're actually expected to do both. It's a full time job, and the second part of it,

promotion, I am not well suited to, and I don't enjoy. Well, I have two more passages I want to read from the moral animal. And I want to get credit again for a 15 year old highlight. Hey, nothing, nothing brings more joy to my heart. However, fleeting it may be as we've just discussed, than to see the yellow highlight marker having been applied to a book I wrote. So this is, again, feels rather philosophical. Darwin wrote in his autobiography

of a habit he called a golden rule to immediately write down any observation that seemed inconsistent with his theories. Quote, for I had found by experience that such facts and thoughts were far more apt to escape from the memory than favorable ones. And then you say, like a lawyer, the human brain

wants victory, not truth. Yeah. So Darwin was aware of confirmation bias before we called it confirmation bias apparently. And yeah, I mean, a big theme of that book is that the human mind is unreliable as a guide to reality. It is in some ways just our lawyer, you know, wants to make the case for our interests and it does that most effectively if we're not aware of all the evidence against the claim

that we should have whatever it is we'd like to have. You know, I mean, the generic point here should have whatever it is we'd like to have. I mean, the generic point here is that natural selection did not design the human mind to see the world clearly per se. I mean, it designed the mind to have the kinds of thoughts and perceptions that we're conducive to getting genes transmitted. Now often that does involve seeing the world clearly. It's like it's not good for your genes to walk off a ledge, right? But even there in the realm of kind of everyday safety, you see how the mind can be

designed to depart from a strictly accurate view of the world. So people tend to overestimate the speed of approaching objects, okay? So they're actually an error, but you can see why the mind would build in that bias. It's better to get out of the way too soon and too late. Sure. But there are lots of ways in which we see the world clearly, it's just that, and I think psychology

has become more and more aware of this lately. I mean, there, you know, more and more people have heard about, you know, cognitive, cognitive biases. And, you know, those are built in for a reason. And you need to be conscious of them to try to prevail over them. Yeah, I was thinking, you know, that the sort of philosophers that they love this idea of rationality. And then what I think psychology has shown us

in evolutionary psychology is just how profoundly not our friend, our brain is. And to me, nothing illustrates this more than cognitive dissonance, right? So it's like, you have a belief, then the world shows you truth, right? Like you have a hypothesis, the, you have a belief, whether it's that the world is going to end because that's what your cult says or, you know, that, you know, the, that, that Donald Trump and QAnon theory is going to be this, this or this, on this date at this time. So you have some idea.

And then the world shows you truth. If your brain was your friend, it would accept truth as it is presented. But in fact, your brain does the exact opposite when shown a truth that threatens your identity. It actually doubles you down on the false belief, which is a pretty, to me, incredible illustration of just how at odds we are with our own thoughts day to day. Right. Although, you know, it depends on what you mean by the brain being your friend. If your brain was going to be your friend in the sense of telling you the truth,

you're right. It would be impervious to these biases. And if you had a belief that impervious to these biases. And if you had a belief that on November 3rd, Donald Trump was going to win an election, and that was going to enable him to root out a bunch of Satan worshipping pedophiles in the government, you would abandon that belief if he lost the election. That's all true. At the same time, if what you want is to be like part of a group and get the affirmation from that, and if being your friend is keeping you, you know, sustaining that social dimension for you, then in the short run at least, your brain is being your quote, friend by keeping you on the same wavelength as the tribe of yours that is continuing to believe in

the false narrative you believed in. And again, it gets back to fact that during evolution, having a social group, having its esteem was correlated with getting genes into the next iteration. It may not be now, but that doesn't matter. Right, no, it's your brain is your friend in the sense of, you asked your friend, hey, if I've been putting on weight, or how do I look? And they tell you, you look amazing.

What are you talking about? Right, it's the friend that lies to you. Your brain is that kind of friend, yes. And I can hurt you in the long run. Right. Yeah. Because you shut a truth up. And I can hurt you in the in the in the long run. Um, yeah. Because you shot a truth up. Eventually it does, you know, you're, you're really just deferring it with interest is the way I think about it.

Often, often, but you know, there, there are people who, who die while the, you know, the still a lot of, you know, their, their, their head. I mean, it's, I mean, it would be easy to set, it would, it would, it would be nice for me to believe that in the long run, clarity of vision is always rewarded. But there are people who are, you know, deeply immersed in, in false narratives and good at prevailing them. And in a certain sense, it works out for them their whole lives. And that's a sad fact.

All right, so this is my last section. And to be this seems like the most prescient passage of the whole book. You say this Darwinian brand of cynicism doesn't exactly fill a gaping cultural void. Already various avant-garde academics, deconstructionist literary theorists and anthropologists, adherents of critical legal studies are viewing human communications as discourses of power. Already, many people believe what the

New Darwinian underscores that in human affairs, all or at least much is artifice, a self-serving manipulation of image. And already this belief helps nourish a central stand of the postmodern condition, a powerful inability to take things seriously. You're sort of arguing it on the other way, like there's this sort of postmodernism that sort of making everything ironic

and then there's sort of annihilism and that. I would argue we've kind of swung the other direction where we have anilism where everything's awful, everyone's evil. It's almost an exaggeration of all the evils and problems of history to the point where it's sort of like what's the point of waking up in the morning? Yeah, you know, I hadn't thought before this moment of the irony that a lot of evolutionary psychologists are super down on the kind of culture warrior, social justice warrior, cancel culture de-platformers kind of because they, the criticism of these people. And of course, these are, these are academics who,

I mean, I've taught a little, at the college level, but it's not what I do. These are people who are at college. And so they are like tormented by these people. It's understandable. Yeah. They're antagonistic toward them. But I just only just now appreciated the irony

that these, and I know these, these evolutionary psychologists, I remember back in the 1990s talking to them at these, these conferences on evolution and human behavior. And we did share the kind of worldview you've just described, which is that in a certain sense, you know, human communication is about power, powerful, sometimes managed to have their narratives prevail and so on. And so that is a fact, but you're right, that that idea has been taken so far in some circles that, you know, it's been taken farther than these evolutionary psychologists think is appropriate,

even on intellectual grounds, and it's also been taken far in a way that that they have found kind of unfortunate and they're in their everyday lives is academic. So there is that irony, but but anyway, I think I certainly believe this such a thing is taking this too far and and especially if you go so far as to quit taking seriously the idea that there is such thing as the objective truth about things. And I'm not saying we can ever be sure we've got the objective truth about things or it's realistic to think we can get there very often.

But I do think that's a good ideal to keep in mind and we can do things that get us closer to it. We've got a quick message from one of our sponsors and then we'll get right back to the show. Stay tuned. Ah, the Bahamas. What if you could live in a penthouse above the crystal clear ocean working during the day and partying at night with your best friends and have it be 100% paid for? FTX Founder's Sam Bankman Freed lived that dream life, but it was all funded with other

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Download the Amazon Music app today. You almost look at some of these academics and it's like they've almost been sort of paralyzed by their own analysis and their own explanations like I was, is the scandal of the day. And who know, I think we're always taking these things much to be much bigger deal than they actually are. But you know, San Francisco, as always, is supposedly renaming a bunch of schools or suggesting they rename some schools, whether it's Abraham Lincoln or, or whoever. But at one part stood out to me where it was like, they were changing the name

of an art department at a school because it was an acronym. And acronyms themselves are apparently symbols or parts of white supremacist culture. And so what struck me about that is not, is not whether it's true or not, because it's like obviously not true. But it just struck me about that is not whether it's true or not, because it's like obviously not true.

But it just struck me as like, I almost felt some semblance of pity for the person who would make that argument, because I think they're actually making it in good faith. But just imagine if your mind has, it is so, it's like when all you have is a hammer, all you see are nails. Like imagine a mind that's so looking for something that it sees it in an acronym and then it cancels out the ability for acronyms to exist.

I mean, it's almost as if you're shutting doors until there's no doors left and you're just trapped in a dark, empty, meaningless room. Yeah, I mean, it's funny. My brother actually graduated from George Washington, high school in San Francisco, which is no longer going to be called George Washington. I went, I went to junior high about a block from there. But so I was definitely keeping tabs on this story. And as you suggest, the more surprising thing is Abraham Lincoln. Yeah. That name is not even

surviving in San Francisco, which, well, my whole view on this is maybe not worth getting into. I do think my own tendency is, first of all, to try to judge people in the context of their time, because I know this is a tangent, but the reason I think you have to is because I think there has been moral progress over time as a pattern. And as a result of the moral progress, the further back you go, the less likely it is you're going to find anybody worthy of approval because things, you know, things have progressed. And by the same token, if you can judge people that way, you should recognize that, that

if God willing, moral progress continues, we will all someday be judged as unmentionable on whatever grounds maybe because we meet most of us have one time another, whatever. So that's a tangent. But you were talking about the whole, I mean, I do have a reflex that may bother you a little, which is that I always look when I see things like that that seem crazy to me, that people

in some other tribe are doing. I do look for things that my own tribe is doing that are at some level comparable. And I think usually you can find those. I mean, the generic, part of the generic problem is that, again, it gets back to the mind not being designed to apprehend the truth necessarily. I think we are all inclined to, if we say something, and it gets us more social affirmation, we say something and it gets us more social affirmation, we say it again.

And we say that we repeat the kind of thing that was. So for example, during the whole Trump era, I identified on the one hand with the anti-Trump tribe, but I thought that the resistance was not really behaving. The resistance I was normally part of is not behaving all that wisely. And you would see the same kind of thing where people would start saying, you know, Trump is a Russian stooge. He's a Putin puppet and they would get retweets for that. So they would just say it more and more and more.

And I'd be like, you know, it's possible to find a smoking gum, but I haven't seen one yet. And then you get to the end of the Mueller report and there's no smoking gum. I'm not saying there couldn't be a connection, but one was never found. And so that became kind of a tactical set back for the resistance, a source of huge unhappiness. And I know the example you gave me of people saying acronyms are evil because, you know, I've seen whatever it is. I've seen white nails use them or some, I don't know what the logic is. But, but as crazy as that sounds, it is. I've seen white males use them or some, I don't know what the logic is. Right. But, but as crazy as that sounds, it is, I do think it's a species of this one thing that,

you know, people like, if people nod when you say something, you say it again and you say it more intensely and we all have to be on guard against taking social affirmation as our guide. No, that's, I think what they're doing is they're taking a logic that's worked in some contexts and just inexorably applying it to every situation until eventually you get to such a laughable extreme, but you don't even realize that you're way off the reservation at this point.

Well, because the social affirmation is coming from your own tribe. I mean, it may also be that you're having success with respect to like the establishment, you're trying to tear down, because they do agree to rename this and this and this and this. But, um, but the main thing is that until your own tribe, quit giving you the social affirmation, that's why these things can can go on so long. Yeah. Uh, and this is where, and I've seen this a number, I have actually more friends who have been sort of radicalized on the right than on the left. And I've watched, you know, I knew a number of people who were sort of in the dating community.

So they were already a little bit politically incorrect, right? And then, and then as, as we started to, wait a second, this is news to me. Is it politically incorrect to be in the dating community? No, no, like in the dating coach community. Let's say, to be like, oh, I see the, the, the pick up players and such. The kind of play or community, yeah. So, so there are already a little bit politically incorrect. So then as society becomes more politically correct, even though they haven't changed, their position is now more extreme. So then the incentives are, do you disavow who you were to try to be part of the mainstream group, the politically correct group,

or does it push you more towards the extremes? And so I think it's even interesting when you look at some of the figures or the right wing celebrities involved in the insurrection of January 6th, they were not even four years ago as politically radical as they are now. It's that they were pushed,

they were marginalized more and more and more. And then the incentives said, well, I have no chance of resonating over here. If I put out a tweet, there's no chance of normal people liking it. I actually have to go more and more and more extreme. So I think this is, this has happened on both ends of the political spectrum, which is that the incentives of social media, the incentives of your tribe,

drive you to be more and more extreme until you're almost unrecognizable from your former self. Yeah, well, this has been kind of a hobby horse of mine. I mean, I did have this during much of the Trump era. I had this newsletter called Mindful Resistance. It's been renamed the non-zero newsletter. But the idea behind the original name was that the resistance should be mindful, you know, for one thing, in the everyday sense of the word,

it's just being sense of the word, it's just being aware of the consequences of what you're doing. And the more you single people out from the Trump tribe for ridicule, and act as if they are typical of all Trump supporters, the more Trump supporters are going to just kind of buckle down and as you suggest, identify more intensely with their tribe,

look more to their tribe for affirmation. And hate our tribe more. And so I think we, my side bears a certain amount of the blame. Yeah, and I like the concept of mindful resistance. I want to talk about newsletters too, but because I think mindful resistance is a great concept, whatever it is that you're resisting. So let's take that lower case resistance

and just be in resistance to anything, not a specific political resistance. There's that Nietzsche quote where he says, be careful when you fight monsters that you don't become a monster yourself. I think you've seen a number of people regardless of whatever it is they're campaigning against or wherever they are politically or socially or philosophically. It's like once you pick a side, then your your inherent

reflexive resistance to the other side can actually make you more and more extreme as you go. And so you need the ability to sort of step back. There's a story I tell in my book, Lives of the Stoics. There was a Stoic philosopher named Dio Timus. And the Epicurians and the Stoics were rivals, sort of opposite schools. And he's under the impression that the Epicurians are repeatedly libeling in slandering the Stoics,

and there was supposedly this very aggressive school of head of the Epicurian school at the time. So what is Thio-Temistu? He ends up writing these fake letters as if they were written by Epicurus that he puts out into the world where they become so popular that they really cement Epicurus that he puts out into the world and they become so popular that they really cement Epicurus' reputation as being a headness.

So it's totally untrue. But ironically, it's him committing the exact crime that he is accusing the other school of being guilty of. Right? So there's this temptation we have where, if you're not mindful of your resistance or your opposition or your competitiveness, you can really end up becoming the thing that you hate.

Sure. I mean, like again, I mean, right now, a lot of people are accusing Trump supporters of being conspiracy theorists, some certainly are. But the Trump supporters turned around and say, well, you guys had this conspiracy about Russia, which just wasn't totally born out, you know. It's hard to do, but I always encourage people whenever they're annoyed by something the other tribe is doing to just try, as an intellectual exercise,

to find examples of it in your own tribe and even in your own life. So before we go back to the newsletter, I am curious about this difficult balance of being sort of philosophical and political, because it might seem like the best way the most Buddhist thing you could do would be to tune out politics entirely, right, to sort of to focus inwardly. Again, as the Epicurians did, right, the Epicurians said, we're going to retreat to our little garden, we're going to focus on our little pleasures, and we're not going to be solid and distracted by all these pointless things. The Stoics are much more politically engaged. The Buddhists are somewhat politically engaged, but how does one participate politically

and maintain their, I don't wanna say philosophical purity, but let's say they're philosophical principles. Yeah, well, I mean, there's a couple of questions that are kind of floating around. And I mean, the one question is, like, will the specific philosophical stance of kind of Buddhism mindfulness kind of, does that naturally take you out of the game? Some people think it can, that it does. It can tend to. I don't think it can, that it does. It can tend to. I don't think it has to.

I think, you know, I recommend that people who are practicing mindfulness try to stay in the game because I argue they're better equipped than others, typically to play a constructive role. The same Harris just did a how to think about this on his podcast, I think, the complaining about readers who thought that mindfulness was incompatible with being a political activist and with his own kind of confrontational approach to it. What's that? I have a similar approach. Yes. Well, you don't strike me as nearly as confrontational as same if that's what you're meant, but

but I don't know, you're kind of asking, set aside mindfulness, you're kind of asking, I guess, You're kind of asking, I guess, can you remain true to any kind of coherence set of philosophical principles while really still getting in the political fight and mixing it up? Is that it? I think that's part of it. I'm actually not even talking about policies. It's almost if if the point of sort of philosophy is to have equanimity and inner peace and focusing on the big, big picture, all these sort of things that are, I think, core to Buddhism and core to Stoicism. It almost seems like being on Twitter following the news, having opinions about things if you're not the president having opinions about things if you're not the president is almost, I don't was say hypocritical, but it's somewhat contradictory. Well, it's challenging, and I guess I'd say it's hard to, I mean, if we are

going to talk about this from within the framework of kind of mindfulness Buddhism, it's very challenging to engage in a way that's consistent with those principles. Because for one thing, you have to rule out kind of ad hominem attacks, which is hard because they're effective, they're crowd pleasers, and they're tempting, right? We don't like the people that we disagree with adamantly, right? We want to think they're bad people. So that's hard, it's hard to be really, you know, intellectually honest

to not oversimplify the things you're arguing against. It's all hard, it's also hard to just refrain from engaging sometimes when that might be the wiser course. It's hard. It's very life is hard. That's my conclusion. No, I love that because, and maybe, maybe how I've started to think about it too, is it's like, and I think you talked about this in why Buddhism is true. It's like, you should be able to be mindful and philosophical as you, let's say, do the dishes or sit in traffic. So why shouldn't one be able to be philosophical and mindful as you debate a contentious political issue? I mean, isn't that the point of these things,

right? And you were saying that actually what you want is more mindful people engaged in politics. You don't want the, if the mindful people leave politics, who are you, who are you seeding the, the, the floor to? Right. Uh, yeah, you have to, uh, you have to do your best. I, I, um, it's a very challenging time because you can see that, uh that there are these positive feedback cycles that are just making the situation worse and worse, right? So like, you know, again, you get affirmation from whether you're on tribe by demonizing the other tribe by taking really aberrant examples from their tribe and acting as if they're typical. That antagonizes the other side and makes it only truer that on their side. You will get affirmation from demonizing the other side.

The rewards for demonization grow and like the process reinforces itself in this cyclical way. itself in this cyclical way. And, you know, I, I, I, I, I asked myself how, you know, sometimes if you ask how these things are reversed, the answer is the society hits rock bottom. Sometimes that means like actual civil conflict, and they finally recover from it and go, well, let's try to find another way. But, you know, I wonder, you know, could you have like a grassroots movement or something that made it its mission to, you know, that within which people gave each other affirmation and reinforcement for being good citizens in the way we're describing? Well, and I almost wonder if part of the resurgence

of stoicism and Buddhism and the popularity of your books and my books has to do in part because people are realizing that the system is not working, that perhaps religion used to play this role for a lot of people, but also some civic norms and your social clubs and such. That as these old structures have fallen away, people are hitting that individual hitting that individual rock bottom and they're going, look, these things are important to me, but I'm wearing myself to the bone or I'm making myself miserable. And I need, I need some spiritual helper or I'm going to go and say it.

Yeah, but the challenge is to keep those people from dropping out entirely, right? I mean, because that is the most obviously effective therapy is to just either get off social media or just change your social media feed so that it's all about like, you know, bowling or something. And the challenge is to convince people to try to, you know, retreat to the extent necessary to regain their equanimity, you know, but then try to use the equanimity constructively by re-engaging, at least periodically. It would also help to have a rulebook for how do you engage productively? I'm not aware of one, but it's hard. Well, this is more common in your philosophy than mine, but the sort of maybe a metaphor here is the Buddhist retreat.

You go on a retreat, it's silent, you're away from the world, all the things that we're driving you nuts are gone, and so you are able to maintain your equanimity. And to a certain extent, you could maintain that equanimity if you never left. But the whole point is that you have to go back into the world. Right. Marcus really talks about he says, you know, you can't, he's like, you think, yes, you could go get peace by going to the beach or the mountains or the country of state. He's like, but actually you have this within you at all times, it's in, but you have to look

inside your own soul. And that, that's a much, that's like the elite level is, can you get equanimity on demand wherever you are? Right. In Buddhism, at least in in Mahayana Buddhism, there is this idea of the Bodhisattva as kind of an extreme example is the Bodhisattva is somebody who could have enlightenment. That's how far along the spiritual path they are. They could just live in Nirvana and in the cycle of rebirth and everything, but they choose to go back into society and engage.

They're almost kind of like saints in Catholicism, I guess, or something. But, but, I mean, I'm, you know, most of us aren't so close to enlightenment that we can do exactly that. But, but the ideal of resisting the maximally comfortable life in order to go back and, and help the world is a good one. Got a quick message from one of our sponsors and then we'll get right back to the show. Stay tuned. Yeah, I told this story before,

but I think there's an interesting contrast in sort of Buddha is a prince, Marcus Aurelius is effectively a prince. One of them renounces their sort of patrimony, What is a prince, Marcus Aurelius is effectively a prince. One of them renounces their sort of patrimony, the other embraces it, and they both get to philosophical enlightenment. But there's essentially two different paths. One is sort of of the world, and the other is kind of apart from or above the world.

And I'm not sure which is right, but there is something I think, the world needs the sort of spiritual insights of a Buddha, of the sage, of the monk, the Thomas Mertens of the world. But the Thomas Mertens of the world can only exist if there's the Marcus Realius' of the world, the people who are doing the work and running the system.

If everyone is among, things fall apart pretty quickly. Yeah, and I mean, that example reminds me that another thing we could use, not just people who go back and engage on social media in good faith and in a principled way, but we could use more people in politics who are admirable. I mean, it's a real problem. I mean, look, we all, as we get older, I think it's natural to think that things have gone downhill,

things used to be better, and maybe I'm imagining it. But I certainly think that politicians didn't used to be as conspicuously obnoxious and disrespectful towards their peers for one thing. And as just Trollish as they are now, of course, it was a different set of rewards that the system was different. Maybe you could say they were getting rewarded for being civil.

That's true. And the question becomes, how do you restore that set of incentives or something? But I don't think we're imagining it when we look at the, you know, the politicians out there and think that we could do a lot better. Well, Neil Postman says that you get the politicians that your dominant cultural medium incentivizes the filters. And it shouldn't surprise us that we had a reality show slash

social media star president when those are our two dominant cultural mediums. No, that's a perfect example. And yeah, I wish I had more answers. But maybe, I mean, I would argue that, you know, we thought we were in a golden age of television with HBO and showtime, but actually Netflix and these streaming services

have unearthed the totally, even superior because the economics are different, right? You subscribe to Netflix. There's no commercials, they have unlimited space. So perhaps, maybe this is, I'm just making this up, but maybe the hope is, well now as the dominant cultural mediums are streaming services, podcasts, et cetera, paid subscription newsletters, which I want to, let's talk about now.

Maybe in a few years, we get, we start to get a breed of politicians or leaders or artists that are, that those mediums incentivize, which I would argue, and I talked about this in my book Trust Me Online, I would argue those are better economics for content and civility and humanity. I hope that turns out to be the case.

And then look, you know, we should give ourselves a little time to adjust to radically new things. I mean, social media are brand new, and it was natural that they would design algorithms that optimize for engagement, and it was not necessarily predictable how bad the consequences would be. Now, what you do about that, I would like to, to whatever extent possible, avoid highly and truce of government regulation, but that doesn't mean there aren't, there aren't things

we can do. And so, I mean, there is, there is, you know, we should give ourselves a break in that sense. I mean, the problem is things are changing so fast that if we get the social media thing figured out, as you've suggested, there will be another thing whose consequences we don't foretell. Yeah, you need the sort of the beef and the meat trusts of the early 20th century, where a natural outgrowth of the technology and the incentives and the economics. And you needed the political will to regulate or rein those things in and maybe were at that place. Yeah. I hope so. And I do hope some of the things you're talking about could make things better. It's a good sign that they are at least part of the conversation. Like, you know, the people at Substack make their case

as, you know, they say that they are kind of an antidote to some of the ills of social media. And we'll see, but at least we can judge them by that. I agree. I love, and I've subscribed to the newsletter since you put it out. What I love about it is it's like it reminds me of the early days of blogging before social media where you would get something delivered to you. It was thoughtful and it helped aggregate and present to you a lot of information that saved you a lot of time of searching. So I love it. It's like, hey, there's, you know, let's say you put 30 links in the newsletter. It's usually an article sort of from you at top and then a bunch of links. And maybe six of the links are interesting to me. And I save those to InstaPaper and I read them on my phone three days later. It's not the

instantaneous viral element. It's, here's a thoughtful person whose opinion I respect, giving me distilling down some wisdom and then giving me some homework, so to speak. Yeah, and there are, you know, I'm impressed. There are a lot of good newsletters out there. It's becoming a very rich ecosystem. I think it will evolve. It'll be interesting to chart the evolution because I now have a paid version of the newsletter that's new and it comes out like multiple times a week and then the kind of the version you're describing

will still come out about once a month for free. And so far, the experiment's working okay, but I don't think this can go on forever that people can keep paying like $5 or $6 a month to more and more and more people, right? And so I think it'll be interesting because I think you'll start to see a kind of aggregation like several newsletters combining and and you and you get them all for

$9 a month or whatever and you know, you'll have something a little more like magazines and and I'm kind of toying with trying to do something like that You're seeing versions of it and I think it'll be interesting to see if you see the reemergence kind of of magazines in in a kind of organic way, in a kind of grassroots way. There's something both stoic and Buddhist.

It has kind of an eternal recurrence of like, new technology explodes something, breaks it apart into a thousand pieces, and then somebody comes along who hasn't heard of how it was before and says, you know, it would be amazing. What if we took all these millions of pieces and we put them together and it's a one big thing? And then, you know, it's funny how we're just, we're just repeating the same thing over

and over and over again, and we don't even realize it. Yeah. Yeah. And I'd be okay with that. I kind of enjoyed the era of magazines. Well, I've been doing the Daily Stoke newsletter for four years. Every day I do an email about Stoicism. And, you know, it's interesting because I did the book four years ago, one page a day, and then every day for four years I've done the email. And the other benefit for it is, I mean, I've written to these people

every day for four years. That's amazing. So sometimes my editor, my publisher will say, well, I don't know about, and it's like, no, no, no, no, no, this isn't a discussion. I know because I have the, you have the real engagement with the thing. So we're talking about, you talking about one of the benefits of being a writer is you're so disconnected. But one of the upsides of the newsletter is that you are connected and you have a sort of a bond or an intuition about what the audience wants because you're actually interacting with them. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And it's interesting. One feature of going paid.

And I mean, again, you still have the two audiences. You have a smaller number of people who are paying and then you have the larger number and you send newsletters out to them to every once in a while. But I'm trying to reorient myself to, you know, the idea of like writing for people who presumably like really like your stuff.

I mean, they're paying for it, right? And it's a different, I mean, the sub-stack, their philosophy is that when you're writing for paid subscribers, just relax, you don't have to fuss so much over the style and over drawing them into the piece like they like you. And their philosophy is that you should work really hard and perfect the pieces that are going to be publicly available. And then they will draw people in your orbit. And they'll go viral, draw people in your orbit and blah, blah, blah. But it's something I'm still kind of wrapping my mind around the idea of an audience that likes me.

It is a bit strange because we have a paid component of daily still. It's not on the sub-stack model. It's you get some extra emails and some other bonuses and stuff. And I really like doing that. But there is a weird part, too, whereas a writer, and this is where you have to do some work on the ego, is like you spent your whole life, your whole career, wanting to reach as many people as possible.

Exactly. So then it's like, wait, you would think, like should I work, your first part of the ego is like, well, I should work less hard on this because it's for less people. But it's actually the exact opposite. It's like, no, no, these are the people that really matter. And you have to put out of your mind,

whether it's for 1,000 people or 1,000,000 people, because it's actually about the people or a million people, because it's all, it's actually about the true, the true fans, so to speak. Well, the sub-sac people, when they're trying to lure you into doing this and doing a paid model, because after, well, that's the way they, they, they, they make their money. I mean, they say, you can be casual with your true believers. So you won't have to spend so much time on the newsletter. I'm just not finding that that's really the case. I mean, I just still care and I try to do a good job. But you're right. There can be a frustration when you're like, okay, I think this piece was really good. But wait, it can still only go out to X number of people. There's no way it can really catch on in a bigger way.

And that's, you know, we can't, you know, the kind of timeless pieces I can kind of wait a while maybe and release them into the wild. They can become part of the unpaid newsletter at the end of the month or something. But still, it's, it is a trade off. And it's a new way of thinking about it. And brand new for me

because it's only been going on for like 10 days. There was another weird thing I had at the beginning of the pandemic, I wanted to do this piece about how Marcus really is responded to the Antonin plague. And so I reached out to someone who's published me at The New York Times before and I said, hey, I'm thinking about doing this piece. And they were like, well, I'm really busy, like contact me in three weeks. And then

and it was like, okay, so so then this again, this is the ego part. So New York Times great, the reach of the times is great, the status of the times is great. As a writer, your impulse is to go to all those things that It tickles all the triggers. But then it was like, wait, I send out an email to 300,000 people every day who are interested specifically in this thing. That's who I, not only is that who I should write it to, I can send it to them right now.

And so there's also something about the newsletter thing where it's not about social media followers, it's not about publicness, it's, it's, are you speaking to the people that you're supposed to be speaking to, but there's something, I don't want to say less rewarding about that, but there is something that challenges the ego about that that you have to wrestle with. Absolutely. And I did even before I went paid, I mean, I would still, somebody would approach you about writing something. And I basically would say, look,

if you can think of a way there's synergy with my newsletter, one way or another, like if your author's bio is prominent, it's at the top and it links to my newsletter, and more people will become aware of my newsletter fine. But if that's not the case, I mean, I just, I just have this devotion to building up the newsletter. And, and, and, and it's true that like, um, suppose you do write a piece for prominent, uh, venue, and a lot of people see that one piece, but you're still not, you're not like capturing them, you know, they're not

becoming, you know, an enduring part of your, your, your meal you. And so for better or worse, sometimes I think I'm crazy. And I should just stick with what I did 20 years ago, which is right for the most prominent places I can write for. But I've been, I think it's the opposite of crazy. I think you should be doing exactly what you're doing. And I think if there's any writers or podcasters or whatever listening, you want, if you don't own your audience, you don't have anything.

You're owned by the outlets, or you're owned by the market. You want to control the audience and you want to speak to them directly and regularly. That's autonomy. And the whole point of a writer is to control, to be a writer or a creative or an artist is to control your own destiny, in my opinion.

No, it is autonomy. I mean, it's freedom, and that's become kind of more salient as the whole kind of cancel culture thing has unfolded. I mean, I think there are more journalists, writers who worry a little about what exactly they can say on this platform, that platform, and I'm not like, you know, breaking a whole lot of new bounds. I don't, I don't, you know, I don't, I don't, I don't go about trying to violate speech codes, but it's nice. It's, it's just nice not to have to worry about getting fired. There's nobody who haven't fired me. Right, right. No, and, and yeah, sure, some, some really extreme cases, they've

been kicked off of Patreon or whatever, but it's like, those were really bad. Those were like, I'm not in that territory. Yeah, no, it's like try to cancel me. I have direct access to my audience in all in multiple different mediums, right? Like try to cancel me, you know, and I think that's the place that you want to get because that's a place of strength and resilience. Whereas if you're surfing the wave of whatever the sort of intellectual trend of the moment is or publication of the moment is, you're

very vulnerable and things can be taken away from you that you think you own, but you don't own. Yeah. but you don't own. Yeah, no, I enjoyed the part of my life where I was doing more New York Times op-eds and writing for time and the New Yorker and stuff. And I'm glad it happened, but I slowly came to wonder how much influence I was having because it's like, okay, so I'm writing this piece from this point of view for the New York Times op-ed, but they've got kind

of one slot for that particular piece that month. And if I didn't write it, somebody else would, because, and so am I really adding that much? So I'm enjoying the new environment. It has its challenges. No, and if it wasn't creating more value for them than it is for you, they wouldn't be having you do it. Right. Right. That's true too. They, and that became true or in true. I mean, I remember a time when all these places paid really well, and then that became less and less true too. Well, I love the newsletter. I love the books. I've read all of them, I love this one especially,

but and then here's my very old copy, so I appreciate it. What are I? We'll have to do this again. Worms my heart, thanks so much for the time Ryan, I really enjoyed this. Thanks for listening to the Daily Stoke Podcast. Just a reminder, we've got signed copies

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