The Daily Stoic - Discovering The Formula For True Happiness | Max Joseph (Pt. 2)

Episode Date: July 3, 2024

Tune in to hear part 2 of Ryan’s conversation with Max Joseph, the creator behind the new docuseries HAPPINESS on YouTube. Max talks with Ryan about the philosophy, science, and secrets to being truly happy that he learned on his quest around the world talking with experts. In addition to being a documentarian, Max Joseph co-hosted MTV’s show Catfish and made his feature film debut in 2015 with We Are Your Friends which starred Zac Efron. Some of Max’s other documentaries are BOOKSTORES: How to Read More Books in the Golden Age of Content and DICKS: Do you need to be one to be a successful leader? which features Robert Greene. You can connect with Max on YouTube and IG: @maxjoseph📕 Thanks to everyone who has supported the new book Right Thing, Right Now - to grab your own copy + exclusive bonuses, head to dailystoic.com/justice✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to the daily Stoic early and ad free right now. Just join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. I've been writing books for a long time now and one of the things I've noticed is how every year, every book that I do, I'm just here in New York putting right thing right now out. What a bigger percentage of my audience is listening to them in audiobooks, specifically on Audible. I've had people had me sign their phones, sign their phone case because they're like I've listened to all your audiobooks here and my sons they love audiobooks we've been doing it in the car to get them off their screens because audible helps your imagination soar. It helps you

read efficiently, find time to read when maybe you can't have a physical book in front of you and then it also lets you discover new kinds of books, re-listen to books you've already read from exciting new narrators. You can explore bestsellers, new releases. My new book is up, plus thousands of included audio books and originals, all with an Audible membership.

You can sign up right now for a free 30-day Audible trial and try your first audio book for free. You'll get right thing right now, totally for free. Visit audible.ca to sign up. ["Audible"] for free, visit audible.ca to sign up. Welcome to the daily Stoic podcast, where each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well known and obscure, fascinating

and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are and also to find peace and wisdom in their actual lives. But first we've got a quick message from one of our sponsors. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I think this is the first intro I've recorded since I got the news. I was, I took my kids to Jujitsu last week. And I was like, I'm going to go to the gym. I'm going to go to the gym.

I'm going to go to the gym. I'm going to go to the gym. I'm going to go to the gym. I'm going to go to the gym. I think this is the first intro I've recorded since I got the news. I was, I took my kids to Jiu Jitsu last week. I'm sitting there on the couch watching them roll around and wrestle and my phone starts blowing up a little bit. And I didn't want to check it yet. I wanted to be present for that. I drove them, we switched with my wife,

got them in the office and I'll play you a clip of that conversation right now. Ryan, congratulations. Well, what's the word? You're number one. New York Times? Number one New York Times advice ahead of all other books. No way.

Doesn't get any better than that. No, it doesn't, it doesn't. It doesn't. This is number two, right? This is the second time? You've hit several number ones, but I guess what? In the series, this is the first time. No, no, I mean, so still this hit number one,

and then this is the second number one New York Times. I don't think I've hit it any other times, because for discipline, it was number two, right? Yes, I think that's correct. Oh man. There's something about hitting a target as a byproduct of doing what you were trying to do as opposed to aiming at said thing.

Like this is nice, but not the main goal. The main goal was to do the book and to get it to people and then this is a byproduct. You know, you did brilliantly with the book, connecting with the audience. I think the way you put it forward, people are really engaging in. So it's, this doesn't get old, my friend.

No, no. You know, after Belichick won his first Super Bowl, someone said, you know, what do we do next? And he said, we win more of them. And I don't know if that's exactly the right vibe, but I do. I'm going to go work on the wisdom book a little bit as a celebration. Absolutely. So enjoy.

And you're really a bright light in the world of publishing now and everybody thinks this book is timely and they're really excited for you. Oh, that's amazing. All right. Well, Steve, thank you for everything that you've done and for making it happen. And as I was saying, when we had dinner, I don't think either of us would have guessed this 13 years ago. It's been a marvelous journey and we're just getting started.

Alright, thanks. Talk soon. Have a good night. So anyways, I wanted to say thank you to everyone who made that possible. Thanks to all of you who pre-ordered the book. Thank you to everyone at the Painted Porch and Penguin Random House, our warehouse in Illinois, my wife, my family, everyone who's a part of Brass Check and Daily Stoic for getting the books out there.

Thank you for physically packaging and mailing all of those books. Thank you all of you who ordered it, of course, and thanks to everyone who's reading it. I hope you love the book. I was really proud of it. And this is something that makes me happy. I try not to let external things determine whether I'm happy or not. But it's funny, I was watching Max Joseph, that's my guest of today's episode.

I was watching his amazing documentary on happiness. And he has this theory that like sort of happiness is these buckets. And like sort of crushing it at work is one of those buckets. Personal relationships is one, health is one. It's a fascinating documentary that I really, really enjoy. And it's totally free on YouTube.

Here's a little clip of that, which I'll play. It's no secret that everyone's struggling with their mental health. US Surgeon General has called it an urgent public health crisis. So I'm setting off on a journey around the world and through the mysteries of science. This is a really powerful fMRI machine.

To seek out world experts. The Times called me probably the happiest man in the world. That's a big cross to bear. And figure out once and for all what happiness is all about. I'm a pursuit of happiness and I know it. I'll be mine once again. I'll be good. So anyways, Max Joseph, awesome documentarian. He's got a great documentary that has Robert Green in it that you can watch. He's in that famous Make It Count video that my friend Casey Neistat did. And you can also see him in the show Catfish the first several seasons. Just an overall awesome dude who I was really excited to have on the podcast.

I wanted to go to a screening of the doc at my friend Tim Urban's house, but I wasn't able to make it. So instead, he and I had this two-parterter conversation which I am excited to bring to you now. Again, thanks to everyone who bought the new book. If you haven't bought it yet, you can still grab it. The bonuses are at dailystoke.com slash justice. Anyways, I hope everyone's well and I'm gonna celebrate a little bit

and then I'm back to work on the new book. You have this great graphic in the happiness dock of like the seven, what are they? Six neurotransmitter. What are they beaker, are those beakers? No test tubes. Yeah, you have you illustrated in this test tubes. But I've got to imagine that was a moment where you're like, oh, that's kind of the narrative device of the concept. And that's your way, basically you got this guy on camera and he probably explained to you a theory using a metaphor

and you're like, oh, there we go. Yeah, I mean, when you're interviewing specialists or experts, like they're coming at you with a bunch of metaphors. They've done all the hard work. I mean, like, I'm not, I am not an expert. I'm a tourist. Sure. And I get to, I mean, that's what I love

about making doc stuff, is I get to kind of immerse in a particular topic for, you know, a couple years, and meet people and kind of cherry pick, you know, ideas and stuff. And then I get to synthesize them without the pretension, without having to assume the pretension of being an expert myself. Yes. And so I'm both like shielded from like,

well, they're not my theories. I'm just explaining it. I'm, you know, there's a kind of Promethean or Robin Hood feeling of I'm stealing from the rich to give to the poor. But there's this moment where you're like, oh, this is my way in. Usually when I'm doing my sort of research,

I'm like, here are the themes that I wanna talk about. And it's when I come up with a story that captures that thing that's really exciting. And then it's extra exciting when I come up with a story that captures that thing that's really exciting. And then it's extra exciting when I go, I think there's, you know, like I'm vaguely remembering or I have this sense like this person from what I know of like their history would be good. And then you get into the material and you're like,

holy fuck, it's like way better than I thought. Like it perfectly makes my argument. And I bet you had that where you're like, I wanna interview this person. And there's this whole process by which you're, you're getting them to agree, you're scheduling, they're sitting down, you're blocking the shots. Then you start to ask the questions

and then there's this warmup. And then there's the moment where they tell you more than you could have hoped to hear from them. That's probably what keeps you going, right? Definitely. Yeah, I mean, that happened on bookstores. And in fact, it kind of happens with all of these. Like the front section of each of these docs

I've been making, like the bookstore one, I was in Seattle for a wedding and I went to Elliot Bay bookstore. And I had my camera and my tripod, because I knew I wanted, my plan was to make just a two-minute film about why I like bookstores. That was it. It was not ambitious,

and I was just, because I was so overloaded, anytime I go into a bookstore, even your bookstore right now, I'm like, I have this urge to capture what's so beautiful about it. And so I got that footage, and then I went like, I have this urge to capture like what's so beautiful about it. And so I got that footage and then I went home and I started editing it. And as I'm editing it together, I'm like, this is flat.

Like, where is this going? Like, this is nothing. This is just literally just like shots of bookstores. But what am I getting? Like, what is the feeling? Like, why did I feel the need to do this? And then I started to unpack the, oh, it's kind of the overwhelming anxiety

of seeing all this beautiful stuff. I'm looking at these books behind you. You know there's good shit in there. Yeah, and there's this urge, there's both an excitement and an anxiety that I'm an excitement to consume it all, but an anxiety that I won't be able to. And then I was like, what is that about?

And then I was like, oh my God, this is not a two minute video. This is like, this is a much deeper, bigger exploration. And that front part of these videos is kind of like where I start. And then with this happiness thing, I've been blessed in a lot of ways. I have a lot of things that I should be happy about every day that should fill my cup, so to speak, the metaphorical cup.

And that cup seems to have a hole at the bottom of it. Like I have an amazing wife, I have a great dog, I've been able to, you know, eke out a career doing what I love, and it's not enough. It's not enough. Sure. And I want more.

Yeah, but the fundamental human drive, which is that we always think if I get this thing, then I'll be good, and it's never been good for anyone. Although we do suspect for other people they are like, oh, it's cause I'm just not at the right level. And then it's good. I could be like so and so I would be good.

Right, if these three things happened, then I could like, I could rest easy at night and feel satisfied in my soul. But what you learn by just talking to people who have climbed those mountains is like, they're no, they're no less restless than they were before. That drive is, is constant. And so that hole that's in, and I say the hole in my heart,

like what's that about? Right. And, and so that was kind in my heart, like, what's that about? Right. And, and so that was kind of the, the starting point. And I also know that there's something there because I talked to friends and stuff about it and they're like, I feel, I feel the same way. And no one's like, I'm so happy. Everything's working.

Yeah. I'm so satisfied. Life is so great. I just, and anyone who does say that, I'm kind of like, oh, you're, you're full of shit. When you also, when you read history, you go, you're like, why were these great people so miserable? And was the misery the driver of the greatness?

There's a Stefan Zweig quote, he's this novelist who also wrote these great biographies. And he think he was talking about Magellan. And he said, he also wrote this book called The World of Yesterday, which is about Europe right before World War I breaks out but he goes, never in the history of humanity has a conqueror been surfeited by conquests. Like never has the conqueror gotten there and been like yes I knew it would do it for you know it just doesn't happen. The thing moves.

Right. And yeah I thought that was very striking about the intro. I was curious too, because you have been very successful in what you do, but I think we show this like you have this thing that you think is going to be your big thing. You have that movie. You think it's going to be going to do everything for you, and then it doesn't hit the way that you want it to hit. And then you have this choice, we all have this choice where you go, okay, if it had done what I wanted, then I would have been happy. Or you can go, oh, it was never going to give me what I needed. And I think, conversely, people who do get it still face the same choice, right? Because it doesn't do it for them. And they go, it's because I need to do more, or it's because it was never gonna do it for me.

So life is constantly like trying to get us to have this understanding that you're never gonna fix internal stuff with external accomplishments. And then we have this magical ability to just like misread what the lesson is, and then just keep doing the same thing over and over again. Yeah, I mean, totally. I do feel like if that movie had done well,

I certainly would have had an easier mental health journey for the last nine years. But maybe not. Like we acclimate to good things really, like really quickly. And we dwell on negative things for a long time, right? And somewhere in there is like the lessons of grit and resilience and all that stuff. Like don't dwell on your failures so much that like you can't, you know, move on or try again, but don't ignore them entirely so that you don't study on or try again, but don't ignore them entirely

so that you don't study what went wrong. And you could have had that exact experience that the guy in your doc has, I'm forgetting the doctor's name. Yeah, Axel Bouchon. Yeah, where he's like, calls his wife to tell her the huge news, and she's like, I'm out, like, I'm leaving you.

That happened, I mean, like, I was making Catfish and doing, making We Are Your Friends at the same time, and it was intense. Like, I had no time for anything. In fact, we were on the road, I was editing on my laptop. I would, like, we would shoot during the day, and then I would edit at night, I would sleep for like three hours,

and then we would shoot again, and I was like, coming apart at the seams, and then I finally, you know And I was like coming apart at the seams. And then I finally finished the movie and I was like, oh, here it is, Deliverance, finally. I can sleep, Redemption. And my wife was pretty upset that I had basically not been around. These are finite wells that you're tapping.

Right. And then the movie didn't do well. So it's like that didn't pay off. And then the, so then the. And you're like, now I need you to support me as I pick up the pieces of my broken psyche. It's like, what? No, you used it all up over here.

Right, yeah, I used up all my credits. And yeah, and then you're like, well, what, what really matters, right? Like we're always, we are walking around and I think we are in America in particular, like we're in a, we're caught in a bind, right? We're, we're smart enough and we're educated enough and we consume enough information to know that there is like a better way to be living our lives. But we're also so immersed in the waters. We've grown up in the waters of achievement and a comp,

like, competing with other people. Yeah, competition and accomplishment-based self-worth. Yes. Which is kind of the fundamental problem that I have and that I have and that I imagine a lot of people have. It's like, yes, we are the sum of our accomplishments. And like, yeah, you go to school for like, you know,

you go through 20 years of schooling or something to get you to like, okay, then you graduate and it's like time to achieve baby. Like now you're in it now. We gave you everything. Yeah, what kind of car do you drive? Yeah. Like how big is your house?

Or it's not, it doesn't have to be monetary. It could just be like, how many books have you published on this subject? How well are you respected in your field? Like your field might not be a well-paying field. And in fact, I found that like documentary, documentary filmmaking is not a particularly well-paying field, that it makes the people in it,

like that much more competitive. Like the laurels are like people will stab you in the back even harder and faster. Yeah, because the pie is so much smaller. And it's still relative, right? So even if, like, look, if you play in the NBA, you're measuring who is the best in terms of hundreds of millions of dollars.

But if you're in academia, you're measuring it in terms of thousands of dollars or how many assistants you have, but you're still measuring, right? And you're still going, yeah, they don't have a 5,000 or 50,000 square foot mansion, but you still go, well, their apartment is nicer than mine, you know, or, or whatever they drive. And you're still humans inevitably find some way to turn

everything into a status competition. That's what we do. Peyton, it's happening. We're finally being recognized for being very online. It's about damn time. I mean, it's hard work being this opinionated. And correct. You're such a Leo. All the time. So if you're looking for a home for your worst opinions, if you're a hater first and a lover of pop culture second, then join me, Hunter Harris, and me, Peyton Dix, the host

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So my wife is Brazilian, and so I go down to Brazil a lot, and I go to parties and get togethers, and no one is talking about work. No one's asking me, what do you do? I mean, I'll bring it up, because that's all I have to talk about. That's the entire personality. I don't have anything else. I'm kind of dying for someone to be like, tell me about that last project you did.

I wouldn't. Yeah, it's like, I have to compete here as a regular person? You know, like, fuck. I got nothing. Yeah, right. I don't have any hobbies. I've optimized my whole life around achieving in this one.

I mean, like I'm not even a sports fan. Like that would at least give me something to talk about beyond- You gotta really get into coffee or something. Right. You know, I started surfing, but by the way, I'm like, I suck. So it's like, I can't, I'm not very good.

So you don't wanna bring up things that you're not that good at, but it's nice, I can't, I'm not very good. So you don't want to bring up things that you're not that good at, but it's nice to be in a culture where your value is not just tied to like, well, what did you do in the last two years? And like, how relevant are you? And it's just the inherent value of just you as a human being.

It's like, I just like you. You give off a good vibe and you ask good questions and I like talking to you. And I'm not saying Brazil has it all figured out. They got their own set of problems. You could, but you don't. No, and it's easy to romanticize a place that you visit once in a while.

But different places have different sets of problems. And our problem in the US, and unfortunately, because we are such an exporter of culture, like we are- It's the only thing we do. We are marketing and exporting our problem everywhere. Yeah, the thing where you're often like the thing that you're most unbalanced about is the thing

you have the excess of, right? So you're exporting. It's like, I thought the most powerful part of the metaphor that you have in the thing, which really stopped me cold because I think it's a tendency we have. So like, I don't think it's a controversial argument, right, to go like, okay, there's these different buckets

or different beakers or whatever you want to call it, you have to fill up to be happy, right? And obviously career and success is one, pleasure is one, whatever. But you go, there's no evidence that shows that a surplus in one can fill up the other or compensate for the other. So what tends to happen is you're good or successful at the thing you have the abundance of, right? And so you just do more and more and more

of that, trying to fill these other buckets or holes. And it's not only not working, it can actually suck the joy and meaning out of the singular thing, right? So the workaholic just is alienating the family, and so they're just, well, work's the only thing that makes sense, so they're working, and they're sucking the joy out of the work. Yeah, as they're empty everywhere else. I can describe the, do you want, so yeah, they're essentially, and this is not,

I didn't come up with this science, I'm reporting on it, but basically there are six neurotransmitters that represent our positive reward systems. All of our, they represent, in different combinations, they represent all of our positive emotions. And they evolved in a specific order, right? There's dopamine, which is like allowed us to be motivated to find food. That came first. Then there's testosterone, which helped with, you know,

reproduction, right? So need, you need dopamine for finding food. You need testosterone to reproduce. Then there was serotonin, which is like recognition and it's pride, which helps in reproduction. Like, uh... And you're the best food gatherer. Right, right. It's like, yeah, someone thinks I'm the best or like you're being chosen or you're choosing someone else

based on how good they are at a certain thing. So that's serotonin. It's recognition. Then there's oxytocin, which is, you're having these kids. You need to basically be able to... It's like family and connection. You want to... You need to take care of them. You need to love them in order to... You know, human children need 18 years

before their, you know, brains are formed. We need a drug or a neurotransmitter to help us take care of our kids. Then there's cannabinoids. So whereas oxytocin is like family love, cannabinoids is friendship love. And that then comes hand in hand with community, with cooperation, working together.

Without cannabinoids, that's not possible. And then there's opioids. Opioids is like pleasure and gratitude. So you have these six neurotransmitters. And the thing is, is that you can't fill one up so much that it then fills up the other, the others. So this even goes to like, if you're taking an SSRI, like, you know, I take. You still got to exercise. You can't be, you gotta go out and see human beings. You can't take so much Zoloft

that it fills up your six buckets. Zoloft is only gonna fill up your serotonin bucket. And sure, it might fill all the way up to the top, but you still have other buckets you need to fill. Same thing with making money and success. Money and success are tied to dopamine and serotonin. So we're kind of stuck, at least I am, but I think a lot of people are stuck in this, we're just chasing dopamine and serotonin, dopamine and serotonin. And we're ignoring cannabinoids, oxytocin, opioids, and testosterone.

If you're a sex addict, then you're just hammering on testosterone and you're ignoring the others. So, you know, it's the key. The key is balance, right? Which is such a cliche, but at least like, you can see what the things you need to balance are. Well, so the stoic virtues are courage, justice, wisdom, and then the middle one is temperance. So it's funny, like when I talk to people about it, I usually render that as discipline,

because that's like what people want more of, right? It's the more palatable way into that. But temperance, the idea of balance, the right amount of things. The other word for this is soffrecine, like the knowledge of what the right amount of a thing is, like what are the things worth having and then what's the right amount of those things. That's really like the key balance. We don't spend a lot of time talking with people about it, teaching people about it. And the problem is, as you said, a lot of our heroes are fundamentally like imbalanced in those things. That's why they became heroic at that thing. You don't become the greatest football player in the world or the richest person in the world because you're balanced out. No, you decided, fuck the other neurotransmitters. This is the only one that matters.

And then people look at that and they go, oh, I'll do what that person's doing. And you're just mimicking a fundamentally unbalanced person. Right, and like the more, right, the further we get in history, the more imbalanced they get. There was a moment in like the Renaissance, right, where they were looking back at the Stoics. Right, where Leonardo is all of them at once.

You know, that is, he's an artist and a scientist. And there is something to that for sure. But what I actually found interesting, and they're gonna come out and they're not gonna have numbers, but it's in the philosophy episode. So each episode- Is that the one I saw?

Yeah. Okay. The first episode that came out is on, is the science of happiness, neuroscience. Then there's an episode on the philosophy, the philosophies of happiness. And what I actually like kind of didn't fully realize or appreciate is that so much of our conceptions of well-being and happiness and even Maslow's pyramid and all hierarchy

and all that stuff. He never said pyramid, even though we show it as a pyramid. He actually never said that it's all individual based, right? Even, even Aristotle's, you know, treatise, it's all about how to become the best person. Right. And it gives short shrift, or at least we don't put the emphasis on the serving of the community. Like, how much our happiness is actually tied up in being one of a group of people. Yes. And I think especially here in the West and certainly in America with our foundational myth of the rugged individual,

like there's this, I'm going to become self-sufficient, right? Or self-reliance Emerson, right? I'm going to become so self-reliant and self-sufficient that I can say, fuck you to everyone else. I can do my thing. I'm going to become self-actualized and then I'm going to, you know, I'm going to stand on top of that mountain. But what's so amazing about Emerson, the irony of Emerson,

so he writes this thing on self-reliance, he's like the most generous person of all time. Like Whitman doesn't have a career without Emerson, Melville and Hawthorne, and he creates this scene. And this scene is like, he had a rich spouse and he had invested well, he was like this guy, his cup runneth over, and he shared, you know, and he was this. And then

I think obviously, one of the benefits of art is that although artists tend to be selfish people, is there is something generous about it, right? You're making this thing for other people, you're sharing what you know, what you care about. And there's something I love the irony of Emerson being this, like incredibly generous person with this awesome coaching tree of all these other artists coming off it. And so yeah, it's funny, like we tend to we look at these philosophies, we'll get

stoicism also as this individualistic philosophy of self mastery. And then what did all of them do? Like they entered politics where they like in politics, not in the, I'm gonna be the most powerful man in the world politics, but they're like, no, no, no, your duty is to serve. And you have to participate. You can't withdraw from the world.

And to me, that's where that other virtue of stoicism comes in the idea of justice. There's this beautiful image in stoicism, they say, so you're born self-interested. So these are called the circles of hierarchies. So you're born inherently self-interested as a baby, you're just like, gimme, gimme, gimme, you care about yourself, then you care about your mom, because you can't survive without your mom, then your dad, and then your family,

you get, you get these circles that come around you have people and things that you care about. And then ultimately there's the biggest circle which is just like the future of humanity or animals, plants, the environment. And he basically says that the work of philosophy is to pull the outer rings inwards. And when I was watching your doc, the sort of we-ness or the all-ness

of where philosophy is supposed to get you. And by the way, where religion is also supposed to get you. Like how you treat the least of my brethren is how you treat me. We are attracted to philosophy and religion because we think it'll help us with our problems. So we have these blinders on, we don't see that the fundamental message

of all of the schools is to stop caring about yourself and to care about other people. This is also in 12-step, right? It's like you come there because you have a problem, they tell you, we can help you with your problem. And then like, but by the way, you have to accept the existence of a higher power, and then you have to start being of service.

Like that's the fundamental pivot of all of it is like, I can solve your problems by you thinking about your problems less. Right, well, you're theoretically supposed to, like, kind of figure out the deficit. You're supposed to get through your problems, but then once you're through your problems, there's a whole other structure above that,

even in Maslow's hierarchy, right? Like, the first two rungs at the bottom are deficits, right? It's like, you need a roof over your head, you need like a house for protection. Conquer nature. And then, but then once you're there, then it's about building on top of that. And like, what's interesting about the neuroscience of happiness and what's also crazy about it,

because Axel is like breaking new ground. There's a lot that's being done now with F MRIs, like with high Tesla numbers that allow you to really look in real time at what's going on in the brain, brain activity when you, you know, with different prompts. And it like his argument, which is really fascinating, is that like the brain evolved with an architecture that points in a very specific direction. Like if these six neurotransmitters are basically the reward system we have in our brain,

then all we need to do is follow them. Yeah. Like instead of just following the cultural mandate of our respective cultures in America, it's money, success, and you know, being respected in your field, if it's more just like, oh, it's figuring out which of these, which things in your life fill up your six buckets and that if you followed that, then you get there. And, and of course those six buckets are totally tied to, uh,

Aristotle's like hedonism and eudaimonia. But it's like hedonism becomes, you know, hanging out with friends, laughing, you know, enjoying. It's not orgies and opium. Right, right, it's exactly. It's like, it's much more pedestrian and quotidian. And then on the other, the eudaimonia, which is like your purpose.

And I think that we overdo purpose, or we misinterpret it. I personally, I'm just talking about myself, like, is my purpose to be a filmmaker? Am I doing it right? Am I serving? Am I following my passion? Purpose is great and all,

but you can't go full, you can't just go full on purpose. Or we have to, because I'm thinking about this for the book I'm gonna do, it's like we take this idea of purpose, so if he's defining happiness as human flourishing, which I think is better, right? Because happiness is a problematic word, because we think that's like laughing

and having fun or something. But we take it as human flourishing. yeah the problem is our western understanding of flourishing being like very successful master of your universe right but if you take human flourishing more as being like a great well-rounded human being like if i told you this person is the greatest ever at what they do but they have neglected their family they're a dick to people they pass in the street. You'd be like, there's a deficiency there that's marring the beauty of the flourishing. Or you could say that's not flourishing

because you're so bad in this other area, right? And so if we take a human as being this person who, yeah, a certain amount of mastery, but then also a certain amount of positive contributions to humanity. What is their role as a daughter or husband or wife or mother or father? You can't read the Greeks and not hear them really talk

about a lot about your role and obligations as a citizen. Because the city was so much smaller, everyone had to like pitch in in a way that now, you ask someone what your responsibilities are as a citizen, they're like, well, maybe voting. And by the way, only 50% of us do that. But the idea that you are obligated to contribute and that that's showing up at a city council meeting

or picking up a tree that fell across the road, that this is also human flourishing, I think if we see it more as you do in the doc of these different buckets we're filling, that you can't be flourishing if you're woefully deficient in any of the things, then maybe we get it closer to what they meant. Totally, yeah, I mean, flourishing, it's a great word.

It is vague and leaves a lot of room for interpretation. And like you could say, well, financially flourishing and charity. And like, I'm working on a thing about democracy now. Like kind of like happiness, but about democracy. And these questions of participation, you know, serving duty, like service. It's not something like,

what is our obligation as citizens, you know, our country? I donate money. Right. They had a much more expansive role of how this thing was gonna work. And it's funny, I have a quote in the new book from Pericles where he's saying like, one person's disengagement is only possible

by someone else's increased engagement. And so there's also this thing by not doing your duty, you're actually seeding the fields to the people you don't want to be participating. You know what I mean? I don't just mean people who disagree with you, but like if the system is not filled by people who are relatively well-rounded,

and they've been successful in other ways, they've got a family and they've got this and they've been... What you're doing is you're basically like the most ambitious monsters, fame hungry, like sociopathic individuals. They just fill that space. How much do you really know about Black History? Like really, really know. Wondery's new podcast, Black History for Real, we use Black History's most overlooked

figures back into their rightful place in culture and the world at large. Listen to Black History for Real on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. Again, with Brazil, there's an interesting comparison because they have mandatory voting. Hmm, that doesn't seem to have solved anything. No, well, because mandatory voting, where you have a lot of uneducated electorate and high levels of poverty, like becomes a worse problem. Like, but we should have mandatory voting.

Yes. But we also, in order to have, in order for mandatory voting to work, you need. Otherwise you just have a mob that you can whip up. Right, so you need better education too. Like you can't have voting and participation without education. And like ideally without moral education, right?

Like values, these courage, temperance, justice, like, you know, humility, humanity, like these are moral, we don't teach moral education. No. Because like- Well, I got a book I'll give you in the store, but the founders were assuming like, hey, we're gonna leave you We're gonna do not delineate any of these rights so you can do do it or not

but they expected you to have a sort of personal moral code and understanding of what is good and not good for a human to be and to do to balance out what they're not explicitly codifying in the law. And you're realizing that the American democratic system has all these unwritten norms or expectations that were based on certain cultural values that the right is now trying to say we're all religious, but they weren't. They were based on the classical ideas, which predate, you know, this these religious ideas. But the idea was like, they expected you to not do it because it was wrong, not do it because it was legal or illegal. And that that was this governing assumption,

which Mayor, it's almost certainly not the case anymore, and that's a huge problem. Right, they assumed that just people would be ashamed to act so awfully, and like to be so amoral that they would just, you know, when they expected ambition to be a check against ambition. So they'd be like, sure, you're going to get a Donald Trump or whomever every once in a while.

But most of the people attracted to it are going to be good. Right. But even Martin Luther King made that gamble. And Gandhi did too. The whole idea of nonviolent protest was to basically invite outrageous things to happen to you and use the press almost like the filming of these meetings. The gamble was that this would outrage the general public and their moral code and it did. Yes, although he also, he writes this thing called

if I were a Czech and he's like saying that if he lived in the Czech Republic or was it Czechoslovakia, then I, whatever, he was like, this is how I would have resisted Hitler and you read the essay and it makes sense and then you go, I don't think it would have worked, right? Because like what he was fundamentally appealing to, not that the British are wonderful people, and they certainly weren't as a colonial power,

but he was appealing to a conscience that was successful in that case. It took 40 years or it took a very long time, but like, and a lot of atrocities to get it to finally nail just as it did in the civil rights movement. But yeah, it only works if the assumption that human beings or cultures are decent is true. And sometimes that's not true

because things have gone so far in one direction and then it maybe doesn't work. Yeah, I mean, like, I don't know if it would work now. Yeah, I don't either. I mean, there's this article called The Cruelty is the Point, and it sort of explains like a whole political movement in the United States right now, which is like, it's not that they don't think

that it's bad, it's that they support it because it's bad. They like that it upsets a group of the other. But that's only because they're so upset. Right, they've already descended into a level of unhappiness that they feel that the only way to elevate themselves is to. Well, if you feel like you're aggrieved and persecuted, you don't, that's how you justify doing it to other people. Right, that's the terribleness of that cycle,

is that you tell yourself that you're the, not, that you're the kicked-upon minority who's standing up for yourself, as opposed to being the overwhelming majority who is kicking the shit out of the little guy. Well, I'm curious. So the third episode in this happiness series is about philosophy,

and there is a bunch of stuff there from classical stuff. What did you think? I mean, I'm sure you had some thoughts. Well, the thing I think you got most of that right, and I enjoyed it, but I was actually, you interview Jill. What's her name? Flipovich. I love her and her argument that which I think I'm thinking more about just in my own life and is the way that in which our happiness come or our fulfillment or flourishing comes at the expense of other people. And so to me, that's a big part of the virtue of justice is thinking about where we externalize.

And there's a joke where like, you know, like women become like CEOs or leaders, and they go, I realized I needed a wife, you know, like they're realizing like, oh, like the men were, that they're competing with or are working with have this enormous advantage, this sort of structural setup that is designed to encourage them to go out and do things.

By the way, a lot of female executives that I know do, like the man does provide that stuff. Like they are taking the division of labor is reversed. No, but having to do that and realizing like, oh, okay, you illustrate it well with the hierarchy, but we just sort of take these things for granted. Oh, someone's gonna take care of this so I can go do this other stuff.

And I thought that was really, like you can see this in couples, you can see this in cultures. Right, Jill talks more, I mean, she also spoke about the way, you know, marginalized communities are often filling in this in cultures. Right, Jill talks more, I mean, she also spoke about the way marginalized communities are often filling in this role too, like housekeepers. The Spartans are this race of great warriors, right?

And they don't have time for philosophy or art, they're just the greatest warriors. And we owe our humanity, we owe Western civilization to this resistance at Thermopylae, which is in the movie 300, but they resist, you know, sort of Eastern tyranny. That's what allows, you know, sort of democracy to flourish, all this stuff. But fundamentally, they run a slave based society where they all train in the arts of war. And there's this race of people called the helots who do all the farming, all the housework, all the stuff, right?

And yeah, just thinking about how you look at even the founding of America, right? Like, where are they having time to just think about these ideas? What are, how are they participating? How is George Washington just leading an unpaid revolution of troops? It's because somebody at home is manning the plantation.

They're slaves and women and poor people who... So I think to me it's this ethical, moral, and then logistical question of how do you set up a society, how do you run your personal life and then a culture in a way that everyone is allowed to succeed that doesn't get into the fantasy of Marxism or something. Denmark. Yeah, where you're thinking about how do we structure this so there's not somebody whose happiness is dependent on their boot being on somebody else's neck.

Right, well, there's a total correlation between, obviously income inequality and violence. Yeah. Like, the more income inequality there is, the angrier people are and the more they're willing to, you know, commit violence to, you know, bring those two things closer together. So there's an episode too about Scandinavia. Interesting. So there's an episode too about Scandinavia. And Scandinavia is often at the very top of the list of the World Happiness Report. So I was like, that was a natural place for me to go.

They even go like, oh, okay, like why is America's birth rate so low? And it's like, it's cause it's so hard to have kids. It's super hard to have kids. Our whole society is like not set up to have kids. We don't have subsidies or childcare, healthcare. And then you look at these Scandinavian countries and you go, well, they have it all.

They have the dream thing. And their fertility rate sucks too. And it's because exactly what Jill is talking about, which is still the cultural assumptions are such that some people's flourishing is dependent on other people's flourishing. And it's mostly a male, female breakdown. Denmark, Scandinavia has this thing called Yanti's Law.

And Yanti's Law is like, don't think you're better than anyone else. And there's pluses and minuses to that. Like what's interesting, and this isn't all in the kind of the Denmark episode, which is that like, there were so many interesting things about Scandinavia that yes, they have universal health care free education

Great maternity paternity leave that allows men and women to divide the labor the labor of raising children together and allows men to have Relationships with their children. So there's there's all that but on top of that like They don't have the hustle killing it culture Yeah like they don't have the hustle killing it culture. In fact, like if, and I asked a lot of people, they're like, if you work past 5 p.m., people are like, what's wrong with you? Like, can you not get your work done in the hours allotted?

And like- It's very hard to do great work, you know, that way. And if you're like, you know, the idea of like working over the weekend to get ahead for the next week. They're like again They're like is there something wrong with you like because and and you have like all these scheduled Community activities there like everyone's in these clubs. There's like the soccer club. There's the this club There's a that club you can't like just pop into a restaurant on a Friday night

Yeah in Copenhagen or our whose which is the other place I went to. These places are reserved. People are making reservations. They're planning it out. They're taking a really active role in their social planners. And also, there's no blingy conspicuous consumption there. It's very frowned upon.

So the idea of getting super rich and then like bragging about it or working really hard and making a big deal about how much you worked over the weekend, like how hard you're hustling, it's like ugly. Interesting. It's like they have a tampening mechanism to basically keep everyone equal and balanced.

And that doesn't necessarily create like massive joy. The happiness in Scandinavia is not like the exuberance. Putting a floor but also a ceiling on it. And then it all depends on us paying for the world's defense budget. You know what I mean? Right, there's no military. Right.

But the people there do feel, I think the human flourishing is maximized on a policy level. Yeah. Right. Except where's the beautiful works of art or the groundbreaking philosophy. You control for these, no one's got the dials perfect.

No. No, and that's why the world is like, I mean, right, you need to look at it in the context of the rest of the world too, right? Because other people, America certainly has got like- We dialed in a couple of them. Yeah, right? Because like, yeah, other people will, America certainly has got like- We dialed in a couple of them really good. Ambition drive like progress. Yeah.

Unbridled, unbridled success and progress. But like they're paying 55% income tax, which is super high, but they're getting a lot back. Like if you're super wealthy in the US, you're also paying about 50% income tax, but you ain't getting anything back. No, I know it's crazy. So I do think that there are these great lessons

we can learn from these other places. For sure. You wanna go check out some books books? Yeah. Alright, let's do it. Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it and I'll see you next episode. If you like The Daily Stoic and thanks for listening, you can listen early and ad free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. Prime members can listen ad free on Amazon Music. And before you go, would you tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey on

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