The Daily Stoic - Thomas Chatterton Williams on Reading, Practical Philosophy, and Embracing Contradiction | Approach Your Troubles Like Doctor

Episode Date: March 30, 2022

Ryan reads today’s meditation and talks to author Thomas Chatterton Williams about how his father helped him cultivate his love for reading, why the point of philosophy should be practical application rather than theorizing, the importance of embracing contradicting ideas, and more.Thomas Chatterton Williams is an American culture critic and is the author of two memoirs: “Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race” and “Losing My Cool: How a Father’s Love and 15,000 Books Beat Hip-Hop Culture.” In 2020, Thomas helped write and organize “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate.” This open letter, published in Harper’s Magazine and reprinted in newspapers around the world, defended free speech at a time of growing censorship and was signed by 153 leading public figures. Thomas is also a dedicated father, and much of his work is inspired by the relationship he shares with his father, and the relationship he has with his own children.Try Surfshark risk-free with a 30-day money-back guarantee. Get Surfshark VPN at surfshark.deals/STOIC. Enter promo code STOIC for 83 % off and three extra months free.Right now, when you purchase a 3-month Babbel subscription, you’ll get an additional 3 months for FREE. That’s 6 months, for the price of 3! Just go to Babbel.com and use promo code DAILYSTOIC.LinkedIn Jobs helps you find the candidates you want to talk to, faster. Every week, nearly 40 million job seekers visit LinkedIn? Post your job for free at LinkedIn.com/STOIC. Terms and conditions apply.Stamps.com makes it easy to mail and ship right from your computer. Use our promo code STOIC to get a special offer that includes a 4-week trial PLUS free postage and a digital scale. Go to Stamps.com, click on the microphone at the TOP of the homepage and type in STOIC.As a member of Daily Stoic Life, you get all our current and future courses, 100+ additional Daily Stoic email meditations, 4 live Q&As with bestselling author Ryan Holiday (and guests), and 10% off your next purchase from the Daily Stoic Store. Sign up at https://dailystoic.com/life/ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemailCheck out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookFollow Thomas Chatterton Williams: Homepage, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook  See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic Podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast where each 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. The Bahamas What if you could live in a penthouse above the crystal clear ocean working during the day and partying at night with your best friends and have it be 100% paid for? FTX Founder Sam Bankman Freed lived that dream life, but it was all funded with other people's money, but he allegedly stole. Many thought Sam Bankman Fried was changing the game as he graced the pages of Forbes and

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Hey, prime members, you can listen to episodes at free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. Approach your troubles like a doctor. It's famously said that you should learn from the mistakes of others because you can't live long enough to make them all yourself. In that way, the books we read

and the information we digest gives us an advantage to those who choose to go through and make all the mistakes themselves. In studying the Stoics, we are able to adopt a mentality battle tested by some of history's most successful warriors, artists, businessmen, and politicians. We can use the same operating system

that helps centuries of people solve the complex problems of daily life. Ward Farron'sworth is the dean of the University of Texas Law School. He's also a lifetime student of the Stoics, an author of the practicing Stoic, a philosophical users manual, an amazing new book on Stoicism that you should check out.

He expanded on the idea we were just mentioning in a recent interview with the Daily Stoic. Stoicism tries to get its students to approach the troubles of other people like a good doctor would, he said. Veteran doctors are very compassionate and they give their all to their patients, but they don't get emotional about it. They might have done so when they were first getting started, but experience tends to turn them into natural stoics in their professional lives. That's one way to think about stoicism. It's an effort to gain by the study of philosophy, some of the traits and immunities that would otherwise be the natural result of long

experience. The study of stoicism is a kind of surrogate for the passage of time. That's why you put in this work, listening to this podcast or reading these emails, because that's what your goal is, to bring yourself to the state that others would take a lifetime to achieve. When you read these emails, try not to just read them, but adopt their lessons into your everyday life. Try to speed up the passage of time that way. Try to get experience. In that way, you're inheriting the wisdom of generations past and you're stronger and

wise you're for it. For more, read our full interview with Ward on DailyStoak.com and check out his newest book, The Practicing Stoak, A Philosophical Users Manual. There's a link on a website or you can just pull it up on Amazon or in your independent bookstore. This book distills the main ideas of the Stoics in 12 easy to reference headings and I think you'll like it. Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. It's a shame

the way that certain phrases have come to mean almost the opposite of what they actually mean, and thus derive and thus deprive us of a term that might be useful or a thing that we actually should be concerned about. For instance, do your own research. Of course one should do your own research. This is a deeply important thing. If you're not doing your own research, you're probably not thinking very critically and just sort of accepting unthinkingly everything that's thrown at you.

The tragedy is the people who are, quote, doing their own research these days are not doing research, they're watching stupid YouTube videos and actually ending up far away from anything resembling research. And this is the sort of anti-intellectual vein of today's culture. The other is term cancel culture, right? Which it does exist, we can be overly sensitive, We can be politically correct. We can throw the baby out with the bath water because someone said something dumb, someone said something offensive, someone said something that's incorrect or they did a long time ago. And then you have, you know, Vladimir Putin describing the West's

reaction to his criminal invasion of Ukraine as cancel culture, where you have people facing very real consequences for terrible things they've done in saying, oh, this is just cancel culture. All of that is so frustratingly dumb. It's like we can't even... This is why we don't have nice things because you people can't use words without turning them into these sort of culture war weapons. That's why we can't have adult conversations. And anyways, all of which is to say, maybe you saw this in 2020,

there was this letter published by Harper Magazine called a letter on justice and open debate. It was reprinted in newspapers all around the world. It was the idea of the authors who put it together were trying to defend free speech at a time of censorship. It was signed by more than 150 leading figures of all different kinds of intellectual bends and backgrounds and political viewpoints, which was kind of the point. It was supposed to be a bunch of people who disagree on most things,

agreeing on the one thing that does matter, which is civil, open discourse about important topics. Of course, this thing got misconstrued to be this anti-trans thing, to be this anti-this thing, to be this anti-woke. It was a disaster. But one of the leading figures behind writing it is someone whose work I followed for a long time and have enjoyed many of his articles over the years. His name is Thomas Chatterton Williams. He's a basically an American cultural critic. He's the author of two memoirs, Self-hop culture. And he's just a fascinating thinker. He's an American who lives in France. He's an intellectual who talks

about popular culture. He's sort of crossing bridges and divides. I think that's really what that letter was about. He's a dedicated father. And much of his own work is inspired by the relationship he shares with his father and the relationship he has with his children and the values and principles and ideas That he wants to pass along to them And so I was really excited to chat with him. I believe he was speaking to me from a hotel room in New York or New Orleans It was a fun little conversation that we had. I'm really glad that I got to chat. Here's my conversation with Thomas Chatterton Williams. You can go to his website at ThomasChattertonWilliams.com. You can follow him on Twitter, which we talk about in the conversation,

the perils, but also the wonderfulness of the platform. You can follow him at Chatterton Williams actually on Twitter and on Instagram. And do check out his book Self Portrait in Black and White and losing my cool. This was a wonderful little conversation. I hope you enjoy. Where are you in the world right now? I'm in New York. I just got in yesterday. And then back to Paris or... And then no, I'm all over the place. I'm going to New Orleans on Friday, then Atlanta, then Minneapolis, then finally upstate to see my brother back to New York and then back to Paris. That's so much. That is so much trouble.

What are you doing? Lots of different stuff. I'm going to the New Orleans book festival this weekend and then I'm doing some reporting for my next book in those Americans in Atlanta and Minneapolis. Five? Yeah, so I think it's going to be cool. It's been a while since I've been to the American South, so I'm looking forward to that. I was just in New Orleans a couple of months ago. I live outside Austin.

Yeah, I know. I wanted to go by your bookshop with Jane, but it just wasn't possible. No, no, next go around. That would be fun. So I wanted to start with your introduction to books. It sounds like your father's the one that made you a reader. Yeah, he deserves the credit for that. I didn't grow up in an environment where everybody around me was

obsessed with literature So that was very much something that he instilled in in me in the home weak group and Very my brother that I grew up in a very small house in New Jersey, but it was packed From Florida ceiling in every room with thousands and thousands of books that my father had amassed over the course of his life and had hauled around the country with him as he moved. How did he, was it just showing you a love of reading by example?

Was it just surrounding you with books that inculcates that love of reading or what else did he do? No, he certainly surrounded and tried to inculcate, but then in addition to that, he made us read. And he was very, he wasn't just a strict authoritarian, though he really tried to make us want to read and the way that he saw to do that. At least at first was to bribe us and to read and the way that he saw to do that, at least at first, was to bribe us and to tell us that reading was work and it was something that we should be compensated

for. And so he took money that in retrospect I realized he didn't always have and he paid us handsomely for our age to sit and study and to read ASAP's fables when we were really young and then to get on to more sophisticated things later. And then at some point, you know, I realized that it was something that I wanted to do on my own and it became a part of me. And I don't really know when, you know, the line from him kind of forcing it or encouraging it and me starting to be self-motivated. I don't know where that line was

or what age that happened. Yeah, I think the weird thing about reading is like, for people who read a lot, why they do it is very clear, not just because it's enjoyable, but they get a lot out of it. There's like an incredible ROI to reading. Like my life has been so

profoundly changed by the books that I've read. And when that's happened to you, suddenly books seem like the greatest investment in the world. You pay $15 for something. And the entire course of your future can be changed. The hard thing is like, how do you convince someone of that power because it seems so incomprehensible if you haven't had it. And then the irony is, the books that we make children read are so often not even remotely up to the task of producing that ROI. And then we wonder why they don't buy the argument.

Yeah, it's tough to get people. It's a really good way of putting it. How you did is tough to get people to see the value of something that they haven't experienced yet and can't necessarily intuit without experiencing it itself. And it's a complicated pleasure. It's not something that's immediately apparent. It's, you know, when you immerse yourself in Warren piece or something like that, it requires hours and hours of investment before you start to feel

this world that Tolstoy conjured up around you out of sheer language. Yes. And that, you know, war in peace when you're 11 versus war in peace when you're 22 could be profoundly different reading experiences. And so I feel like we also have this kind of one fits all, like everyone should read great Gatsby in high school. And you know, we sort of go through this list because the generally those books are quite good. But I feel like everyone I know who's like a big reader, it was like the right book at the right time that changes everything. And yeah, getting the, I think the it really does have to come from the house because the parent is going to know you well enough and the parent is going to be, their interests are going to be closer to yours enough that I just don't know if it's something that school is even

equipped to do. Well, the type of school that I went to, I mean, yeah, the great Gatsby I fell in love with in high school. That was one of the books that they assigned us that I think we could immediately see. It was exciting to us. Yes. Sixteen-year-olds. But by and large, we were not being assigned really challenging or important works of literature

where I went to high school. And it was very difficult for me to see, even as somebody who was coming from a house for books, who was difficult for me to see why at that age, I was reading weathering heights, for example. But yeah, but my father was very adept at kind of finding things that, you know, we talked a lot too, that's the thing. It wasn't just like, here's a stack of books.

It was, these are ideas that we've been discussing, and here's a book that can kind of complicate or extend this conversation that we've been having. I know you're interested in how does a person live a good life or what is the good. And then here's some things that you can like take into your room and spend some time with and then we'll continue this conversation. So my dad always told me that books were actually conversation partners and that he always felt that he was surrounded by friends, even if he was by himself, because he could talk to people who really understood his inner self just by pulling it off the shelf. Yes, yeah, there's a line in the history of Stoicism,

Zeno goes to the Oracle of Delphi as a young man and he's told that he'll become wise when he begins to have conversations with the dead, right? And it's only many's told that he'll become wise when he begins to have conversations with the dead, right? And it's only many years later that he realizes that the the the oracle was speaking of reading that books are how we talk to the dead, right? That it's this sort of portal into the past. But yeah, so so many of the books we we get assigned. We have no real conception of why we're reading them. We have no conception of, we're not really told what we're supposed to do with them.

They're just this like homework that we're given. And then you just told that this is important. And this is good. Yeah, but you're not told, you're not told why. I think that, you know, but you know, the other thing is that not everybody, even if they were to be told why is going to, is going to love reading. It's, it's, you know, some of the best pleasures in life are difficult pleasures. They're not, they're not easy to have, you know, some of the most gratifying flavors are things that you reject viscerally as a child

because you have to go through many steps to develop the palate. I think reading is that way too. Although, one of the things I found that's made me a little bit less, like I'm like a physical book snob. Like I only like physical books. That's what change. So it's so intensely about the hardcover book for me, right? Or whatever. The physical books. That's what changed. So it's so intensely about the hardcover book for me, right? Or whatever, the physical book. But one of the things that's been interesting

is watching the rise of audiobooks and the number of people that I hear from that did not read before the popularity of Audible. And then when you talk to them, what you realized is they thought they hated books. What they really didn't like was reading, right? And realizing that people consume information in radically different ways. And that from a literary perspective, we've been sort of not including a huge portion of the population that, and then I found that, you know, they got sucked into audiobooks, and now actually they do read physical books also, but just realizing like, the sitting down by a fire with a physical book, although has become a very normal ritual

for me, they just didn't have a place or an attraction to that in their life, and that there's other ways to get this information into your system, what really matters is the information, not so much the specific means, I feel like. Yeah, on an intellectual level, I tend to agree with you and I've read that actually the brain processes audio the same

as reading with narrative, especially, I think. But I'm like words on the page guy and a sentence guy where when I see a sentence that really is well crafted, I go back over it multiple times before I move on. And I just linger in the texture of what's been accomplished by the juxtaposition of words in a way that I'm very partial to, I've never listened to an audiobook.

I've had people write to me as an author, I've had people write to me and say that, that they were really happy to have my audiobook and the fact that it was read by the author made it even more of a rich audio experience. And I can understand that, but I've never consumed that way. But, you know, then I'm a podcast guy. And I guess the line is getting thinner and thinner between that type of pleasure in

an audio book, right? Yeah, totally. I can do podcasts. I can't really do audio books. Like, to me, I need to be engaged with the material. I can't, I shouldn't be doing two things at one time like I shouldn't be working out and. Well that's the risk. Yeah that's the risk is that when you're reading that the beautiful thing is that you can't do anything else and read. Yeah

and that's why the phone is so dangerous now next to the book because you're constantly like leaving this immersive experience but when right, reading actually makes the world recede around you. Which is, I think, a thing you actually need, especially in this crazy world that we're in. So, yeah, you can read an e-book on your phone, and that's certainly better than not reading an e-book on your phone.

But I think anything that you can do without the screen, you should probably try to do without the screen. Yeah, I'm becoming more and more aware that I have to make those, I have to erect those barriers. Otherwise, even as somebody who, I make my bread and my whole life is about reading and writing and it's getting hard. It's harder.

I've been, I published my first book in 2010, so it's been 12 years for me, and you know, the difference between writing the first book and reading and writing for this third book I'm on now. I mean, the phone has destroyed so much of what I took for granted about my own self-discipline. Well, I wanted to talk to you about a bunch of stuff pertaining to this, but jumping ahead,

because I think it's related to what you were just saying, I feel like so many of the sort of class of people that we know, the sort of knowledge worker, public intellectual, writer, journalist crowd, I feel like so many of their brains have been scrambled by the amount of time they spend online, specifically the amount of time they spend online, specifically the amount of time they spend on Twitter. When you see the amount of tweets that some of these people send, you're like, there's no way you're reading anything long form because there's not enough hours in the day. You have been, your brain has been hijacked by this short form, hot take, respond as soon as you see it,

mentality of social media, that there's no way you're doing the work to generate the certainty that you are projecting with the things that you are writing. Yeah, it's really bad, and I'm guilty of this, and I was not Somebody who was early on interested in Twitter. I I really kind of 2017-2018 that I became more active and then

2020 that I actually started to have you know a number of followers and then that changes your engagement with the platform because After a certain threshold you're constantly engaged if you want to be. So it's more like you have to force yourself not to be engaged because people are always talking to you. There's always an audience if you want it. And as a writer, the thing that attracted us to this line of work in part was the audience. It feels weird to not engage with it. Very much so. And this is really, really dangerous.

And it's also very dangerous to be able to get no matter what you say to get a certain level of approval, because it doesn't necessarily bring out the best or the most reflective instincts in you. And I'm willing to offer myself up as a prime example of how this is something that is problematic in public thinking, but I think we're all more or less in this new context, and I don't know how as an individual you're strong enough to just on your own resist it. I've heard you in other

podcasts say that you kind of have a level of discipline that I find admirable. It's very, very difficult though. Actually, like, Zadie Smith told me once that, I just have to absolutely get off of social media. And I told her, if I were as famous as you are, I think that would be a lot easier, but maybe I'm just completely wrong about this,

but there's a sense that you have to be there. Otherwise, you face the prospect of disappearing, but of course, that's objectively not true. Is this thing all? Check one, two, one, two. Hey y'all, I'm Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress, a singer, an entrepreneur, and a Virgo, just the name of you. Now, I've Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress, a singer, an entrepreneur, and a Virgo.

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this is Kiki Palmer podcast. I'm putting my friends, family, and some of the dopest experts in the hot seat to ask them the questions that have been burning in my mind. What will former child stars be if they weren't actors? What happened to sitcoms? It's only fans, only bad. I want to know, so I asked my mom about it. These are the questions that keep me up at night, but I'm taking these questions out of

my head and I'm bringing them to you. Because on Baby Mrs. Kiki Palmer, no topic is off limits. Follow baby this is Skicky Palmer. Whatever you get your podcast. Hey, prime members, you can listen early and have free on Amazon music. Download the Amazon music app today. Yeah, I mean, it's easy. It's easy for certain parts of the literary culture. The people who are sort of in before social media came up who are sort of anointed, who just happened to operate in a rarefied world where the old system still works for them, right?

It's I think easier for them to say it, but then it's also easy for our egos to convince ourselves that what we're doing is work, even though by definition it's not paid and it's taking away time from doing the thing that you are paid to do, which is think about big things and write about them in long form. But then I do also lay some of the blame

on the industry for this too, because you get really mixed messages in this workplace that's been in flux for the past decade, where when you're writing books, your publisher really wants and expects you to come with some form of a platform. Now, that's just part of what you're, informally, that would be selling the books. You have to do it. So, yeah. And so, how are you doing that? You're informally selling the books. You have to do it. So yeah.

And so how are you doing that? You're doing that in social media. Then if you're a journalist or you write for magazines, essayist or whatever columnist, there's an informal expectation that you engage and that you publicize your work and have an audience. And then also that you're not supposed to trip over these invisible and moving lines of something

that will get you in trouble for saying something that's beyond the pale, that maybe wasn't beyond the pale a few weeks ago or a year ago. And so you're constantly navigating this kind of, you need to be there, but also like don't mess up. And if you mess up, it's on you. It's really difficult. And I do sometimes look back at how writers used to just take for granted that they had institutional

platforms that were sufficient and they didn't need to do that stuff on their own. Yeah. And it also feels like when I dip into the conversation, it's like, man, this is like a thousand people all talking to each other. You know, they're acting like they're broadcasting to millions of people, but it's like the same group of people who are just chattering amongst each other and judging each other and criticizing each other and sub-tweeting about each other. It's like this weird high school mentality that for whatever reason the rest of our culture

is downstream from. There's a sad patheticness to it also. You know what I mean? Yeah, I mean, people liken it to high school all the time for a real reason. There's a variety of tables that you can choose from at the Twitter lunchroom and they're the kind of, they're the people that sit at the heads of these tables

and they direct the conversation and then there are, then there are millions and millions of people just kind of listening in to any number of these conversations, but they're not really participating or part of the table. Yeah, so going back to your dad, what were the big books that shaped you or what were the big books that shaped him that then shapes you. So my dad, one of the, I mean, this is probably a little bit cliche or it's maybe obvious to some of your listeners, but when I was 15, 16 and my best friend and I were studying all the time with my dad, and we were navigating

our social context and trying to figure out how to manage and maneuver around peer pressure. My dad gave us Shirley Jackson's The Lottery, this sort of story about this public stoning, you know, that the whole town participates in. And, you know, that was a profoundly impactful and moving reading experience for both my friend and I and it made an enormous

impact on me and how I thought of, you know, what it takes to go like to be strong enough to not participate in whatever direction the group is influencing you to move in. So that was the lottery is something that I can still see myself sitting at the kitchen table and am handing to me on a Zürach's printout to think through an underlying and then talk about later when we were done. For my dad, like enormously impactful books for him were like, my monodies guide for the perplexed,

which I have to, I used to talk to him about my monies and stuff I never did actually read. I guess it's a bit nice. The books that really, really, really made an impact on me that changed me started from like 18 years old once I arrived at college. And so for me, like, I think the book that destroyed my faith, I had always been in Catholic school and my parents, my mom's a Protestant and my father's an atheist, but they just let

faith be a private matter that my brother and I could decide for ourselves. And I kind of just loosely identified as a Christian and then I read the brother's caramotsof and it was just an astonishing reading experience for me and it kind of shattered my faith. And I was just deeply impressed that Dusty Fsky being a proselytizing kind of believer in his own life, could nonetheless as an artist be so powerfully moved by the vocation of art that he put the strongest

and most compelling arguments in the voice of Ivan Karamatsov, who's the atheist. And so it just made me think about life and art and the fact that this guy who was kind of racist and anti-Semitic and lived in another century in Russia and thought that Russia was distinct from Europe, nonetheless seemed to understand who I was on the inside more than many of the people I grew up around. And so the Brothers Caramatsu was like this link to the world for me. And then I studied philosophy.

And so some of the most important books in my father's life were like Plato's dialogues and things like this. And so once I got to college and I properly studied Greek philosophy, that was also very important for me as well. And then I understood my father better. How did your father come to be this literary figure? Was he self-taught? Did someone done this for him? What makes him this lover of books that then shapes you into being one? Self-taught, my father was born in 1937 in Galveston, and long-view Texas and then raised in Galveston, Texas under segregation, and no one in his family had an education beyond high school,

and he didn't have a father and was raised mostly by a hunt and local. And they kind of discouraged him from being bookish because they thought that actually, you know, a black kid being overly bookish could get himself in trouble in the South. And so he basically was under the age of 10 and the story that we've always understood from him was that he, in a neighbor's house, he came across a copy of Will Durant's The Story of Philosophy. And the neighbor had bought the house from, there was an immigrant family in the house before

his neighbor, currently residing there. And the neighbor did not have the book was there. But my father, just like paging through that book, there was an illustration of Socrates and my father was wondering who this guy was that lived so long ago that was important enough that there was an image of him in a book and you know that led him to wanting to know what philosophy was and he just accumulated from that age as many books as he could and just read on his own and just told himself, I guess, that if he were to transcend his circumstances, the only way that that was going to realistically come about was if he were to develop his mind. And I always wonder, I was pushed by my father. I'm amazed by the people that, in some sense, I'm amazed by the people that in some sense,

you know, they liberate themselves from the Matrix. They don't have anybody coming to tell them that they're in the Matrix, but they somehow figure out that this world is stifling and that there's a way out. And he had that inner kind of voice telling him that there was more, and this connection to philosophy, it allowed him to realize that whatever he was being told about his worth as a second-class citizen in the segregated South in the United States of America, there was a universal humanity that he was discovering in this book that linked

him to ancient Greece and to thinkers that, you know, told him about something that was more than that. And I don't know why that struck him, and it didn't strike other people that he was related to. Well, it's interesting that there's kind of like there's the two paths to philosophy. There's sort of like blue collar, auto-diedact path to philosophy, the self-liberation. Like, anyone can access these books. Anyone can apply these ideas no matter who they are and what they're doing.

And how radically different that is than the sort of academic introduction to philosophy that people get in school, which is very high-minded, which is very theoretical, which is very high-minded, which is very theoretical, which is very abstract, which they think needs all sorts of pre-qualifications and, you know, hand-holding, and yet they really should get you to the same place, which is, you know, the ability to apply these ideas to every day life, apply philosophy to who you are as a person.

Well, that's what I was always attracted to with philosophy. I went to Georgetown, which is one of the few college programs which is essentially continental philosophy and not analytic. And yeah, I was attracted to metaphysics and ethics. What are we doing in this life? Why are we, what is what are we doing in this life? You know, why are we what is the good life? How do we go about flourishing? And the other questions kind of were not what moved me to the discipline. And I think that, you know, I still, you know, I still find myself out of step with,

you know, language questions and games like that. I think that they can be intellectually fascinating, but that's not what stirs me. You know, I still have that kind of antiquated notion of having your soul stirred, you know, and I'm sure that is the way you approach it, too. I mean, if you're thinking about stoicism and, you know and thinking about how to cope with life's hardships and not allow them to derail you. Yeah, it's like, what am I supposed to do with this information? Not like how can we have a very exclusive, you know, difficult to follow, but intellectually provocative conversation.

Like, how do we know if there's such a thing that's right or wrong or how do we know we're not living in a computer simulation or whatever? What if reality is a hallucination? Obviously, I guess our intellectually interesting, but what am I supposed to do with it? The next time I'm stuck in traffic and I get frustrated or somebody calls me a horrible name or somebody I love dies, right? Like real? Yeah, the real shit.

Yeah. The real shit. That's what I think the books that last, they addressed themselves to the real shit, the books that, you know, that we're talking about thousands of years later. And yeah, socrates is mostly not talking to other philosophers. Socrates is like talking to to dudes on the street, you know, and asking them questions, enforcing them to evaluate their assumptions and question the things that they've taken for granted, you know, not not sitting coistered in a classroom. Yeah, he was the antithesis of that, actually.

Yeah. So did you find that your study of philosophy, did it clash with your dads or did you find one to be superior than the other? I'm just curious. No, it is very much the same. He was interested in the psychotic dialogue. He was interested in asking questions to get a slightly more refined sense

through, through a back and forth of what might be closer to the truth. He was interested in the questions that you're talking about. How does a man die with dignity? How does a man live with dignity? You know, how does a man live with dignity and earn women live with dignity, how does a man live with dignity? You know, how does a man live with dignity and earn women live with dignity and situations that are impossibly undignified?

And so this is what he thinks of his philosophy. And my step further, like Socrates, my dad would say, it's not credentials that make you a philosopher, it's not that you majored in philosophy, it's how you're thinking. It's, do you define yourself as a philosopher? Are you addressing yourself to these questions? And then you are and no one else can certify you.

No, I wondered if that sort of, to me, earthy understanding of what philosophy actually is, if that clashed with what your Ivy League professors were then, you know what I mean? Like I wondered how, as you went on and studied things in a less auto-didactic way, more in a sort of academic way, I'm just curious how that, how you know how the relationship changed. Basically, I only studied it undergrad, so I stayed with those kinds of questions mostly. I mean, I started to study Hagle and Heidegger and things like that,

and it got really complicated, but I was still really interested in it and it's still continental in the sense that they're not playing language games. Yes. So, no, it didn't really clash so much. But then when it came time to decide whether I would pursue a doctorate in philosophy or not, I really was, by that point, aware that I wanted to, you know, ask certain questions, and I wanted to be a writer, but that I wanted to address myself to more than a very, very restricted readership, you know, and it's necessarily restricted if you go the academic

rep. Yeah, I mean, right, what is the... Sometimes you read these books books and you're like, how many copies could this have possibly sold and how many copies did you think it was gonna sell? When you spent seven years of your life, writing this thing, like, of course, it's not that it was a waste of time,

but it just seems so indulgent. Do you know what I mean? Professor, I mean, that was really what influenced my thinking. A very kind and accomplished professor told me exactly that. He said, if you are thinking about going to grad school for philosophy, you need to think very hard about whether you would feel satisfied with 12 people purchasing your book, eight of whom are colleagues. And, you know, he said, you have to really, really, really answer that question for yourself

whether that would satisfy you. And I think, I, you know, that very quickly, I knew that wouldn't satisfy me. I didn't know that you're not guaranteed to get a readership if you go the other way, but at least you have more of a shot. Well, there's a meritocracy to it where it's like you have to go earn it, you have to go build the audience as opposed to almost being padded on the back for not having the audience. Like I always love when they criticize, you know, like a Malcolm Gladwell or something for like popularizing something, as if that's not like the job of a thinker is to take ideas and make them accessible or

usable for people. Yeah, I mean, there is an argument and something to be said for people that are talking to other experts so that kind of, you know, that develops knowledge and then, you know, those books will be consulted and referenced. And I'm all for the production of knowledge, but, you know, I think that's why it's great to have a division of labor. Some people got it right, like Malcolm Gladwell and spread ideas and the larger discussion is richer for it.

So, how have you thought about this with your own kids in reading? I'm assuming your house has plenty of books in it, probably not floor to ceiling, but how have you thought about of books in it, probably not floor to ceiling, but how have you thought about inculcating the same curiosity and thirst for knowledge in your own kids? Yeah, I mean, the house is full of books. My children see their parents reading and working with books and take it for granted in a way that I'm very happy about. They think it's normal.

granted in a way that I'm very happy about. They think it's normal. I read to them, my wife reads to them. And I always am very hesitant as this line between constantly encouraging my sons to young right now, but my daughter is eight and a half. And constantly encouraging her to read and wanting her to be a voracious reader and also not wanting it to ever seem like work.

Or I want her to still have that sense of pleasure and play where it doesn't seem like a chore or like a punishment. And it's tough because when I see her wanting to do other things, I get stressed out that maybe I'm not being tough enough. And then where there's the modern, the contemporary problem of And then where's the modern, the contemporary problem of, she also sees you staring at your phone quite a lot and that becomes something that she thinks is to be emulated. And so there's this discrepancy between do as I say and do as I, and don't do as I do, you know?

So I'm just, I'm trying my best to just have books be like air around her, you know. And even with my dad really pushing me to be a reader, I think that's actually what really sealed the deal is just that books were, I don't think a house without books, it feels right. It feels off to me. It doesn't feel like feels off to me. It's not a home. It doesn't feel like a home to me.

Yeah. And so living with books is something that he kind of gave me through example. And I think that's what I'm really trying to do with my kids. They have tons of books in their rooms. They live with their own books and not just ours. Yeah, and I think that thing you were talking about that I'm very inspired by that exchange.

You were going through a specific thing, you were at a specific point in your life, and your dad was like, this is the thing you should read right now. And then you see that very clear, like, oh, the books are a solution to a problem, right? Yeah. And maybe eight is a little, my oldest is five,

so also a little young. But like, I think it's really there. It's learning that books are something you turn to when you're struggling with something, when you're unsure about something, when you wanna understand something, that's really where the deal gets sealed, I feel like. Absolutely.

And I'm still trying to figure, my children are growing up in France and Paris. And so they are increasingly bilingual, but I also have the, I'm not completely bilingual. And so I'm navigating trying to, you know, turn them on to books, but in the language that speaks to them. And sometimes I don't have exactly the same expertise in the language that speaks to them and sometimes I don't have exactly the The same expertise in the language that they want to be reading in and so, you know There's an extra degree of difficulty with that as well, but I think it ultimately sorts itself out. I think that children

They understand what you value and take seriously. They intuit that So I'm having faith in that process, but I'm going to start freaking out in the few years if my daughter's in high school. She's not a self-motivated reader by then. Yeah, I agree. What is it like in France these days? I imagine it gives you just as studying the past helps

one understand the present a little bit better. I imagine seeing the place that you're from with an ocean and another culture between you helps you see things a bit more dispassionately or clearly. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that I've all, one of the writers that's always meant the most to me as an adult is James Baldwin and he always, you know, made the point that's always meant the most to me as an adult is James Baldwin and he always made the point that leaving France. Yeah, leaving the United States allowed him to look back at it from outside of it and have a perspective that he wouldn't have had if he stayed in Harlem.

I like to think that when I'm working well, that's something that I can do too. I mean, it's certainly something that I think allowed me to, you said dispassionate and I think that's a very good word for what I think has happened to me. It's allowed me to step outside of the American racial discourse and the Black White binary and sometimes that pisses people off that I don't actually always as a man of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of partial African descent, I don't always respond to all these questions with what I think some people expect should be the, the, the, the proper emotional response. I think I have a, a perspective that I think sometimes really does help me think through some of these questions

because I'm not in it the same way. Living my life in Paris, my primary identity isn't being black American. It's being American or it's being foreign. The national difference becomes emphasized. That's a long way of saying that I think that stepping out of the emotional urgency of some of the debates is healthy even if some people think it's a way. I think that there is and I'm sensitive to it, I understand it. Some people can mistake that distance for lack of concern or even a kind of disloyalty,

but I don't think it's the same thing at all. Yeah, I think living somewhere other than where you're from, for me being from California, moving to the South, you just, it forces you one, I think, to see a different perspective. And then also you're just not surrounded by people And you just, it forces you one, I think, to see a different perspective. And then also, you're just not surrounded by people who think exactly the same way you do.

And it forces you to understand, I think people think it would make you understand, be more understanding, which it does. But I think it also helps you understand just how wrong those people might be about certain things. Do you know what I mean? Like, exactly what happened to me. I grew up very much under the American logic of the one drop rule. A drop of black blood makes a person black because they're not white. This is what, this is the custom of the plantation.

This is slavery. I never questioned that. You know, I had a white mom black dad, black kids I grew up around with, accepted my brother and me as black, the white kids I grew up around with didn't think we were white. So it was kind of a closed case for me in America, but in Europe, in these nations that they have their colonial history of enormous crimes against humanity, but they didn't have slavery within their national borders and so they didn't have the kind of the real obsession with blood purity. And so they don't actually have, they don't assume the logic of the one-drop rule. So you have to explain it to them.

And you hear yourself explaining this logic, and you say, wait a minute. I don't even fully, that's not even fully convincing me anymore. And so that actually, I don't know if I would have arrived at some of the conclusions I've arrived at about the absurdity and the harm imposed by the absurdity of and the harm imposed by the racial categories that we take for granted in America. I don't know if I would have arrived at a rejection of that without having stepped outside of the American racial paradigm. Yeah, that's interesting. It does seem that the discussion in America has become so consumed with race

that we almost lose sight of the fact that the whole thing is made up. Yeah, we very much do. We end up reinforcing the very categories that we say are made up and are harmful by reapplying the very same logic and then doubling down on the identities as a way of manifesting solidarity, which I certainly understand, but I don't think that you can, you know, cliche, but it's true. You're not going to, you know, tear apart the mat, you're not going to deconstruct the master's house with his tools. You're going to have to need a new language, new methods of thinking, new paradigms. If you want to transcend racial thinking that results in racism, you can't do that by, you're not gonna rehabilitate categories of black and white,

which come with a ready-made hierarchy within them. They presuppose hierarchy. You're not gonna scrub those categories of that hierarchy. You're gonna have to actually do it, France, Benou, and many others called for, which is conceive of a new man. And that sounds unrealistic and naive and impossible to people. But so long as we keep reproducing the same thought

that comes out of the plantation, we're going to have this kind of unending, very frustrating, racial conversation. Well, it's like that thing about Keats, where Keats said, you know, to hold contradictory ideas in your head at the same time is like, what wisdom really is. It's like this idea that race has historically been incredibly important in shaped almost everything that's ever happened, particularly in America.

And at the same time, is a bullshit made up thing. And so by focusing too much on the former, you end up actually undermining the latter, right? So it's like you have to be aware of everything that happened without reinforcing it and propagating the very thing that you're trying to get rid of. But you just did it perfectly. You just summed up what I was trying to say and way too many words, much clearer. That's exactly it.

And that's actually really one of the main arguments in my second book, Self-Portrait and Black and White. You have to hold two ideas in your head. You have to have two goals. You have to deal with and oppose the very real racism that exists in the society we are thrust into and you have to keep this longer term goal of transcending these categories and doing away with them in the future and people seem to think that if you if you if you are intent on transcending race you're not paying sufficient attention to racism but it's exactly what you said.

You have to have both at the same time. Well, you actually know I'm thinking of another thing. You know, Nietzsche had that line about how those who fight monsters have to be careful that you don't become one. And it's like clearly a person who is a racist, like you think about the three men who killed Armada Aubrey, right?

Clearly those were men whose entire existence and day-to-day frame of reference was consumed with thinking about people and the color of their skin from the Confederate flags in the back of their truck to the racist text they were sending back to each other. Yeah. One is angry that his daughter is dating a black person, right? So clearly they're like consumed with race. So those people exist and they have been this terrible driver of misdeeds and injustices throughout history and sadly they continue to exist.

So that's this reality, but in fighting those people and arguing with those people and trying to limit their ability to infect and change our laws, you can end up becoming obsessed with race, which is what I feel like some of the leading sort of intellectuals on the left have done. They've become, those two people think about race, those two extremes think about race far more than is possibly healthy or conducive to an integrated society. Absolutely, because one of the things they both do, and it's not morally equivalent, but more than is possibly healthy or conducive to an integrated society? Absolutely, because one of the things they both do and it's not morally equivalent, but it ends up being

effectively the same thing as they think of individuals in terms of categories, color categories, and the thing that's most important and they can't transcend it as the category. So, whether you're coming at that from a racist or an anti-racist angle, it's counterproductive to the integrated multi-ethnic society we're trying to achieve. Yeah, and it doesn't seem like it's good for, like it was interesting you talking about you going to France and this sort of changing how you think about things

and James Baldwin. You know, Tana Hosskoz also goes to France, but it doesn't seem like it manages to, I don't know, when I read his writing, especially over the last couple of years, it just doesn't sound like a guy who's, I don't wanna say having a good time because that seems dismissive,

but it doesn't sound like a guy whose worldview is able to make any room for progress or improvement or optimism or really any change at all. It almost becomes the same sort of nihilism as the people that he's criticized. It's interesting because he seems to really have a real love of France and he seemed to have really thrown himself into the study of the language and from what I can tell he liked living there. But there's an astonishing kind of passage in between the world and me where he basically sees a kind of caricature of an upper class or a wealthy Frenchman in a beautiful car smoking cigarette and he imagines him going on to have some type of Amazing night and kind of living this kind of privilege that he imagines is

Equivalent with his identity as a white Frenchman, but it ignores the reality of the extraordinary inequality in France and suffering that like the Gilles-Jones Manifest a few years later by showing that just like a huge number of white French people who you couldn't describe by any means is privileged. But I always thought that it was unfortunate that his success with that book became so great that it cut short his stay in France, I believe. So he didn't get a chance to actually spend as much time as maybe would have been what he had intended to and would have allowed him to, you know, reflect in ways that would have seemed more, I guess, like James Baldwin's

or Richard Wright's or someone who, he didn't get a chance is what I, what I understood, because America will call him back with a huge commercial success, and that was undeniable. Yeah, you know, talking about some of these like Twitter people that we're talking about, it feels like the sort of obviously social justice is incredibly important, and it would make sense to be a warrior for said thing

if that were to make a difference. But you sort of read what these people write and you see the things they talk about. And it almost has, it seems like it is consumed who they are. And in many ways just sort of sucked the joy out of life. And then you read the sort of cruelty and animus and snark and sarcasm and cynicism and what they write. And I don't know, there's a darkness to it that I think that's partly why it doesn't sell itself very well because it's in nobody's vision of what humanity should be, if that makes sense.

Well, yeah, it's not persuasive to those who don't always already agree, because I mean, and especially like on Twitter, you see there's a kind of perverse joy in attacking from a perceived position of righteousness. So for someone who doesn't already start with the presupposition that you are yourself righteous, it looks a lot like bullying and it looks rather unjust, ungenerous. And so, you know, that dynamic is really unfortunate. And I think that one of the real changes that's happened over the past decade with the rise of social media and also the kind of disillusionment that I think happened after the financial crisis and after the horrific spate of videotaped killings that went viral on the Black Lives Matter and all that.

I think that one of the things that happened is that all aspects of our lives are now heavily politicized. And the election of Trump really exacerbated this tendency that you can't actually, from a social justice perspective, you can't actually have things giving with a relative who votes differently than you because that's being like quiet in the face and evil or that's being, you know, that's not being sufficiently an activist. And I think that's really unfortunate because, you know, there are many realms of human life that should actually be off limits

to the kind of contankerous political debate that we're mired in now. One of the problems with the moment we live in now is that everything has become so intensely politicized, all aspects of life, even areas that have been understood as non-political become a matter of your identity as a political person and, you know, and a highly polarized society like ours. That means that there's a limitless opportunity for a kind of really ungenerous interaction with our fellow Americans. Yeah, and I've been reading lately.

I've read David Halberstam's book, The Children on the City of Movement. I've been reading lately I've read David Halberstim's book The Children on the City of Movement I've been reading a lot about John Lewis. I just keep coming back to how how important and primary the idea of hope was in everything that they did and that to me seems what's most missing and the change in the civil rights movement from the early civil rights movement and then as it switches to black power, this is where you see the hope sort of leave

and any kind of positive message leave. It becomes more militant and more angry, not that it wasn't very much deserved, but how a movement without hope is such a joyless one and such an uninspiring one and how it eats at the people at the core of it. Well, yeah, and I think that's actually, that's not just racial politics, that's, that's, there's kind of, that's everything. In anger, in cynicism and's, that's, there's kind of, that's everything.

In anger, in cynicism and everything, even food, yeah. Next, you know, I mean, there's an, yeah. There's an edge to, to a kind of non-meditating activism. Yes. Isn't hopeful for a better world, but it's kind of angry at people that still want to eat meat. And I don't think that that's something that is very

inspiring. There's a... We're sustainable. Like, how long can you be angry without becoming a bitter, cynical person? Yeah. And, you know, I don't know. I mean, I think that that's going to have to wear itself out.

But it can go on for quite some time, apparently. Well, because I was thinking about the Harper's letter that you were a part of, there was a certain amount of hope and sincerity and good faith in it. And then the overwhelming, even though there's almost nothing in it that a person, a reasonable person would actually disagree with or be angry about, somehow the spin or the presentation of it is that it's like, you know, the most evil thing that's ever written, right? Like I'm constantly amazed at the

ways, the creative ways that people manage to find some core negative thread in a very anodyne or positive message. Yeah, we were really surprised by that too because none of us expected that people would comb through the list of signatories and say, well, the text actually does say this and none of that is objectionable, but if you look at who signed it,

this is actually an anti-trans document. And then that was like, that was at first. Then it's like, no, actually, if you look at who signed it, this is actually an anti-trans document. And then that was like, that was at first. Then it's like, no, actually, if you look at who signed it, this is actually a Zionist document. Then it was like, no, if you look at who signed it, this is actually an anti-black document. But it's like, on its face, of course, everything that they say we agree with.

And that was just astonishing to us because it's like, wait a minute. And Malcolm Gladwell had one of, he was one of the signatories and he said, people are saying that it's problematic that certain people who, you know, whose views on other matters I might object to have signed this. But for me, that's like one of the reasons why I did sign it is like, here are some principles that we can all, sure, uphold.

And it's weird too because it's like there are anti-trans people out there and there are bad people who believe bad things But instead of focusing on those people and attacking them where they are they try to Like insert that animus into things where it's it's really not there It's a weird. You're really took a surprise. I mean, I don't think any of us anticipated that, which may have itself been naive, but we just simply thought, there's multiple people here crafting together a document that multiple people from a variety of perspectives

can sign on to trying to be persuasive and concise. That just says that, you know, from both the left and the right, you know, there's a kind of creeping climate of sensoriousness and that a liberal society is a maximally tolerant one. And that, like the urge to publicly shame and punish is not healthy. We didn't see that as necessarily being something that people would comb through. But then also we didn't really fully understand that people would say that there's nothing objectionable in the points that are being made, but actually the mistake is the timing. So there's a better and a worse time to say that societies should be maximally tolerant.

It's just a very strange reaction. I think if you look at what, like, the idea Neopostman talks about this, that like sort of whatever the dominant medium of culture is, shapes what people make, how people perform, how they think. And it's like if we live in a society or through a technological medium that demands, like interesting takes on things,

right? The take of like, this is pretty good, is not an interesting take. Right? Yeah, of dopamine rushing in your head for saying, this is based on anodyne and good. You have to work, it's rewarding the person who can most creatively misinterpret or discover the secret evil or, you know, subtext in the thing. And then that, of course, is what gets amplified because whether that take is legitimate or profoundly stupid, it's going to provoke the biggest reaction

to sort of even keeldness, there's no market for that. That's exactly right. Yeah, I mean, it's unfortunate that the medium of social media and Twitter specifically is so dominant for public thinking because it doesn't incentivize certain modes of behavior that I don't think are necessarily in the best interest of public thought. You're absolutely right.

I don't know how to really escape it, because it's not going anywhere. We're not going to put that toothpaste back in the container. Yeah, but you were talking about this with those Tchaevsky earlier that you were struck by this book that presented an idea from a person who almost certainly wouldn't have liked or accepted you, right? That he managed to do it like that through space and time you manage to connect, even though,

you know, in another circumstance wouldn't have managed to connect. And I think that's like the tragedy of it is that it deprives us of the ability of finding common ground, that rare common ground with people or ideas, like just the amount of, like, yeah, you read some old Southern writer, whether it's Walker Percy or Faulkner, and you're like, this person almost certainly was a vehement racist, all had all sorts of regressive, ridiculous views on things, but the work is beautiful, and you're connecting through the work, and that the work is better than they are, right? Like to me, that's what I take from Jefferson. Jefferson's writing is better than who he is. But if you lose the ability

to do that, you deprive yourself of a lot of good work or good ideas. Oh, you absolutely do. And you also, I think, make life a little bit boring. Yeah, sure. You know, it is boring. It's intellectually boring, but it's also just bland to basically reduce questions of interesting, uninteresting, insightful or not insightful, profound or not profound to good or bad in a kind of preordained

frame of a window that is very simplistic in its rendering of what is good and bad and lacks a lot of shading. I think that that's just essential to the kind of life isn't that way. You know, Jefferson is a perfect example because whether we like it or not, he authored our country that has to matter in some way and part of what our country is is a place that did really horrific things, but it also had mechanisms inside of its structure

that continuously sought to correct for things it did wrong, and that has to count for something. We have to be able to hold these contradictory ideas in our head at once and appreciate the entirety of the man and their creation. And I just find this urge to go back and edit and sanitize what came before to be rather childish. That's not adult life. Well, it's also disempowering, right? It's like you have to accept this person all or nothing, right? It's like they're dead.

Who the fuck cares what they think or what they want? I am going to pick and choose the stuff that I like from here and there and cobble together something that makes sense here in the 21st century. There's a Seneca line that I love. What I love about Seneca is the Stoic, but the philosopher, he quotes more than any other philosopher in his writings is Epicurus, his rival. And he has this line, he says, all quote a bad author if the line is good. Yeah. Right. And I like the idea of like, they're dead. They don't get, they don't get to

enforce some fundamentalist interpretation of their work. I can take, I can choose to see them however they want, however I want and take whatever whatever I want from them, and wrench it out of context if I want, because I'm empowered as the reader and thinker. It's almost infantilizing that we say people can't do that because they're not. It's not infractual. Yes, exactly. It's thinking of them as being incapable of handling the complexity and difficulty of the person in full.

Yeah. Yeah. And, right, it's like, it's dogmatic, right? The idea that you have to take all of it, that the whole thing is, there's a fundamentalism to that that makes no sense to me either. It's like, pick and choose. Like, put your own thing together. That's what intellectual journey is.

Is a cobbling of influences together? That's exactly it. Yeah, that's exactly it. And that's what's to say one more thing about social media. That's what's so kind of disturbing is that there's the kind of algorithmic incentive for the bubble and for the echoing of of what one already agrees with that doesn't allow you to cobble together these disparate threads because you're not even exposed to them if that's how you're primarily receiving information.

That's totally right. And then and then more alarmingly on both sides of the spectrum, you have people going like children shouldn't be allowed to access this. This should be banned. This should be taken away from them, which has not solved many problems over human history. It's never worked out that banning things. Exactly. That's why I used to go. Myself and three other authors this summer wrote an op-ed in the New York Times against

these proposed CRT bands because that's not the way that persuasion and disagreement work. You cannot ban out of existence ideas that you deem inappropriate without having really adverse consequences for that. Well, what I liked about that op-ed is that I imagine there was a good amount of political disagreement between the three of you, but you were able to come together on this one thing that you agreed with, which is like what we need more of. Yeah, I think so. I mean, it definitely did lose some, you know, it lost some of us, if not friends, some allies,

but I think that that's an attempt to put your money where your mouth is and to not be strictly tribal. Yeah, right. No, the more you are locked into an identity or a world view, the less optionality you have, and the less potential allies you have, because you see things in such a binary way.

That's right, yeah, absolutely. Well, this was amazing, man. I love your stuff. I loved the letter, and I forgot about that op-ed, but I remember reading it. I'm a big David French fan. I've had him on the gas before too. He's such a nice guy.

Again, someone totally different world view than mine, totally different, but you can't help but appreciate someone who is at least thinking seriously about the things that they think. Exactly. And willing to refine his thinking and change his mind, which I think is actually, that's something you can get penalized for, because people will pull out the receipts and show that you're contradicting yourself. But I think that we should all hope that we can evolve our thinking on questions that are complicated as new information emerges as we see new arguments.

I mean, that's what I want out of an intellectual that I look to as an example, and that's what I want as a model for my own kind of behavior too. Yeah, there's a line in one of Cicero's dialogues where someone quote something that he said before and says you're contradicting himself and he goes, yeah, I'm a free agent. And you should be able to change your mind and you should be

able to look at each individual issue anew and there's a certain, what Emerson say about consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. You know, like you should be able to change. It's a bad sign if you can't. Yep. Yeah, no, that's a line. Is it Emerson? My mother used to always tell it to me and it always made me feel better. That's it.

Yes. And then I used it to get out of being reprimanded, you know. There you go. Well, I really appreciate it, man, and keep up the great work. Thank you so much, Ryan. You too, keep it up.

I really enjoy your podcast. Thanks for having me on. You know, the Stoics in real life met at what was called the Stoa. The Stoa, Poquile, the Painted Porch in ancient Athens. Obviously, we can't all get together in one place because this community is like hundreds of thousands of people, and we couldn't fit in one space. But we have made a special digital version of the stoe we're calling it daily stoeic life. It's an awesome community you could talk about like today's episode you could talk about the emails,

ask questions, that's one of my favorite parts is interacting with all these people who are using stosism to be better in their actual real lives. You get more daily stoeic meditations the weekend, just for the daily stoke life members, quarterly Q&As with me, cloth bound addition of our best of meditations, plus a whole bunch of other stuff, including discounts and this is the best part, all our daily stoke courses and challenges, totally for free, hundreds of dollars of value

every single year, including our new year, new year challenge. We'd love to have you join us. There's a two week trial, totally for free. Check it out at dailystokelife.com. Hey, prime members. You can listen to the daily Stoic early and add free on Amazon music, download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and add free with Wondery Plus in Apple podcasts.