The Daily Stoic - Arthur Brooks’ Ultimate Philosophy Masterclass (PT. 1)

Episode Date: March 26, 2026

What are you missing by only seeing the world through one philosophy? In this masterclass, Arthur Brooks and Ryan walk through the biggest schools of thought and reveal how they fit together in a way most people never see.Join Arthur on March 27 for a free live workshop -- along with his friends Rainn Wilson, Hoda Kotb, Chip Conley, Simon Sinek, Andrew Yang, Maria Shriver, Dan Buettner, and Chris Williamson. Together, they will deconstruct the 'Meaning Gap' and share the raw, unscripted truths about finding purpose in a chaotic world. You can register here.👉 Preorder Arthur Brooks’ NEW book The Meaning of Your Life 📚 Grab copies of Arthur Brooks’ books From Strength to Strength and Build the Life You Want Arthur Brooks is a social scientist and one of the world’s leading authorities on human happiness. He is a Harvard professor, columnist with The Free Press, host of the podcast Office Hours, CBS News contributor, and internationally acclaimed public speaker. His previous books have been translated into dozens of languages and include the bestsellers Build the Life You Want  (co-authored with Oprah Winfrey), From Strength to Strength, and Love Your Enemies. Follow Arthur on Instagram @ArthurCBrooks, YouTube @DrArthurBrooks, and X @ArthurBrooks🎙️ AD-FREE | Support the podcast and go deeper into Stoicism by subscribing to The Daily Stoic Premium - unlock ad-free listening, early access, and bonus content: https://dailystoic.supercast.com/🎥 VIDEO EPISODES | Watch the video episodes on The Daily Stoic YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos✉️ FREE STOIC WISDOM | Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemailSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of The Daily Stoic Podcast. Maybe you can hear that. I'm in my office and my kids are stomping around upstairs, making quite a bit of noise. So I will keep today's episode short because I want to get right into it. It's with one of my absolute favorite people.

to nerd out about philosophy, someone who has done a whole hell of a lot to bring practical philosophy of all different types, from all different schools to a huge audience, mostly through his column at the Atlantic and then through his best-selling books, including one he recently did with Oprah called Build the Life You Want. Arthur Brooks came out to the painted porch here in Bastrop. I think he's been on the podcast more than anyone else, or at least close to. He's close to being inducted. into what the four-timer club or the five-timer club, I don't remember exactly. But I do remember this conversation because we talked about Socrates. We talked about Plato. We talked about the

cynics. We talked about Nietzsche and what we can learn from these ancient philosophers about living a good life today. Arthur has a new book that comes out on March 31st. It's called the meaning of your life, finding purpose in an age of emptiness. And if you're feeling lost or struggling, you want to find purpose, which is what we're here to do. I think Arthur is a great resource in that regard. It's also going to be doing a free live workshop on March 27th. You can listen to him talking with Rain Wilson and Hoda Cobb, Chip Conley, Simon Sinek, Andrew Yang, Maria Schiver, Dan Butner, and Chris Williamson. And you can also grab his books here at the Painted Porch from Strength to Strength, Build the Life You Want. And his new book, The Meaning of Your Life,

finding purpose in an age of emptiness. Here is me, Arthur Brooks, digging in on ancient philosophy. What I'm noticing about your column, tell me if I'm wrong, but I feel like you are going through the philosophical schools one by one and saying, like, here's something from each one, which I think people don't do enough, right? Because people are, I'm a Buddhist, I'm a Stoic, I'm a Christian, and you're just, you kind of just stay in your lane. Right. And obviously there's something about going really deep into one school philosophy.

But what I like about the ancients is how familiar they were with all the other ancient schools. So I thought maybe we'd just kind of go through them. And my favorite lines from Seneca is he says he'll quote a bad author if the line is good. Yeah. And he quotes Epicurus more than he quotes any of the Stoics, which I always thought was really interesting. Right. That he was not just familiar with his quote-unquote opponents, but he really looks. liked their ideas and you could engage them.

Yeah, there's a lot to take from all different ways of thinking. Yes. And when it comes to philosophy, but by the way, it's the same thing with behavioral science. I can talk about the whole approach that I've taken to the study of happiness for the past seven years. Yeah. I started off by figuring out what was wrong with it. Mm-hmm.

And then I rebuilt it in a particular way that required that I have more than passing familiarity across a bunch of different disciplines and then within the different disciplines as well. Do you find that they're all saying really similar to? things though? Like at the core when they boil down that that there are some essential truths that all the schools have? No doubt. I mean, no doubt that there is something behind it. There's a basic physics behind it. Yeah. But it's funny. It's kind of like what that's what Schopenhauer calls villa, which means will in English. And what that means is that that's the ultimate truth that you can't actually see. And so you can get at it. Yeah. You can get at it. This is the

shadows on the cave wall for Plato, of course. That's what Hegel would call. Geist. You know, that's the ultimate truth behind, which means ghost. And for him, that was kind of God in its way. But you can only get it through a glass darkly, as St. Paul put it. Yeah. And so this is all this whole thing, right? You just did it. You just gave me like five people saying the same things. And we could look at Husserol or any of those guys or, you know, any of those subjectivists who would say that actually there isn't that, but the reality comes to exist at the moment and at the point of your perception. Yeah.

That's, I don't think that's right. I think there is an underlying objective reality, but you only get it by coming at it from many different perspectives because when you're sitting only in your home is through a glass too darkly. Well, I've kind of likened it to a convergent evolution where like different animals have similar adaptations.

So you go, oh, it must have descended from a common ancestor. Right. And it's like actually the common ancestor is just the need. Like it's helpful to have an opposable thumb or flying is is a great way to escape from things that are trying to eat you. And so different species, bats and birds and, you know, apes and different animals have similar things, but you can't actually trace it back to like some one animal, one person figured it out and then everyone's a branch. Obviously, what's that line about where it's all table scraps from the feast of Plato or whatever? Sometimes it's that, but a lot of times, like, we actually don't have much evidence of the Buddhists and the Western philosophers overlapping, at least when the ideas were being formed. Later, you're like, wow, it's very similar.

And that's kind of the point. That's the point. So you just gave the biological metaphor for, of the philosophical. And then there's, of course, the market metaphor. And the market metaphor is what Hayek talked about, which is the called emergent order. Emergent order says you need lots and lots of people doing lots of different things in different ways and different places for different. reasons and then what will emerge is a wisdom. Yes.

The wisdom emerges from the micro decisions of people all over the place. The truth emerges, as you see, the similarities between different philosophers coming at it from different angles. The biology will actually produce certain phenomena on the basis of congruent need. Yeah. And so it's the same basic idea. Sure. And that's why you have to be looking outside your tiny little worldview.

Yeah. They're trying to navigate ships at sea. and they're figuring out different ways of doing it, but there's only so many ways to do it, and it turns out they come up with kind of similar innovations. That's right. And that's why academics are often so radically wrong while so unbelievably smart

is because we are trained when we get our PhDs not to do that, precisely to not do that. And so you can be just like as great as you could possibly be to try to be right but going in the wrong direction. You're getting better and better and better at walking 180 degrees offshore. Sure. But you're a specialist in X.

And so that's the fullness of your domain. You're not going, well, what if there's something totally the opposite of X or in a totally different discipline or domain, you have tunnel vision. Exactly. That's why I started my career over on the basis of not doing that seven years ago. Let's start with some schools. Should we start with Socrates? Yeah, sure. Who brings the wisdom down from the heavens?

What do you think Socrates has to teach your average person about life? Where do we start? So the average person can learn from Socrates, the basic idea of humility, that your knowledge, that your enlightenment will come when you're not blocking that truth with yourself. Yeah. When you're not standing in the way with your own shadow of the truth. That's the, that's the Socratic idea that I, the only thing I know is that I don't know anything, that concept.

Yeah. And which is, of course, a contradiction in terms, but it's a beautiful concept. contradiction in terms because when you basically say, I don't know, man, then what you can do, what you're actually doing. So what Socrates would say, if you bring it forward to what a modern, semi-modern psychologist would say, William James, the father of modern psychology, is that Socrates helps us go from the me-self to the I-self. The me-self is that which I'm thinking about myself and my rightness. The I-self is that in which I'm just looking at the world and learning. Right. And that's humility. The I-self is going around asking questions, not making statements.

Plus, he's actually not reflecting on his own brilliance and rightness. Yeah. He's sort of a non-defensive understanding of the world. It's an openness to the rest of the world. It's a beautiful kind of outward focus on actually trying to learn things. One of the things I've been taking pains to point out about Socrates, though, is it's easy to see him as this intellectual figure. Like, he's your academic. He's living off the largesse of the success of Athens.

He's, you know, walking around. in his toga, life must have been simpler and easier then. But I think you point out, no, he's in the middle of a great power conflict. He serves in a war. He lives through the time of the 30 tyrants. Like, not everyone likes him. He lives in Athens as Athens is going through incredible turmoil. And like, we think of it as classical antiquity. To him, it was the most advanced time in human history. And it was scary and uncertain and not the past. Yeah. And that's because we weigh in after any one of these phenomena, we have what you have in your own life. What we all have is something a psychologist called Fading affect bias.

Fading affect bias is that which you look back on prior times, strip out the discomfort from those times and only enjoy the learning that one got. Yes. And so fading affect bias in your own life is for everybody watching us right now is that they went to college when they were 18 years old. And they were incredibly lonely and unhappy. and calling mom every single day. So come pick me up, I hate it. And then they go back for their 10-year reunion and 20-year reunion for college

and they're seeing their friends that I met in their first semester of college. Best years of my life. That's fading affect bias. Because they learned a lot and made great relationships and the discomfort of the moment wasn't there. The discomfort that was Socrates's own life is stripped away and is completely irrelevant,

even though it was the most important thing to him. He had a shitty marriage. Yeah. Like that's one of the things you hear him talk about all the time. And everyone knew it's like, Socrates did not make a great marriage choice. They did not get along. Yeah. And part of what allowed him, he saw that, even that, though, as a kind of philosophical practice.

Right. And indeed, you know, there are things that each of us deal with all the time. You know, we have children and soon enough you're going to have teenagers and let me tell you, it's super fun. Yeah. And these are difficult things that occupy most of your brain space. Yeah. The current difficulties and, you know, it's a mess. Yeah.

Your life is an actual mess. Mm-hmm. But the things that you're doing that. will be passed on are not the current mess. It's the salient truth that you'll be able to uncover from time to time. And that's what people remember about Ryan Holiday. And that's a lot of what you'll remember about these years for yourself as well. Yes. Okay, so Plato comes from Socrates. Right. What do you think Plato's main teaching for people is? There's so much. I mean, there's so much. Yeah. For me, as we were talking about a little bit earlier, this is the first time that we

start to see there's a truth. There's a transcendent truth. Yeah. But we're changing all the time. The changes are kind of a distraction from the ultimate truth, but there's an ultimate truth that underlies all of the stuff. And a lot of people, by the way, are true platonists. They're true platonists because they believe that that change is extraneous and the unchanging is actually the reality. And that's a very, very platonic ideal of what's going on. And that's the whole idea that came to, you know, all the way up to the 19th century existentialist philosophers and even absurdists who said there's an underlying truth. I mean, Hegel, Schopenhauer, et cetera,

they believed that too, and they were highly platonist in this way. And you mentioned the cave. I think the allegory of the cave is one of Plato's most interesting concepts, which is the idea that there is this truth, but most of us are looking at shadows. We're chained in a cave, he said, and we can sort of see out on the outer parts of the cave,

light being reflected and we see these shadows. We don't know what they are. So there is a reality. Yes. And all we get is the shadows and we have to do the best that we can with the shadows to figure out what's going on. Right. And then we escape from the cave.

Exactly right. But there is this truth, unchanging truth. Yes. And all the dynamics and things of it are what confuse us. And we have to sort of triangulate across the images as best we can. Yeah. And we discover what this truth is having left the cave. Right.

Our obligation. Yeah. What is Cato says. Is it Plato's cave or Cato's Plague? Yeah, exactly. So Plato says you escape from the cave, you get some sense that, oh, what I was looking at before are only shadows. Right. And as I understand it, he believes that then the role of the philosopher of the human being is you're obligated to try to come back and communicate to the other people in the cave what those shadows were. Right. Your obligation is once you actually have greater enlightenment is the share of that particular enlightenment. Yes.

Which goes forward into all sorts of schools that people aren't even aware of. Well, Buddha wrestles with this exact thing. Well, this is super important. And so, you know, I've worked at this. the Dalai Lama for the last 12 years. And the Dalai Lama says that you can't actually benefit from meditation until you stop trying to get the benefit from meditation. I say, he says, this is why I tell Westerners not to become Buddhist because they're doing it for the wrong reason. I said, well, it's the wrong reason your holiness. And he says, you want to meditate so you feel better. You need to meditate so the whole world will feel better. That's an incredibly platonic idea. Yes. Right? The whole idea for you

to find enlightenment is so that you can bring it to others. Yeah, Buddha wrestles with, should I just continue to pursue my own enlightenment, or should I teach enlightenment? Should I take on students? And there is this kind of obligation, and I think you could trace it to this idea in Plato, but in all the schools of thought that with insight and understanding and wisdom comes responsibility. Right, right. And so the whole concept is what does the monastic life mean under the circumstances? And that's a really interesting medieval Christian idea. Actually, from the time of St. Benedict and the, you know, six, seven, eighth centuries early on. But then into the middle ages of the scholastics, you know, what are you supposed to do if you're actually a monastic? And the whole idea is

teach other people like St. Thomas Aquinas, or are you supposed to actually just pray for other people? Yeah. And or are you just supposed to be a pure contemplative? Right. What is the right approach to that? And Plato would have a strong view. Well, and the Stoics and the Epicureans have this debate, too. Should we participate in public life or not. Right. And what does it mean to participate in public life? Of course, there's another wrinkle on that. Yes, of course. We'll get to them in a second. Because you are, even though presumably you're not going to run for public office. Yeah, I do think the ancients had a much more limited definition of public life because there were only so many ways to contribute. Running an enormous company that

employs thousands of people might be making a far bigger difference than being a senator and also running. And yet, you're a lot more. in public life like Plato. You personally, you're doing the public intellectual gig. It's just that you have the means that disseminate these ideas way, way, way beyond anything he could have imagined. Yes, yes.

And although the irony is I had James Rahman here and he wrote this book, Plato and the tyrant, Plato's forays into politics are a cautionary tale against thought leaders and intellectuals sometimes participating in public life because you're, well, he was an easy mark. Which is interesting. Easy marked for Dionysus, the tyrant.

He goes and he advises a king who is making pretensions about wanting to be a philosopher king, but really wants to be a tyrant with the propaganda and the reputation. Yeah, exactly. And Plato is complicit in it. In the way that, you know, a generation or two later, many generations later, Seneca and Nero fall into the same. And in other words, intellectuals are easy to roll. Yes, yes, because you don't have the experience.

and you don't even, you don't necessarily even understand what you represent to the people in power and how you can be a tool for that. Yeah. Okay, so what about the cynics? I find the cynics to be fascinating, Diogenes being the most famous of them. But I feel like they have a lot to teach us in today's very materialistic world. To begin with, we don't understand them. Yeah. Because we cast us versions of people who are cynical.

Yes. I mean, the whole idea of the skeptics and the cynics, different schools, of course, that there's some. something that's kind of suspect about the character. You know, we don't, you don't want to be a cynical person because you're, you're just negative all the time. And that's exactly getting it wrong. Yes. How do you characterize the school of cynicism? I say they're like the punk rockers of the philosopher. They are transgressive and radical. And they are by taking it too far, actually providing us insights about sort of a moderate middle ground. Like if everyone lived as Diogenes lived, the world would be a horrible place. But if everyone lived,

lived according to ambition and trying to, you know, make as much money and get as much power and valued all the wrong things. You also get a really bad society. And he's the, not the court gesture, because that's almost too dismissive. But in sort of, he's like the hippie sort of like, none of this matters, man, you know, like, and in so doing, it's a certain thing that. Not even that matters. He's saying, this is stupid. Yes. So it's worse than whatever's. Yeah. You know, he's making fun of your suit and your tie and your fancy car. Right. And I mean, the famous story about Diogenes that I love is, you know, he has very few possessions, but he walks up to the well and he gets a cup of water. And a young boy runs up and gets water with his hands.

And Diogenes realizes that even here, having reduced what he thought his needs were to nothing, actually has one more that he can get rid of and he smashes his cup on the ground. Put a piece of word. You imagine me married that guy? Yes. I don't think he want to. Although, you know, so Zeno, the founder of socialism, his philosophy teacher was named Cretes. I'm forgetting Creti's wife's name, but she was a famous cynic philosopher, too. So we tend to think of it as this primarily male world, but there were fascinating cynical philosophers in marriages, which, you know, if they were totally abstaining and rejecting all convention, they would have rejected even that. Yeah, yeah. And then the skeptics who just knew nothing. I just, I know nothing. Yeah. Who just, they banked on knowing nothing. So no matter what, they say, I don't know. And sometimes the extreme cases tell us something. Like, it's not exactly a defensible position or a scalable position.

But in the extremeness of it gives us color and another angle to understand ourselves. Right. And there's a humility to it. Yes. There's a real humility to it. So there's a kind of a pose with the cynics. And there's an anti-pose with the skeptics. And so they're quite different in this particular way. The cynics are interesting because what they do is they can make you realize that life is hilarious. Yeah.

By the way, you go fast forward in history and you find that a lot in Nietzsche. Yep. So the whole competitive set of ideas between what the Greeks were doing, which is that essence precedes existence. And then what the existentialists we're doing in the 19th and 20th centuries, which is that existence precedes essence. In other words, meaning either comes before you're born or you're born and then you find your meaning. That's the big conflict between ancient philosophy and Christian philosophy, all the things that you and I are stocking trade. And what the modern existentialist do. And Nietzsche's like, no, no, no, no, no.

There is no essence. There is no meaning. It's like, so how am I supposed to live? Just have a good laugh, man. Yeah. Just have a good laugh. Well, the humor of the philosophers is not something I think your average person is clued in on. Yeah.

Right? Like, because philosophy seems dry. Yeah. Philosophy seems academic. Philosophy seems confusing. And then you read- It's all of the above in many cases. But you read Diogenes, the cynic, and you're like, oh, this dude's fucking hilarious.

Yeah, yeah. He's a badass. Like, he goes up to Alexander, or Alexander the Great comes up to him as he's sunbathing. And Alexander the Great says, I'm the most powerful. in the world, what can I do for you? And Diogenes looks at him, having reduced his needs to nothing, and says, you can stop blocking the sun. Get out of my way. And, you know, that's like, that's not just funny, but it's, it's badass. Yeah. And Nietzsche's hilarious too, by the way. And probably the best writer of all of the, all the 19th century absurdists and existentialists.

Yeah. He's a beautiful writer, incredible writer. It's really, really worth reading Nietzsche, even in English. Well, what's the first. forward. What do you think Nietzsche has to teach people? Where would you go? To truly question your understanding of essence and existence. Okay. And it's really, really worth understanding it because we come with the biggest problem philosophically, and by the way, scientifically, and in terms of almost everything that we do, is an inability or unwillingness or just an ignorance about our own assumptions going in. That's a huge problem because it's garbage in, garbage out effectively. But that doesn't mean that your assumptions are garbage, but if you don't question them, you actually, it's very, very hard to grow because you're

constrained to the philosophical outline that you've been given based on your assumptions. And a lot of what Nietzsche is talking about is questioning this fundamental algorithm of life, which is, did your life have meaning before you were born or were you born and have to go find your life's meaning? And he breaks it all apart, like, you know, smashing his cup. And he has a lot more to question. Like, Socrates has, you know, a couple of things. hundred years of philosophy to question. Nietzsche has 2,500 years and 2,500 years of, you know, Christian teachings, too. So he's inherited a stabbler world.

Sort of, although I strongly suspect that Socrates was relying on a lot that simply wasn't written down. Yeah, the pre-Socratic philosophers. And who were very sophisticated, but we don't know. Yeah. And what Nietzsche had was a lot of stuff that had been written down. Yes. And so the Socratic tradition was writing stuff down that had been,

preserved in the oral tradition. Yeah. And who knows what's a bigger library. That's true. That is the interesting thing about, you know, the ancient world is we tend to compress it down into this period. We go, Socrates, Aristotle, Plato, they're all kind of around the same time. Diogenes is in there.

And you're like, Zeno to Marcus Aurelius is like 600 years, you know, or... It's like 300 BC to 300 AD or something like that. Yeah, it's a huge swath of... time. Like, they would have been, like, Marcus, the Roman philosophers would have come to Greece as tourists and said, look at these ancient ruins. I know, I know. You know, and, and, and- It's like going to look into the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah, but much older in many cases, right? Like, it would have gone through, it would have been built and rebuilt and then destroyed by an earthquake and then ravaged by the Persians and then rebuilt.

They would have just seen generation after generation and generation. They would have experienced it differently, they would have been still polished and shiny in some cases, but like they would have, they would have come and gone the smartest people who ever lived centuries ago, walked where I'm walking. And it's like we're all tourists going back to this period. Right. It is kind of a beautiful. It is. And the thing, however, that's worth, I think it's always worth remembering is that no doubt in the time of Socrates, he was looking back to philosophies that have been, that he could chart back to the ancient Egyptians. Yes.

And so Socrates was as far ago from us as the Egyptians were to him. And that's a long time ago. And if we move over to India, for example, I mean, that's a, the Hinduism is a 6,000-year-old religion. Lord Krishna lived in Mathura in the, you know, the Hindi heartland six thousand years ago. And there's a little bit written, but the whole point is that the idea has reached us. And for us to say, knowledge is limited to what's been written down in books is like, for our kids to say knowledge is limited to what's on the internet. Yeah.

It's the same basic idea. And that's actually obviously not true for all sorts of reasons. We all experience injuries, pain. There's physical obstacles, things we can't do that hold us back. That is a part of life. But what we have, ultimately, is a choice about how we respond to those setbacks. And Built from Broken is an award-winning book from a corrective exercise specialist named Scott Hogan that helps you heal painful joints and rebuild your body stronger.

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Yeah, that this is a thing that goes way back. And sometimes we'll read, yeah, we read something from. Socrates, or you read something in meditations and you go, that's a beautiful idea. And you don't realize that that is them riffing on things. Like what I love is when you, when you, there's this play by Joseph Addison called Cato that was popular in the 18th century. And once you read it, you go, oh, like 80% of what the founders were saying was just them quoting this play. Like we might say immigrants to get the job done or, or like, you quote the godfather or something. Like it was a cultural Touchstone in the time. We lose the illusions that they're riffing on. And in some case, if you really go in, you go, oh, actually, okay, the footnote is telling me this comes from a play from a line from a play by Euripides or whatever. But if most of it was oral, we wouldn't know that actually Socrates is a recycler.

Yeah, yeah, of course he's a recycler. That's the point. And that's exactly the sort of the whole point of what we're discussing here. You're not going to be doing good works unless you're mostly recycling. So the body of knowledge when it's actually useful is like sourdough bread, right? Sure. And that means it has this old thing in it. Yeah, starter. The starter is the most important thing in sourdough. That's the most important thing. And it can be really old. Or, you know, the yeast and bread can go back. Literally the ancient Egyptians is what it comes down to. And if you don't have it, you don't have it. You don't have. red. And, and, you know, the truth is that, it may it's probably, you know, you know, as you and I, we do a lot of talks on the outside is kind of what we do for a living. And, you know, 20% of a, has got to be some old stuff that you've been working on and the jokes that you know that work and the big ideas. And that's the spine of your talk of your new talk. Yes. If it's 100% new, it sucks. Yeah, because you're, you're doing it by trial and air with a new audience. Yeah. And this is a profoundly conservative worldview, by the way. But I think it has the virtue of being largely correct is that when somebody comes out of the, out of left field with a completely

new way of seeing human nature, it's always wrong. And it's actually destructive and dangerous. Well, hasn't been tested in actual human experience yet. And it hasn't been through boom times and depressions, wars. And like, yeah, if you came up with some totally new philosophy, it might sound really great. It might work great in a TikTok. But does it have a thousand years of human That's the problem with utopianism. That's the problem with utopianisms all throughout history is that they've always been a failure and led to, you know, large-scale destruction, death, and suffering precisely because they're not sourdough. Yeah, you've got to take something, old wine and new skins, as they say.

Yeah, I mean, the problem with that is that, that, of course, is from the Gospels, and it says that old wine and new skins breaks the new skins. Well, we skipped Aristotle. Give me something from Aristotle. So, of course, Aristotle was almost forgotten. until the Middle Ages and considered, you know, and also ran to Plato, because it was a Neoplatonist in the Middle Ages. So by the time you get to the 12th and 13th centuries, you know, I have Averroes and you have Momonides and, of course, Thomas Aquinas from the three great Southern European Abrahamic traditions.

And they were all Platonists. They were all Platonists. But especially Aquinas, he rediscovered Aristotle and brought Aristotle to what at the time was a modern audience. And he said, this is the guy. This is the guy. I mean, Plato's okay. But Aristotle, he's the guy. Why? Because he was full spectrum scientist. But there was also this one weird thing that he did that Plato didn't do. He said that change isn't a distraction from reality. It is reality. That's a big deal. That's the whole idea that dynamism is the essence of reality itself. And so you know, you as a person are different than who you were and who you're going to be. And that change, that first derivative of Ryanness is the essence of Ryanness. And that's a pretty big deal.

when you think about it, because that's just the dynamic understanding of oneself. And to be celebrating the change, and that has a lot to do with how we understand modern behavioral science. We, I mean, the underlying, unchanging essence of ourselves is not very interesting to us. What we want to make is progress. Yeah. We're just like, progress, progress. That's the essence of what a good life is really all about. When it's point that virtue is something not that you have as an essence, but is something you are doing and getting better at doing.

That has been super, super influential in my own work, which is this one-third philosophy, one-third neuroscience, one-third behavioral science is kind of the three-pie, the three parts of the pie, as I'm putting it in there, that I started off doing this work years ago saying, I want to find the secret to happiness. And it's wrong because you can't be happy. What you can be is happier, which is an aristotelian notion as opposed to a platonic notion. You can get happier. And the goal, is putting yourself your life on a jagged, messy path toward happierness. And his definition of happiness, Eudamania, maybe give us that definition. Because it's not, I think when people think happy, they think grinning from ear to ear,

living your best life, and it's not quite that. Well, it's not that at all, actually. So the biggest mistake that the moderns make is thinking happiness is an emotion. Happiness is a feeling. It's not. It's not even one of the basic emotions according to behaviorists who, do work on emotions, the basic emotions researchers. Happiness has feelings associated with it like Thanksgiving dinner has a smell.

So feelings are evidence of happiness, which is really, really important thing to keep in mind, because if you're actually looking for the feeling per se that you're searching for a vapor, you're going to be about as nourished as if you're trying to get the ultimate smell experience on Thanksgiving Day. Yeah. Happiness is enjoyment and satisfaction and meaning. that's what happiness is all about. And that experience of going from pleasure to enjoyment, which is what it means to grow up

and be a responsible person, but also to be a happier person to derive satisfaction, which is joy that comes from accomplishment after struggle and meaning, finding the meaning of your life, the wide of your existence, there's tons of suffering in that.

Yes. Tons of suffering in all three of those bins, which is, you know, and that's very Aristotelian. Eudymonia means a good life well-lived. There's actually a, there's not an adequate translation. I mean, everybody,

we all struggle with, actually, what does eudaimene mean? It's the good life, and the good life has lots of suffering in it. And so, therefore, the modern elimination is strategy, which is to say that if you're feeling sad and anxious, you're broken and you need therapy.

Yeah. That is profoundly anti-arest atest atelian, but it's also an exercise and futility because you can't get enjoyment, satisfaction and meaning unless you're, like, suffering. Yeah. Bring it on. Yeah.

Which is stoic, by the way. Of course. Of course, yeah, he's saying that you have to be doing the things that humans were meant to do. Right. And specifically what were you meant to do? So it's a lot of like when people talk, I've got to find my purpose. Right. That's what Aristotle is saying when you get there, you're a lot closer to happiness than anything else.

Which is why, you know, Aristotle was a great theorist and the stoics are very practical. I mean, they're working out eudaimonia. That's the stoic philosophy is like, how do we do this thing? How do we get this eudaimonia? And, you know, a lot of it is like, get the hell out of bed. Yeah. You know? Yeah.

Which is this and is extremely Aristotelian in its way. Yeah, I think that, like, this is more stoic than aristotin, but it's like, what are the things that I'm glad I did after that I hated while I was doing? Like, going for a run, you feel great after. Right. It's not that fun while you're doing. Jumping in a cold plunge. You're not, you don't love the period of jumping in. You don't love as you come up for it, but you love 20 minutes after.

Yeah. Let me ask you a question. Do you love writing books or having written books? Well, that's the joke that painters like painting and writers like having written. Yeah. I try to make a distinction between writing and publishing. Writing is in my control. Publishing is not.

Yeah. So, like, sure, am I glad to be done with a book? And is there something about that? Because books involve suffering and as all projects do. So I get that. I do make a distinction, though. Like, I actually try to work on enjoying doing the thing. because it's the only part of it that's up to me.

Yeah, and that's a really important thing to keep in mind because there is a lot of suffering. But in the dynamics of the whole thing, if there's nothing good for you in the journey, then you'll fall prey, sure as we're sitting here to the arrival fallacy, a very well-known phenomenon that says when I get to the end, then I will feel pure bliss. Yes. Which is axiomatically wrong. If the whole thing is suffering, then you need external results to make it worth the suffering. Right.

You have to figure out how actually you enjoy practice. Right. Like you enjoy the doing of the thing. And then the question becomes, which is a very stoic and both Aristotelian, kind of a stoic. Yeah. You know? Yeah. He set the ships in motion, I guess.

Yes. Is how much did you enjoy the suffering? Yeah. See, this is the thing. People are like, they try to dichotomize. And they say the process should have enjoyment, but it also has a lot of suffering. And if you only suffer, so you can get to the enjoyment. join me at the end, the arrival fallacy will hunt you down and kill you like a dog,

which means you'll be more, you'll win the Olympic gold and be depressed for six months because you're like, you feel like your life is over. The real trick here, the real stoic trick, is enjoying the suffering. Yes. Do you enjoy the suffering? I do. I do. I've had to work out. I don't think you're just naturally there because there's this part of you that wants to avert and avoid suffering wherever possible. But then I try to go, oh, you know, this is actually like a dream. Like, I get to do this. Like, this is my job. I'm very lucky, and I try to enjoy it and then try not to rush through it also. And this is probably the most profound Aristotelian point of all, which is because he was a good biologist as well as a philosopher.

And he asserted in many, many places in the writings that human beings have kind of two spaces that they can live in. There's animal impulse and there's moral aspiration. Animal impulse and moral aspiration. And now we know why, the reason that we actually have a choice of living in one of these two spaces, is because we have a prefrontal cortex that's astonishing in its complexity beyond any supercomputer that exists or will exist. I mean, it's one-third of our brain by weight,

and your dog's prefrontal cortex is wafertil thin, which is why it has only animal impulse. Yeah. But if you follow what Mother Nature is telling you, what your urges are, all you'll do is the things that will immediately slightly raise your odds of survival and passing on your genes.

Yeah. Aristotle points out, as do all the good philosophers, and religious traditions that you can actually choose to stand up to Mother Nature, to stand up to your animal impulses, and live in your moral aspirations. And when you're making that choice,

the suffering is sweet. Yes. That's the point. This is, I mean, this is a key point of Aristotle and everybody else, by the way. Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes,

that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it, and I'll see you next episode.