Modern Wisdom - #419 - Meghan Sullivan & Paul Blaschko - A Philosopher's Guide To The Good Life

Episode Date: January 8, 2022

Meghan Sullivan & Paul Blaschko are Philosophy Professors at the University of Notre Dame and authors. How to lead a good life is one of the biggest quandaries that humans struggle with. How to think about status and money and love and death are huge challenges. Today we get to find out some of philosophy's answers to life's most fundamental questions. Expect to learn the role of truth in leading a good life, what history has to teach us about responsibility and agency, why Socrates was the world's first troll, how generosity is linked to fulfilment, what Marcus Aurelius says about fears of the future, Paul & Meghan's issues with Stoicism and much more... Sponsors: Join the Modern Wisdom Community to connect with me & other listeners - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours at https://www.drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 20% discount on the highest quality CBD Products from Pure Sport at https://bit.ly/cbdwisdom (use code: MW20) Extra Stuff: Buy The Good Life Method - https://amzn.to/3G1hPYt  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bonjour friends, welcome back to the show, my guests today, a Megan Sullivan and Paul Blaschko, their philosophy professors at the University of Notre Dame and authors. How to lead a good life is one of the biggest quandaries that humans struggle with. How to think about status and money and love and death are huge challenges. Today, we get to find out some of philosophy's answers to life's most fundamental questions. Expect to learn the role of truth in leading a good life, what history has to teach us about responsibility and agency, why Socrates was the world's first troll, why generosity is linked to fulfillment, what Marcus Arraileus says about fears

of the future, Paul and Megan's issues with stoicism and much more. If you haven't already, then don't forget to join the Modern Wisdom Locals community where you'll get to connect with me and thousands of other people who listen to the show. There is discussion forums in there and we have threads about each episode and you get to hear about upcoming guests before anybody else. Head to modernwisdom.locals.com. You can sign up for free and if you want to support the show, I thank you very much. You can do it through there as well. Modernwisdom.locals.com.

But now it is time to learn about the philosophers of history. Paul and Megan, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having us. Yeah, we're excited. My pleasure. So I want to start with a quote. Are you not ashamed of your eagerness to possess as much wealth reputation and honors as possible? While you do not care nor give thought to wisdom or truth or the best possible state of your soul. What's that mean to you? I can start. So that's a very famous passage from Socrates's apology.

2,400 years ago Socrates, the kind of founder of philosophy, was put on trial by the Athenian government for, among other things, corrupting the youth of Athens. We're asking too many hard questions and being a bit too aggressive and pushy about whether Athens was pursuing the things that were really valuable in life versus just kind of inflating their own egos. And one of the things I love about that quote, we shout that and read it to undergraduates here at Notre Dame quite a bit. You can imagine somebody saying to their enemy or like their opposition, you guys don't care about the right things.

All you care about is money or all you care about is fame. You don't care about what's really good. But Socrates is not saying that to his enemies. He's saying it to his friends and students. That's one of the quotes that got him into trouble is he's going around to people he really cares about and saying, like, Paul, I think you're getting too addicted to these cultural lies about money and honor and I really think you need to work harder on like going after things that are really worth having. And that was a threatening idea in Athens.

Why was it so threatening? Well, I mean, so for one thing, Athens is a direct democracy, right? And so the ability to argue and the ability to persuade people could be literally a life or death matter, right? If somebody got up and accused you of something in front of the assembly, you just had to stand up and you had to argue.

You had to say, this isn't true. Or this is why somebody else owes me a bunch of money or whatever it might be. And so the ability to just win arguments at all costs is something that goes a really valuable skill. And they're actually professional. We call them argument or debate coaches, they're called the sophists, right?

Who would be hired, often by the wealthy in Athens to train Athenian citizens on how to argue, right? And it's easy to see how you might lose the truth in all of that, right? Or lose a desire for the truth, lose a love for the truth, because if it doesn't matter, whether your argument's true or not, if it just matters, whether you're persuading people, there's not really as much incentive to focus on whether your reasons that you're giving are good.

So, this is one of the reasons why I think Socrates is such a revolutionary figure, but in his own time, and also ours. I mean, as we sort of did the research and we're looking at ancient Athens, I was just reasons why I think Socrates is such a revolutionary figure, but in his own time, and also ours. As we did the research and were looking at ancient Athens, I was just struck by how many parallels there are between the complaints that Socrates has about his own time, and the complaints that a lot of us have when we look at the state of political debate or the state of debate on Twitter, and people trying to own each other on Twitter, exert some power without any respect for love of the truth.

And that's an over generalization. It's not always the case. It's not what's always going on. But it certainly resonates. The message resonates. As I read, Socrates' critique, I just constantly found myself nodding along and thinking, yeah, I recognize this. Why did he end up being killed then?

Yeah, good. This is the question from the last 2400 years. I mean, so much philosophy has been written starting with his student Plato about how did this go so wrong? This is one of the things I love about reading Greek philosophy is, you know, you can empathize with these guys. I don't know. I suspect a lot of your listeners are like me, and you look around, it's 2022, and you just think, how did we get here? Like, what exactly got us at the point where this is what we're fighting about in the news, and this is how I'm living my life for, you know, allegedly, the charges against Socrates were that he was corrupting the youth

that he was encouraging atheism or rejection of the Greek religion. The weirdest one is that he worships things below the earth or he's too interested in things below the earth. And again, even at his time, people are like, what is his charge? And again, even at his time, people are like, what is his charge? You know, one of the hypotheses that I think makes most sense to me is put yourself in the shoes of the Athenians.

To make decisions, you have to do them democratically and people have to vote. And I don't know if you're part of like a local school board right now, or if you're part of an office that's deciding your like policy for coming back to work. Anytime you need people to vote to make an important decision, you really need people to be lined up and together and agreeing with each other. Otherwise, it's really, really fraught and very painful and stressful, especially if you think that the other a bad decision might get made. And so for Athens, they made all their big decisions. We're going to war. We're going to let you new tax. They made all the decisions that way. And somebody like Socrates going around encouraging people to question the status quo or question the culture is going to be, once you see

it working, and it worked. Like, you got people to think like, maybe I'm not so right. Maybe I shouldn't believe what the louder guys tell me. Then you also start to lose confidence that we're able to vote on anything anymore. And that can be really scary if there's a lot on the line. I think to you just to kind of jump in here, you know, one of the really powerful moments in the apology is where Socrates is given the choice to either go free, right? You can totally go free, but they say, if you go free, you can't keep asking questions, right?

You can't keep doing this thing that you've been doing, or we're gonna kill you. Like those are your choices, right? And of course, he chooses to die. He says, the unexamined life is not worth living. This is something that we put on stickers here at the other day. Is that his response during the trial? Yeah, it comes in the apology. Yeah, he said that is a fucking boss move like What an unbelievable response?

If you think that's that's great. I mean the other thing they say is like well What do you think your sentence should be if not death? He says you guys should give me free lunch for the rest of my life Yeah, literally I mean He's totally trolling life. He literally said that he should provide for five people. He was kind of trolling them. I mean, at this point, he is totally trolling them. He knew where this is going. Yeah. Yeah. But I think one of the reasons that's so powerful for me is because, you know, a way of focusing in on what you think are the most important goals in life, or the most important good things in life, right? Is just to ask, like, what are the things that if I didn't have them, my life wouldn't be worth living? You know, Aristotle famously says, you know,

without friends, a man would not choose to live though he had every other good. And to me, you know, that just strikes me, right? I think like, yeah, gosh, you can imagine somebody who's, you know, totally wealthy, they have, you know, they're physically fit and healthy and everything else. But if you have any friends, you think there's something deeply lacking in that life,

right? And so in choosing not to continue to live if he can't engage in this kind of questioning, if he can't pursue the truth with other people in his community, Sardines is really just saying like, this is the ultimate good. This is the ultimate goal in my life. And if you're going to take that away from me, you might as well take my life too. That like, I don't know, even now, like gives me chills. It's sort of, you know, is the reason why I think philosophy professors see him as sort of the the martyr kind of hero figure in philosophy. And I think, you know, it's a worthwhile thought experiment for us too, just to think like, you know, what are those good things in our life that we'd be either

willing to give up our life for or that just, you know, without which we would say, yeah, our life is not worth living or is certainly not as good as it is now. I think, and this can kind of sound like, you know, literature, not realizing that this is a real, a real tradeoff that people face even now. So I was really moved this summer reading about faculty members in philosophy departments in Hong Kong who are faced with this decision of going to jail if they continue to teach certain kinds of political philosophy or if they're willing to stop teaching that then they can keep their jobs and what type of philosophy is it? Philosophy about liberal democracy. So like John Rawls and Western style arguments about

how decisions should be made in a democratic liberal republic. Rawls in particular is kind of the flash point because he's on a lot of curricula. And there are faculty members who are threatened directly with the government with jail sentences or losing their jobs who I think are pretty brave. I read this in public, gosh, what would I do? Would I be willing to change my class

to avoid going to jail? Or would I think, like, there's no point in me claiming I'm a philosopher or living in this world if I can't ask the questions that I think we need answers to? That's a chronic sacrifice. It's a good way to kick off any subject area, right? Like if that's the guy that was, you know, that's your Jesus Christ, it's going to make some pretty badass people downstream from that. I didn't even know that about Hong Kong, because they're not

Hong Kong a separate nation state independent of China, right? Or is there some Chinese influence that's coming over the top of that, which is causing issues? It's quite complicated at the moment. This is definitely not an area where I'm an expert. I've had the chance to spend some time at these universities in Hong Kong doing philosophy, and they have really vibrant, totally amazing philosophy departments. But yeah, the mainland China and the people's Republic is taking over more and more governing control over Hong Kong as part of this process of Britain giving up control. And so facing some really hard questions about what the nature of education is. I mean, it's just two very different mindsets about what's really valuable.

And it's institutionalized in these particular people having to make hard decisions. One thing, yeah, that this reminds me of is there's this great series of episodes on this American life about Hong Kong and about what's going on. And it's actually just fascinating. Again, I know nothing about the political situation in Hong Kong, but one thing that comes out in that series

is just how education is a flashpoint, as you're saying. It's kind of, it's got this power, right? Like what you're teaching in the schools, it's got this generational power, which is humbling to think about in our own context, because I think it's easy to get lost in all the different debates that we have in academia or wherever else. But it does hold the power. What you're teaching, what you're learning, what kind of community you're building up with people that you're asking questions with. It's got political impacts.

And I think the critical thing to remember about Socrates is it's not that he was willing to die for a particular belief. I mean, there are a lot of academics and a lot of people with ideas that I think it would be horrible if they said they'd be willing to die for them because their ideas could be wrong.

They could be dumb. People have dumb ideas all the time. Socrates was willing to die for the right to ask questions, like the right to try to figure out the truth and to be satisfied about the truth. And that is worth defending at great lengths, but not necessarily saying, like, if you don't believe me on this particular philosophical theory, I'm going to burn this place to the ground. That's, that's intethetical to philosophy. Yeah, it's so fundamental, right?

There was a, a conversation I had a couple of months ago to do with free speech and where free speech begins and ends. And there was a justification that the only type of speech which shouldn't be permitted is that which further restricts free speech. So if you try to employ your free speech to limit other people's ability to use free speech, that actually starts to cross the line because it's inherently self-defeating and that's kind of what you're talking about here. It's not necessarily a particular point of view with regards to a type of philosophy. It is the process that undergoods the ability

to do philosophy itself. It's like saying, you're not allowed to do philosophy. That would be one of the implications of it. So rolling the clock forward to what you guys are doing now, what does this have to do with leading a good life? Yes, we actually talk about this in the first chapter of the book. We talk about all of the adventures we've had in teaching philosophy over the last four years where we try to ask these really hard questions to hundreds and hundreds of 18-year-olds

and kind of like like the match and watch what happens. I think one thing that we've learned and we really try to share this with the reader in the first chapter is a lot of folks are frustrated right now by realizing that they have pretty persistent disagreements with other people about hot-blown issues, about racism, about how to handle a global health emergency. And they think that strategies that we get recommended to us, one strategy, which I feel like I read about all the time and the New York Times and the Chronicle of Higher Education, is how to mold people's minds to agree with you using subtle techniques. So how to get Paul to come around on wearing a mask by using rhetorical tricks and say,

oh my gosh, this is sophistry. This is totally not the ethical way to treat people who disagree with you. Another approach is like, why your arguments are better than the people who disagree with you and how to know that your arguments are better. That's also not going to help you make any progress at trying to figure out how we can all get on the same page and improve our beliefs. Plato, in the Republic, just talks about how frustrated he is with trying

to argue with people who spend all their time thinking about winning arguments. But then he also says, we have another option which is to first like remind ourselves when we start to get into these fights, why we care in the first place about this issue and like why it matters to us to get it right rather than just to win. Plato has we care in the first place about this issue and why it matters to us to get it right rather than just to win. Plato has his students in the academy doing all these exercises, like math problems, to just remind themselves that they still like getting the right answer, even if it wasn't the answer they initially started out with.

And he thinks that cultivating that feeling of wanting the right answer rather than defending the answer you currently have is a better option. Then we get this allegory of the cave in the Republic where he's like, what if there's better answers about absolutely everything and not just math problems? What if if you tried harder, you might get those as well and how beautiful would it be to be outside the cave? How much better would it be to be outside the cave with your friends and not just by yourself? And starting to kind of, we call it fear of missing out, go philosophical fear of missing out. Like if you kind of feel like there could be something better that we could achieve by cooperative discussion of this issue, the truth rather than just trying to win the argument, then maybe watching that would

help decrease some of the tension. I think, too, so the way that I experience the method that Socrates is employing, and in some ways this is related to even the title of our book, the Good Life Method, thinking about rightly ordering the values that you have in pursuing the truth or in thinking about what matters in your life and what your goal should be. The way I connect it with our contemporary, especially our very contemporary situation, is maybe 10 years ago or so. I used to read a lot of op-eds that had the following form. They would say, like, look, we all disagree about things.

But as long as we get all the views out there on the table, we're eventually, the truth is going to rise to the top, and we're just going to figure it out. And then it turns out that when people start making arguments with no regard for the truth at all, this strategy just doesn't work. In the book, we call this after Harry Frankfurt calls this bullshit, just making arguments without any concern for the truth at all.

It's just bullshit. You can't have a policy, a personal policy or an institutional policy that just says, look, we take every single argument that comes out there, and we put them at exactly the same level, and eventually we're all going to agree. There's going to be a consensus. Now, where that does work is if you have some shared value underlying, you

know, the arguments that are getting on the table. And here's how I think about it and experience it. I argue with my mom like all the time. Like this is like the way that we show that we love each other is we, you know, call each other up. We're like, there's this article about something and, you know, I think you're wrong about this and we go back and forth. And the reason I think it works for us, whereas it definitely doesn't work for me on Twitter or on Facebook or on social media, is that my mom and I care both about each other but also about the truth.

Like we genuinely, not always, I mean, it's like easy to kind of get into a position where you're like, I just wanna be right. But we really care, we really think, look, we're both gonna be better off if we know the truth about this. Even if that means that you're wrong, even if it means that I'm wrong, even if it means we're both wrong. So I think, I don't have a deep diagnosis of why we're so politically polarized or why we've gotten to a position where we use

argumentational bullshit to just push the different positions that we have to try to change politics or our community or whatever it might be. I don't know why exactly that is, but I do know that, you know, Plato and Socrates and Aristotle are onto something where they say part of the problem, a huge part of the problem is that we just don't have this really fundamental attitude, a love for the truth, and it's something that we don't have in relationship and in community with other people. And if we have that, if we can rediscover that or reawaken it, it's going to make a huge

difference. I think the problem is that you have perverse incentives going on here. If somebody was constrained by the truth, then their argumentation would be less effective, because the race to the bottom is the person that isn't constrained by the truth can use more limbically hijacking language or they can be more inflammatory or they can understand neuro linguistic programming or whatever tactic it is that they need to be more effective. If you decide to play, if I decide to play football and I'm constrained by the rules of football, but you decide to pick it up and run with it under your arm like it's rugby, then I, there is an asymmetry in terms of how effective we can be at playing

this game because you've decided not to play by the rules. So yeah, there's two ways to do it, right? One way would be to say we need to have very, very hard and fast rules about the game that makes it incredibly highly sanctioned if you decide to pick the ball up and run with it under your arm. The alternative, which is what you guys are suggesting, is to have an emergent bottom-up social enforcement mechanism where all of the players on the field would stop and go, mate, you can't pick the ball up. Stop being a dick. So you have sort of this top-down or bottom-up approach.

But yeah, I think increasingly at the moment, the bottom-up approach, because of how tribal everybody is, no one wants to restrict their own team's ability to win. And generally at the moment, there is such an anti-authoritarian, like what gets called authoritarian now, there are some authoritarian policies out there, but it's a word that gets used enough a lot to describe like any type of intervention that occurs from the top.

So it's kind of hard to work out how to just get people playing by the rules of the game again. Well, and this is why again, you totally need Socrates and you understand why he was in such a bind at the end of the apology because you very well could decide I care about the truth. I'm going to be willing to change my mind. I think a big cultural problem we have right now is if somebody looks like they changed their mind about an issue that they really care about, they get beat up. Like, people just think that's true. It's so, so, so, so, so, so, where I'm not going to win football games as a result of it Or where I might my job at risk. That's why Socrates is saying you've got to care about this More than your job. You've got to care about this more than winning. It's got to it

It's got to be that important because to to to make it a part of your life You're you're gonna take some risks Part of the the living philosophically and living a good life doesn't mean that you're just going to get everything. So aside from the avoiding culture war topics and stuff like that, how have you guys defined what a good life means? What does a good life mean to you? Yeah, that's, I mean, one of the sort of structuring principles that we used in writing the book is, you know, we tried to

look at different, what we call virtues. We're working in a virtue ethics tradition, but I should maybe just say, the way that we're thinking about virtues here is as human excellences. So we're thinking about virtues in the way that Aristotle thinks about virtues. So what are the traits of character? What are the habits of soul, if you want to put it sort of in different language, that are required to flourish as a person, to be happy? And so one of the ways that we organize the book is each of the chapters looks at a different virtue or a different kind of class of virtues. So we go through the beginning of the book, we talk about the love of truth, we talk about generosity and the ways that people think differently about generosity and

what it means to be a generous person, how you should structure and order your financial life. We talk about love and attention and care, how should you relate to the people in your life? And responsibility is one of my favorite ones and how you can take personal responsibility for things. So we go through these, right? Each of the chapters is kind of a picture of a virtue and hopefully one that you can see related to an actual life. We give a lot of personal stories as we go through and say, look,

this is how we think about generosity, you know, theoretically, like Eswellossus, but this is how we try to live it out in our actual lives. And so what we're hoping emerges is, you know, a picture of what we think are, you know, really important virtues for a good life so that our readers can kind of see that, see themselves reflected in each of those stories, and then critically evaluate and say like, yeah, that is how I think about generosity too, or no, totally not. I think you guys are wrong. You say that a remarkable feature about human history is that we all started wondering philosophically

about how to live better lives at roughly the same time between 600 and 300 BC. Why do you think that happened? We've gotten that question once or twice now and I feel like this is what we show out little we know about the history of the world. We should say, you know, we probably should have qualified that in the book of like that's at least when the written records all start popping up. So you got Confucius and the Jew dynasty. You've got Gouda working in Southeast Asia.

You've got the Jewish wisdom tradition that's really getting fired up and writing like Job and Ecclesiastes and starting to think really hard about this whole God question in a philosophical way. And then you got your Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Dream Team, operating in Greece. And it is, I mean, 300 years is actually not that long. It's a drop in the bucket for humans. And so it's pretty nuts that just, you know, spanning a bunch of different parts of the world, they're all issuing theories that are different in some respects, but the core operating system is shockingly similar. Humans have a certain way that we are right now.

There's a human 2.0, like a version of us that would be better and that we can't help but worry about and want to be. But we don't quite know how to get from where we are to what that version is. And we're not even 100% sure. Aristotle talks about being an archer who kind of sees the target off in the distance, but doesn't have good enough vision

to know exactly how to hit it, or exactly what it looks like. And folks think we're gonna need philosophy and we're gonna need systems of education to try to figure out this target. And we're gonna be philosophy and we're gonna need systems of education to try to figure out this target. And we're gonna be miserable if we don't find it. And then it gets weird, obviously. Like, Buddhists have very different vision of the target

than the Greek philosophers do. And Confucius is not 100% clear about whether everyone has that target, or it's really just people in the judinistie that need to hit their target. So it's not to like try to lump them all together, but that there's this kind of recipe. Let's start developing schools and training systems

and try to be a lot more systematic about figuring out what it is that we're trying to become. That's pretty freaking cool. And some of these cultures are interacting with each other, but it's not like they're right on top of each other. So that's a bit of the mystery aspect of what was going on in human development, where we're all just kind of turning on to this stage at the same time.

Yeah, and one of the things that we talk about in the book and that Aristotle talks about Ednausean, like across all the text of your rights, is that reflecting on our lives as a means of improving them is something that's just baked into us, right? He thought this was like our function or like part of our nature, that we are self-reflective, reason directed creatures, right?

We wanna think about how to get better. I love the example that Megan often gives about this. It's like, dogs don't do this. They don't wake up and they think, man, how could I be better at fetching? Let me read a book about fetching. They just like, they fetch and they're either gray at it or they're terrible at it, right? But human beings, we use the intellect.

We use our mind and we do it in community with other people through conversation to get better. And so I think that's just sort of fascinating evidence that Aristotle was certainly on to something and figures in these other traditions that talk about it as well. But there's just something really attractive, right? All humans buy nature, desire to know. Like this is a quote from the beginning of the metaphysics by Aristotle. All humans desire by nature to know

that's just a value that's baked in. I don't know, I think that resonates and I think it's sort of evidence by all of these different traditions popping up at the same time. I love the way Plato and the protagonist is giving, has Socrates giving this speech about how you really need to start teaching your kids

math and philosophy, like do it early. And he's talking with his friends and his friends are like, why is this such a big deal for you? And he's like, look, this is a paraphrase, obviously. But he's like, animals have a lot of advantages. They've got fur, they've got sharp teeth. They've got a lot going for them in this whole survival game.

Just, this just given to them. But we are a furless, toothless, kind of awkwardly designed creatures. We're featherless bipeds. The only thing we have is our wits. And so if your kids don't develop that, like the ability to kind of make far-sighted plans and trade-offs, that's what they're talking about

in that passage, we are screwed. Like we're not gonna make it. It's the only advantage that we've got in this game. If you've seen, there's a meme of a guy and a dog next to an open landscape, and there's a thought bubble coming out of the guy and it's a computer and it's a car and it's a money tree and it's other shit. And coming out of the dog, it's just a small representation

of the landscape that they're seeing, right? It's like a comment on the fact that the reason that the dog is happy is because the dog is able to be present and the human's unhappiness is because he's constantly ruminating about all of the shit that he needs to do. There's something about that that kind of triggers me a little bit. I always feel it regularly comes up and it always makes me feel a little bit, I don't know, just pissed off because like implied in that is if we were able to tune our cognition down to some sort of more base level, we would be happier.

That the dog is somehow superior or it's the dog's got it right because it made the choice. It's like no, no, no, no, no. It is working at its maximum capacity. The dog is thinking about going for fetch without trying to become better at playing fetch because it can't think of that If it was burdened with the depth of thought that humans have it would have all of the rumenations and all of the awful

Reflections that we do as well. There's something about that that always pisses me off. I don't know why I Love that I think and I love that like you get mad at this. I do the same thing. I look at these memes. I was like calm on I of it like you get mad at this. I do the same thing. I look at these memes and I was like, come on. I think one thing that's interesting that this just really calls to mind for me is the Stoic tradition, right? So we talk about Stoicism at the end of the book and about how human beings, they can sort of capture what's good about,

you know, what's happening with the dog, but we do it in a really distinctive way, right? We do it in a contemplative sort of way. And so here's what that means. Look, yeah, we've got all this other stuff going on. And it's a huge advantage. Like, I would never give up the ability to like, you know, rationally think about my life and organize it.

And appreciate in an intellectual way, like what I love about my family and all these other things, they're just incredible things. Like, but there's a bunch of downsides. There's a bunch of terrible stuff that comes along with that, right? Loving my son, but also knowing that the world could intervene and frustrate this in some way, gives me deep anxiety about the future, right? And that's the downside, right? So it's great that we can think, there's this downside.

Because what do we do about that fact? One of the things that's really fascinating about stoicism and the stoics is they say the answer to that problem is philosophy, right? What you're supposed to do is you're supposed to come up with meditations or exercises or ways of intellectually contemplatively putting yourself in touch with reality.

Not again, not in the way that the dog is. I think the meme is mistaken, even in like, attributing this as a thought of the dog. I mean, the dog is in it. There's no representation. Actually, sorry, I'm gonna get out of the philosophy of mind of animal fun. You know, it's just, boom, it's just there, whatever.

Well, for human beings, right? One of the things that we can do is we can look at our representation of the way things are. I might lose, you know, my son in the future, be estranged from him or whatever, and we can use our contemplative capacities to make sure that those are attuned to reality in the right sort of way, right? So Marcus Aurelius is constantly writing to himself. He's like, look, don't think about how you might lose the things you love in the future, like return to the present and realize they're here right now. And in worrying about them, you're missing out on what's so good about them that you

could be present to them, that you can be sort of tethered to reality in the right sort of way. So only that's just fascinating to me about the Stoics and a lot of traditions in philosophy around the time they're writing is that they think that the answer to the problems that arise with intellectual capacity is actually to go through those capacities, to go through contemplation and Aristotle writes about contemplation at Great Link. And I do think that's actually something that in our culture we sometimes sort of lose, right? We think of, I don't know, contemplation is this weird, isolated, monastic sort of thing

that like some weirdos do, but like, yeah, I'm not gonna do that. But really like, you know, the Stoics, Aristotle, they think, no, no, this is absolutely central for dealing with exactly the kind of problems that you're referencing. Well, think about what most people are trying to do or what a lot of people are trying to do with their daily lives,

either consciously or subconsciously They're trying to escape from that contemplative practice. They're using caffeine to make themselves move faster or alcohol to make themselves move slower and down regulate the resolution that they see the world with phones to distract themselves and Netflix and sex and extreme sports and you know, pick your pursuit. Naval Ravacant has a quote where he says, we don't want peace of mind, we want peace from mind. And that distinction of us, just Paul Bloom,

who you may know, psychologist from Yale now in Toronto, he's interviewed a dominatrix and she said, nothing captures attention like a whip. And what she meant was that if you get slapped in the face for the next five seconds, you don't think about anything. And that's a very rare but beautiful situation to be. And in a bizarre way, looking down the pipe of a dominatrix where I'm leather with a whip in a hand.

But it's true, right? You have this opportunity to escape the ruminations from your mind, and this is, I think, again, like, that's what the person that made that meme is trying to create. Look, if only we could be like the dog, if only we could dial back the resolution that we see things with. You've mentioned just a thought come up there.

You mentioned Stoicism and awful lot. I've had a ton of stoic scholars on the show, Ryan Holiday, Massimo Piglucci, Donald Robertson. What is it about stoicism that's made it so sexy in the modern era? Like, why is Epicurianism or Taoism or, you know, cynicism? Why are there no other renaissance and do you think, if you could put a couple of bets, if you could invest in some different philosophies, do you think that we'll see a renaissance for some other ones coming soon?

I can start off on this. So I've got my own podded theory about why stoicism is having its moment. But first, the first thing I'll say, one of the things we try to show in the book is that stoicism is part of this much bigger, longer, more interesting and variegated tradition and philosophy called virtue ethics, which gets going with the

Greeks. You find versions of it in China. But if you really like the general thrust of stoicism, but you don't like some of the recommendations or some of the goals seem shallow to you, that's okay, because there's other versions of this kind of philosophy that you might find a lot more use out of. So, we encourage you to think about stoicism in context of this bigger kind of philosophy. I think stoicism is really exciting and appealing to a lot of folks in the United States right now because first, the stoics are about finding ways to thrive in hostile environments. So Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, these guys were all dealing with the hot dumpster fire that

was the Roman Empire. They were important men of like public life. So I mean, some Stoics were full-time wackadoodle philosophers, but a lot of them were people with day jobs, like significant prominent honor-inducing day jobs, but who also had the big kind of problems, and this philosophical view seemed to help them thrive in light of challenges rather than being

pummeled by them. And you look at all of the change that's even happened during our lifetimes. The fact that the internet has totally revolutionized every aspect of how we think and interact and communicate. That's happened just the last two decades. That's crazy. The way that we've dealt with political changes, the fact that we're in a mature empire that's having its own kinds of puzzles. Stoas, we can see a lot of ourselves in these Romans who are dealing with their problems. And we might want to see that we're like them because they did okay. And my Marxists really did okay in the end.

I think also there are some really helpful psychological therapies that the Stokes suggested and then modern psychology is made really effective. Probably the most obvious one is cognitive behavioral therapy. This idea of you're facing anxiety, which we all do, and you might have thought that you just have to live with it or it's your own problem. But in fact, there are exercises that you can undertake to start to control your emotions, negative emotions. And Stokes took that extraordinarily seriously, and I think a lot of us find ourselves in

the situation right now where we want that benefit. Yeah, and let me make, so I'll make a prediction, and that is that I think virtue ethics is in one way or another the thing that sort of comes next. And here's why I think it. So I think Megan's totally right, that stoicism, you know, gives us these practices, these meditations that are empirically grounded, but it also gives us a bit of substance, a bit of philosophical substance,

to sort of grab onto and say, you know, not only does this breathing technique work for me, but it also connects up with my purpose as a human being, and it connects up with this rational sort of contemplative nature. Now, one thing that's really crucial to the stoic picture, and then I guess I would really push a stoic, contemporary stoic on if I had a chance to talk to them is,

the stoics actually have some pretty crazy views in the background. The reason they're so optimistic that if you get in touch with reality, your anxiety is going to go down, is because they think the cosmos is divinely ordered, right? And a lot of contemporary stoics say, well, you know, okay, we'll take some of that or we won't take some of that or maybe it's metaphorical or whatever it might be. One thing that's really cool about virtue ethics and about the various different forms it takes is that there are versions of it that don't assume substantively some of these pictures, these metaphysical pictures that I think a lot of people today don't assume,

right? Some people do and you can plug in sort of theistic pictures to stoicism or whatever, or even look at like a gust and see how he tried to manage that kind of stuff. But a lot of people, if you're just like a secular person out in the world looking for a great philosophy, a lot of the stoicism resonates, but then you start thinking, gosh, like I don't know if I think that there's this sort of cosmos that's divinely ordered and whatever else. There's news that we all share.

I don't know. So my thought is, if you keep digging philosophically, virtue ethics is just this incredible territory where you can start coming up with resources and tools to come up with a substantive philosophical picture that you actually believe that you think is, this is the right picture. And of course Aristotle has this.

He's got a view of human nature and our function, our purpose. Again, going purpose. Again, going into Augustine, the Christian philosophical tradition has these. But again, I think as people continue to look for more and more substantive philosophical views behind the things that they find really useful and helpful, I think they're going to find that the virtue tradition is just totally full of these rich pictures that are really appealing in their own way. What do you think is a tool or a couple of tools that Virtue Ethics has, which

stoicism is missing massively? I think just really distinctive pictures of the human person, right? And distinctive pictures, just practical pictures of how we can take something like our view of what we think we are, what we think our functioner purpose is, and then translate that into really practical advice, right? If you look at the Nika McKin ethics from Aristotle, and the Nika McKin ethics is really fascinating, right? The form of the book is it's actually either lecture notes that he sort of wrote or that somebody that was taking his class wrote on a class that he was giving about how to be happy, how to achieve you dimonia, right, how to flourish as a human being.

And so if you look at it, yeah, there's really abstract theoretical stuff right at the beginning, he says, look, I'm going to give you an argument about what your function is, about what the purpose and meaning of life is. And then immediately we jump into, and here's a virtue that in light of that fact, you've got to acquire. And here's what it looks like. Here's what friendship looks like. And he's giving arguments.

He's not just saying, trust me. He's saying, here's my argument about why friendship is really important. He does that for most of the book. He's looking at these really practical issues, giving you arguments. And then he ends up kind of zooming back and saying, okay, so let's tie this all together, and let's look at what this entails in the very end. But for me, I mean, it sort of shows the power of virtual ethics. You can have this really substantive theoretical view, but you immediately get into just really practical issues, really practical advice about the things that we care about, about how you should spend money or raise your kids, or whether you should practice a religion,

whatever it might be, kind of the way that there was big questions, sort of show up or appear in our daily lives or experience. To me, that's, I don't know, that's one of the huge strengths of virtue ethics. I think one thing I found a little bit irritating about the kind of contemporary American version of stosism that's really popular right now is, if you ask them kind of what the goal is, we talked about trying to figure out that target that you're trying to hit with your arrow. A lot of times it sounds to me,

and this might be a little bit uncharitable. Like the goal is kind of invincibility, like to make myself immune from bad things that might happen. I would have said indifference, but yeah, invincibility might be a way to put it. And again, I don't know about you. Like, that's not my goal.

When I think about what a really good person is, sometimes it's somebody that makes extraordinary sacrifices for others, and in ways that's not going to tribute back to their own glory, and like has this kind of concept of a comic and Marcus really is certainly think stuff like this too. So only is it fair to necessarily pin it to the Romans but when you listen to some of the stoic Technology driven a metaphysical self-help advice right now. It's like I'm going to use stoicism to make sure that I win every argument with my board

And it's like no man the whole point of it was like, you are mortal, and you are a non-for-non-sharp teeth covered organism that depends on other people, and good reason in order to do well. And it would be better if you were a little bit more vulnerable. There are some really great goods that come from suffering for other people and allowing suffering to happen to you. And I think that, you know,

certainly like Christians in Rome at the time were really critical of how into this, the Roman Empire was getting because it was also making the Roman Empire cold. And I mean, that's the thing that I struggle to kind of pass out. Stoicism doesn't seem to have a ton of joy in it to me. Or certainly not, I'm not gonna try and be like an advocate

for your philosophy needs to account for hedonism. But, you know, people like to party, we like to find pleasure in the moment. And it seems like there aren't really much room for that in stoicism. One of the things that shocked me as I went back and read Marcus Aurelius this like last time, and I read the meditations like every couple of months now

because I teach it in different classes. One of the things that shocked me is right, you know, at the beginning of the meditations, he's giving a list of people that he's grateful for and the things that he's learned for them. And one of them, I forget who he's talking about, he says, I'm grateful that he showed me how to be the same man in all conditions, even during this period where he had lost a child.

And I read that and I was just like, whoa, dude, back up, to be totally indifferent to something like that. That struck me as not monstrous, kind of not monstrous, but you know, the wrong way to go, right? So to have the resources to say, look, there are times where it makes sense to tie your happiness up with the happiness of another person. There are, you know, ways in which we flourish

and we're happy only if we're flourishing together. That to me is a really powerful idea and I think we can swing sort of too far to one end or the other and we can start thinking well our happiness consists in being super wealthy or having these external goods and okay now we're going in the wrong direction. But again one thing that I think virtue ethics provides a resource is just to balance out some of that kind of the pejorative sense of stoicism that you sometimes hear people talking about. Which I do think is a real danger. What role do you think that truth has in the good life then?

Yeah, I mean, well, yeah, so I go all the way back to Socrates, you know, I find our students will often tell us that the line that we quoted from Socrates at the beginning is the thing that really sticks with them after the class, right? The unexamined life is not worth living. It's this idea that's, again, shocking, especially in our times, sort of a deeper commitment to the truth than even to my own goals in life or to, you know, winning arguments on mine or whatever else. I take that just really, really seriously. I think if I can become the kind of person who cares more about the truth than winning

arguments, who cares more about the truth, then, you know, my status or whatever it might be, if I can become a little bit more socratic in that way, I think that's sort of like Socrates serves as an exemplar here for me, for those reasons. Yeah. I think I've been reflecting a lot and we write about this a little bit in the book

about the Elizabeth Holmes trial. She was just convicted on four fraud counts. We were writing about her when we were writing about William James a year ago, when we were working on the manuscript and we were thinking, man, this whole news cycle is going to be over by the time this book comes out. Nobody's going to care about our philosophical. Nailed it. We can release. Nailed it. No, no, we totally nailed it.

But you know, we have up in the office where I work at Notre Dame, we have some pretty vigorous debates about how a good person should feel about that trial. Your readers or listeners don't remember. Elizabeth Holmes was this very young medical device entrepreneur in Silicon Valley. He dropped out of Stanford and started heavily marketing this blood testing technology

she was trying to develop. He's really small. That's a blood to determine various diseases. And like everybody she got caught up in this culture that values like fake it till you make it like just pitch really hard and you can you can your dreams can outstrip reality with respect to technology and she raised all this money and Walgreens started like trying out her blood testing technology and the whole thing fell apart

because at the end of the day, her blood tests don't work. Like she can't get accurate data. And you reflect on her case and you one psychologically and culturally, you totally understand how she got into this mess mess because we there are so many really tempting advantages to being somebody who who just wants something to be real but doesn't care that much about whether or not it's true. And there are so many success

stories like Steve Jobs of like it worked. He lived this way, he lived his life this way and worked out for him. But one of the reasons why we think it's really important to pause and make philosophy part of your life and why we think it's desperately important that kids be taught it at elite colleges before they go work for companies in Silicon Valley is you can't believe that myth. Like you have to believe that there's some truth out there that's worth making the anchor of your decision making or otherwise practically speaking,

you might end up in federal prison in San Francisco, but even just speaking for her soul and other entrepreneurs and founders is like, you might end up being the bad guy in history, like the person who sold everybody's snake oil. Well, let's tune that up a little bit more. Think about the fact that over the next 100 years, we're moderately likely, I would give it maybe a 50% chance

that we're going to see super intelligent, general artificial intelligence, right? Over the next 100 years, 50% chance. If that is done by somebody who is more concerned about being first and being right, the control problem and the alignment problem are not going to be fixed, and we're all going to be paper clips. Like we're going to be Nick, Nick Bostrom's nightmare. So, if that happens, this is, you're so right. Like, when the externalities of your decisions begin to become civilizational

collapse, you need to have a more fundamental grounded, emergent idea that everybody agrees on to do with how the world should be run and trying to think what is good for humanity at large, when you can impact humanity at large, you know, it's all well and good. Think about the fact that Socrates was talking about this. And who could he impact? The people that were within his, the field that his voice could reach. That's it. You know, the guy didn't even have a megaphone. Let alone the ability to completely rework every piece of electronics on the planet to kill us. No, it's totally true. This actually gives me some optimism for philosophy, at least as a field. One of the things we talk about in the book is in the 20th century, virtue

ethics really got this huge boost right around the time of World War II and afterwards. And a really concrete reason that happened was nobody saw the atomic bomb coming and nobody saw complete total war fascism coming. Then they happened really fast and people realized, holy cow, we better have a kind of ethical theory and a sense of ethical goals that is going to be able to cope now with living in a world where you could wipe everybody off the planet with the wrong program. And then you see like Iris Murdoch and Elizabeth Anskum and Philip of Foot and all these philosophers rushing in to think, okay, like we need to think about this.

So we need to think about how we're going to redial because the game has changed. And philosophy is really good. Again, at that like goal finding activities, hopefully for the good. I mean, you could also imagine, like, fascism was also fueled by a kind of philosophy. So we hope we get it right, but you definitely can't have this technological advance without the accompanying philosophy. Yeah, and just even, you know,

going all the way back to Socrates, you know, he's often described as a gathly as sort of, somebody who is able to, to some extent, stand outside kind of dominant narratives in the culture and sort of just pick at them and just say, you guys, are we really sure that this is the thing that we want? Or are the arguments that we're making that this tech platform is gonna transform

the world for the better? Like, is that right? Like, what are the assumptions here about what kind of people we are, about what kind of community that we want to actually have? What are the assumptions that are, and are those true? And so, one thing that gives me a bit of optimism is, that's something that, like you mentioned,

he could just do on his own. It's sort of, you can form yourself. You can, again, we use the language of craft your soul by doing a little bit of philosophy, knowing a little bit of philosophy, and then doing some exercises or doing some meditations, you can sort of change yourself so that you're disposed to care about and stand up for the truth in circumstances where it might be incredibly difficult, there might be a lot of social pressure not to, right? Yeah, well, I mean, that's that's what we were talking about at the very beginning, right? The fact that you have, how do you say, competing narratives and competing

influences on people that makes changing your mind or having a nuanced view or beings, anything that isn't one extreme or the other, there are very, very few, do you know who Scott Adams is, the guy that wrote the Dilbert creator? Oh, yeah. Yeah, do you follow him on Twitter? Okay. I'm gonna go on Twitter.

All right, that's good for the benefit of your sanity. So Scott Adams was very pro-Trump, he was very sort of right of center with a lot of things over the last couple of years, right? However, he's incredibly skeptical around this vaccine skepticism stuff that was seeing that's coming out on the internet at the moment. And this is just spurging his entire audience out. He's getting ratioed every single tweet on Twitter. He's getting annihilated because his audience can't work out. They pattern

matched him as being this one person and then when he rolls forward and doesn't continue to follow their projected trajectory for him, they just lose their shit. And he's getting, I feel bad for the guy, like you thought that you had this person in your corner, but the reason that you liked him was because he was able to arrive at a place that was independent and it was heterodox, at least for what a lot of people from his background were thinking about, popular writers and stuff like that.

And now he's done the same thing again, but because it doesn't align with your interests, you don't like it. Yeah. And think about like the incentive structure there. I don't know, this is something I think about sometimes, because you see it a lot, right? You see somebody who rises to prominence

because they've got, they're speaking some uncomfortable truth, they're talking about something that a lot of people want to be talking about. And then all of a sudden, there's an orthodoxy that forms around that very quickly. In the minute they apply that same sort of reasoning and they say, hey, I'm gonna be open-minded and think about some other topic, like you're saying, they get.

No, no, we co-opted you about some other topic, like you're saying, they get. No, no, we co-opted you about this one. You're one of our tribe now. And the thing that really strikes me is, so from their perspective, okay, once you've climbed to the top of Twitter or wherever it is, you know, gotten a job in politics or whatever it is that you wanted to do, there is so much of a temptation to, you know, just use that power to kind of ride that wave and say, okay, yeah, you're right, you know what?

I will sort of pander or whatever it might be. And that's kind of a cultural sort of sort of cultural sickness or whatever it might be. But again, what can we do about that as individuals? Well, if we cultivate, if we craft our souls, to make ourselves more immune to that sort of pressure and to say, yeah, I could walk away from, you know, whatever it is that these people care about hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers or whatever it might be,

and my life would still be good. Why? Well, because influencing those people, that's not what it's about at the end of the day for me. What it's about is actually like, you know, pursuing the truth and having these kind of virtues. I think that's, you know, I think that's tough. It's understandable, man.

You don't need to agree with Scott Adams. Oh, I use Sam Harris as this example all the time. Sam consistently gets shit on by the people that last week said that they loved him because he falls on both sides of the argument a lot at the time. You know, you had someone who was anti woke, anti Trump, anti BLM riot, but anti Biden progressive policies and you're like, how, who else is holding all of these opinions at the same time? But the reason that I believe Scott genuinely

believes what he says, the reason that I trust him and the same reason that I trust Sam is he pays a really, really high price to hold those views. I have to presume that he believes what he is saying because if he didn't, why the fuck would you choose to say that? Like, why would you decide to go down this like slow motion car crash torpedoing of your own audience? It could be a nihilist. Yeah, maybe. And look, let's just see how much I can destroy myself. Blossomers, blossomers, you read Nietzsche.

Half the time, that's a legitimate psychological hypothesis. Man, this guy just wants to watch and burn. What's the thing you either... There's some kind of authenticity of really owning the consequences of your beliefs. You like to figure like William James? Who was William James? William James is a philosopher who's writing in the late 1800s in America. And he has this really famous essay called The Will to Believe.

Which is basically about times when you believe things, even though you don't have enough evidence, because it's just an important part of the kind of vision of the good life that you're going after. And one point that James makes is it's not the case that you can have consequence-free beliefs. Like taking a risk with your beliefs and ideas is just as serious as jumping out of a plane with a parachute.

We're going on a rock climbing expedition. Like there's legitimate goods at stake with your intellectual life. And so that's why this is hard. Like this is why you need to learn some philosophy and you need to think and practice and have help. Because there are costs to getting things wrong, but there's also costs to not trying. Yeah.

Not trying to figure out what's right. I was happy to see that agency made it into the book. It's one of the most important traits that I think that anyone can have. It's something that I try and cultivate in myself all the time. Have you got a story from history about agency that you can tell me? Yes, so the philosopher that we rely on in that chapter, and we talk about agency and responsibility, is very closely tied together, right? So the philosopher we're relying on there is Elizabeth Anscombe, who I just adore, I love Elizabeth Anscombe. She's a virtue ethicist, middle of the 20th century, and she's writing about human action, right? And how we try to figure out when we're acting well, when we're acting wrongly.

How do we measure that? And one of the huge insights that comes out of her work is that it really depends how we describe or how we tell the story of our action, right? A lot of things hang on that. So the example that I give, it's a silly example, but it illustrates it. I show up late to a meeting.

Well, I can tell the story of my action in one way. I can say, look, oh, the traffic was so bad. And I tried my hardest, and here I am. And in doing so, I excuse myself. I sort of say, look, I did everything I could. I cared about the right things, and I get it wrong. Or I can take responsibility by describing, look, I just slept in, I didn't care

enough, right? I didn't leave time for traffic, I took a risk and yeah, look at your AM. Okay, so the way that we describe, the way we tell this story of our actions, and they can be simple ones like, you know, arriving and they can be really complex actions that take place over a long period of time with the people that we care about. This is going to, like, crucially determine, whether or not we're taking responsibility, whether our agency is sort of being deployed rightly or wrongly, right? So one thing that we rely on Anscombe and another philosopher, Bernard Williams, for us, is this idea of using what Williams calls morally thick concepts,

like virtue terms, like generosity or anger, whatever it might be, to interrogate and ask questions about the stories that we're telling. Am I telling stories that always make me the hero? And if so, are they true? It doesn't seem like they could possibly be true, right? So why do I tell them? How do I go back and start telling more accurate stories? Or start even just asking questions about my intentions in the first place, right? So I think this is one of the things that we get

from the virtue of extradition from Anscombe, that again can just sort of practically, and does practically change the way that I present myself in the world or that I think about actions that I'm going to be undertaking in the future. How do I tell a story that's not just sort of, you know, a good story about it? How do I tell the true story about it? And what does that sort of say about me, about my character, about my intentions?

What about generosity? It's an interesting one. I had Scott Barry Kaufman on the show talking about he's an expert in Maslow and he was talking about the hierarchy of needs and he was adamant that after actualization you get to transcendence and transcendence is when you then go beyond yourself and you give to other people, what was the angle that you guys came to charitability or generosity from? I've been thinking about this question for a while because ever since I've been teaching philosophy and certainly since we started teaching God in good life here at Notre Dame,

I've taught Peter Singer who has these really interesting, super practical pieces of advice for how to make your money into a part of your moral life. And what Singer tells his students at Princeton, which is fascinating, and I love reading about it, is he's got all these really smart 18, 19 year olds who are also morally serious and who care about other people and care about their moral reasons. And he says, look, there are a lot of people

out there in the world whom your money could help more than your time or volunteer or thoughts and prayers. You could literally change the world. You could save people from malaria if you earn money and then do the hard thing of committing all of it to these really efficient ways of enhancing lives. And they'll teach this class and they'll get some students will sign pledges to try to pursue a high income in at least a morally permissible way. So they're not going to become like drug dealers, but they might go work for a hedge fund or a really big banking

unit and then make as much money as possible and make themselves into a vehicle by which money is converted from the economy in the West to these really needy people elsewhere in the world. Any rest? I don't think it's so revolutionary to kind of look at charity in that way and giving in that way. Because kind of the story that we've been told around charity is that it's sort of this cottage industry that you're supposed to do, that the person that goes and gives their time at the soup

kitchen is, that is the virtue that they have. When you realize through the effective altruism movement, or like 80,000 hours Rob Wibblins thing, that if you are able to be an absolute force of nature at generating wealth, and then you just decide to give it away, that is your best way to help a lot of other people. But it runs quite counter to this sort of like homey, very kind of homespun style charity that's been a narrative that we've seen a lot recently. Oh, yeah. No, and I mean, it weighed a lot on me because I've read those arguments and Singer Mix

are really good point. Those children in Africa, there's somebody's children in the South Sudan, like people love them. They matter. The system has been set up in such a way that their lives are valued much less than the lives of people directly surrounding us. And at the time, when Paul and I were getting started with teaching our God in the good life course, my youngest brother was getting ready to go to college. And we have a very, our parents are a really low income. And so the question became like, how much money would I be willing to put towards my brother getting a really elite education? And the answer, I didn't have to think very

hard about it at all. It was like, man, I would pay double my mortgage down payment for his college. But then, you know, I had this pause, especially as I was teaching our students, that amount of money could save on average seven people's lives. Would I kill seven people to send my brother to get the whole degree out? This is the fucking problem with singers stuff. This is the problem, because as soon as you go down that there is a boy drowning

in the lake next to you, you don't wanna get your shoes wet, it's over the next village, it's in the next country. You just, I struggle to not feel like an asshole. All the time. Well, philosophy's point is to make you feel like an asshole sometimes. So, so one of the things that I got thinking about and then Paul and I started working on really hard when we got to that chapter of the book is, Singer gives a very practical advice.

What kind of advice would a virtue ethicist give that tells you like, no, seriously, you're kind of smart, 18, 19 year old, with the capacity to make a lot of money but also the capacity to join the peace core or the capacity to like start a family. How like practically speaking how can I help you figure out how you can make a morally serious difference without just assuming that like you know we can imagine the kind of cultural default which which is, of course, give a whole lot more to people that are biologically related to you than you give to people who are far away. And of course, whatever you feel is the right way to spend your money, is the right way to spend your money, which is very unphilisophical.

Or like, you can use philosophy to justify the decisions that you don't want to make. But it's hard for a lot of people to decide to change or morally evaluate their financial plans. So we wanted to get into that. It's a weird one, especially when a modern phenomenon like wealth acquisition comes crashing up against kind of this like old dusty, or what feels like an old and dusty,

academic subjective philosophy. Oh my gosh, like I think about dusty, academic, subjective philosophy. Oh my gosh, I think about this a lot, and I just get in my, me on the therapy couch. One thing I think about quite a bit is, I don't wanna be the kind of person that measures the good life in terms of money. We know that from Socrates, like don't do, that's a theorized disaster.

So then you think, okay, well, I'm in my job at a big corporation. How hard should I negotiate for a pay raise? Or how often should I complain about how much I'm being paid? If I literally don't care about money and my needs are met, and you might think the answer is none. But then that gives you pause. It certainly gives me pause because you think, but it's also grossly unfair that women are paid less than men, that some people who I think work is in fact objectively less economically valuable, get paid more because of who they are. And so you want to fight individually against those forms of discrimination or injustice,

but at the same time, want to hold this paradox in your head of not wanting to care about money and use it as a way of keeping score, but you're also using it as a way of keeping score on justice. So how to resolve that? I think it's a puzzle a lot of people, certainly women and people in marginalized groups are like dealing with that every single year. It's a weird one. It's an interesting one,

thinking about how to ethically use money and money acquisition and chasing it without becoming captured by it or without being emotionally invested in it. Yeah. It's, yeah, it's a, talk to me, let's say that someone's quite seduced by the idea of virtue ethics and wants to make a crack at it. What would you say are the most accessible books, the best sort of introductions? Where would you get people to start? I mean, like, I don't know,

just to plug our own class here at Notre Dame. We actually have a whole website where we just put the whole class online, basically, or all the text that we read in the class online. So you can go to godendgoodlife.endee.edu. And you can get a got in goodlife.nd.edu. And you can just see sort of how we walk through texts from the history of philosophy. We've got a lot of annotated texts

so you can read Aristotle's Nikka McKee and Ethics, but with some pointers and some help to understand kind of the weirder distinctions that he's making. So that's one place you can start to look. I mean, probably the even better place would be to buy the good life method book, the book that we wrote based on the class, which is really designed for readers who are coming

at this not as a college course, but as somebody who's just really curious about starting to build philosophy into their life. And we have every chapter ends with, every chapter tackles a different kind of question of the good life that comes at us from philosophy. And we start off little with like how to have better political disagreements with folks using Plato, building up to like how to be a better romantic partner and parent using Iris Murdoch and Virtue ethicist. We talk about work, life balance and all the ways philosophy makes that question a lot different than you think it is. And then build up to like what are you going to do

about this whole religion thing? What are you going to do about death. We have a lot of practical exercises, but also just like it's hard to just sit down and start reading philosophy. We don't recommend that you go to Barnes & Noble and buy a Nietzsche book and just sit down and try to read it from beginning to end. It's going to be hard because it was written in a different time and it was meant to be put in context. But one of the things we do in the book is if you're just getting started, try to give you all the handholds so that it feels really, like you're making progress at the right pace

and really understanding things. And our students, we've taught this material to thousands of Notre Dame students right now, have really loved this system. It's worked for years with us. So we're hoping it'll have a much bigger audience now. Well, that will be linked in the show notes below. Paul, Megan, we made it. We made it to the end.

Thank you very much for coming on. It's been really, really interesting. It's nice to hear a different side of philosophy coming out. I really appreciate that you guys are flying the flag for some sort of re-emerging and lesser known philosophers in this modern world, so thank you. Thank you Chris. Thank you so much. This is really fun. you