Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - Ancient Secrets to Modern Happiness | Tamar Gendler

Episode Date: December 11, 2023

What the ancient Greek philosophers discovered about how to do life better.Tamar Gendler is dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Vincent J. Scully Professor of Philosophy, and Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science at Yale University. Her Open Yale course “Philosophy and the Science of Human Nature” has hundreds of thousands of views. An updated version of this course will be available on the Coursera website this spring. In this episode we talk about:The tension between our animal nature and our spiritual/intellectual natureHow to define concepts such as “virtue”, “morality” and “the soul” Whether living a moral life actually makes you happy The similarities and differences between ancient Greek philosophy & Buddhism And how Tamar has applied all of this to her own lifeRelated Episodes:How (and Why) to Hug Your Inner Dragons | Richard SchwartzAn Ace Therapist Gives Dan A Run For His Money | Dr. Jacob HamSign up for Dan’s weekly newsletter hereFollow Dan on social: Instagram, TikTokTen Percent Happier online bookstoreSubscribe to our YouTube ChannelOur favorite playlists on: Anxiety, Sleep, Relationships, Most Popular EpisodesFull Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/tph/podcast-episode/tamar-gendlerSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello, my fellow suffering beings, how are we doing? You may have noticed, either through meditation or just being alive, that your mind is out of doing. You may have noticed, either through meditation or through just being alive, that your mind is out of control. You've got all sorts of things you want to do, habits you want to establish, goals you want to achieve, and yet you often don't manage to do them. You have all sorts of things you don't want to do, procrastinate, lose your temper, whatever, and often you end up doing those things anyway. We talk a lot on this show about how the Buddha had tons of strategies for taming the monkey mind, but so did the ancient Greek philosophers about whom we don't talk that much.

So today we've got a professor from Yale who studied these ancient philosophers extensively and has come up with a very clear and practical way to apply these ancient secrets of happiness to our modern lives. Tomorrow, Gendler is Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Vincent J. Scully, Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science at Yale University. Her online course Philosophy and the Science of Human Nature has hundreds of thousands of views

and an updated version will be on the Coursera website this spring. In this conversation, we talk about the tension between our animal nature and our spiritual slash intellectual nature, how to define concepts such as virtue, morality, and the soul, whether living a moral life actually makes you happy, the similarities and differences between ancient Greek philosophy and Buddhism, and how tomorrow applies all of this in her own life. But first time for some BSP, blatant self-promotion. I want to tell you about a big series we're kicking

off here in the New Year. It's called the non-negotiables. We have lined up a whole cavalcade of stars and by stars, I mean experts and all sorts of areas, plus some actual celebrities. To come on and talk about their non-negotiables, the practices and precepts they cannot live without. We're talking to relationship guru Esther Perel. We're talking to the Buddhist nun, Pemma Chodren, talking to the actor and comedian, Bill Hayder, who talks about how he deals with anxiety. Here's a hand, he says the hippies were right.

I mean, last one, he says that. It kicks off on January 3rd, so keep an eye out for that. Also, a quick note about our friends over at the 10% happier app. If you're looking for a last minute gift, you can give your friends and loved ones the gift of sanity. Get them a gift subscription to the 10% happier app. You can visit 10%.com slash gift. That's 10% all one word spelled out.com slash gift to snag one for your friend or loved

one. Hello listeners, this is Mike Corey of Against the Odds. You might know that I adventure around the world while recording this podcast. And over the years, I've learned that where I stay when I travel can make all the difference. Airbnb has been my go-to place for finding the perfect accommodations. Because with hotels, you often don't have the luxury of extra space or privacy. Recently, I had a bunch of friends come down to visit in Mexico. We found this large house and the place had a pool, a barbecue, a kitchen, and a great big living room to play cards, watch movies, and just chill out.

It honestly made all the difference in the trip. It felt like we were all roommates again. The next time you're planning a trip, whether it's with friends, family, or yourself, check out Airbnb to find something you won't forget. Unleash yourself. Ride, run, box, or freak the hit out. It's your workout, your rules. For Peloton's December offer, head to www.1peloton.ca slash deals. All access membership separate, terms apply. Celebrity designer Jeff Lewis is back with Hollywood Houselift. I'm excited to be working with new clients.

I'm not getting rid of that. I hope I never see you both again. Yeah, then all new season. Those have to go. That has to go. From Oh, wow. It's been actual nightmare. Oh, wow.

This is such an upgrade. With celebrities like Josh Duman, Christina Ricci, and Gina Rodriguez, Dazzle Nietzsche. It looks like Chuckie Cheese. Stream an all new season of Hollywood House Lift with Jeff Lewis Lewis now streaming on Free V. Professor Tamar Gendler, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much. I'm really excited to talk to you. Let me just start with some basic biographical information. One of your areas of expertise is how the wisdom of ancient philosophers can help us do life better now. I'm just curious, how did you arrive at this area of interest? So I was really always interested in the way in which the same idea is presented in different contexts,

depending upon the goal of the person doing the communicating. So I grew up in a family where my father was a rabbi and you might think the project of religious interpretation is a project of taking a set of texts which were composed at a time in history, distant from the time that we are right now, and help make salience their relevance as guides to the deepest human questions. So in the same way that a scholar of religion or a practitioner of religion might relate to ancient wisdom texts as objects that can help you in the present. So too did I come to recognize that many of the texts that I was reading in the context of my academic work as a faculty member, works of people like Plato or Aristotle or the early

modern philosophers like Descartes or Hume, that all of them could be treated in a similar way, which is to say, what are the insights that appear here that can guide us because they are truths that extend beyond the time and place at which they were composed? Was there something about your life, aside from the fact that your dad was a rabbi and was interested in universal truth. Was there something about your life and your needs, desires, curiosities, problems, challenges, neuroses that sent you in this direction? So one wonderful thing about human beings is I suspect there are exactly zero people on Earth for whom there are not needs, desires, neuroses, circumstances, frustrations

that require them to think about. How can they thrive in a world that doesn't perfectly conform to the world in which they wish they found themselves? So I had what by every measure is a wonderfully supported life. I grew up in a loving family. I found a loving partner. I had two wonderful children. But even against that backdrop, there are things that don't come out the way you hope. And I was not particularly religious, though I had been raised in a family that was spiritual. And so I was looking for ways of answering questions that really mattered to me. What is it to put yourself in a position to be able to truly care for and truly listen to another person. And I didn't have a theological framework

in which to do that because for whatever reason, the framing of the world as divine eminence didn't speak to me. So I was struggling with what I think are the set of questions that we all struggle with. How do I live in a world so full of imperfection, in ways that I can care both about those close to me and about those further from me, in ways that I can take joy in what I'm doing at any given time? And for me, the set of wisdom texts

that spoke most effectively to the kinds of questions and concerns that I had were a set of texts that were pretty cleanly logically structured in the way that philosophical texts are, as opposed to another modality of something that is, for example, associatively structured in the way that metaphor or mysticism is. I think what you're describing is pretty common these days.

You have people who, you know, a quick way to put it, the sort of common parlance way to put it as, um, spiritual but not religious. And everybody, whether it's spiritual religious or, you know, hardcore atheist, everybody needs purpose or meaning, whether they're aware of it or not. Everybody lives in a confusing and tropic world. And what we're now seeing is that we're looking for

meaning in places that are somewhat surprising, from work to soul cycle to meditation apps as mainstream religion loses its appeal for many people. Yeah, I mean, I would say all of us live in a world where there are earthquakes and fires, that is to say all of us live in a world where there is unimaginable degree of human suffering. And all of us also live in a world where the people we love and care about most are sometimes going to disappoint us. So both in the very narrow sense of daily life, no one's daily life goes perfectly. And in terms of the planetary situation that we inhabit, there will always be an extraordinary amount of human suffering. And what to do in the face of those two facts, the very personal reality of frustration,

and the very, very objective reality that there is suffering which we can only do a small bit to alleviate. Those are gonna be constant truths. And the question is how in a world of which that is true, can we build lives that feel meaningful to us and that I would also say are meaningful to others. We care both about how it feels to us and about what it does in the world.

We're going to talk about the overlap between Buddhism, which is something I know a little bit about, and these ancient folks. But you can find many of the same themes in shamanism, and Judaism, Islam. You name it in these traditions that were separated by both geography and chronology. Is the answer just blazingly obvious that if you think hard about the human condition, you're just going to come to the same conclusions no matter when or where you are. So I would say there's a common structural problem that we face, which is that we are simultaneously physical, embodied contingent beings whose instincts and responses are fundamentally those of animals, that that is of organisms whose main ambition is To have children who have children. So one fact about human beings

Always and everywhere is our embodied nature and that means all sorts of things It means we're hungry. It means we're thirsty. It means we're sexually attracted to things It means that we feel discomfort. It means that we can die. All of those are a set of truths. At the same time, human beings are capable of abstraction, they're capable of representation, they're capable of seeing one object as standing for another, they're capable of sophisticated emotion, and they're capable of planning and seeking to influence the world both directly at the moment and indirectly in long-term ways. And I would say the tension between being a finite physical being being a finite physical being and a conceptual, intellectual, emotional planning being. The tension that produces requires strategies for resolution.

And I would say all of the wisdom traditions to which you advert are different attempts to resolve the tension between our animal nature and our spiritual intellectual emotional nature. And you're convinced, I think you are, that even though these wisdom traditions are ancient, they really can apply to what's going on in our lives right now. I can imagine somebody listening to this saying, well, the Greeks, the Romans, the Buddha, the shamans and the jungles of South America, they didn't have to deal with always on technology, they didn't have to deal with climate change, they didn't have to deal with political polarization of the variety that we're seeing now.

There are so many modern problems that one could possibly argue are unprecedented. So I think there are at any moment in history a set of problems which are distinctive to that time. So we have a set of problems which are raised for us by modern technology. You just listed an excellent set thereof, but we don't in, for example, the part of the world where we have this technology, face the rate of child mortality that was typical among individuals who are living at Greek and Roman times. We have, as a society, developed alternate views of the way in which gender does or doesn't allow somebody to be an effective

thinker. That is in the ancient Greek and Roman world. It was hard for people to see women as full cognitive equals, whereas in the contemporary world it is in most communities, excepted that gender or sex is not what's determinative of cognitive capacity. So yes, there are going to be differences. Those differences are useful to look at both directions. It's useful to see that when you read back at the beginning of the Iliad, the story is about a fight over a woman who has been enslaved to be a mistress to one of the generals, and nobody, nobody in the story thinks that's a problem. So recognizing that we've made moral progress in terms of our capacity to understand subjectivity,

that's the difference between the modern world and the ancient world. So too, the kinds of distractions that people face when you're reading an ancient Greek story, they're looking at the shape of the fire and it's mesmerizing. Is that similar to or different from the way in which looking at your iPhone is mesmerizing? Same in some ways, different in others. So I find that there is sufficient commonality for it to make sense to look across worlds. But yes, there are real differences. There are ways in which the modern world has things that the ancient world doesn't, and ways in which the ancient world has things that the modern world doesn't. And noting that alongside noting the commonality is part of what makes it valuable to use ancient texts.

All right. Having set the table in that way, and thank you for your handholding. Let's talk about some of the key terms that you use, or that the ancients were using. One of them is you dimonia. Yes. What does that mean? So the central phrase that you dimonia,

how is that it's centered the word diamond, which is transliterated in English, D-A-I-M-O-N. And if you've read the film, Pullman, Children's Stories, or if you know what the idea of a demon is, a diamond is something that is your spirit, your soul. And you can think of it metaphorically

as the set of things which aren't just your spirit, your soul, and you can think of it metaphorically as the set of things which aren't just your body, your emotions, your imagination, your ambitions, your sense of morality. So that's your dimon. And what you dimonia, or you dimonia, adverts to, is the condition of the soul, the spirit, the diamond being in good order. So think about if you're working as a waiter and you're carrying a set of plates back to the kitchen. If your tray is you demonic, that is, if it is in a position to thrive or flourish, all the plates are lined up in the right kind of way and nothing's that risk of tipping. So a way to think about an English translation of Udimonia or Udimonia is spiritual thriving, well-being, flourishing. All right, I have many questions about that, but I'm going to hold it because we're going to go much more deeply into this balance that the ancients are calling for, which by the way, you know, modern psychologists are calling for it as well. We'll put a pen in that for as I can

in the name of just defining a few more terms. So we've done Udimonia. The next one is, and please correct me if I'm mispronouncing this, Fronisus. Good. Fronisus is an ancient Greek term that refers to a particular kind of wisdom. And we make this distinction still today. Fronisus is practical wisdom in contrast to what we might call mere book smarts. So somebody might be theoretically wise, they might know a lot of information, they might have a full encyclopedic sense of the structure of the community of which they're apart,

but they might nonetheless lack practical wisdom. So the term for nieces refers to the kind of wisdom and understanding that has two really crucial characteristics. One is that it is sensitive to situation. It is responsive to what is specific about the moment. It is aware of the ways in which whatever action is undertaken will affect the particular details of the circumstance in which you find yourself. So that's one feature. It's contextually aware. And the second is that it comes out on the spot quickly in real time in ways that are authentic. So think about ways in which those two things might not be the case, right? So you might have some abstract knowledge, but not be able to apply it to a particular situation. Or you might have that particular knowledge, but not be able to apply it to a particular situation.

Or you might have that particular knowledge, but you can't call on it right at the moment. The moment that it matters to be able to control your anger is the moment at which you're about to get angry. It doesn't matter if you have that skill at other times. The moment at which it matters to express authentic sympathy, particularly with someone you don't like, is the moment when you are together. And so, Frenisa involved having cultivated in yourself the capacity to respond instinctively at a moment in a way that you wish you would respond that is sensitive to the particularities of that moment. So it's like a wisdom-based spontaneity.

It's a wisdom-based cultivated spontaneity. In the same way that when you try to get theoretical knowledge, think about the drills that you do at school when you're learning multiplication tables. You want to learn the multiplication tables so completely that there's no think time between seeing six times seven and saying 42. Those want to become profoundly associated in your mind. And practical wisdom involves doing the same sort of rehearsal, generosity, kindness, loving kindness, forgiveness, so that those

come out six times seven is 42 when you see those two numbers, I am compassionate towards you when I see you're suffering. I like that concept a lot and we are going to come back to it. Continuing on the definitional tip, however, the next set of words I want to take a look at are, and maybe these should be addressed together, and maybe they should be addressed separately, but virtue and morals. Good, so these are vexed terms.

And one of the things we often discover in conversations is that sometimes people disagree about concepts, and sometimes people disagree about which words apply to which concepts, and that that second question sometimes really feels like it matters to people. That said, in this context, I'm going to tell you how I think it would be helpful for us to use the word virtue, and for us to use the word morality in the context of the conversation that we're going would be helpful for us to use the word virtue and for us to use the word morality in the context of the conversation that we're going to be having for the next hour or so. So let me start with morality because that's a more general term in this context. Morality is

roughly relating to the world with the recognition that you are not the only person in it. There are lots and lots of other ways to think about morality, but I think fundamentally what moral theories ask you to do is to take your perspective, understand what it is that you feel and experience and desire, and then recognize that the world is filled with many other such perspectives, each of which cares about its well-being as completely as

you care about your well-being. So to behave morally is to recognize, for example, that your actions can harm or help another, and that that matters. And whatever moral framework you subscribe to, whether it's a utilitarian, consequentialist, moral framework or moral framework that comes from a divine command theory, or a contian, what's sometimes called

deontological moral framework, what all of those have in common, is the assumption that other perspectives matter and that you recognize that in your actions and thinking. So that's how I want to characterize the notion of morality. And we can talk more specifically about different ways in which morality is sometimes characterized. Now let's move to the notion of virtue. The notion of virtue in the way that I'll be using it in our conversation is a notion of a really good bundled package of ways of doing things that tend to help morality. So, it's as if there's a giant menu and people have thought really hard about which things

go together really well. So, if you're going to have this kind of first course, it really makes sense to have this kind of second course and it will really go well if you drink this kind of liquid. A virtue is like that. A virtue is a set of practices that are likely to help you be moral in a wide range of cases. So for example, according to the ancient Greek tradition, wisdom, courage, moderation, and justice with a special notion of justice are the four cardinal virtues. So let's think about bravery. So bravery is standing firm in the face of

frustration, standing firm in the face of fear, standing firm in the face of disapprobation. And the ancient Greek picture says, it is useful if you want to be moral, to be brave, because it allows you to carry through on your moral actions. But says the ancient tradition. In order to be brave because it allows you to carry through on your moral actions. But says the ancient tradition. In order to be brave, you have to recognize that bravery is in between two things, each of which is dangerous. One of those things might seem obvious, which is being cowardly. So being brave is standing up even in the face of discomfort, even in the face of fear, even in the face of criticism.

It's moving forward with something that you're committed to even when it's not easy to do so. But bravery also needs to be distinguished by something on the other side, which is recklessness or stubbornness. And just as it's possible to, instead of being brave, be cowardly, so to is it possible instead of being brave to be reckless or stubborn, right? You want to persist in the face of others telling you not to, but not if they're right. So the virtue tradition involves developing very subtly calibrated

habits of response to the world, like being brave. That are exquisitely sensitive to the ways in which bravery can easily slip into either cowardice or recklessness. And that as it avoids the other, it moves towards the one. Would it be safe to say that morality, I love your definition of morality relating to the world as if you're not the only person in it? Would it be safe to say that morality is, to put it in my terminology, morality is a kind of pulling your head out of your ass and seeing yet you're not the only person on the planet

and that other people matter too. And virtue are the tools with which one leads moral life. Beautiful. Morality is pulling your head out of your ass and virtue are the tools that once your head's out of your ass, let you shape the world in the right sorts of ways. I consider it a victory that I've just gotten a dean from Yale to use the phrase pull your head out of your ass and not once but twice. So thank you for that. All right, but final word to define before we get into your framework, which is so interesting. The soul, the ancients talk a lot about the soul.

What did they mean by that? So every culture tries to figure out a way to talk about the part of us that isn't just our body. The part of us that is aware of the world and able to communicate with the world. And so when I use the word soul in my conversations about the ancient Greek, ancient Roman, or early modern tradition, all I mean by soul is mind, spirit, emotion, all the parts of you that aren't physical. So something that isn't in your soul is the

orange juice that you drank for breakfast this morning. You orange juice that you drank for breakfast this morning. You orange juice that you drank for breakfast this morning is in your body and there's lots of relations between your body and your soul. But roughly speaking, your body is the thing that's circum is abstract, intellectual, emotional, spiritual, conceptual, any of the terms that describe you as a thinking or feeling thing, as what philosophers sometimes call an agent or a patient in the world, an agent is somebody who does things in the world, a patient is someone who is affected by the world. So your soul is the part of you that affects and is affected by the world intellectually and emotionally.

Great, super helpful. Thank you again for your patience with me and walking me and by extension everybody else to the basic terms here. Much more of my conversation with Professor Tamar Gennler coming up after this. What a life these celebrities lead. Imagine walking the red carpet, the cameras in your face, the designer clothes, the worst dress list, big house, the world constantly peering in, the bursting bank account, the people trying to get the grubby mitts on it.

What's he all about? I'm just saying, being really, really famous. It's not always easy. Whooo! I'm Emily Loitany, and I'm Anna Leon Grofieie and we're the hosts of Terribly Famous from Wondery. The podcast which tells the stories of our favourite celebrities from their perspective. Each season we show you what it's really like being famous by taking you inside the life of a British icon. We walk you through their glittering highs and eyebrow raising lows and ask, is

fame and fortune really worth it? Follows terribly famous now wherever you get your podcasts or listen early and ad-free on Wondry Plus on Apple Podcasts or the Wondry app. We can't see tomorrow, but we can hear it. And it sounds like a wind farm powering homes across the country. We're bridging to a sustainable energy future, working today to ensure tomorrow is on. And bridge, life takes energy. you can give the gift of 10% happier, go to 10%.com slash gift to get a subscription to the 10% happier app for anybody in your world. All right, so you have set out a framework that we're going to use as the framework for the rest of this discussion, but I'm just going to lay it out for people and then you can say a few words about it and then we can dive into each part of the framework. say a few words about it, and then we can dive into each part of the framework. The top of the pyramid is Socrates, who has an observation about human nature.

And number two is Plato, who explains that observation. And then, once we've understood something about human nature, there are four tactics to deal with these facts. And they are habituate, that's Aristotle, two is situate, and that comes from the Odyssey, three is attach, that comes from the Iliad, and four is detach, and that comes from Epictetus. So we're going to dive into each of the component parts of this framework, but am I spelling it out generally, correctly? Beautiful. Thank you. So let's go into the observation, which is the first part of this framework.

Socrates had an observation about who we are and how we operate. What was it? Good. So Socrates observation is that we are fundamentally unknown to and to some extent unknowable by ourselves. unknowable by ourselves. We don't know ourselves. That's a simple way of describing theocratic insight. There's a whole bunch of ancient stories about Socrates and the details of them differ in the different tellings. But the fundamental theme of all of them is the recognition that Socrates wisdom consisted in his humility, in his recognition, not of what he knew, but of what he didn't know. And in particular, of his awareness of the ways in which human beings are not transparent to themselves.

The point that Socrates makes there is, of course, in some sense, the most obvious point ever. There could not be TV shows or novels. If it weren't the case that people sometimes did things for reasons other than they thought they were doing them. No story of human experience assumes that we have direct access to who we are inside to what motivates us, to what we really care about, to the reasons for which we're doing something. But interestingly, this is like an inverse of morality, it's really easy to recognize that something is true of everybody else without recognizing that it's true of you. So in a really ironic way, the way in which Socrates knows himself is to know that his self isn't any different

from yourself or from anybody else's self, and just as they don't have direct knowledge or access to their motivations or to what it is that they really want or why they're doing what they're doing. So too is that true of Socrates. There's an incredibly ironic structure where self-knowledge involves the acknowledgement that you don't a very interesting sense, not special. You are just like everyone around you whom you know do not know themselves. So how does this job with the Buddhist notion that the self is an illusion, that it's unknowable because it would be like trying to get to no Santa Claus. There is no Santa Claus, so there's no point getting to know him.

So what I would say is the degree to which it is impossible to know oneself in the Buddhist tradition is more extreme because as you point out, the Buddhist view is that there is no self. Self is an illusion, self is a frame that we use for making sense of a world that is extraordinarily complex, that is useful for us in an unenlightened state, but gets in the way of a kind of true enlightenment. The Greek picture as I am reading it here, and let me say there are many different pictures of what the soul looks like, and so I'm just giving a characterization of one way we might think about it, is that there actually is a thing which is the individual, that there is a self in a sense that the Buddhists would not take there to be a self. There are various pictures, for example, of a self as persisting into an afterlife

in the ancient Greek picture, but that that self is hard to see. So it's a different picture, hard to see. So it's a different picture, but what's important about the commonality is that very often, even if you're going to Cleveland and I'm going to Billings, Montana, we can still travel west together on route 90 for a while, even if you're going to get off in Cleveland and I'm going to go all the way to Billings. Yeah, I don't know which place I would less rather go, but setting that aside, what is the chronological relationship between Buddhism and ancient Greek philosophy? With the Buddha alive, many hundreds of years before Socrates are around the same time. So Socrates and the Buddha are roughly contemporaneous

in the sense that they're both in this sort of 6,500 BCE before the common era time. There is some speculation about what kind of interaction there is both between the Buddha and the Buddhist tradition and in particular, the Stoic tradition, which starts in the Ancient Greek and Roman world about the year 300 BCE. But I am not a historian, so what I want to claim is contemporary naity without making

any hypothesis about the relation across the world. Fair enough. Okay, so that's the conclusion, that's Socrates. Then we move on to Plato, who has the explanation of the secratic conclusion. Again, the secratic conclusion is we don't know ourselves and it may be impossible or at the very least very hard to know ourselves. And that's just a fundamental fact about the human condition. And then Plato comes in with an explanation of this conclusion. What did Plato say? So what Plato says is, no kidding, we don't know ourselves because we're made up of a huge number

of different parts and each of them experiences the world in different ways and feels inexplicable to the others. So in particular, Plato uses a metaphor. He says that human beings have what can be hopefully thought of as three parts, what he calls reason, what he calls spirit, and what he calls appetite. So let me start with appetite. That's the big part of us that basically we share with non-human animals.

It's basically consumption and procreation. Anything that's required for our continued well-being. And that part of ourself wants to deal with the here and the now and the available and that which is giving simple pleasure. So there's a big part of us that is a petitive, that is responsive to really, really immediate features of the world. But in addition to that, says Plato, we've two other parts of ourselves, which he calls the spirited part and the rational part. The spirited part of ourselves is responsive to social deprivation and disaparitation.

Basically cares what other people think of us. And it does that in such a way that it too gains pleasure or pain from being accepted or rejected. So in the same way that you can be hungry in your repetitive part or feel pain in your toe, so too can you be hungry in your appetitive part or feel pain in your toe. So too, can you be hungry in your spirited part? You can be hungry for love or you can feel pain at the rejection of some approach that you have made towards someone you care about.

So those are two parts of the soul, the appetitive part of the soul, appetitive from appetite and the spirited parts of the soul, the appetitive part of the soul, a petitive from appetite, and the spirited part of the soul, the part of you that cares about social, approbation and dis-approbation, social approval and non-approval. Finally, says Plato,

you have what he calls a rational part of the soul. That's the part of you that's capable of planning and having long-term thoughts about what you do and what you want to be. And the rational part may have very different pictures about which of your spirited or appetitive desires you want to be indulging at a particular moment. In addition, your rational part is the part that does all the talking. Your rational part has the ability to speak in words. Your repetitive part has the ability to speak in things like your stomach grumbles or your

hands are tapping because you're nervous and anxious. So the problem is that to the extent that you are thinking of yourself, cognitively, to the extent that you are thinking of yourself from the perspective of rationality, you couldn't have direct access to spirit and appetite. Because no matter how many words you say to yourself, you're not going to stop feeling hungry. What speaks to appetite is food and procreation. What speaks to spirit is human connection. And reason can't directly provide that.

So says Plato, it shouldn't be a surprise at all that we are opaque to ourselves. It shouldn't be a surprise at all that we can't see fully inside to ourselves because the big parts of ourselves, they're like two giant horses, appetite and spirit. And they're just pulling us around all the time. And the little part of ourself that can control that, which he calls the charioteer, isn't a horse. It's so interesting that you see this notion of parts, that we all have parts, just echoing through the centuries, all the way up to modern psychology with things like internal family systems, which literally uses the word parts, internal family systems

for the uninitiated is that we've talked about it a lot on the show. I'll put some links in the show notes to prior episodes on this. It's basically a school of psychology that says you have these parts, a jealous part, an angry part, a petitive part that do their thing and are competing for salience in your mind at any given moment, and happiness, wholeness, balance, eudaimonia is the ability to work skillfully with these various parts. Exactly right. And just to move to another valuable perspective, the perspective of neuroscience, neuroscience is fundamentally a theory of functional roles that are played by either literal or metaphorical parts of the brain. Roughly speaking, the pieces of our

brain evolved independently to do different kinds of things, right? We got a really big bunch of stuff in the back that's visual cortex that helps us take in information from the world that is presented to us visually. And then we have another part of ourselves that takes in information auditorily, and then we have emotional information that comes in and stuff that comes in through smell and stuff that comes in through memory.

And notice that these can be in conflict in really simple ways. We have a set of structures in our brain that tell us whether we're moving or not. And we have a set of structures that proceed through our visual system that tell us whether we're moving or not. And if you're sitting on a train and the train next to you starts moving, those two systems are in conflict with one another. Your part that feels location through motion, thinks you're still, it happens to be correct in this case. Your visual system says relative motion is being observed,

and it concludes that you, rather than the other object, are moving, and in fact, you begin to feel a little sensation about that. So the reason that almost every theory that tries to understand human beings makes reference to parts and how those parts work together is that as far as our best scientific understanding suggests, we actually quite literally are composed of parts and those parts come into competition with one another all the time. They're basically racing through your

brain to get control of your hands. That's why you can feel pulled into different directions. Okay, so Socrates and Plato, T.S. up, they've given us a description of the human situation. We, Per Socrates, are opaque to ourselves and then per Plato, of course, we are opaque to ourselves because there's just so much shit going on in there at any given moment. It is hard to be happy or content or you dimonic at any given moment because there's chaos and cacophony inside and out. And that then tees up these four tactics that you talk about in your course that can help us deal with the facts on the ground. The first of the four tactics is, this is your term that you use habituate. What do you mean by habituate?

So think about the kind of being we've just discovered we are. We've got a little tiny horse driver and two giant horses who are running off, responding to things that have been true and motivating for human beings for the last few million years of evolution. So, one of the things to recognize is that's what we're made of. We're made of an amygdala, and we're made of a visual cortex, and we're made of all sorts of sensory apparatus that have evolved to be responsive to certain features in the world. And we are built of a whole bunch of drives and instincts

that were designed to solve a very particular problem, namely, that we have to have babies who have babies. OK, so that's just a fact. Roughly, we're animals. So if you are trying to teach something to an animal, you might have discovered that narrative, storytelling, reading, persuasion, aren't especially effective, means for that.

You don't take dogs to obedience school and read aloud to them from Esop's fables, oh you greedy fox, you should not seek the grapes. That's not useful in training a dog. What you do when you train a dog is you engage in the presentation of certain kinds of motivational structures that make it pleasant to do a behavior that you desire to have happen. An unpleasant to do a behavior that you

don't desire to have happen. That is, we are capable when we think about our relation to non-human animals of understanding how it is that you train something that's not responsive to reason that has habits and instincts that pull in directions that are problematic for whatever the circumstance in which you're putting it and notice if you're training a dog to hunt or training a dog to tend sheep or training a dog to lead somebody who has a visual disability, those are three very, very different kinds of training. So just as you can train a dog, you can train yourself.

But in addition, there's a certain fact about human beings, which is evolution gives us a set of tools that make us capable of what's often called learning. Learning is developing habits, so that things in your environment become easy to deal with. So anybody who's ever learned to drive has learned that if you put your foot on the right pedal, you move forward and if you put your foot on the right pedal, you move forward, and if you put your foot on the left pedal, you decelerate.

And you've learned that in such a deep way that you can use your full mental capacity in other ways while you are drive. That's why it's possible to talk and drive. Everything that you have learned to do while you are doing something else, all of those are habits. So if you're gonna build, or if evolution's gonna build, a creature who is capable of learning, there must be an easy way of getting habits. And the answer is you get habits by doing the thing that the habit will ultimately encode. How do you learn to play the piano?

You learn to play the piano by practicing playing the piano. And what Aristotle, on whose work I'm hanging this idea of habituation suggests is that just as you can learn to practice a physical skill, right, you learn to catch a baseball by practicing. So, too, can you make it in your self instinctive to act in accordance with what Aristotle calls the virtues. And you remember, the cardinal virtues are wisdom, courage, moderation, and justice, but Aristotle's interested in all sorts of other virtues, like the virtue of generosity. So Aristotle says the way to become generous is just to practice being generous, until generosity becomes second nature.

So a way that I sometimes summarize the idea that Aristotle has, that anything you practice often enough becomes what you automatically do, is to say what I suspect you would call fake it till you make it, but to act as if you already were that which you wish to become. So you want to become brave? Act as if you were already brave. Just as crossing the street is a habit, just as typing is a habit, just as touching your phone with your thumb when it appears before you is a habit. So too says Aristotle, things like bravery and Generosity can become habitual So this I guess brings us back to Fronisus the idea that you're training these skills in order to become a better person

That's right. I would say Fronisus, which is the term that we're using to refer remember to practical wisdom So wisdom. So there's theoretical wisdom, book smart, and practical wisdom, world smart. Phronesis, practical wisdom is, in some sense, recognizing, habituate, situate, attach, detach, and to using each of those tactics in the circumstance where it's most valuable. We're gonna to do situate attach and detach presently, but let me ask you one last question before we get into that Aristotle, like Plato and Socrates before him is talking about achieving these virtues in the minds of these ancient Greek philosophers.

Were these virtues, was this morality synonymous with happiness, or was this a type of thing you did just to be a good citizen and there was no self-interest? So Plato has a wonderful argument in a book called The Republic, where he argues that the virtuous person is 900 times happier than the non-virtuous person because their soul is well ordered. So the picture on this ancient Greek view is that the virtuous person, the person who is wise and brave and moderate and just and has the other non-cardinal virtues as well, is living a life of you dimania because that which they value aligns with how it is that they're living.

So it isn't a picture according to which you're guaranteed to be happy with regard to the repetitive part of your soul, if you're virtuous. It's not that if you're virtuous, you will get the most food to eat, or have the most exciting sexual partners. It's not even necessarily the case that you'll have the admiration of the largest group of people. But if you are virtuous,

you will in the most important sense thrive. So virtue, which is going to cause you to be moral, because virtue involves recognizing, of course, that you are not alone in the world, virtue, and the morality that come with it, practice through the skills of Fronisus practical wisdom, are going to leave you in a state of you, pneumonia, in a state of spiritual well-being. But notice that spiritual well-being may not take the form that you thought it would pre-enlightenment, right?

It's not necessarily going to give you better clothes and a particularly good glass of wine. Right. Yes. clothes and a particularly good glass of wine. Right, yes. You, Dimonia, doesn't necessarily mean you're, you know, taking selfies in front of a private jet with the hashtag, blessed, it's a deeper kind of happiness than is often understood in the culture. Much more of my conversation with Tim Ghandler coming up after this.

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Or add free and one week early on Wondery Plus Kids. [♪ Music playing in background, music fades out. The music fades out. Just to reset, Play Don't Soccercrates have diagnosed the basic problem for humans that our minds are out of control. And we don't have a clear view of them and are whipped all over the place. Then what to do about that, the four tactics that you lay out, we've just covered number one, which comes from Aristotle, which is to habituate,

in other words, to create good habits that can help you build the virtues, which will make you happier. The second of the four tactics is situate, and you draw this from the Odyssey, which many, if not all listeners will have read in junior high like I did and probably not remember. So can you describe the Odyssey in brief and then talk about what in it suggests that situate is a good tactic for us? So the Odyssey is a really long book which in 24th chapters tells the story basically of a guy getting home through a wildly indirect pathway. And most quest narratives end up taking that form. You start somewhere, you're going somewhere else, and you go to a whole bunch of places in between. In the case of the Odyssey, this character, Odysseus, who is heading home, finds himself in all sorts of different circumstances, and depending upon the circumstances in which

he finds himself, he finds himself behaving in different sorts of ways. So he ends up on one island where there are beautiful songs being sung and he's tempted to take his ship off course. He ends up on another island where everybody gluttonously eats and indulges themselves in those ways. So let me give an analogy that will help bring out the relation, I think, between habitually and situate. So habits are useful in some contexts, but might be completely non-adaptive in others. Here's a really simple one. I have a habit of reaching for the purple toothbrush, because my toothbrush in our family has always been the purple one.

So really, really good habit, and I am thinkingly reach for the purple toothbrush, and that's mine. But suppose I go to your house, where there's five different people who have purple toothbrushes. Although suddenly I'm in a situation where a really simple habit

reach for the purple toothbrush isn't useful. Okay. What does this have to do with Aristotle and Odysseus? Habits are useful in the sense that they are contextually specific. Running really fast is a good habit to have when you are hearing the gun shoot at a cross-country race, but it's not a really good habit to have if you're right in front of a large street and you hear a sound and you run into traffic.

Awareness that whether a habit is effective or not is going to depend upon the situation in which that habit is carried out. So situate involves putting yourself in circumstances that make it easy for your habits to work right. You might think of that in two different ways. One is that situating, surrounding yourself by others who share your values, can make it really easy to develop habits. If you want to study hard for an exam or get work done that is somewhat aversive to you, going to a library or a co-work space is a way of situating yourself so that the habit that you're trying to develop gets reinforced. The reason you take a yoga class, the reason you take a meditation class, the reason you take a language class is not because you couldn't do those things on your own, but because it's easier to do things when you are surrounded

by others who share those values. So you situate yourself in a place that makes it easier for a certain practice to become habitual. The second thing that you do when you situate is that you make sure that your habit is able to deal with the situation that you find yourself in, and if it isn't, you can use some sort of external mechanism. So suppose I've worked really hard to cultivate in myself healthy eating habits, but it's nonetheless the case that a particular kind of sugary buttery scent makes me attracted towards a particular

kind of food. The advice situate says, don't keep those kinds of cookies on the desk in front of you. Move them away from you. Or plug your nose when you walk past the bakery. Or make it impossible to eat those cookies by putting them on a really high shelf. The other reason that I use the Odyssey as the example of situate is because the story of the Odyssey tells exactly stories of Odysseus engaging in self-control in the face of

temptation. So famously, Odysseus has to share his boat between two islands. They're in Silla and Corribdus or Silla and Caribdus. And on those islands are sirens that is beings with beautiful voices. And when you hear those voices, you're going to be tempted to steer your ship off course. Odysseus anticipates that he's going to be going through this narrow straight, that he's going to be tempted in this way. And so he does two things. The first thing he does is that he fills the ears of his oarsmen with wax so that they

won't hear the sound and they'll be able to continue. That's like plugging your nose as you walk past a factory that has food that you see really appealing, or it's like not buying food that will be tempting and putting it in your house. And meanwhile Odysseus has himself tied to the mask so that he can't jump off the ship and listen to the sounds of the sirens. That's like doing something Dan Arieli has an example of putting your credit card in a glass of ice water and freezing it so that you can't take it out until the water melts. You prevent yourself from acting on something. So the notion of situate just to recap is first the

recognition that habits are context specific, and that you can use the situation to reinforce a habit, and that it's also sometimes the case that a situation means that a habit isn't useful. And second, that we have strategies that we can use when habits themselves aren't enough. We can do things like avoid temptation, and we can do things like preventing ourselves

from acting on temptation. So that's the notion of situate, and that's why I take it from the Odyssey. We're working our way through four tactics to deal with the human condition, which is often a dumpster fire, and we've worked through habituate, which is to create good habits, and then we went through situate, which is to reinforce those habits with the places and strategies that are wisely

strategic, and we're moving into the third tactic, which is a touch, and you marshal your evidence and support of this strategy from the Iliad, which if memory serves is the sequel to the Odyssey. The Iliad is the prequel to the Odyssey, but as we know from Star Wars, it doesn't matter the order in which you issue the tales. Hopefully your hosts should know these things, but clearly your host is a dummy. You know, I actually think temporal order and narrative are highly flexible things.

So the Iliad, the prequel to the Odyssey, is the story of the war from which Odysseus is heading back roughly. So the Iliad is the story of what's called the Trojan War. And it's a story of basically nine days of battle and of how a group of human beings who are incredibly closely connected to one another and intricately affected by what they think of themselves and what other people think of them. How those groups of people, a group of Greeks and a group of Trojans manage to bring an end to this long, long battle, which has lasted for almost a decade.

And the picture here is that there's a sort of square in which we can operate. We can habituate, we can move over and situate. And one of the things we can recognize is that when we situate, one of the best ways to take advantage of circumstance is by exploiting the fact that we are profoundly social beings. So ultimately, we have this spirited part of our self

as Plato would say. Ultimately, we care this spirited part of our self, as Plato would say. Ultimately, we care what other people think. We spend the entirety of junior high school, the entirety of development into adulthood, working out where it is that we want to fit in the social world. And the capacity to care about others, both with the passion that love provides, and with the passion that hatred provides, both with the passion that jealousy can give, and with the incredible joy that comes from generosity,

that's what I mean by the tactic of attach. So notice, all of these involve recognizing that you have a little driver who isn't a horse, who has to figure out how to talk to the horses. One way to talk to the horses is to cultivate habits in the horses. Another way to talk to the horses is to situate the horses, right? Put them in places where there's plenty to eat, so they don't fight, or where they have a bridle on them, so they all move in the same directions.

That's situate. Another thing you can do with the horses is you can attach them. You can surround them by other horses who are acting in the way that they're acting. So that comes to be and feel natural to the horse. There's a beautiful metaphor in the Buddhist tradition of yoking an elephant who is to be tamed to an elephant who's already tamed. And thereby, the elephant comes to see that this mode of being in the world

is available to it. So the category of things that I'm calling attach, which I put in the context of the Iliad because it's a story of love and war and jealousy and hatred and fighting and friendship and how painful it is to lose someone you love and how frustrating it is to be defeated by someone that you saw as an enemy. All of what that story is about is the incredible power that we have to use social situations to cause us to behave either more or less in the ways that we reflectively want to behave. Yeah, there's so much overlap here with, which talks about the importance of Sangha or community, which I often described as like the HOV lane or Carpool lane effect of meditating or doing life with other people who take this stuff seriously. And then you see it in modern psychology.

And habit formation is bolstered by having social support. In other words, being around people who are trying to do the same things you're trying to do. And that brings us to the fourth of the four tactics, which is detach instead of attach. And this comes in your schema from Epic Tidus. So Epic Tidus actually comes from the third wave of the Greco-Roman Stoic tradition. Unfortunately, we've lost the works from the earlier period. But epic teedis is a thinker around the year 70, 80, 80, or CE, depending on how you refer to that

time. He is born as slave and he writes a little handbook. Actually, one of epic teedis's students writes down in the form of notes from a lecture that Epic Teedist gives. A tiny little book that is literally meant to be the first self-help book. And the book begins with the unforgettable sentence, some things are up to us and some things are not up to us. And of course, that opening sentence is reflected in contemporary discussion in the form of the serenity prayer.

Right, God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. So Epic Titus says, thriving, flourishing, living well requires you to approach the world, knowing the difference between two kinds of things. Things that are up to you, that is things that are in your control, and things that are not up to you, that is things that are not within your control. And then, it's like an economics lesson, devote your efforts to the things you can change.

Don't waste your money on the slot machine that's never gonna give you a prize. So, EpicTitus' picture is this. In order to apportion your effort correctly, in order to have your desires align with the world. You need to put your energy towards changing the things you can and not towards trying to change the things that you can't. So that's step one.

It's a waste of energy to try to. I wish the sun wouldn't rise at seven o'clock tomorrow morning. Well, you know what? The sun's going to rise at seven o'clock tomorrow morning. I wish my know what? The sun's going to rise at 7 o'clock tomorrow morning. I wish my coffee were ready for me to drink when I woke up. Hey, that's something over which you have control. You can set the machine the night before, instead of falling into bed. But the second thing that Epochetus says is that people often get things in the wrong category. In particular, they fail to recognize the degree to which

their responses to the world are up to them. So, Pectetus points out that no one can insult you unless you let them. Somebody says something to you. They don't like your shirt or they think you're a really bad podcaster. It's up to you whether that is received by you as an insult or for example whether it's received by you as an expression of their ignorance or an opportunity for growth. So, a Pectetus points out that in fact, almost all our reactions to the world are things that are up to us, our reactions to social deprivation and disaprobation, and our reactions to the things which are sources of frustration.

We feel very attached to an object, then as objects do, when it breaks, we will be sad. Rather, says Epictetus, if you detach yourself and your happiness from the things which are not up to you, you will be in a position to thrive. And you'll notice it's a very Buddhist theme. The second thing you'll notice is that if you are trying to cultivate detachment, suppose an object feels very, very important to you, Suppose an object feels very, very important to you, and you're trying to make it matter a little bit less. You can't just say to yourself, oh, that doesn't matter to me anymore.

I don't care about X. You can't just do that at will. But notes Epic Titus, there is a way you can do it, which is that you can try to cultivate habits that make it easier for you to detach and reattach to the things which matter for you to distinguish between what is in it and in your control and the ways in which you relate to them. So notice that we have a square. Habit is a way of controlling our instincts, but habit is both dependent on and affected by our situation. Our situation is largely shaped by the social interactions that we find ourselves having through attachment. But how we interpret

and understand those social interactions, the way in which they motivate us, is actually much more up to us than we would think, not directly, but indirectly, through our ability to cultivate and create habits, and so on through the quartet. Okay, so we've just walked through all of this, you walk through the diagnosis of the human condition and for tactics to deal with it. Where does this leave us at the end here? So what I would say is, I've hung on a particular set of enduring texts, what I think is a really easily universalizable, tangible way of thinking about a particular problem that we all have, which is basically, we do stuff we wish we wouldn't do, and we do it because of the fact that we are both human and animal.

And I happen to have attributed the first of those to Socrates and the second of those to his student play dough. But basically it's a universal human truth that we don't always end up being able to do what we wish we would have done at the moment. that we don't always end up being able to do what we wish we would have done at the moment. And that one of the reasons for that is because we're built up out of a whole bundle of stuff. And then I said, look, if we're built up out of a whole bundle of stuff, what's a relatively easy way to think about how to get that bundle well ordered, how to get the plates balanced on the tray so that we can carry it around. And what I said is, here's four, we can form habits, we can put ourselves in useful contexts, we can surround

ourselves by people and take advantage of the ways that motivates us, and we can recognize the way in which our reactions to things are a lot more up to us than we thought they were, especially if we use habits to cultivate instincts that we care about. And I happened to attach each of those, habit to Aristotle, situate to the Odyssey, attach to the Iliad, and detach to Epictetus, but you could do this exact same storytelling using a set of novels. You could use this exact same storytelling in the context of a 12-step program.

I've given you a set of tools that actually underlie first rational behavioral therapy and then cognitive behavioral therapy. So all of these are intended to be tractable, understandable, easy to hold on to in the moment. And notice of course that that's the lesson that we would expect to be the case. It's not useful if something rips to have the Scotch tape that you use back at home. It's useful to have the scotch tape ready to hand. The metaphor that Epictetus uses when he writes his handbook of something that's ready

to hand is actually the metaphor of having a sword ready to draw at the moment. So part of the reason for putting these in snazzy little heuristic form, habituate, situate, attach, detach, is to have them be ready to hand. We do well when something is easily available, and something is easily available when it's put into a simple form. And that's part of why you need to have your podcast every week, right? It's not enough just to say once, here are some tactics and strategies for flourishing and thriving. It's not enough to like meditate on Tuesday and then you're done meditating.

Exactly because we are the kinds of beings who are helped by heuristics, habituate, situate, attach, detach. We are beings who need such heuristics. So that brings me to my gentle, gingerly offered Buddhist critique, not of your heuristic, which I think is fantastic, but more of Greco-Roman philosophy, generally, to the extent that I understand it, which is not a great extent. So you may actually be able to undermine the entire foundation of this critique I'm going

to advance here, which is given how hard it is to remember not to be an asshole, given how hard it is to remember not to give into your animal desires on the regular. I think, in my experience, at least, that we need more than just heuristics and more than just the intention to create habits toward generosity and other virtues. But meditation, which allows you to kind of pound this into your neurons to see clearly how chaotic and cacophonous the mind is. Not in a theoretical way, but in a very embarrassing way all the time. So you're giving the charioteer, who as you keep reminding us, is not a horse.

This muskularly challenged charioteer. So a little bit more muscle so that he can, or she can, or they can see what the horses are up to at any given moment and redirect them. Anyway, does that make any sense what I'm saying? It makes a lot of sense, and actually I want to extend your metaphor, right? So I've told the story at the level of a self, a particular human being. And I've said, here from the perspective of self is a set of heuristics. Interestingly, when Plato has this big discussion

of the individual, he's actually using it to figure out how society should be structured. And when Aristotle finishes the Nekomikian ethics, which is his big discussion of habit, he actually goes on to write a book called The Politics, which is about the structure of society. So let me say this in response to your Buddhist concern. The self is a really useful level to think about things. And I've given you a framework for thinking about things from the perspective of the self. Play to an Aristotle and political philosophy in general say the self is also, though useful,

too small of framework in which to be thinking about this. We actually need to think about what's the structure of society, what's the structure of religion? How is it that we build things that reinforce in people, all of these tendencies, right? So you might think the self is one size and society is another. What you are rightly pointing out is that the Buddhist tradition

is intensely aware of the ways in which the self is not just too small to be the only focus of our attention, but also too big to be the only focus of our attention. And by the way, it doesn't exist anyway. And so in addition to the reinforcement that comes from building the right social structures and religious frameworks and the support that comes from using these four heuristics at the level of the self, in addition, the Buddhist rightly points out, this needs to be reinforced at the level of the sub-self,

at the level of the neuron, at the level of not even recognizing this particular contingent assemblage of subjective experiences as being anything more than a contingent assemblage of subjective experiences. So I would say, think of these as three among the many scales of approaches

you could take, sub-self, self, super-self, and all of them, I think, in that sense, are making the same set of observations. Did the Greco-Romans have, did they make any attempts to kind of build an inner microscope that allowed them to see the subself in a way that would give either the self or the body politic a leg up when it comes to the horses. I don't know of a meditation tradition in the Greco-Roman context, but I am to reiterate not a scholar of the period. I do know that there is lots and lots of work, for example, in Plato's Republic about the rhythmic training of the soul, and about the essential ways in which you train individuals who are going to be in leadership

positions to appreciate harmony in music, to march together. That is, you use things that are at the level below consciousness, things that involve the entraining of certain kinds of sensitivities, and all of those happen at a subrational level. I personally don't know of ways in which there is an analog to the meditation tradition, but there is a lot of spiritual letting go. So there is a notion of revelry, there are certain kinds of ingestions of drugs, inhalation of vapors, which involve a detachment from reality as a way of letting go. But I would say to my knowledge, the closest analog to the practice of meditation is the

practice of the cultivation of sensitivity to harmony. And what does that practice look like? So Plato has this great description in the Republic of how it is that we're going to train what he calls the guardians, which basically the people who are going to be in charge of making wise decisions on behalf of the community. And he has a long description of how their early childhood involves particular kinds of gymnastic routines and trainings in hearing the harmony of particular kinds of sounds. And so the idea, roughly, I mean, it's the poster in your doctor's office, children learn what they live. And the picture is supposed to be

individuals who are going to go on to leadership positions, should be individuals who find it instinctively joyful to move their bodies in synchrony with others, individuals who find it instinctively joyful to hear music that is orderly in a certain way. And the idea I take it is that those things will come to feel comfortable and deeply real to the guardians in such a way that they will try to cultivate a society in which not just literally, but metaphorically speaking, bodies

move together in harmonious ways, and the aesthetic and social experiences that people have are ordered rather than disordered. Final question for me, you've, you've you've been studying and teaching these concepts for so long. How are you doing with your own levels of you, Dimonia and Furnesis? I am privileged to be in a marvelous moment in my life. But I'm in that marvelous moment in my life, largely because of the practices that I have undertaken. And I would say, I was someone in particular who needed the lessons of epictetus. The recognition that some things are up to me and some things are not up to me, the recognition that whether a behavior on the part of someone I love is a betrayal

or whether it's an expression of their independence and autonomy is mine to judge and determine. And I would say the framework that Epictetus gave me, buffered by the recognition that habit and context and association with others could make a big difference has been absolutely essential in getting me through the parts of life that anybody faces at my age, apparent dying, my children leaving the home and a sudden need to reconfigure what it is that my ambitions and relationships look like for what I hope will be the next three decades of my life. I could ask you so many more questions about all of that, but I'm sensitive to your time. And grateful for your time and for helping all of us get a step or two closer to Fronise's professor tomorrow. Genneler, thank you very much. Thank you so much, Dan Harris.

Thanks again to Professor Tamar Genneler. Great to talk to her. I love that episode. In this conversation, you may have heard me mention a model of therapy called Internal Family Systems to learn more about IFS, go to our show notes and you can find some links to past episodes that will deliver. 10% happier is produced by Lauren Smith, Gabrielle Zuckerman, Justin Davie and Tara Anderson, DJ Cashmere is our senior producer, Marissa Schneidermann is our senior editor Kevin O'Connell is our director of audio and

post-production and Kimi Regler is our executive producer, Alicia Mackie leads our marketing and Tony Magyar is our director of podcasts, finally Nick Thorburn of Islands, wrote our theme. If you like 10% happier, I hope you do. You can listen early and add free right now by joining 1-3 Plus in the 1-3 App or on Apple podcasts. Prime members can listen to add free on Amazon Music. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at 1-3 dot com slash survey.

We can't see tomorrow, but we can hear it. And it sounds like a renewable natural gas bus replacing conventional fleets. We're bridging to a sustainable energy future. Working today to ensure tomorrow is on. And bridge, life takes energy. Hey everybody, it's Dan on 10% happier. I like to teach listeners how to do life better. I want to try.

Oh hello, Mr. Grinch. What would make you happier? Ah, let's see. And out of business sign at the North Pole or a nationwide ban on caroling and noise, noise, noise. What would really make me happy is if I didn't have to host a podcast. That's right, I got a podcast too.

Hi, it's me, the Grand Puba of Bahambug, the OG Green Grump, the Grinch. From Wondery, Tis the Grinch Holiday Talk Show is a pathetic attempt by the people of Ruvil to use my situation as a teachable moment. So join me, the Grinch. Listen as I launch a campaign against Christmas cheer, grilling celebrity guests, like chestnuts on an open fire. Your family will love the show! As you know, I'm famously great with kids. Follow Tuesday Grinch Holiday Talk Show on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts.