The Daily Stoic - Melinda Moyer On Changing The World By Raising Curious Kids

Episode Date: July 12, 2023

Ryan speaks with Melinda Moyer about how the death of her family dog became an opportunity to teach her children about emotions, why feelings of powerlessness led her to write her best-selling book How To Raise Kids Who Aren’t Assholes, why encouraging curiosity is a fantastic way to help kids grow up with positive outlooks on life, and more.Melinda Moyer is a journalist and author whose work focuses on parenting, science, and medicine. She is a contributing editor at Scientific American magazine and a regular contributor at The New York Times, as well as a faculty member in the Science, Health & Environmental Reporting program at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. Her first book, How To Raise Kids Who Aren’t Assholes, was published in July 2021 and won a gold medal in the 2022 Living Now Book Awards. Melinda’s many accolades include the 2022 Excellence in Science Journalism award from The Society for Personality and Social Psychology, the 2019 Bricker Award for Science Writing in Medicine, and first place prizes in the Awards for Excellence in Health Care Journalism. Her work can be found at melindawennermoyer.com and on Twitter @lindy2350 and Instagram @melindawmoyer.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 Holiday. Welcome to another episode of The Daily Stiller Podcast. I think a great goal in life is not to be rich, famous or important,

or accomplished, a great, and I think much more reachable goal is to just not be an asshole, like to just not be an asshole, to be a good person. Now, you can't control whether other people think you're an asshole or not, of course, even Mark's Revealist beginning a meditation talks about how even the greatest people, if someone who wishes they were dead, they want their apartment or their glad to get them out of the way or whatever it is, but you can control whether you deserve that epithet or not, right? And my guest today, Melinda Winner-Moyer, is a journalist who covers parenting and science and medicine. She's got a master's in science and health and environmental reporting from NYU.

She's written for their scientific American and the New York Times, which is this great parenting newsletter that I get every week. And the author of a book we carry here at the Painted porch, one of the parenting books I recommend all the time. I think I gave it to Jordan Klepper when I was on the daily show. I packaged up some of my favorite books.

I know he's got a young kid and I gave him a copy. But this book, How to Raise Kids Who Aren't Assholes, is so important because I think not only are we trying not to be assholes, but it's also really important that we model not being an asshole. So we don't make the next generation full of them either. It's a really great book. It's filled with reporting, but then it's also just super accessible and practical. And I was very much looking forward to this conversation. And I think we had a great one. You can follow her on Instagram at Melinda W. Moyer. You can go to MelindaWentermoyer.com to sign up for her newsletter or just search MelindaWentermoyer substack. And it should come up. I'm David Brown, the host of Wondery's podcast, Business Wars. And in our new season, two of the world's leading hotel brands, Hilton and Marriott, stare

down family drama and financial disasters. Listen to Business Wars on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts. Well, I am sorry to hear about your family dog. We just went through the same thing at our house. Oh, no. Yeah, it's really hard, right? Yeah, I feel like a lot of people that I know are all going through the same thing who have young kids because you got the dog when you got with your spouse as like a trial,

right? Yeah, absolutely. got with your spouse as like a trial, right? And then you figure out you can do it, and then you have the dog for a while, then you have kids, then you have kids and a dog, and then everything's happy, and then the dog starts to get really, really, really old, and then it is a teachable, but very sad moment for everyone at fault. Yes, it was. And yeah, I was more worried about my kids than I was about my own grief, which I feel like is a little odd.

But yeah, I was like, how, especially my 12 year old who has known Henry for almost his whole life. Right. Well, almost Henry's whole life, but definitely my son's whole life. Right. Yeah, you know, that's a big loss, but they're doing okay. They're doing okay. Yeah, you realize like your kid has known the dog their entire life. And then for me and my wife,

the dog was the thing was the longest standing relationship in our lives other than like maybe your parents and each other. You're just like who who else has been with you through all of these things? That's a really good point. Yep, and all the moves, all the different apartments we had in New York. Henry was always there. Yeah. How old was the dog? He was 14. Wow. So he had a good long life. How about yours? 16. And you, you know, obviously, when you get the dog, you have some sense of how long those kind of dogs will live for, whatever, you know, sometimes it's 10 years, sometimes it's 15 years. Sometimes it's one of those ones that lives a little longer than that. But you really can't conceive

when you're signing up for it. How long 14 or 15 or 16 years is and who you will be and what kind of affinity you will have for that person or thing by the end of it. And then you're like, why did I sign up for it? Right. Why did I put myself through this? Right. Right. Because you know it's coming. It's always going to come. It's inevitable, but yeah. No, I know. And you know, it's weird because it's always gonna come. It's inevitable, but yeah. No, I know. And it's weird, because it's grief is so weird.

It just pops up. Like, somebody will say something, and I will just be like, oh my God, I'm gonna start bawling. Yeah. Well, and you get used to having this animal in your house, right? So it's like, your life's kind of pivotorant. It's like when you get home, you have to let this thing out. It's this thing you have to do in the morning.

And you don't realize just, because it's sort of operating in the background, but you just don't realize how much your life has come to revolve around this thing that you like, but it's also just this animal in your house. You know, it's weird that it was, it's so central to your existence, but then how much you take it for granted, and then you notice once it's also just this animal. You know, it's weird that it was so central to your existence, but then how much you take it for granted.

And then you notice once it's gone, just how much space in a positive way it was taking up. Yep. That's absolutely true. I think the hardest moment for me was the Monday after he died Monday morning. I'm home alone. My kids are at school. And that's when I feed the dogs myself and kind of hang out with them and

And I came in and I was like, oh my god. I he's not here. I can't feed him and it was like that. Yeah, that sort of Routine thing was the thing that really got me, you know, yeah totally and You you sort of you know you hear people who talk about like losing someone they're really close to and it's like, you know I miss their spot in the bed or whatever. You just, it's the ordinary space that they are possessing in your life and in your physical world that, again, when they're gone, you're just like, whoa, where did that go? Right, right. And you didn't really recognize it when you had it. Like, it was just there and you didn't even notice. And then when it's gone, you're like,

oh my god, there's such a big hole in my life. Was it was it hard at the end for you guys? Like, like, how was the last couple years of the dog's life? Because I read your email piece about it, but I'm just curious. Yeah. So, you know, he was doing okay. Like, he definitely had arthritis and he would limp. But I would say the last three or four months was when we really saw this precipitous decline. Yeah, so, you know, he was doing okay. Like he definitely had arthritis and he would limp. But I would say the last three or four months was when we really saw this precipitous decline where, you know, he started having trouble

even just standing up because his legs were so weak and that was heartbreaking because he would get so stressed out about wanting to stand up and then sometimes he would like, you know, poop well, he was kind of sitting because he couldn't stand up and he, you know, and then he would be sitting and it was really sad. A lot of panting and, you know, it just seemed like he was in discomfort, you know, like panting, pacing the most voracious eater. I mean, just insanely obsessed with food. And then he started not wanting to eat sometimes. And we were like, oh, wow.

Yeah, that was right at the end. So, but, you know, it's, I think the hardest thing is, and the vet said this to us is, you never, so we ended up euthanizing him. And she said, you know, you're never gonna feel like it was the right time. Everybody always thinks it was too soon, or it was too late, and I put that in my sub-sac. And that was actually really helpful to hear

because I was so afraid it was too soon because I was like, well, he's clearly suffering. She says he's suffering, but you know, some days he's okay and like, I don't wanna end his life and take that responsibility for ending his life if he's not ready. And that was, that so that was hard, but then having her reassurance that look everybody feels this way. Really helped. power of the decision is a really tough one for which you're not going to have many equivalent decisions in your life where suddenly the power dynamic between you and the pet becomes very clear, right? Because like, while you have the pet, like even though they're the animal, they sort of run your life and they're cute and they can manipulate you and all these wonderful

things about having the dog, you sort of fool yourself into thinking that you're equals. And then it comes towards the end. And suddenly you have to make this terrible decision. And I don't know how it went for you guys, but we had the vet come to our house and do it. And so you're just sort of like in this instant, or it was this little doxin. And all of a sudden, the doxin who for behavioral issues

and personality issues always loomed very large in our lives became so like dreadfully and tearfully small. Do you know what I mean? Yes, yes. I absolutely know what you mean that I absolutely know what you mean. That moment of, you know, yeah, the moment when she really went to sleep, we were at the vet. Yeah, just sort of seeing him like crumple down. It was just the heart, that was the hardest thing. And I feel like I hope I stop having flashbacks of that because it's like really traumatizing to have witnessed that and to have decided it, to have chosen it,

to have made that kind of monumental decision for another being, it's a lot to weigh. It's a lot of responsibility. And yes, and just, oh, God, that moment was the hardest moment of all, of the whole process was just seeing him, his life sort of just come out of him and just having chosen that. Do you think part of that has to do with just how wonderfully safe and

healthy the world is comparatively? So like, you know, it is out of the ordinary to see this animal die, because first off, we're not seeing animals die around us all the time. We're not putting down our horse also. You know, like just the way and the role that animals play in our society for one, how disconnected we are from our food for another, but then also just, you know,

you're not surrounded by losing people all the time the way we might have been in the past. There strikes me. It's, it, it, it, it, it was traumatic for me too. And then also, it's how I felt guilty, but it felt, if, if it was illustrative to me that it was so traumatic because I don't think for other generations, it would have been. Yeah, right, we are not,

we do not see death in the way that people used to see death all the time around them. We're really in this sort of bubble that we were protected from it. Yeah, I think that is a big part of it too. I mean, this was honestly, I haven't dealt with a lot of grief yet in my life. My parents are alive. I actually haven't had to deal with the loss of, well it's

weird, the back stories of my pets that I've had in the past, like they would die when I was you know away or one dog I didn't even know when she had died because my parents had given her a way towards the end of her life And so I just feel like I it's a very new experience for me in general Yeah, it was interesting for me. I was thinking about I had a dog when I was a kid and you know My parents just like took it to the vet and I didn't see it again And I was talking to my father-in-law and he was like, yeah, that's what that's what we did You would just take it to the vet You would drop it off at the front of the vet and then go.

I don't know if we're torched, like perhaps part of the reason it was traumatic or maybe it's healthy, I don't know, but certainly people weren't having the vet come to their house and put the dog down in front of them when I was a kid. And before that, I mean, I there wasn't even a vet involved, you know, there'd be like a firearm or something, right? So I don't, I don't know what that says about where we are as a society, either if that's progress or if it's some weird torture we've come up with. That's a really good question. I don't know. Yeah, it was a lot to be there.

It was a lot. And I remember telling myself, oh, I want to be there so that he's with us and he's not scared in the moment of his death. It was like doing it for him in some way. But I don't know whether it actually matters. Like, I don't know. Like, did he actually have a more peaceful death

because we were right there? Or was he so old? And I mean, he was like mostly blind and deaf at that point too. Like, did he even know? Yeah. Was it worth it? I don't know. How did you talk to your kids about it?

So, you know, we broached the topic. As soon as we knew that he was declining, we started talking about it in a sort of abstract sense of like, we don't know exactly when this is going to happen. But Henry's getting old. You know, he's he's had such a wonderful life. But he might not be around for that much longer. So, you know, we just want you to know that we wanted them to kind of be prepared for the concept of death.

And as it became clear when he was really declining rapidly and we knew we were going to want to euthanize him, we brought it up again and we said, you know, Henry really seems to be struggling now and we've talked to the vet and we think that, you know, it's going to be soon that he's going to die. And I remember trying to introduce them to the concept of euthanasia. And at first it was like, it went all terribly wrong because we said so, he's suffering. And we think maybe it would be best to put him out

of his misery. And my 12 year old was like, you're going to murder Henry. And he was horrified. And I was like, oh God, oh God. I'm like back pedal, back pedal, back pedal. And I said, well, no, not exactly. And we had some more conversations that night. You know, I can't remember exactly what happened right at that moment.

But then later on, you know, I said, I want to talk to you some more about Henry. And I said, you know, he can't really communicate with us, but the vet has seen how he's behaving and what he's doing, and those are clear signs to her that he's in pain and probably in constant pain in a way that we have never experienced. And, you know, and I said, so sometimes in those situations, the kindest thing you can do for an animal is to let them go and is to, you know, is to let them die. And he really sat with that for a minute and he said, so do you think if Henry could talk to us, he would ask us to do this? And I said, well, that's a really good question.

That is a good question. Yeah, right. I don't know, but I think it's definitely possible that he would want this. And he really, that really helped. And he said, okay, he said, if I can think about this as something that's really kind to do for Henry, something that he would actually want and would give him relief, then I can wrap my head around that,

and that's a lot easier. And it really helped, I mean, that really helped him, like the whole time, even the day of when he said goodbye, he said, I feel okay about this because I really do think we're helping him and we're doing something for him. And so, you know, he was still sad and everything, but he wasn't resentful of what we were doing.

He wasn't like, he understood on some level. And I think that helped. Yeah, and how did you, how did you talk to them about the emotions and the grief? Like, my oldest is six, took how did you, how did you talk to them about the emotions and the grief like my oldest who's six took it extremely hard, which was surprising because he didn't really like the dog, like he and the dog for some reason towards the end, the dog decided that it was like his room where he would go to the bathroom, you know, despite unlimited trips outside and stuff. So they kind of had this contentious, not contentious,

but they were not like, it wasn't like a boy in his dog, like best friends kind of a thing. Cause the dog had been so old towards the end, but then as soon as we told them that, hey, this is probably what the timeline is gonna be like and the dog should be sick. He was just like bereft for like three or four days and like crying and so my, and the dog should be sick. He was just bereft for three or four days, and crying, and so my wife and I really had to think about

how do you let them have those emotions and sit with it and deal with what is a terrible, sort of unavoidable reality, when as a parent, you don't want that to be happening. You know, like you you want to take away your kids' pain. That's your sort of instinctive human reaction, but that's also not fair, and that also doesn't help them process or get over this thing that they're they're having to to deal with as themselves. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, this whole idea of how do we deal with our kids' negative emotions is something

to talk about a lot in my book. Because yeah, our instinct is often to just try to fix it and say, oh, you're fine, you know, don't cry, right? Because, I mean, of course, we don't want our kids to be unhappy. We hate seeing it. It's like, it's hard for us. But we know that when we do try to get rid of their emotions, tell them that their emotions aren't really valid, that that, you know, we're ultimately

undermining their emotional experience, and that's really unsettling for them. So it can make them feel ashamed, like, oh, something wrong with me that I feel this way, maybe, you know, what's wrong with me. They might then try to like repress or suppress their emotions and we know from lots of research that this only really backfires, it can make feelings get bigger and more out of control. So, you know, what I did, because I also knew that grief, I mean, it makes, of course,

they're going to be sad, right? It's a really appropriate emotion in the circumstance. So, makes, of course, they're going to be sad, right? It's a really appropriate emotion in the circumstance. So I just really kind of, I didn't try to exaggerate it in any way, but I just validated and listened and said, yeah, this is so hard. Like, of course, you feel sad. This is so hard. But the interesting thing was I did notice

that my eight-year-old, when the night before we were going to take Henry in, she really wasn't showing a lot of feelings and she's usually a very emotional kid, like she does not shy away from showing her emotions. And she also wasn't as close to Henry as my 12-year-old wasn't. So I also decided to say at dinner, look, there is no one way to grieve. There's no one right way to grieve. And sometimes you can love someone or an animal and you don't always feel sad. And that's okay. That doesn't mean that you didn't love him.

It doesn't mean that you didn't love him as much as everyone else did. And I said, sometimes you might feel sad one minute and then totally find the next minute. You may find that some days are hard and other days are easy. I said, or you might not really feel a whole lot of anything. And I just want you to know that that's okay too. That's perfectly normal. And she, that night at bedtime, she said to me, you know, mom, that was really helpful because I'm not that sad right

now. And I don't know whether that'll change, but I thought something was wrong with me for not feeling something and not be sad. So I think that was helpful too. I'm glad that I said that. Yeah, it was kind of a mixed bag for us because he's had trouble with his emotions. So like, when he was changing schools, we thought, okay, of course, you're probably very sad. And he was like, not only am I not sad, I don't miss any of these people. You know, he was very, we were worried or concerned that he was having trouble being in touch with his emotions generally. And sometimes we can tell like when he's hurt, he struggles to be vulnerable or to share like,

hey, I feel this way, you would get embarrassed or whatever. So when he sort of overwhelmed by it, when the damn breaks on this thing, we're obviously like, okay, we would like you not to feel this way because it doesn't seem like it's fun for you. And on the other hand, we're like, this is good. This is how this is an experience or, yeah, this is an experience you should be in touch with. So it's sort of caught us by surprise. But it kind of struck me that maybe the final sort of act of service or a lesson that the dog was teaching or the

bit of value in the relationship was, or is maybe this is what pets are, is an opportunity for us to sort of experience all these things, but sped up, right? Cause dogs age faster than us. They don't live as long as us. And, you know, they teach us all these valuable emotional lessons, whether it's unconditional support

or being present or being fun and play. And then finally, at the end, they force us to reckon with all the emotions that they bring up in us. Yes. I think that's absolutely true. I remember interviewing someone who was, I think a psychologist who was an expert on grief and children. And he said, I recommend that parents get pets so that their kids can experience death and grieving as a child, because it's actually very helpful to go through that. And I've kind of come to the belief that

most really hard things in parenting ultimately are kind of like opportunities. You know, they're hard in the moment, but there's conversations you might have that you wouldn't have otherwise had with your kids, there's, you know, new ways of connecting you might discover, you know, there's often really good things that come out of bad things. for him, which we don't get the ability to do as often as we would say, like or hope, because he is sometimes emotionally closed off. And so there was something terrible, but also sweet about the entire thing, which I, that is also one of the things about death, right? Is the funeral brings everyone together and you connect and suddenly in light of the loss or the unexpectedness of it, there's also the reminder of what you took for granted,

how this could happen to anyone. Death is this thing that we try to push away, but when it's close enough and we can't deny it, there is a lot that it teaches us. Yeah. And I bet too, just his experience of showing his feelings and your supportive response to it was really helpful for him for the future.

He may have had this idea of like, I don't know what mom and dad will do if I really show how I feel. You know, there could have been some of that going on in the past where now he's done it. And, and, and you know, you were supportive and it was okay. And so maybe this will help him do that more, you know, you never know. Although one thing my wife said was like, why did we do this to ourselves? Not just having a dog, but she was like, why did we have children? This is, if this is what you feel with the risk of having a dog.

I mean, there's a Joan Didian quote where she says something like having a, having a child makes you a hostage to fortune and you are never not afraid. Just the overwhelmingness of, again, losing what is, you know, at the core level, like just this animal that lives in your house. I mean, how do you, how could you even contemplate a world in which something could happen to this person? I know, you know, three days after we lost Henry, our school went into a real lockdown. So that was like boom, boom, like, oh my god, I was, yeah, everything was fine. They were fine, but it was terrifying.

You know, it was the first time I think in the school's history that gone into a lockdown. And it was because some guy on the street right next to the school set off fireworks or firecrackers in the middle of the day. And it sounded like gunshots. And so immediately, like, my daughter was on the playground. She was pretty close to where the firecrackers went off. And apparently all the kids were screaming and running inside and thinking, oh my god, are we getting shot at?

I mean, it was awful. But the school handled it really beautifully and everybody's okay. I mean, physically okay and emotionally, mostly okay. But yeah, that coming right after the loss of Henry II, it was like, oh my God. No, it's like that thing, like having a kid is your heart running around

outside your body. And I mean, obviously I love your book and the idea of how to raise kids in our nation is so funny, but it's like like how do you deal with a world that is filled with assholes and people that do terrible things and leaders that don't do what they are supposed to do. And it's, we really are hostages to fortune

and hostages to assholes. So if you think about it, it's this incredibly vulnerable place that every person is inherently in and then when you have people that you're responsible to, you're just exponentially more exposed. Yeah, it's true. But the interesting thing I've learned about the book, I mean, yes, it's how to not raise assholes, but then in not raising assholes, you also help kids cope with all sorts of things.

One of the reasons that people act like assholes is because they don't have enough emotional literacy. They don't know how to deal with situations. They just haven't had a lot of opportunities to understand how to deal with different situations. So, in looking into the research on how to raise good kids, you ultimately find that it does a lot more than that. Focusing on whether they're going to grow to be good human beings is really also focusing on supporting them in the ways they need to be supported so they can handle the really

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You can listen to Sports Explains the World early and add free on Wondery Plus. Yeah, it's like that expression hurt people, hurt people, and it's true, but it's very hard to care about those people and they're hurting when they are potentially hurting or putting the people you care about most at risk. Yep, that's very true. Yeah, I really have no empathy for the guy who set off the firecrackers,

who then was arrested for cocaine possession, and I think he had like a ton of cannabis as well. Yeah. So yeah, they're... Yeah. But and that's just like, you know, that's poor decision making, but no one was actually endangered, right? Like, that's the, hey, you scared the shit out of me. Don't ever do that again, as opposed to, you know, trying to raise kids in a world in which, you know, people would rather spend their political capital making making certain kids feel very afraid, and then do nothing to protect

all children from very real and terrifying threats that don't really happen anywhere else in the world. And we can leave it at that without having to go too much in the specifics of any particular political or partisan issue, but it's just sort of like, how is a parent supposed to wake up and be okay with a world where you have to get alerts about your school being locked down? And we won't do anything about it. Yeah.

Oh, it's so infuriating. So infuriating. I'm sure you read that piece in the Atlantic a while ago where it's sort of like, what's the title? Like the cruelty is the point. There seems to be sort of a political strain in our politics, but then also in society where there is this just sort of,

not just in difference to suffering or pain that other people feel, but almost a relishing in it. Like by definition, what it is to be an asshole, you know? And I just think about those people and I go, if the only difference I make while I'm here is that I raise two people that are not like those people, that's my job. Yeah. I mean, that was the inspiration for my book.

I felt like so powerless in general to everything that was happening. I mean, I started writing the book in 2017. There was a lot of bad stuff. No, that's not true. I didn't. That's totally lie. 2020, there was a lot of stuff happening. What was happening in 2020?

Yeah, what I don't know, I can't remember. And I remember feeling just so frustrated and so hopeless and powerless about the world. And then it kind of dawned on me that like, well, here's one thing that I can do is make sure that I raise good human beings who, you know, maybe will make the world a better place. And then I was like, if I can reach a bunch of parents, and if we can all work toward this goal, then we are collectively shaping the next generation.

And that felt like a form of activism. Like that felt like the thing that I could do that would both make me feel a little less hopeless. And maybe, yeah, actually do something good. Like that was the whole impetus for the book really. Have you read Mary Laura Philpott's book, Bob Shelter? I have not. It's a series of essays. It's very good a lot of it's about parenting but she she tells a story about her father who in the 60s or 70s her dad's he was a doctor, but he was one of the consultants on the,

they lived in DC, his job was coming up with the plan for how they would evacuate the president and the leaders of the government in case of a major nuclear attack, right? And she's talking about, she only sort of realizes this later because he couldn't have talked about it, but like her dad's job was to go to work every day and prepare for effectively the end of the world in which his family would probably not be among the survivors, right? Like, it's not like coming up with this plan,

like he gets a seat on the the plane or a ticket to the bunker. And she's just sort of thinking about like how did he how did he do that every day? How did you how did how do you exist in a world where you have to contemplate the you know the unfathomable and she just sort of goes like I don't think you do you just wake up and you make sandwiches and you take them to soccer practice. Like there is kind of this, you have to be aware of it and then also put it entirely out of your mind

and just put one foot in front of the other. That's what parenting is. Yep, yeah, I mean, in some ways in a much less intense way, I feel like we are doing this every day, right? I mean, yeah, yeah, that's all of our lives in some way. And it is really hard, the cognitive dissonance of that, though, is just when you really sit down and think about it, you're like, what the hell? This is crazy. But, you know, let's keep going. I'm going to go take the dog for a walk, you know? Totally, right. How do you raise kids in the middle of a pandemic?

How do you raise them in the midst of political unrest? How do you raise them in midst of fentanyl epidemic, a violence epidemic? Like you create a little bubble in your house, sometimes more literally than figuratively, and you just try to raise them to not be like that. Yeah, it's very, very true. Yeah, there's a lot that I, you know,

I'm pondering another book and that will be more in the like way of how do we raise kids in this impossible world? Like how do we teach them the skills they need to survive? And how do we deal with it ourselves and wrap our heads around it? Because yeah, that's, I mean, I feel like I feel like the people who subscribe to my sub stack, they're all parents and that's, they keep bringing that up. It's like, how do we do this in this world? And how do we keep going

every day? I mean, yeah. I mean, obviously in the past, there's always been a belief that the future would be better. And I do think the future will be better. But I wonder how much of this is also a perennial and a timeless thing. Is there ever a generation where they were like, not only is today amazing, but tomorrow is going to be amazing, and there's zero pro... I think it's probably always felt like the world was ending or coming to pieces. Yeah, I think that's true. I mean, I've certainly, I know that's true with new technologies that appear and everybody's like, oh my god,

this is going to be the end of the world. People are, it's even, like, things that, you know, novels. I think there was like fear over, you know, what novels we're going to do to people when they were first written in books and so yeah Now the thing we're desperate for people to read we were at one point convinced would be the end of civilization Right, I mean, it's crazy to think about but And there's always and in the like parenting world that there's always every single

Generation has a kids these days like they're you know, they're terrible like they're awful But every single generation goes through that. And so, yeah, I do feel like, I mean, and I get a little bit of comfort in that, I will say, thinking about like, well, maybe this is just how we're supposed to feel, how everybody feels when they're raising kids to some degree. But on the other hand, it is pretty bad. Yeah, I think it's just like, it's always been bad. That doesn't mean that it's good, but it's just like, yeah, if you had a kid born in America in 1931, you know, not only did you have no conception

of the wonderfulness of the future, you also had no sense of the terrible that lay ahead, but you were also just in the middle of the Great Depression and they would gladly trade places with you right now Absolutely. Yeah, right. I mean right and when you talk to those if you talk to those people that lived through that they're they're not like Nothing was ever the same You know, we're still licking our wounds. They're like that's kind of what I was trying to remind myself during the pandemic Like speaking to my grandparents who lived through the depression and the war

and all the stuff, you know, they're like, those were transformational events that shaped who they were in a positive way, right? Or they chose for it to shape them in a positive way. Obviously they didn't choose to go through it and they wouldn't go through it again if they had the choice. But, you know, the idea that just because these things

are happening to your kids as they are developing, or to you, doesn't, it's probably, experience has shown that in retrospect, I think Freud has a thing, he says in retrospect, the struggle will strike you as most beautiful. And that's probably how our parents look back at what were dark moments

when we were children. And that just as we look that way in events in our own lives and our kids will hopefully think the same thing or know the same thing. If we give them the tools to be able to see life that way. Yeah, no, that's true. I mean, obviously there's a difference between, you know, challenges and trauma here, but we know from the research on resilience and how it develops and kids is, you kids have to go through hard things in order to learn how to cope with difficult things

in order to realize that this is part of life, they can get through it, they might even grow from it. I mean, if we're constantly protecting them, then they do not have, they don't have the experiences they need to really become resilient in the face of challenges. So yeah, on some level, these can be very positive if our kids have the tools to cope with them and whatnot.

One of the things I try to think about is like, do I have the tools, can I get through this? And you just go, well, what have you been through before and you're still standing, right? And also what have your ancestors been through? So to me, it's not a question of capability, right? We have the capability. The question is, what's the story we're gonna tell ourselves

about that, how are we gonna integrate it into our lives? And this is second, this is unrelated to whether it was fair or whose fault it is, whether it was voluntary or not, whether we would choose it again, whether we should take steps to make sure it never happens again. This is all unrelated to the fact that it did happen and now you have to figure out how to integrate it in your life, not just because you have to carry on,

but as a parent, there are people who are counting on you. Yeah, the way that you frame it, the way your perspective on it makes such a difference in terms of how it affects you and what you do with it, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, I was just thinking it's like,

how do you not let the fact that there are assholes turned you into an asshole? That is the mission we're all on. Yeah, right. So I mean, I think with My kids when there's something that somebody has done in the world that's terrible, you know, often it's just an opportunity for conversations. So I'm trying to think of like, I mean, when Trump was president, we had a lot of conversations about

why is this happening? Why does he do this? You know, really trying to bring some curiosity to the situation. This is something I'm realizing, like, is kind of my, like, the most helpful thing I've learned from all the research I've done is instead of immediately like reacting both to things in the world and to things that my kids are doing and judging them and, you know, interpreting them in some, like, huge, I try to get curious about it. And like, okay, this terrible thing has happened. What can I take from this to help my kids grow or to help my kids learn?

And so I remember we're almost, tomorrow's the anniversary of you all day, right, as we're recording this. And I really struggled as to whether to talk to my kids about it. But I also knew that they might hear about it at school, and they might hear really inaccurate information. So with my 12 year old, especially, I said, OK,

I need to talk to them about this. And it ended up, it was a hard conversation talking about what happened. But then we started talking about what keeps him safe. And we were talking about, you know, why, you know, how worried should we be about these things? And he started talking, it just led to like a really productive conversation about like fear and about risk and about statistics and about things like that.

So when terrible things are happening, I often think there are ways to use those, a kind of weird way to our benefit with our kids to teach them a lesson, to have a conversation, to show, to give them space for their feelings and show that you support them. So I try to think of it that way. When you mention the word,

maybe I'll just pull at this thread, but I think you mentioned the word being curious there. Which is something I'm trying to work on. Some of the kids at my son's school are religious and we are not. And for some reason, I don't know where he picked it up, but he's very not religious. It's, which, you know, it's fine, fine by me. But, but he sometimes asks about it or says something about it or we're living Texas, so these things come up.

And, you know, he has a very sort of, I don't wanna say judgmental, but he has a very, you know, sort of quick understanding or definitive, he makes definitive statements about what is or isn't real or about whether church is worth going to or not going to. And one of the things that struck me about is at a younger point in my life,

I probably was making statements like that myself. If you asked Atheist Ryan at 20, what I thought about religion, I'd give you a lot of my opinion. And now, and what I'm trying to talk to him about, is like, well, why do you think they think that? Or what do you think it does for them? Right? Like he's convinced that church is boring, even though he's never been. We've never taken him, but he's very convinced that church is quite boring and he would never want to go. And so I try to

talk to them about the fact that to the vast majority of people who go, it is not boring. And it's something that they look forward to, and why might that be? And it doesn't have to change our opinion, but it's interesting to, it's interesting and then also just life changing to think about what it's doing for other people.

Yeah, and so you're doing a lot of really good things there. We know from research that there's a skill called theory of mind that develops in kids at different ages, but it is basically the ability to put yourself in somebody else's shoes and to take their perspective. And when I started digging into the research on not raising Assels this concept of theory of mind came up over and over and over and over Where we know that the ability to take another person's perspective is like really a foundational part of compassion of

generosity of all sorts of things and So the more that we can you know kind kind of say, okay, you know, you might not be religious, but let's think about why other people might be. Let's think about what it might give them. Just that ability to sort of think about and know that somebody else can have a different experience and different perspective and different beliefs from you is incredibly important for kids and incredibly helpful, you know, kids with high good theory of mind skills are less likely to bully, like there's all sorts of ties to theory of mind.

So I think that's fantastic and it's funny because we're in kind of a similar situation in our house with our feelings on religion and the kids having a lot of questions. My daughter just went to a friend's first communion this past weekend and it was the first time they had been in a church. I mean, I guess they'd been in a church for a birthday party once, but

and they were like, what is this? And they were very curious and they had all these questions and, you know, we were really trying to keep our answers neutral and, you know, let's, yeah, let's let's talk about why why people believe this and what it might mean to them. Let's talk about why people believe this and what it might mean to them. Yeah, but yeah, no, I think that that's a really helpful way to talk about people who are different from us and really just trying to understand their motivations and whatnot. Yeah, I've told this story before, but we met these people who were men and night and so I was just sort of talking to them about, where they went to church and what it was like and then they invited us to church

and I was like, oh yeah, sure, maybe we'll come. I was obviously had no intention of coming and my son was like, no, no, no, we definitely don't wanna come. Like he was like, he was like, why are you even, why are you even, you know, intert, and so not only did we have to have the discussion about, you know, they don't think it's boring and they like it.

And this is the life that they are choosing to lead, but also speaking about not being an asshole of like, you can be polite and respectful to other people's beliefs, even if they are completely baffling, if not outright, even if they are completely baffling, if not outright, even if they seem outright crazy to you, which is what I was trying to explain I was doing. I didn't need to let them know that I would never go to their church. Right, yeah, yeah.

And also, I mean, I think too, having these conversations like this with your kid, you know, you're teaching him to be More curious as well. I recently for my sub-sac I wanted to write about like why are kids so Irrigant and certain about you know their beliefs. I mean my 12-year-old is like a lot You know, it just makes these statements and I'm, you have no idea what you're talking about. Like a zero. And yet, he just makes these proclamations. And it was super interesting.

So again, like I was curious about why are kids like this? And I talked to some researchers who study it. And first of all, it was so fascinating. There's research showing that kids actually believe that bragging and boastfulness and like arrogance is helpful because they see it as they're giving information to other people that might be useful. And so they actually see it as like a, yeah, as an act of generosity in some way.

This is their perceptions, which I thought was totally bonkers and really interesting. And the second thing is, is it's quite evolutionarily adaptive researchers think. So kids are bad at so much and they're learning new things all the time that they're just, you know, that are really hard. And so they kind of build up in their heads this optimism about how quickly they'll learn things, how much they know. And they do this in a way to keep going. Like, I have to believe that I'm super smart and know everything about everything in order to keep my confidence up. And it's like an adaptive thing that kids do.

That all kids do really. They're like, I'm going to play for the Lakers when I'm grown up in your letter. Wow, you know, and they're saying this because they really believe that they're going to be able to do that. And it's a way that, you know, it's a, it's kind of a rationalization that keeps them like continuing to try and getting up in the face of falling down because they think, well, I'm going to be able to do this. It's going to be fine. That kind of brings to mind this story that I actually have in the book that I'm writing right now. There's a story about Jeff Bezos.

He's like eight or nine, and he's with his grandparents. And he just heard this radio report that was talking about how many years smoking takes off your life, right? Like how many packs a day for how long, how much smoking takes off your life, right? Like how many packs a day for how long? How much that takes off your life? So he's sitting in the car with his grandparents, his grandmother is a smoker and he's doing the math and he does the math and he goes grandma, just exciting news, you know, you have cut off, you know,

14 years of your life or whatever. And she promptly burst into tears and his grandfather, you know, 14 years of your life or whatever. And she promptly burst into tears and his grandfather, you know, takes him aside and he says, I think this is something like Jeff, you know, someday you're gonna realize that it's easier to be clever than kind. Which I think is such an interesting response to what happened.

I mean, ideally the lesson would also, you know, stipulate, you were of course right and grandma should not be smoking, but the way that you passed on this information, you and I were talking about the theory of mine earlier, took no account of how this news would be received by someone who probably deep down already knows this information. But I think there is something, it's not just in kids, but it's in all people where you are very convinced that being right or being correct or having the proper information is the only variable that counts in a discussion or in life.

And so there's this kind of relishing of throwing the facts in someone's face and not understanding all of the emotion, all of the experience, all of the reasons that went into the person being the way that they are and that that's probably not going to help them change their mind and is probably more about you than it is about them. more about you than it is about that. Yeah, that's really interesting.

And I wonder too about like schooling in our education system and how much that sort of reinforces, you know, all the focus on testing and right answers and how much that kind of reinforces this idea that, you know, being right is kind of the most important thing. Yeah, but no, in that situation, like having that conversation about like, well, okay, house, house grandma gonna actually take this and what are all the things that my might she smoke, like that's again,

like injecting this sort of curiosity and yeah, and the theory of mind, which I mean, yeah, I feel like it constantly comes up in our house. Last night my daughter got out, Starbursts for dessert and started eating them and was like, Starbursts are the most delicious candy in the world right in front of my son who has braces and can't eat Starbursts.

And then you got so mad and she's like, why did he get bad? And I'm like, well, let's think about it. And I think part of me thinks that she did on purpose to rile him up a little too, but she denies that. But it's just constant, you know, this sort of lack of a, maybe lack of awareness

or maybe actual real awareness, but using it for not good of other people's feelings and other people's experiences. Well, it strikes me that most of us have some sort of emotional age similar to that where it's like, if I can just show you that you're a fucking idiot, then of course you will change your mind, right? Like, like the the teenageness of the way that we think we will get someone to switch sides on an issue or change or whatever. It's like, this is the 16-year-old in all of us operating from a level of having read one book about something

and ceased all curiosity, gotten, you know, totally incapable of any empathy or emotional regulation and just, you know, trying again and again with the same ineffective approach and getting angrier and angrier when it's not only not convincing the other people, but it's driving them further down whatever, you know, road they've been going. down whatever road they've been going. Yeah, and we know that from research that the best way to, I mean, it's hard to change people's minds, but the best way to at least get people to engage with your perspective is to approach their perspective with curiosity, try to understand it, you know, be empathized with them in some way.

That's like a precursor to it, but yet, yeah, we do it the wrong way all the time. Well, one of the pieces of advice I got that's helped me as a parent is someone said, your kids aren't giving you a hard time. They're having a hard time. And so, even to understand the theory of mind of them, which is like, they're a 16 year old raging with hormones who knows nothing about anything, or they're six, and they're not sure when you are angry with them if x, y, or z will happen. You know, there's just all these things that they don't know. And if you can try to understand there's this German word, um, well, I don't know if you know this word, but it's like, it's like,

it comes from a famous essay called, like, what is it like to be a bat? And to think about how the bat, how a bat perceives the world, right? And so I try to think about what is it like to be a six year old or a two year old or three year old? It's fucking hard. It's confusing and weird and scary,

and you're dependent on these people, and you have no freedom. And like, of course they do 90% of the things that drive us nuts. It's not a reflection of their character in any way, or are parenting in any way. It's just a reality of the weird situation that they're in. Yeah, this idea has really transformed my own parenting,

and again, it's all about like being curious about your kid, right? But I found that it's so common for parents to make these, to interpret their kid's behavior in a way that is just totally not accurate, right? We tend to think they're doing this on purpose, they're doing this to rile me up, to interpret their kids' behavior in a way that is just totally not accurate, right? We tend to think they're doing this on purpose, they're doing this to rail me up.

And 99% of the time, that's not the case. And it comes up like over and over in just daily things. Like, so recently my daughter, we found that she'd eaten like a bunch of snacks in her bed and her bed was like covered in crumbs. And the initial reaction that my husband and I had was like, why would you, why would you think this is okay? Like of course, you know, but then I'm like,

well, first of all, we've never actually had a conversation with her about where she can eat. So she had no idea this was a rule because we've never communicated it to her. That's something that I think parents do a lot as they assume their kids should know better when actually, you know, the reasons that we have this rule are not clear to kids at all and, you know, they can't connect those dots and they have no idea why

you're upset, right? So first of all, we haven't communicated that we care about this, that we have expectations around where they eat. And, you know, second of all, yeah, she doesn't think about crumbs in the bed. Like, she doesn't know that, you know, ants could come into the house. We have these ideas that they will understand the implications of what they're doing in ways that they absolutely do not understand. And yeah, getting curious about like another thing was my daughter used to have meltdowns right when we announced it was dinner time. And my husband was like, she's doing this to ruin dinner. And I was like, okay, let's think about this. You know, she's, this year's like six years old at the time.

I'm like, okay, but also maybe she's really tired, because it's the end of a long day. Maybe she's really hungry, which, you know, hangar is really important. I'm 90% of all issues in life. Yeah. I'm like, maybe that's what's happening. And so we started moving dinner a little earlier. I started giving her a snack before,

and it like solved the problem. And yet we still had gone to this place of like, it's, you know, she's doing it intentionally to ruin our dinner when that couldn't have been further. When it's like, what was the plan, right? Because the plan was probably not to spill the crumbs, right? The plan was probably to keep them on the plate, to eat nicely. And then you're remembering this is an eight year old with mediocre reflexes and easily

distracted and all of these things. Like I was actually just going through this with someone who works for me. They had sent something out for one of my newsletters and it didn't. I looked at it and I was immediately not pleased with what had happened, right? And I said, like, why did you mess this up? And we were having this discussion about it being messed up and they thought I was going to be really upset. so they were not responding. And then when we finally sat down and talked about it, they were telling me it wasn't was an error and I was upset that it had

happened out of sloppiness. As soon as you explained to me that this was intentional and it's just a call that I disagree with, I see it completely differently, right? Because I want you to take risks, I want you to try things, I'm paying you to have your own ideas. But there's a difference between like, let's say negligence and creative risk, right? And I think sometimes just stopping and thinking to pull us back to parenting, but to all people, like, what were they trying to do? Because they were probably not trying to make your life miserable. They were probably not trying to break something. to make your life miserable. They were probably not trying to break something. They were trying to have fun with this toy that requires water. They just couldn't think through that they were dumping the water in the thing that doesn't have a bottom. And so the water was inevitably

going to end up all over the floor. And also, in the big scheme of things, do I really care that there's water on the floor? Like how easy is this problem to solve? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, no, I mean, this stuff comes up all the time. And then there's also like the biological reasons why they can't do things the way we want them to do them. I mean, a while ago, for my newsletter, I decided to look into like, why do kids have such terrible table manners?

And I talked to this occupational therapist who talked about how like the, first of all, like, if they're feet are dangling, they, if you're feet are dangling from a chair, you have to use so much more core strength to sit up straight, which I didn't know. And kids don't have much core strength. Right. And also the placement of the table, like if you're really short, like a kid and it's up higher, that's also just it's much harder to eat when you have a table that's like underneath your chin. And that causes them to like, you know, have more problems like sitting still. And, and you know, all these things that I was like, so kids aren't trying, like they're not trying to annoy us by like sitting on their kneeling at the table or not being able to sit still.

It's actually physically kind of impossible for a lot of kids to do this based on their muscle strength and the other ways that it's positioned. And I was like, wow, that's crazy. Or just like how late in life, and recent it is for me to be like, I am responding this way because I am stressed out or because I'm hungry or because my routine has been disrupted

or because I'm mad about this thing that's happening in the world, right? And the idea that like three year olds who has not been on this planet very long would be capable of a similar amount of self-awareness is impossible. And then also, yeah, do you just think about people who were born a long time ago

so they didn't get taught certain things or people who didn't have, it's like at the great Gatsby, you know, he opens, you have to remember that most people do not have opens up, you have to remember that some, most people do not have the advantages that you have had. That's the advice that Gatsby gets, that Caraway gets from his father. And just trying to realize that most people are behaving,

the way they're behaving, out of some sort of adaptation or out of ignorance, not because it is some plot to torture you or make you miserable or reject the rules of civilized society. Yeah, right. And just taking that moment with your kid when they do something that's frustrating and like reminding yourself of that,

like, okay, he's probably not doing this on purpose or you know, what could be really at the root of this? I feel like that is the thing that saves me from screaming. I mean, I still sometimes scream at my kids. Of course. I don't get me wrong. But we all do, right?

Sure. But that's the thing that saves me sometimes from it. Like the minute I'm about to explode and then I'm like, oh, maybe he's hungry. Oh, yeah, right. He's sick. That's why he's doing this. So whatever it is, it just say, yeah, it's like,

oh, all of a sudden the anger's gone. I am just learning to recognize when I am hungry or tired or whatever, right? Like, and I've had decades of experience like with that cause and effect and I never made the connection. You know what I mean? Like, this person has been capable of feeding themselves

for a matter of months. And I'm like, why are you being an asshole? And it's like, I'm the asshole. I'm the asshole. I'm the one that decided, taking this phone call could bump dinner by 30 minutes. And now I'm holding them accountable for pushing their brother down. You know, it's

like I'm the only one who is capable or capable of, you know, accepting some of the responsibility here is me. Yes, yes, yes, yes. No, no, I, well, I love the book no, well, I love the book, and I love the newsletter, and I think your stuff's great, and I just like the idea too of like, let's both radically lower and raise the bar of what we're trying to do, right? It's like success is,

you're not trying to raise a doctor necessarily, you're not trying to raise the next CEO of a Fortune 500 company. You're just trying to raise someone who's not an asshole. And yeah, also realizing that there are a lot of people who have become CEOs of Fortune 500 companies and become doctors or whatever, and ban assholes. So what's the harder thing to do? You know, like what is actually the rarer target to hit? It's being a decent, contributing member of society. That's the hardest thing to do.

Yeah, it is, it is. You know what I thought was so interesting, I'm reading the daily dad. I'm loving it. And all of the lessons in there are, I mean, pretty much all of them are in my book too, but we came to them from such different places, right? So, you know, I, everything that I wrote in my book comes from research, you know, the research that's been done and what helps kids and what makes them more compassionate and kind and all this stuff. And nothing is in there that doesn't have, you know, isn't backed by science in some way.

And yet, you know, and then the same lessons are in the daily dad coming from the Stoics and, you know, philosophy. And it's just, I thought that was so cool how it's like they basically, you know, converge in the same exact place. A friend of mine was a professor at MIT, and he did all these sort of interesting experiments. He would look at these huge data sets and find things about what people were privately expressing about their thoughts on the internet. And he sort of these big, like one of his big break, one of the big discoveries he found is that young people

associate success with accomplishment and older people with contentment. His name is CEP Camaro. But anyways, he, I was talking to him about his research once and he said, the very humbling, but also beautiful thing about all cutting edge research is that it, it mostly just confirms ancient wisdom. Wow. Yeah, I mean, that's what it seems like. Because it was interesting. The only reason it's ancient wisdom is that it has stood the test of time. We tossed out most of the stuff that wasn't based on some replicable part of the human experience.

But then there are certain things where the research conflicts with what we tend to do as parents, but I guess that maybe doesn't mean it wasn't, you know, it might have been different in the ancient wisdom, but you know, for instance, like talking to kids about race, you know, for so long, white parents were like the best thing to do is to, you know, be colorblind and not ever talk about skin color. And then the research was like, oh, actually,

the opposite is true. And so it's interesting because maybe it does confirm ancient wisdom, but at the same time, so much of what I uncovered in the research did conflict with what my instincts were in some way. But that's a good idea. I totally get what you're saying there, although that's an interesting example of like just some weird cultural practice we picked up like 50 years ago, right?

Like like the color brown color blind were past the terrible things that we used to do. That's not, you know, that's not like Aristotle. Okay. Yeah. True. True, true. But I guess still the lesson there is like talk to your kids about stuff, connect with them, conversations with them about the world, and that's probably something that's been recommended for a long time. Just pretending something doesn't exist is not a strategy for dealing with it, which is that's ancient wisdom right there. Yeah. Actually, there's a great James Baldwin quote I love where he says something like, just because you face something doesn't mean you can change it, but you can't change

anything you don't face. And so there is a lot of like stick our head in the sandness with parenting stuff. That is kind of conventional wisdom if not ancient wisdom unfortunately. Yeah yeah no we do it all the time we don't want to have the hard conversations about sex, about violence, about you know politics, about anything. We want to protect our kids, but that's just ultimately it backfires in a big way. Yes, yes. And doesn't it only set, yeah, it sets them up for being unable to deal with those things

when they inevitably arise. I mean, don't you think so much of the, um, all the things we know about why, you know, a hereditary monarchy is a terrible system of government, is also wisdom about why snowplow parenting is a terrible parenting strategy. Yeah, okay. Like if you give them everything they want and you spoil them and you remove all adversity

from life and you entitled, you know, give them a sense that they're entitled to. I mean, you're just raising a monster like it's not going to work. Yeah, absolutely. Right. Yeah, we know kids need bounders. They need challenges. They need hardship in some way. Absolutely. And when you clear that away, then they are completely inept adults.

Yes, yes, who should not be in charge of anyone? No, no, they shouldn't. They absolutely shouldn't. Well, this is amazing. And I love the book. And I'm so glad we got to have this conversation. Thank you, Ryan. I was very excited to chat with you too. This is really fun. And then the newsletter is great. And one of the few, I get your parenting newsletter and I get Emily Oscars. Those are the two that I read.

You're, is yours every day or is it a couple of times a week? I forget. Couple of times a week. Yeah. Tuesday, Friday, but I have a thread on Thursdays usually. Yeah. So I feel like you guys balance each other out. It ends up like almost one to read every day.

That, yes, that makes sense. I get hers too. And yeah, I think they do. I think they kind of work out that way. Yeah. Well, that's great. I'm honored. Thank you.

Amazing. Amazing. 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. Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic early and ad-free on Amazon Music, download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad-free with Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts.