The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Good Life Method: Reasoning Through the Big Questions of Happiness, Faith, and Meaning by Meghan Sullivan, Paul Blaschko

Episode Date: January 10, 2022

The Good Life Method: Reasoning Through the Big Questions of Happiness, Faith, and Meaning by Meghan Sullivan, Paul Blaschko Two Philosophers Ask and Answer the Big Questions About the Search for Faith and Happiness For seekers of all stripes, philosophy is timeless self-care. Notre Dame philosophy professors Meghan Sullivan and Paul Blaschko have reinvigorated this tradition in their wildly popular and influential undergraduate course “God and the Good Life,” in which they wrestle with the big questions about how to live and what makes life meaningful. Now they invite us into the classroom to work through issues like what justifies our beliefs, whether we should practice a religion and what sacrifices we should make for others—as well as to investigate what figures such as Aristotle, Plato, Marcus Aurelius, Iris Murdoch, and W. E. B. Du Bois have to say about how to live well. Sullivan and Blaschko do the timeless work of philosophy using real-world case studies that explore love, finance, truth, and more. In so doing, they push us to escape our own caves, ask stronger questions, explain our deepest goals, and wrestle with suffering, the nature of death, and the existence of God. Philosophers know that our “good life plan” is one that we as individuals need to be constantly and actively writing to achieve some meaningful control and sense of purpose even if the world keeps throwing surprises our way. For at least the past 2,500 years, philosophers have taught that goal-seeking is an essential part of what it is to be human—and crucially that we could find our own good life by asking better questions of ourselves and of one another. This virtue ethics approach resonates profoundly in our own moment. The Good Life Method is a winning guide to tackling the big questions of being human with the wisdom of the ages.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. The chrisvossshow.com.

Hey, we're coming to you with another great podcast. We certainly appreciate you guys tuning in. Be sure to watch our coverage of CES show 2022, which is going on right now. You're going to start seeing the videos come out for those. And also, you go to Goodreads.com, Fortuness, Chris Voss. You see my books and everything reading and reviewing over there. YouTube.com, Fortuness, Chris Voss. You're one of the definitely be on that, not only for all the great authors we have on the show,

but for the CES coverage, all the tech toys, and all the groups, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and in between. Today we have two amazing authors and philosophers on the show. So our brains are going to expand to an exponential level, and we have to order new craniums or something from Amazon. The book that they have comes out tomorrow, so you want to hurry and grab this baby up so you can be the first in your book club to read it. The Good Life Method, Reasoning Through the Big Questions of Happiness, Faith, and Meaning. We have Megan Sullivan on the show and Paul Blaschko on the show. Welcome to the show, both lady and gentlemen. How are you both? Great. Thanks for having us. There you go. I'm assuming you're a gentleman, Paul, but we'll give that to you as a gimme. Anyway, guys, give us your bios so we can get to know you guys a little bit better.

Yeah, I can jump in, Megan, if that's right. I'm an assistant teaching professor here at the University of Notre Dame. I direct a program that's housed in the College of Arts and Letters that focuses on work in the good life. And I teach this big course, God in the Good Life, which Megan and I have been working on for several real years, and which formed the basis of the book. And I'm Megan Sullivan. I'm the Woolsey Family College Professor of Philosophy here at Notre Dame. I got to know Paul really well when he was a PhD student here at Notre Dame and started

working with me on developing this course, God and the Good Life, which has become a phenomenon on our campus and many other campuses. A philosophy course pitched around helping young people think about the really big questions that are guiding how they're choosing goals and how they're understanding meaning in their lives. And Paul and I got going on that when he was a PhD student and it's grown and expanded and we've gotten to work together alongside some of our colleagues and building this big thing here at Notre Dame and then launching satellites and other campuses. Oh, wow. So the whole, the good life thing is a movement and kind of, or what would you describe

it as? Yeah. So it's actually a network. So a few years back, Megan got a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which I worked on as well. It's called the Philosophy as a Way of Life Network. And it's a network. There's hundreds, 150 or so college professors in it committed to the idea that philosophy is useful and relevant and that it's asking and answering some of the big questions that ordinary people like us struggle with from day to day as we're trying to navigate uncertainty in the world and think about things as small as how much money should I save this month and where should I put it, or as big as what should I do about the fact that I'm inevitably going to die. So, you know, our network members approach philosophy teaching in the same way that we do with our course here on campus. And there's just been a lot of fruitful engagement and interactions with folks really all across

the country. Wow. That's crazy, man. So it's turned into a whole thing. You guys have built a popular course around it too, as well as the book? Yeah. Yep. That's right.

We've been teaching it, is it seven years, I think. Oh, wow. We've been going seven years. We've got several thousand Notre Dame students who've gone through it. We also, and this is part of the impetus for us writing the book, realized pretty quickly after we launched the course here, it got very popular on campus very quickly. And we started getting a lot of requests to do philosophy talks for adults, for Notre Dame football fans, for people who are worried about particular good life questions. And we realized very quickly that the interest in this expands way beyond just 18-year-olds

at Notre Dame. And just a lot of folks are ready to start to think a little bit more philosophically about what's going on in their lives. Are people searching for deeper senses of meaning maybe after coronavirus or before coronavirus? I mean, have we reached a world where people feel so disconnected they're searching for something deeper? Or have we always been that way? We started getting hit up for these philosophy and the good life talks pretty much as soon as the course launched, which again is 2015, 2016. So these questions arguably are eternal questions.

At the very least, we found that the market for this kind of philosophical questioning predates Corona. That said, Paul and I were working really intensely on the book during the pandemic. I remember we're also next door neighbors. So we would take these like long walks as we were working on the book and thinking about directions for different chapters and case studies that we wanted to use for showing people the value of philosophy. And I remember at one point, our editor, Ginny, telling us, don't make the entire book about coronavirus now, because we've got this huge philosophical thing that's affected all of our lives in really profound ways. And there's a strong temptation to think that our only good life challenge is COVID. But in fact,

we've got a multitude of philosophical puzzles, and COVID has just brought a lot of them right up to the front and center. Wow. So what is philosophy for those of the laymen out there? We got to help the Gen X, Gen Yers and the Gen Zers and the millennials out. They don't read much. So what is philosophy? Yeah, I think of philosophy really broadly. And this is literally how I describe it to my intro students.

You know, it's thinking really hard about reality, using the resources available to natural reason. I guess like natural reason is jargony in there. But the idea is just you're out looking at the world and you just use any sort of resource available to make arguments about how things are. So there's different fields. It's a discipline, it's a profession. So you can go to a philosophy department and you'll find people who describe themselves as philosophers working there. Really generally, we're just asking questions like, what is the nature of belief? What's the nature of love? But also really practical questions like, how should we form beliefs? Or who should we

love? What does that entail? That's my really general response. I don't know. Do you have anything to build on that, Megan? Is that, yeah. I think I'd add to that. There's the discipline of philosophy, like what me and Paul and our colleagues get paid to work on full time. And then there's also philosophy as a way of life, which is something that's kind of just, it's universal to being a rational human trying to make your way in the world. This idea that there are questions about why you value what you value and what your most significant reasons are and what your

most superficial reasons are. This kind of philosophy is a little bit like exercise. There are professional versions of it that are really surprising and astounding and require full-time commitment. But then there's also just versions of it we all experiment with on a day-to-day basis and all want to get incrementally better at, but maybe we don't want it to be like the sole focus of our lives. If you guys ever do your second book and call it The Bad Life Method, I have a lot of different contributions of stories I can do to that book. We teach Nietzsche, who some semesters gets voted off the syllabus and some semesters he's back on. But it usually happens around Halloween. And students always, on Nietzsche Day, think that we should rename the class,

There is no God in the good life, or there is no God in the bad life, or God is dead in the good life. So we get a lot of these jokes. Yeah, you can do a lot of research at trailer parks. And who's that guy who used to do that show where the trailer park people? Now I've lost my trailer park audience. I don't know. They can't afford radios. So in the Good Life book, you guys talk a little bit about God and religion and philosophy. Tell us a little bit how that works. Yeah, religion is just like jam-packed full of philosophical questions. One of the ones that we start with in our class is, does God exist?

And the second one is, should you believe in God? It could be that God exists, but there's really good evidence that God doesn't exist. Maybe God exists, but we shouldn't believe in God. Or some thinkers even go, I think this is a little off the deep end, but they go so far as to say, look, it doesn't matter whether or not God exists. You should still believe regardless of whether or not God exists. It's going to have maybe pragmatic or practical justifications. It's going to be good for your life. If you believe as if you maintain this, what might be an illusion. Those are basic places that you can start when

you're thinking about religion and philosophy. And from there, there's just, there's a lot of different footholds that you could get if you're thinking philosophically about religion. What is an apology and how do apologies play into the structure of the book? Good. So Paul and I wrote this book. And one of our key goals is to encourage people to try this art of philosophical apology writing. And the first thing to note is that a philosophical apology is not saying you're sorry for anything. Though probably a lot of us should probably should apologize a lot more for things that we do. But the word apology, it comes from Socrates.

So 2400 years ago, if you remember your Greek history, Socrates was put on trial by the Athenian government for asking such penetrating questions about justice and the nature of being a good human. And the Athenians first thought it was interesting, and then they got sick of it pretty fast, especially when he went after people in power. He was put on trial. And in Plato's Apology, we see Socrates giving his defense of his pursuit of the good life and how he's chosen to live his life and what he thinks the most important values are. And Socrates taking the time to try to give this story about how he found himself set out doing philosophy and why it matters so much to him, and ultimately being willing to give his life for these ideals, has become this pattern which many

other philosophers and just ordinary folks in subsequent history have followed, thinking part of the good life is being able to tell this story about what my most important reasons are, what happened in my life that showed these reasons to be so important to me, and how I'm going to defend them against folks who might think that they're not so good. And we see examples. Augustine writes his apology when he suddenly converts to Christianity and his friends are like, wait, what? And it's a story about what was happening in his life then, but also the reasons he has for believing this is worth living for. W.E.B. Du Bois does one about his experience understanding racism. Nietzsche does one to tell

you that he wants to become the Superman. So this idea of giving a philosophical story for your life, it's a part of our tradition since the very beginning. And we want folks to realize that they can try it out too. There you go. I wrote an apology for eating the last piece of pie that was in the fridge. What were your reasons? It is what it is. I just did it. That's a kind of Nietzschean apology. Is it? Is it kind of? Yeah.

I wanted it. It was there. Therefore, it is in my belly. You guys talk about love being an important part of the good life. What's that all about? That love thing? Yeah. In the love chapter, we focus on Iris Murdoch, who actually Megan has done a lot of reading

and research on. I can turn it over to you if you want, Megan. But the basic idea is something like we often think about love as something that we do for other people. If I love my kids, I'm going to give them candy or maybe give them vegetables. I don't know. We think about the actions associated with love and the things that we can do. But one really important aspect of love is actually intellectual, right?

It's paying attention to somebody in the right sort of way and cultivating that sort of attention, right? Being interested in the thoughts and the feelings and the intentions, the inner life of another person. Iris Murdoch gives this example of a mother-in-law who finds that she has a relationship with her daughter-in-law, and yet she just doesn't really like her that much. She doesn't really love her that much. And so she goes through an exercise where she tries to put herself in the shoes of her daughter-in-law and just continue to look again, as Murdoch puts it, until she can cultivate this empathy with her daughter-in-law and also see the world from her perspective and see what is it that motivates her? What is it that makes intelligible the actions that she does? And one of the things that we encourage in the book is to think about stories and especially literature as a way of kind of extending then our capacities to love other people in general,

but also concretely just other people in our lives who might be very different from us and might have very different inner lives. There you go. Or they might want that piece of pie. So is basically the core of it a revolve around a lot of philosophers, a lot of quotes from philosophers, a lot of stuff that has been learned over time? Our plan for the book actually follows a plan for our class here at Notre Dame, which has been really successful. It's to start you off with philosophical questions and activities that feel really ordinary and day to day, even if they're puzzling. And then try to build up to the bigger and more existential questions. So I'll give you an example.

We start the book off introducing you to Plato and this question, how do you handle disagreements with people about politics and morality and religion and philosophy? Let's forget about whether your theory is true for a minute. And just what does it mean to still care enough about the truth that you want to pursue with other people? And what do you do with the fact that other people drive you crazy or other people don't seem to have the same goal as you. That's not, that feels like a really 2022 problem. But in fact, that was a hundred percent an ancient Athens problem. And they talked a great deal about how to navigate it. And that's something we're all experiencing in our social media lives right now. So we start there and want to introduce you to Plato and give you some techniques that he recommends that you can try out. And then we move up to money. And then we move up to being a good mom and dad or brother or sister or romantic partner, something people

worry about, but it gets you a little bit more existential and try to zoom out each time in each chapter, giving you a bigger good life question to chew on a philosopher that says some interesting, we think very relevant contemporary advice on that question. And then some stuff that philosopher says you should do if you want to live like a philosopher around this topic. And one of our rules, the reason why Paul and I get paid the big bucks is a really good personal trainer, like a doctor to point you to things that might help the questions that you're probably already bringing in that you're already worried about. And then maybe point you to new philosophical questions you haven't had the time to think about yet. Yeah. This sounds really good because it gets you to the

real core of what you're looking for. There's so many people, especially in the Instagram era, where they're like, I need to choose what everybody else has on Instagram. And then maybe I'll be happy because they seem happy. I see they're really smiling big in their fake photo in some jet, and it's a stage jet or something. And a lot of people feel disenchanted. I think there's some studies that young women are affected highly by it, seeing other people succeed. I think there was a community that did a joke once that said when they dig us up or society up, whoever digs us up is going to be like, holy crap, these people smiled all the time. They were happy everywhere they went. They're going to find all our stupid pictures.

But you guys talk in the book, too, about how embracing some of the tragedies and some of the challenges in life are part of maybe having a good life. Talk about that, if you would, please. Yeah. One of the chapters that we write about that sort of those themes focuses on what philosophers sometimes call the problem of evil. And this is the idea that, look, we live in a world, and especially if you believe in God, right? We live in a world that was designed by an all-powerful, all-perfect being, and yet you look around and there's so much sadness and there's so much pain and there's just so many awful things going on. What sense should you make of that if you're a believer or if you're not, right? I think there's a way in which this fact is existentially threatening to a lot of us. And so one of the things that we recommend

is that you think about the story of the suffering and the role that it plays in your life. And you use that as a way of integrating it into your worldview, not being insensitive to it, not denying it, right? You don't want to say, ah, I believe in God and therefore the world must not be good. Or sorry, there must not be any suffering or evil. On the other hand, you don't want to take it so far as to say, oh, there's so much evil and suffering that life is meaningless. And we explore some thinkers that try to navigate a middle way between those two and try to give you strategies for doing that. I think it's really important realizing people get sort of discouraged because you're not going to have a perfect run through life where it's just all going to have a perfect run through life

where it's just all going to be good things happening to you. Although on Instagram, it seems to be that way. But some people get frustrated and they get bogged down. I just got done writing my book, which is partially a memoir, my stories basically. And a lot of them were stories about me falling down or getting screwed over or some sort of business deal gone bad, bad partners. And we're all sorts of examples of how, yeah, they were really horrible at the time, but now I get to laugh about them because I have these great stories. And if I didn't have them, I don't

have a book right now. We look for examples of people who are doing philosophical apologies in the wild, so to speak? We got to look at your book, Chris. But one story we talk about in our book is Stephen Colbert, who is a very happy guy who has lived a really troubled life. His father and two of his brothers died in a totally preventable plane accident when he was a kid. And he gets this question all the time of like, why do you see there's... He frequently talks about how meaningful and valuable he finds life to be and how grateful he is for it.

And he'll sometimes get these really great interview questions of like, but why? Like, why are you so happy? And I think about your Instagram example. A lot of us think to demonstrate we're happy, we need new pictures of us on vacation, or we need to show that we like hit this weight loss goal this year. That's not genuine happiness. But you might even be happy and have had all these like difficult things in your life. How do you explain why you're happy? And for Colbert, he turns to Augustine and to bits of philosophy to explain

how he's making sense of how he feels so well about the life that he's living, even though on the surface, it looks like a pretty complicated, messed up life. Yeah, it's interesting. And I didn't even know that about Stephen Colbert. I'm a big fan of him. It's a very moving story. He's such an interesting, authentic guy. He really is. I know he's religious. I think he's Catholic. And I'll talk about it every now and then. I'm an atheist, so it doesn't bother me. But he seems to really put well together, and whatever his belief systems seem to work for him. But I study him as the host on the show.

Him and Johnny Carson are two of my favorites. But what are some other things we want to tease out on the book that will encourage people to buy it? Good. I think we have four skills that we try to teach over the course of the book. We try to give a lot of pointers or examples, things that you can start off doing. First, how to ask better questions. If you think the idea of having a conversation about the good life with my friends and family right now just seems like a freaking nightmare, it's like a recipe for disaster. How to start to loosen up a little bit and enjoy talking about these philosophical

questions with other people again, especially in a really polarized time. We work on those skills quite a bit. We work on the second skill is this idea of agency, learning how to figure out what parts of your good life you're responsible for and which things are just things that happen to you. And how do you understand what you should feel badly about, what you should ask forgiveness for, and which kinds of things you should just understand as being like forms of suffering that are happening to you. And how important that is for feeling like you are leading your life rather than your life is just happening to you. The third skill Paul already mentioned, but it's this idea of how to attend to the good lives and the stories of other people, which we think is really crucial to love and to relationships. And also to just building out your moral life and starting to enjoy a life that's not just totally trapped in your own head. And then the final skill is

connecting up all the pieces. And this is, again, this is like the gold brass ring for philosophers. This idea of starting to realize you've got all these discontinuous puzzles that you're reasoning through and challenges that life is throwing your way. How do you start to form it into something that seems meaningful and coherent that you've got a big plan for? And we try to introduce you to philosophers. A lot of folks throughout history have found to be really helpful on these questions. And then Paul and I put our own lives on the line too. And we suggest experiments that come from those philosophers. And then we try them out, Paul with his unfortunate wife and children and me with my parents and my brothers, and we will pull back on the results. And so we also do try to put our money where our mouth is showing that you can try

to live more philosophically and reflect a little bit on whether these experiments are working or not. That's interesting. It's always interesting to me how you mentioned earlier about how the same problems they were having in Athens back in the day were here. It's really interesting to me how the problems of humanity are just constant, whether it's, you know, 10,000 years ago or yesterday or whatever's on the front page of the news. I always tell the line, the one thing man can learn from his history is that man never learns from his history. Everybody, we go around and around. I mean, going back, there's a reason that those original philosophers, I don't know what you call them, axioms, basically are still true to this day and have endured thousands of years of things is because they are still the, I don't know, still the quantifiable thing that man is searching for, I guess. I think that's totally right. I think if you look through some of the debates

that we bring out in the book, you find that they're the same debates we're having today, just in a different form. So one of the first things that we look at is this question of happiness and what it even is. So we touched on this a little bit ago, but you might think about happiness as a feeling, as like feeling good or feeling up. And certainly we use the word happiness in that way, and it's an important concept to have. But from the very beginning, there were debates between Socrates and some of his contemporaries. Aristotle laid out a whole theory where happiness consists in something much bigger. It's the shape of one's entire life. It's a shape that can incorporate suffering and pain and loss,

like you had mentioned a second ago. But it's one where there is some essential continuity. There's something there that's connecting everything up. So just looking at that debate and realizing, look around today, when we think of happiness, we often go back and forth between these two ideas. And if we're not really clear about which one we have in mind, when we're making really big decisions, we might really mess it up. I was thinking about happiness as just a feeling of just well-being. I never had kids. I know the data about how miserable you become when you have kids. But I was able to kind of put that in a bracket and say, okay, that's one kind of happiness. But maybe there's this other kind of more meaningful happiness that I'm looking for that involves 18 years of no sleep. I guess eventually

they start sleeping. I don't know. They tell me. They tell me. Well, anything more we want to touch on, guys, to tease out of the book? I think one thing, it's interesting to think about what you hope for from a project that you've invested yourself in so much. Paul and I really have been living and breathing this book and this course for the last six years, and it's totally transformed the way we approach our work and how we think about the good life. If I've got one quick takeaway, I hope for people who read it, I think a lot of folks hear about philosophy and they think, oh, it's going to be boring or it's going to be involved learning all these really difficult vocabulary words or it's elitist or it's dark. It means thinking about death all the time.

And we want, I want people to read the book and realize philosophy is fun. Like I enjoy doing this. I really love having these conversations. And once I get a little bit better at it, I want to build it into how I spend time at dinner with my family. I want to read more about these great philosophers that people talk about all the time, but I just never picked up Seneca or I could never get my head around it. Hoping, like the course does for our students, for the readers, it's going to point you into a direction where for the next phase of your life, you can realize, oh, I've got all these philosophical resources that I can build into my plan for how I'm doing what I'm doing. And that would be huge for me if people read the book and they thought, man, I really enjoy this. I think too, just to add to that, recognizing how

much philosophy is happening every day. If you just go on Facebook, people are assuming certain philosophical claims all over the place. If you read the New York Times, these op-eds, they just have built into them philosophical assumptions, which is totally fine. Like you have to assume certain things in philosophy. But I find that I sometimes get trapped by certain ways of thinking. And I read the article and I think, that's not right. But I don't know where to go from there. I just post angrily about it. When you can unpack it a little bit and see what some thinkers have argued really seriously about this particular kind of a claim,

it gives you a sort of freedom. It gives you the ability to articulate yourself with respect to the views that are on the table. I find that to be really liberating, really enjoyable. Do you think it helps to have kind of the framework of the philosophers to deal with, to know where that comes from, a good foundation maybe? Even in the ancient times, Stoic philosophy or Confucian philosophy, people were not meant to just read this cold the same way you'd read a novel. You're meant to have a teacher or teachers and people to talk you through it. And you don't necessarily start at the beginning and work your way through to the end. It's meant to be the kind of thing that you learn about in community and with discussion.

So I think sometimes people think, oh my gosh, I really need to read Nietzsche this year. And they buy the book from Barnes and Noble and sit down with Thus Spoke Theresthustra and realize they're pretty frustrated because they have no idea what's going on by page four. Everybody feels that way about reading philosophy. Even people with PhDs in philosophy try to sit down and read a new philosophy book and they don't know where to start. You need guides and pointers and help. And that's always been the kind of point of it is to read these texts to get the questions and to learn maybe a technique for arguing or a principle and then to start having the arguments and discussions. And so I think, I hope our book and other books where philosophers

are trying to introduce you to the craft are good starting places because if you try to just jump in cold, it's going to be like trying to read a mathematical paper without knowing the language. You're just not going to get anything out of it. And I like how you guys put it in real world context too because, you know, when you're reading thus, they, why, thy. Yeah I like how you guys put it in real world context too. Because, you know, when you're reading this, they, why, they. Yeah, no, you think what are other people getting out of Nietzsche? But then you realize, oh my gosh, there was a huge debate a few years ago about whether or not the Arlington National Cemetery should have special tombstones for atheist soldiers. And what would you put with a cross or with a Star of David to denote somebody's

commitment to atheism? That's a big practical debate the federal government had to have. And it gets you all into Nietzsche. That's what he wrote about. It's like, what does it mean to think of atheism not as a just, I don't believe in God view, but in itself a way of life and a set of commitments. And so once like where to start looking for the value in these thinkers, and that's what the prose can help you with, you'll start to realize that there's a lot more depth to these contemporary puzzles. And Paul and I think have made it our career to try to find those connections. That's pretty cool, guys. So is it almost like taking the course, reading the book?

Yeah. And no exams. Yeah. There you go. A lot of the structure of the book does come from the course. And some of the stories that we tell in the book are stories we literally just tell with our students. After each chapter, there's a practical sort of recommendations for how to apply this in your life. They're not assignments quite, but they are the sort of practices and exercises that we give our students. So you can take what you're thinking about, take what you're reading, and then see like,

how does this fit into my life? Or how does this help me articulate my apology? So a lot of the, yeah, a lot of the content in the book is related in that way to the course. And hopefully, I don't know, I hope it feels like we're having that engagement because that's what I find most exciting about philosophy is that sense of community and that sense of walking together through these incredible questions. There you go. We try to pick the topics and examples and puzzles that our students really love. One thing that's better about the book than the course, like Paul said, is you're not going to get graded on anything, whereas our students do get graded on how well they are at understanding the good life by the end of the class. One thing that's maybe a little bit harder about the book than taking it as a class in a place like Notre Dame is Notre Dame, you've got a ready-made community that wants to have these

conversations with you. And if you get the book, we recommend reading it with your book club or with family members or other folks who are going to want to talk about this with you, because we know from Socrates onward, philosophy is meant to be discussed and debated. It's not like a history book where you just sit down and read it quietly and then don't try to do anything with it. Philosophy is really active. Yeah. The one thing man can learn from his history is man should learn from his history.

Anything more you guys want to tease out in the book before we go? Somebody's got some comment. That's my kids. I'm sure they learned how to call. You never teach them that, man. Huge mistake. Huge mistake. I guess one of the things I really love about the final couple chapters in the book is we look at some traditions and philosophy that really emphasize contemplation

and the role contemplation plays in our lives. And this is something I'm seeing more and more, right? As people are rethinking their work situations, as they're thinking, I've been packing so much into my life and becoming incredibly busy. And now with the pandemic, we have this sort of forced two-year break where you can't keep up, keep doing that all the time. The question arises, well, what to put in its place? What sort of activity would be meaningful enough for that? And in the book, we look at Marcus Aurelius, who was a Stoic philosopher, and who thought one of the most important things you can do is just refocus yourself every day on the things that you really care about, on the things that you really value. And that sounds just abstract,

like general. Yeah, of course, that's true. But he has a really concrete way of trying to do that. He has meditations that are just a couple of lines long, and he recommends you actually do this every day. And I took this practice up in doing this research and thinking about this, where actually I'll record on my phone a meditation every now and then, whenever I feel like I really need reminding of something. And it might be a joke or it might be like a poem or it might be just something that I wrote down and thought, yeah, I really got to remember this.

And this has been a practice that, I don't know, it's just really enriched my life. It's really helped me sort of reorient my activity around the things that I think matter most in life. I think that's a part of the book that I really enjoyed writing and I really enjoyed thinking about. And just generally the role of contemplation,

which I don't know, at least in my life, I've got so many sort of apps going and so many different things that it's sometimes hard to remember. Yeah, I can stop for a second. I can take this time to contemplate. Anything more you want to throw in, Megan? I think we've covered it. There are different topics in the book that have resonated with

both me and Paul at different times, given the particular challenges that we're facing. And I totally agree with Paul that I feel like as we finish out year two of this really weird season where a lot of our plans have been canceled and where it's been hard to predict the future, philosophy and especially the kind of philosophical skill of being able to take a step back and take stock and try to think about what things mean and try to make meaning out of really weird experiences, that is very practically useful because there's oftentimes right now, especially not a lot of things that we can plan to do to make our lives better, but lots of ways that we can think about our lives and appreciate our lives that help us unlock value.

That sounds a little bit new agey, but honestly, from the Greek philosophers onward, they've been trying to coach themselves and each other about how to deal with volatility and uncertainty and change and trying to find things that are, that in fact do feel really fixed and meaningful that can be there when we need it. There you go. There you go. It's been wonderful to have you guys on the show. And this is pretty amazing. We all need to focus on having a better life and a good life. I did some, a lot of soul searching over coronavirus. So there you go. Thanks for being on the show guys.

We really appreciate it. Yeah. Thank you. Have a good one. And give us your plugs so people can find you guys on the interwebs. Oh, sure. Good.

Gosh, plugs like my Tik TOK. Do you want my Tik TOK? Sure. Your, your.com is wherever you want people to go check you out. I guess. Give me your phone number. That'll be...

Your kids are going to do it. Oh, man. I am on TikTok. I have been experimenting on doing philosophy on TikTok. And that's been fun and rewarding. That's got to be interesting. Stressful in its own sort of way. But I'm at Prof Blaschko. So if you want to check me out on TikTok, you can check me out there. Yeah. And I've got a newsletter that I write called The Space of

Reason on Substack. Yeah, I think those are my plugs. Okay. You can find my webpage is Megan Sullivan, M-E-G-H-A-N Sullivan.org, or you just Google Megan Sullivan. You can find a lot more about this book and my previous book, which was on time, philosophy of time and the good life. Um, I am not, I don't understand what Twitter is not even a hundred percent sure that it's real, but that's probably the best way to track it all. I mean, you can also see the webpage that we use for our course. It's, uh, God in the good life.nd.edu or if you just Google God in the good life, it'll come up pretty fast. There you go. There you go. Thanks for coming on if you just Google God in the Good Life, it'll come up pretty fast. There you go.

There you go. Thanks for coming on, guys. Thanks for tuning in. Be sure to order the book, The Good Life Method, Reasoning Through the Big Questions of Happiness, Faith, and Meaning. You can order it.

It's available tomorrow wherever fine books are sold. Go to goodreads.com for us. That's Chris Foss. See everything we're reading and reviewing over there. Go to youtube.com for us. That's Chris Foss. See all of our reading and reviewing over there. Go to youtube.com forward slash Chris Foss. See all of our videos as well as our CES 2022 coverage.

Also go to all of our groups, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, all those crazy places the kids are at. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe, and we'll see you next time.