The Daily Stoic - Arthur Brooks’ Ultimate Philosophy Masterclass (PT. 2)

Episode Date: March 28, 2026

What did Epicurus, Buddha, and Viktor Frankl understand about meaning that most people never question? In Part 2 of this masterclass, bestselling author and Harvard professor Arthur Brooks joins Ryan to break down Epicureanism, Buddhism, Christianity, and other schools of thought, revealing what each one gets right (and wrong) about happiness, meaning, and how to actually live.Arthur Brooks is a bestselling author, Harvard professor, and one of the world’s leading voices on happiness, meaning, and human flourishing. Through his books, columns, and teaching, Brooks helps people build more meaningful, satisfying lives grounded in both philosophy and modern research.👉 Preorder Arthur Brooks’ NEW book The Meaning of Your Life 📚 Grab copies of Arthur Brooks’ books Strength to Strength and Build the Life You Want 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. The basic premise of Stoic philosophy to me is life is going to kick you around. It's going to kick your ass. It's going to go sideways. And you've got to be able to handle that. You've got to be able to not be broken by that. And then, this is the most important part, you've got to be able to turn it in. to something. You've got to find meaning and purpose in it. You've got to be able to rise to that challenge and then use that challenge to become better than you would have had it never happened. It's actually something I talked to David Kessler about a few years ago. He's an expert on grief. He worked with Dr. Kubler-Ross on the stages of grieving. And he adds a new step, a six step, which is about how do you find meaning from grief and loss. Let me play a little chunk of what he and I talked about. There's some disconnection that I've heard.

heard over the years from people in grief. And as I started to talk about it, it became so apparent. Everyone was like, well, David, there's no meaning in a child's death. There's no meaning in a murder. There's no meaning in a betrayal and a car wreck and a divorce and a pandemic. And I realized, oh, the meaning isn't in the horrible thing. Yeah. The meaning is in us.

It's what we do afterwards. And that is precisely what Arthur Brooks. talked about in today's episode as well, how you transform suffering into meaning. We did kind of a masterclass on all the different philosophical schools, the Stoics, the Buddhists, Catholicism, versus Stoicism, Arthur's own inner conflicts, and more. I think you're really going to like this episode. If you don't know who Arthur Brooks is, well, you should. He is a social scientist, one of the world's leading authorities on human happiness. He's a professor at Harvard, columnist with the free press, formerly the Atlantic, host of the podcast Office Hours.

a contributor to CBS. And a wonderful speaker, he did a book with Oprah called Build the Life You Want, did the bestselling book from Strength to Strength, and a book called Love Your Enemies. All of those are available at the painted porch. But let's just get into it with Arthur Brooks. Here is part two of our master class on philosophy. All right, so give me, I think we can skip the Stoics. Does it get enough of that here? They can't get enough here. They can't get enough. Tell me about Epicurus. Epicurus, well, of course, who is way, before Epictetus. Yes.

I mean, it's what, 250 years before? Greek Roman. Yeah. So Epicurus predates a lot of this stuff. And Epicurus, who is completely misunderstood today, because it's the whole idea of eugdymonia versus hedonia. Yeah. Right?

And hedonia, which is hedonist and hedonic and all these words come from it, as if it's the pursuit of unbridled pleasure. That's actually not right in a bunch of different ways. Pleasure is a limbic phenomenon that occurs in, you know, the limbic system, an ancient console of tissue that's up to 40 million years. old, predates homo sapiens. That's what produces your emotions, negative and positive, which you need to survive and thrive, to be sure. If you hit the lever of pleasure over and over and over again, you're tapping the limbic system, and you're being managed by those pleasures. That's the reason that, you know, your friends from high school that wanted to feel good all the time are still living in their mom's basements, because they couldn't make anything in their lives because they were being managed by their limbic systems. Delayed gratification is that other part. Yeah, well, it's among other things. I mean, the whole idea of that we're talking about here is, is, is, is the other part.

Yeah. So that's how we think of, of hedonism. That's not Epicurus. Epicurus talked about enjoyment, not pleasure. Right. Pleasure and enjoyment are related,

but pleasure is a component part of enjoyment. Enjoyment is pleasure plus people plus memory. And it moves the experience into the prefrontal to cortex, executive centers of the brain, where you can manage your pleasures. Yeah. And you can make permanent memories. And so doing,

that's why it's a component part of happiness, enjoyment. And so if you're doing something that's addictive and you're doing it alone, you're probably doing it wrong. Yeah. That's the whole idea. And that's really important to Epicurus because Epicurus is all about enjoyment, which means you're surrounding himself with people. And they were talking about pleasant, non-conflictive, big ideas and living in extremely deep moral existence. This was not like a constant drunken orgy that was going on. And I do think the best Stoics had a strong epistem.

Epicurean streak. Right. And we, the first person who, I mean, Epictetus trashed Epicurus, right? And just it was a complete, what had only do with what? It was just using him as a foil. When I think Epictetus having such a life filled with profound suffering, like first 30 years of his life, he's a slave. Yeah. I think there's probably something about him just at a human level that's like, fuck that guy. They got rich guy. That rich guy in his commune with his weird cult. Yeah, he doesn't know anything about, you know, he didn't, he didn't have to, nobody broke him. He, he didn't, he, nobody broke his leg for sadistic pleasure. You know, Epicurus never had to see Nero's court.

Right. You know, like there's, he probably looked at Epicurus the way some of us look at an academic philosopher or a guru or something. You don't live in the real world. Or Mara Lago. Yes. Right. I mean, there's something where I like, really?

Yes. You know, and so for sure. But that's not what Epicurus was all about. Epicurus, it was a very, I mean, it's libertines, you know, the Berkeley generation of 68, they couldn't have lived with Epicurus. No. They wouldn't be able to put up the rules. Right.

Because Epicurus' whole idea is if you're actually going to live in a state of semi-permanent enjoyment, you better not reduce it to pleasure. Yeah. You better not reduce it to pleasure. And that's a really important distinction. And so what we can learn from him today is about this pillar of happiness. Is Epicurean enjoyment as opposed to Epicurean pleasure is one of the best ways that you can become happier.

It's incomplete. Yeah. Indeed, it's incomplete. That's why the stoics are better on the meaning pillar of happiness. The moderns are better on the satisfaction part. And the Epicureans are really, really good on the enjoyment part. No, and that's why I say you fuse them together and you get something really powerful. Because there's actually something pretty Spartan about Epicurus, right?

He's like, you know, there's a joke about the Spartans that hunger is the best flavor. You know, like, and there's something about for him, he reduces his needs down pretty low. And then he's like, this is great. Everything's awesome. I don't have to reach for anything. I don't have to go without anything. It's all very accessible and practical and realistic. He's not saying pleasure is, you know, flying in a new Gulf Stream to have lunch in Paris.

He's saying, you know, this small pot of cheese is miraculous if you think about how it was made and if you savor every bite of it. That's right. And the whole idea is, I mean, on the satisfaction pillar, your animal impulse tells you that it's about what you have and having more, which is the Gulf Stream, et cetera, which leads to ruin, absolute personal. I'm talking to anything else, just personal ruin because you can never have enough. It's actually better described as what you have divided by what you want. And the denominator is more important because a very efficient way to get greater satisfaction

in your life is by decreasing the denominator by wanting less. And so this epicurean notion of wanting less, wanting less, wanting less and watching your satisfaction rise and rise and rise or enjoyment in the. this particular case. But of course, asymptotically, it doesn't work. Right. You can't go to wanting nothing. Yeah. Because if you want nothing, well, I mean, wanting for nothing, I suppose, that's heaven, I guess. Right. Which is not what he was trying to create. I just think, like, I think about his garden and the simplicity and the beauty and the long evenings in it. It's a pretty simple thing. What it is is really in modern thinking and in Buddhist thinking, but really in

modern thinking, it's really a lot of a mindfulness. Yeah. And that mindfulness is a a very hard thing to do because the human brain, the prefrontal cortex is designed for you to time travel. Yeah. Retrospectively, prospectively, and mindfully. Those are the three time zones that are actually in your head all the time. Most people spend the least amount of their time here now. Yeah. That they don't spend their time mindfully. So Marty Seligman, you know, my great mentor in the positive psychology business of happiness, he says that we shouldn't be called, we shouldn't be called homo sapiens. we should be called homo prospectus because we live in the future. 20 to 50% of your cycles on average are living in the future. If you're an entrepreneur or a striver, like the whole audience for the show,

it's more like 80% of your time. And you're missing your life. The whole, as Epicurus's point is, don't miss your life. He's saying actually this is better than the vacation that you are pining for this present moment. Don't build castles in the sky. Don't do that. And don't be wishing that you could. go backwards in time. Don't be enjoying your memories and don't be enjoying your fantasies.

Enjoy this now. Yeah. And that's super hard to do. As a matter of fact, is all kinds of evidence that our brain isn't even designed to do that very well. You know, when you put people in fMRI machines and you say, think about nothing, then you turn on the default mode network and set us to structures in your brain, you'll start thinking about the future. Yeah. Automatically. Well, there's a famous letter that Epicurus writes where it goes, like, on this, the happiest day of my life, the day of my death and that's what the letter opens. Like he's trying to he's he's saying and again for people who think that Epicureanism is hedonism, he's trying to say you can be happy on the day that you die. Right. So it's definitely not related to what you have. And it's not because he has some delicious

last meal or something. He's just saying this is the day that I have now. So it's the happiest day of my life. I'm alive right now. And being alive right now is awesome. Yeah. That's the whole thing. And good. We should all try to do that more. I'm not very good at that. Are you? No. All right. So you mentioned the Buddhist. Maybe let's... We're going back in time a little bit. Let's go back and in East a little bit. Because Buddha was a contemporary of Socrates. Yes. So that was about 500 BC. And this is, of course, a notion that this, this came out of the Vedic and Hindu traditions. And so Gautama, Prince Gautama, Sidortha, Buddhist print, Hindu prince, completely sheltered from ordinary life, very, very rich. I wonder what's outside the walls of my castle. It goes out. and he sees all the suffering for the very first time in his life

and questions everything that he's ever been taught. This is approximately 500 BC, decides to figure it out on his own, becomes a complete acetic, right? Just like the mendicant acetics, everything. It doesn't eat anything, starving, miserable, the whole thing. And he realizes that that in itself is a form of attachment. Yeah. That aceticism is a form of attachment.

And under the Bodhi tree where he's setting, which is still, you know, famous, famous, famous metaphor for all kinds of enlightenment that we would get. He figures out the eightfold path of Buddhism, but fundamentally that philosophy is based on these four noble truths. The first is that life is, this is Dukha in Sanskrit. Life is suffering. That's actually not a good translation. It should be it, and you'll appreciate this as a stoic, life is dissatisfaction. That's what it really should be, because it is. It's not satisfying. It's not the way you want it to be. And there's a reason for that. We're aspirational creatures, which is why we're so unhappy and we're so successful.

because we're in the hunt. Okay, so this is animal impulse versus moral aspiration. Okay, the second noble truth is that the source of our dissatisfaction is attachment, attachment to worldly things. The third noble truth is that the secret to actually breaking free from this dissatisfaction is detachment from these things. And the fourth, and you're like, okay, okay, okay, okay. And then the fourth noble truth is the eightfold path of Buddhism,

which is the rest of your life and a whole bunch of other lives. Yeah. I was like, ah, is what it comes down to, which is why Buddhism is hard. It's a really, really hard thing. But this sets in motion, this whole idea that, and it's a fundamentally non-theistic religion, whereas Hinduism that it sprang from is profoundly theistic. And at its core, and what people really understand about Hinduism, it's not a thing. It's a family of related religions in the Indian subcontinent, largely in the Indian subcontinent

with a few other outposts like Bali, that where they're related, but they're very non-trivial differences between the variance of it. Fundamentally, at its most esoteric forms, it's profoundly monotheistic. And it's very much like Christianity insofar as you have Brahman, which is the godhead,

has Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva, which are the three manifestations, three in one, kind of a Trinity, and then a whole bunch of other avatars and manifestations of God. The Buddhists are ruling, different than that. Really, really come out of a very different tradition than that. And that's why Christianity is much closer to Hinduism than it is to Buddhism. We think of the karmic religions is kind

of all the same. Yeah. Big differences, as it turns out. And Buddhism took over almost the whole subcontinent for hundreds of years. Right. And then there's a Reconquista where Hinduism came back. And the reason that this India subcontinent is largely Hindu today is because of the claim, the argument based on sort of evangelists that were going through the countryside saying, don't you want God? Yeah. You want God, don't you? Don't you want to have a relationship with God who loves you, God who created you?

And people like, yeah, I want that. Again, that conversion evolution, that there is some part of the human condition that wants that. Yeah. And anthropologists have studied this whole, and again, for those who are Hindus who were like, you know, throwing stuff at the, throwing stuff at the laptop right now. Sorry, I mean, this is a. This is a religious studies interpretation. Yeah, well, this is a Catholic who spent the last 12 years talking. and studying with Dalai Lama, okay?

So which is appropriate humility, you know, on this. But this is a really interesting thing because, you know, today we lump the karmic religions together and the Abrahamic religions together. But in this case, Buddhism is super different than the Abrahamic religions and especially different than Christianity, the goal of which is to live forever. Yeah. The Buddhist, you know, goal in its essence is to break out of the cycle of birth and rebirth, which because life is suffering and stay dead, man.

Yeah, to embrace the impermanence of it. Yeah. So the Bakavad Gita is a Hindu. It's one of the Hindu holy books. And that's the epic adventure of Lord Krishna, who's an avatar of Vishnu, the God Vishnu. What do you think that teaches us? So a lot because it's just huge.

It's like the Odyssey. It's like the Odyssey, basically. And what it is is that it's supposed to teach you about life itself. It's the experiences of this guy who's an avatar who has got, heavenly side. It's sort of kind of a, what is it, the homeostatic union of metaphysical and physical in this guy and this Lord Krishna. And fundamentally, it's about him living this earthly existence, but a heavenly, with a heavenly will. And the way I read, and again, with appropriate humility,

is that this is an opportunity for everybody to understand that there are spiritual beings living a living a physical existence that you are too. Yeah. You would say in Christianity there's a Christ's likeness to Ryan. And that once you understand the metaphysical essence of who you are, not to be Gnostic, not to say that the body falls away because it's unimportant. On the contrary, it's the fusing of these two things. That's the essence of life itself and that you can have a profoundly metaphysical, spiritual transcendent existence in your ordinary life of like going into battle and marrying a girl and having your kids and paying your bills and all that. Each one is, each one of us is kind of a microcosm of this larger spiritual. Yeah. And so people see themselves in Lord Krishna.

Yeah. That's, they kind of see themselves in Ulysses. Yeah. They see themselves. That's the whole point of a lot of these great epic. It's the hero, it's the hero's journey, but from India. Yeah. It really is. It really is. And that's because there's nothing new under the sun. Sure. But oh, back to the point that you were making a minute ago, though, that anthropologists have found there are no civilizations ever found that that are not religious. And what that suggests is that the humans are built to worship. Humans are built to. It doesn't mean every single person is religious because there's a ton of different experiences and different, I mean, just physical differences between people, to be sure.

And the psychology being the biology, you might not have a very, you know, strong religious tendency. You might or might not. Yeah. And different people do. But the whole point is, in the main, humans are made to worship. That's a very, very strong hypothesis. Today's sponsor is Chime, the fee-free banking app changing the way people bank. Chime isn't just another banking app.

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and 365-day returns. Q-U-I-N-C-E dot com slash stoic. It's interesting how easy it is to do the kind of religious studies interpretation of all the religions but your own. You know, you can be like, this is what they taught. This is where they lived. This is how it evolved. This is what it meant. This is the technology in it. This is why it worked. But it was fascinating to me in Athens this summer, you're standing at the painted porch of Stoophilia, where Stoicism comes, and you go, wait, wait. So St. Paul came here, met with the Stoics, and then they walked up together next to the Acropolis, and he gave one of the most famous speeches in all of Christianity. And when you just read the Christian version, you're like, this is the Christian. You're not thinking that all these

faiths and ideas are are intermixing with each other and walking the earth like Jesus and Seneca are alive in the same time in the Roman Empire right for sure they're both teaching philosophical teachings one we come to call a religion and the other stays philosophy but what do you think philosophically the the broad strokes Christian tradition can teach us and that's harder for me because I'm in the middle of that's what I mean said that's like I go to mass literally every day and so yeah So that's, so for me, you're Stoic. I'm a Catholic. Yeah.

I also grew up Catholics. Yeah, yeah. So you've got some of that wiring. I think that's why Stoicism lands with them, because they have the same cardinal virtue. Well, yeah, for sure. But also, it's worth pointing out that one of the reasons, Catholicism, Christianity, is unbelievably imperialistic.

Yes. It just, give me, that's good. I'll take it. Yeah. You know, I like it. I like it. Oh, you mean imperialistic and that they just take from anything and then absorb it and they go reinvented that.

It's sort of the America of religions. Yes. They like the Columbus thing. It's a melting pot, which is not to say that it's not true. In the contrary, I really, really believe it as a person. But I recognize that the best way for you to understand it, even from the inside, is by understanding the influences from the outside. Yes.

That's a really important thing to do. And even in the ancient world, by the way, there was a lot of Eastern philosophy that was warming its way into it because there were a lot of people coming from all over the place. I mean, you look at what in the acts of the apostles, what was going on in early Christianity, and they talk about people meeting from all over the world. Sure. And so the idea that somehow, because of the Internet, we're able to see what's going on.

No, no, no, no, then too. Yeah, we think of the Romans as being like blonde with blue eyes or something, you know. And it's like, Denmark or something, right? Yeah, it's like, no, no, no, there's profoundly influenced by Carthage and Turkey and, you know, like, I mean, the Romans land, Roman explorers land in China during Marcus Reelius's reign. Right. And so you're like, they're all intermingling. Right.

But anyways, what's the main Christian philosophical truth that we... So the Christian philosophical, well, truth, the advance as far as I see it. And again, this is where my humility has to hit its apogee because, you know, I'll be learning this for the rest of my life. And my wife's a the theologian, by the way. So, I mean, I'm getting it, you know, mainlining it at home all the time. So Christianity is purely about the space of moral aspiration, right? It doesn't deny that there is animal impulse. It doesn't say that animal impulse is evil,

but it's all about getting as far into being the person that you're meant to be, which is in the image of God, as you possibly can. And it's a worked out version of the entire method of actually how to do that. And so often, you know, people ask, at its essence, what is it?

Your animal impulse for you to live the best possible life is sort of three principles. Yeah. And the three principles are, love things, use people and worship yourself. That's animal impulse. And the reason is because stuff out there is just like, I want, I want a bigger cave, I want more animal skins, I want more buffalo jerky, I want to use people in the ancient

environment. We lived in bands of 30 to 50 individuals. We owned slaves and conquered. But even before that, I mean, in our environment. And so even in the time of, you know, the ancient philosophers, they were still, that was a from the brain that had, the human brain that had been evolved 250,000 years ago, which hasn't changed very much. And we've had more or less the same intelligence for the past since the beginning of

the Pleistocene about a quarter million years ago. And so we're designed to be a kin-based hierarchical species, and we want to rise in that. And that means that other people are there for our pleasure and advancement. Yes. That's how we see other individuals. And now, of course, we bond to them as kin, and we have, you know, all this biochemistry that makes us, you know, you see your kids in oxytocin goes bruch, right, et cetera. But fundamentally, your people are there for your pleasure and use.

Yeah. And then you're the center of everything because, you know, the prefrontal cortex has got you in the psychodrama, which in the psychodrama is, you know, it's Ryan's lunch and Ryan's money and Ryan's podcast and Ryan's bookstore. And Ryan, Ryan, Ryan, it's so boring. Yeah. And so the result is the animal, the world of animal impulse. It makes you animal successful and utterly miserable. And God, according to the Catholic Church, according to the Catholic Church,

according to Christian religion, can set you free to your moral, to your moral aspirations. And that has a different formula. It's like, this is kind of the transition from Old Testament to New Testament, right? Like, like, right? It's like clans and families and people doing fucked up stuff to each other. Then Jesus and everything after Jesus is about this moral aspiration. Yes. The new covenant, which is that, you know, today I give you a new teaching.

Yeah. Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. Matthew 544, the sermon of the Mount sums it up, right? And, well, I mean, the summary is the Shema, which is Deuteronomy 5. You will love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your means in the original translation. That means everything you got. Yeah. You're going to love the God, you're the Lord.

And then Jesus says, and you'll love your neighbor as yourself. Well, that's what I was going to say, Hillel's summary. He's asked to, you know, to define Christianity while standing on one leg. And he says, love thy neighbor as thyself, all the rest is commentary. Yeah. You feel like that's a fair summary? Yeah, except the Shema is incredibly. important, which is to love God.

I mean, okay, love by God. No, no, no, love God. And that's huge because everything in that is about faith. Right. Somebody you can't see with whom you have apparently one side of conversations, a lot of cumbersome rules. Love, no, no, no. Love him.

And that's really important. Why? Because Aquinas, in 1265, defined love is to will the good of the other as other not withstanding your feelings, which is super important. Very stoic. Very stoic. To love is to will the good of other people. whether you feel it or not because it's not a feeling.

It's an action. Yeah, it's an action. It's an action. It's a decision. It's a commitment. Right. It's a, and that's huge and that's really, really central to Christianity. And that really gets to the, the Christian formulation of a good life, which is the formula, which is different. Remember, it's like love things, use people, worship yourself. Yeah. It's kind of change the verbs and nouns around. Use things. Right. Yeah, man. Abundance. Beautiful. Dominion over the. Yeah, for sure. But it's just. It's great. Yeah. It's great.

Love people. Love people because that's what we're made to do, that's what we're just talking about. Sure. And worship the Lord. Right. And worship God. Because only God is made for worship.

Sure. And once, and that's the, that's the Christian teaching for the life that we want to live, which is the life of the people we're supposed to be. That was sort of that simple formula. Well, and it's interesting that the Romans clash with the Christian so much. and you realize what a radically transgressive idea Jesus is bringing into the world by saying, love their neighbor as they self, Good Samaritan,

basically care about... Love your enemies. Right, but care about the people that the Roman Empire uses up and smashes and destroys when they get in its... Like, when you read about the Roman Empire, as fascinating as it is, you go, unless you're the emperor or a senator or one of the families, it's a shitty place to be. Right. What the Christian sort of invention is that, no, no, no, it's actually, you know, the meek shall inherit the earth.

It's the little guy that actually matters. That's who this is all about. That's who you have to care about. And the Roman philosophy of might makes right is then articulated again, again and again and again throughout history, most notably in Nietzsche. And then Ein Rand. I mean, it comes back and it comes back and it comes back. And the defense against that is always Christianity. Christianity is always the defense.

No, no, no, no, no, no. Read it again. Read it again. The truth of the matter is this, you know, the whole concept of the Enlightenment as problematic as it is for Christianity comes from the idea that if you, and again, this is Matthew 544 in the sermon of the Mount where he says this like crazy, Jesus says this crazy thing. He says, you have heard that you should hate your enemies and love your friends. Today I give you a new teaching, love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you. The most transgressive teaching of all time, which is use things, love people, worship God. It's the gospel of love, notwithstanding your feelings is what it comes down to, this stoic principle that comes through the, you know, this, the metaphysics of the stoic principle is what it comes through.

It's like fight against that lower part of your nature to aspire to the Christ-like part of your nature. And that's what you want to do. And that will give you the best life. That will give everybody the best life. That's who you're supposed to be. That's how you get to heaven. And heaven starts here. Yeah.

But by the way, this changed back to philosophy. You know, the idea in ancient Roman. in times and most of history forever is it might mix right that if you want there are people who disagree coercion is the only tool negotiation and persuasion come from that idea that you can love your enemy sure whether your enemy yeah even if they're wrong even if they do bad things you're equal in some sense and and you by the way if you persuade somebody it's win win if you negotiate with somebody's win win win if you coerce somebody's win lose we went from a world of win lose into one that's largely win-win because of this idea.

The Crusades and religious wars, not with staff. Of course, because there's always the exceptions. Well, that's the human. Of course. That's the animal impulse that's puncturing its way into the moral aspiration again and again. And it will always be thus. We'll do kind of a lightning round with some of these other ones as we wrap up.

Are we almost done? How only we got women to go? An hour. Really? I thought it was like 15 minutes. We'll be here for five hours if we do every school. But I think Ein Rand is interesting. I always have loved Christopher Hitchens,

rejoinder to the idea of the virtue of selfishness. And he said, I'm not really sure humans need any help in that department. I know. And I've always felt that like there's an interesting parallel or contrast between the allegory of the cave, which we were talking about, and Galtz, Gulch in Atlas Shrug. It's like, hey, the little guys are parasites. They're taking from you. They don't appreciate your genius.

They don't understand that you know truth. Retreat to your fantasy world where only the smart entrepreneurs and the geniuses hang out, fuck everybody else. That is the opposite of what Plato was saying you do with enlightenment. It's quite Nietzschean. It's really quite Nietzschean. There's a version of that in more modern America that I love. It's my favorite philosopher.

Okay. Ralph Walden Emerson. Yes. I love Emerson. You think he's in Randian? He's like, he's Randian, but not awful. Self-reliance is everybody, everybody should read Self-Reliance. Yes.

Self-reliance is like a tall glass of cool water on a, on a summer day in Bastrop, Texas. It's stoicism and Christianity mixed together. But with a little Randianism, a little objectivism in there, right? It's like the sturdy lad from Vermont or New Hampshire. Yes, yes. Who builds it, makes it, farms it, farms it, and always lands on his feet like a cat. Yes. That's a moral superiority as far as Emerson is concerned.

But the difference between Rand and... Emerson is, Emerson is that guy, right? Although most of his money comes from his dead wife. There's that. But he's funding the whole transcendental scene. He's paying for it. He's generous.

He's helping slaves in the Underground Railroad. He's a good friend. He is generous to a fault, right? The obligation is there. That's why the RAND stuff doesn't do it for me, but Emerson, but here's the problem that I have, though. Here's my internal conflict. I'm a Catholic.

And Emerson's not, man. I mean, Emerson is like a Jesus, maybe. Well, he's a heretical Unitarian. Yeah. Right. Which, you know, we think of Unitarians today as people who believe in up to one God. Right. It's a. And it's all cool, man.

But no, no, no. I mean, Unitarianism was a real going concern, you know, in that part of the 19th century, in the 1840s, et cetera. But the rugged individualism, which just speaks to me. I love it. I love it so much. That's the best part of it. what being American is supposed to be.

That's what it's supposed to be, but the truth of the matter is that it's, it's very, very incomplete because we need community, we need people, I believe we need God, we need to transcend ourselves, the only way we can transcend ourselves is to transcend ourselves toward the divine

and transcend ourselves toward one another. What about nature, though? Emerson would say nature is that form of transcendence. Sort of, I mean, but basically he's in individualism. And so I'm always, my inner conflict is the fact that I'm, you know, 75% you know, right on board with, you know, the Pope. Yeah.

But there's that 25% of Emerson this college pulling at me all. And, you know, I have a big, big, a big strong libertarian streak in me. But it's an Emersonian libertarian streak. That's what it is. It's not that, it's not that kind of mild creepiness that actually comes from the radical, me only,

and the weak are cursed. If it's liberty fused with a, strong sense of personal obligation and virtue, it works. If it's, you're free to do whatever you want and fuck these guys. It's a pretty vicious place. Or everybody. Yes. Fuck everybody but me. That's a problem. It seems to me, and there is a balance in there, and this is actually one of the things that's really great about studying multiple philosophies, which of course you've done, is that you don't, you can live in multiple worlds at the same time. And you can understand yourself better. The problem is, and this is the academic problem,

is when you go in one particular direction, you're not actually going to be testing any of your ideas as a result of that. And that's how you can get more and more and more and more weird and wrong. And that's a lot of what's happened in academia, these weird, exotic ideas of the human person that lead to these fads and panics in American life and ruined universities.

Yeah. Cancel culture and, you know, radical activism and, you know, the whole anger that actually that we see in a lot of it today has to do with the fact that we're just not good intellectuals. Enough. So speaking of a multidisciplinary approach, let's go back in time a little bit. He doesn't get a school attached to him. But I think Montaigne is a... I know very little about Montaigne. Really? I know very, I mean, I've read Montaigne, but I know very little about Montaigne. But I think it's interesting of all these guys, he doesn't get a school, but but has so much to teach us about intellectual humility. Yeah, but epistemic humility. That's where that comes from. Yes. What do I know? Yeah. And that curiosity, I just think it's fascinating. And I have a book in the bookstore. I'll give you that. That's my favorite biography of him.

But like the idea of it's when you realize he was living in the middle of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation where thousands of people are being burned at the stake for having differing religious beliefs. And he's like, what do I know? And they're discovering the new world. And people are like, oh, it's filled with cannibals. And he's like, we draw in quarter people. We're not so great.

And I think there's something beautifully open-minded and yet, based in, very much in the classics in Montaigne that's worth. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Every time I read Montaigne, I say, I wish I knew more, you know, for sure. And, you know, it's funny because there's a balance there too. I mean, you can become the cynic who says everything is every, you know, everybody's fat and stupid, right? But that's not a good way to live either.

I mean, it's a good thing to say to actually be able to recognize all the wonderful things that your culture does well, maybe better than other places, and then want to share it as opposed to being triumphalist about it. it. That's right. And then also having an open mind to say there are other things that we can learn and we can be better at at the same time. Yes. He traveled a lot. And one of the lines about him is that he loved meeting anyone he came across on his travels except other Frenchmen. Because he didn't need to meet another. He was French. She didn't need to meet any friends. He wanted to meet people who are different than him. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sort of makes sense. And you know, you see that a lot.

You see that a lot with people who are really trying to learn about the outside world. That there's almost nothing more annoying knowing the people from their own hometown. I was like, I don't want to talk about the Seahawks. If you're selling online or out of a storefront full time or a side hustle, you know it's a challenge. People got to find you. You got to wait for them to walk in. Well, today's sponsor, Whatnot flips that. On Whatnot, you go live and sell directly to people in real time.

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Just go to pesti.com slash stoog for an extra 10% off your order. That's P-E-S-T-I-E dot com slash doeg for an extra 10% off. What about Kimu? Oh, yeah. So the absurdist school. often distinguished from the existentialists, of course. Camus is super interesting. I mean, Camus, because his medium, he's kind of like Ein Rand in the sense that he was a novelist.

But he's actually good at it. His novels are short and exciting and interesting, and there's no 90-page speeches. There's no 90-page speeches. That's absolutely true. Camus is a, I mean, so if we read one Camus, we'll read the myth of Cissippus, right? Yeah. Because that's the one thing to read. I remember trying to read it in eighth grade.

If we're talking happiness, that's the one we should do. That's the one to read. And I've written about the myth of Sisypheus because there's one key idea in the myth of Sisyphus that I just tried to, I mean, there's a lot of stuff that Kimu says, but, and it's basically this. So everybody knows that something is Sisyphian is an exercise in futility. The whole idea is something's futile. He's pushing the boulder up the hill.

He almost gets to the top and falls back down because there's, you know, the Greek myth of Sisyphus who's being punished for all time by never being able to accomplish his task is the whole thing. And he goes through this and he does a philosophize. I'll treatise on this, but here's the last part, is the last point that Camus makes. The most important point is what everybody misses, because everybody's like, yeah, Sisyphus, that suck.

Yeah, life is like that. Life is kind of absurd and dumb, right? You roll it up and it rolls back down. Doesn't this suck? Another day, another day, another day, another day. But Camus says in the end, one must suppose that Sisyphus was a happy man because he had something to do.

But that's the point. Yes. That's the point is that he had a purpose. Was it a futile purpose? Yeah, but welcome to life, man. I mean, just like feed yourself and keep your biological organism running and try to pass on your genes a little bit,

and you're actually just like everybody else and trying to pretend that you've got this unique goal and it's got this mission, like unlike any, you know, a world historic figure here, you know, and actually you're just like absolutely everybody else and you're rolling the boulder up and it's rolling back down. But, you know, God bless you.

You got something to do. Lucky you. What I think is fascinating about Camus, and I'm just starting to read about him more, is he's supposed to be the embodiment of these modern philosophers who like Nietzsche go, God is dead. It's all meaningless. It's stupid, absurd, silly. Then you look at his life.

And here he is speaking out about the moral issues of his time. He's in the French resistance in World War II. He is actively, this is not a, this is not a, nihilists in practice. And he is in fact, you know, in the thick, he is involved in public life in the way that Stoics say you have to be involved in public life. Because you can't work out your ideas unless you're completely alive, which is what they, but also they aren't ideas. They're ways to live. You have to, yeah. The philosopher is not just a person who arranges them well on the page. Which is the problem with a peccurus. Yes. Because he was sitting in his garden. Yeah.

Right. He was actually out. He wasn't out in the world. Yeah. Most great religious movements, by the way, have been those that are in the world. I mean, it's really interesting when you actually look at it, even in the Catholic world, you find these great movements that are trying to, you know, work for a better world at the individual level. Catholic worker, but even some that are not utopian and not even progressive at all.

What they're trying to do is to build a better world and they're understanding their own theology like Mother Teresa through the way that they're lifting people up at the margins of society and the poorest places in the world, which is a really interesting thing. And an important thing to do. And that's kind of, it's kind of Camu. You're right.

And the way that he's actually living his life. And a lot of the way, and which we don't remember, of course. But then you've got, you know, like Sartre, you know, just sitting there smoking a, you know, camel straight and the, no, a galwa in his, you know, sipping an espresso. And he was kind of living this intellectual's existence, as hermetically sealed existence, which is one of the reasons that when you read Cammo, you're like, I can kind of understand life through this. And you read Sartra, or at least I read Sartra, at least I read Sartran. I'm like, I don't get it. Yes. I don't get it.

It doesn't, this is all theory. This is just theory as far as I'm concerned. Well, I think the fall and both the fall and the plague are two striking books for this moment. I mean, the fall is basically this smart guy's walking through the streets of Paris and he hears someone go into the river. And he's busy. So he's like, but not my problem. Right. And he's haunted by the idea later that he could have done some.

It's a moral allegory about indifference to the suffering and pain of someone. Right. else. It's basically he's talking about World War II, but he's probably also talking about people like Sartre who are philosophers in this moment where the world is on fire. And they go, I'll get some reading to do. I know. And we didn't even talk about the Russians who are contemporaneous as a Russian existentialist who are having this huge moment. I mean, you gave me the Diary of Wisdom from Tolstoy. Oh, calendar of wisdom. The calendar of wisdom. You gave it the last time I was here, as a matter of fact. But yeah, yeah. And Tolstoy and Dostoevsky are having this huge moment right now. This is the next

big thing for young people. I think so. For sure. I mean, it's like a lot of people that are continued to be super interested in stoicism, but the Russians, and apparently, and how do I know this? Because my publisher says that every, but there's manuscript after manuscript that's coming in about Russian existentialism, largely on the Tolstoy-Elskevsky, who are contemporaries but didn't know each other.

But a lot of what we're talking about here, you can learn just by reading the Brothers K. Well, what's interesting, too, about that Tolstoy book is that... Calendar of Wisdom, that's right. It's so good to read right and forbid. And it's very, I mean, there's a lot of Catholic teaching there too. Well, he was super religious. Yes. But what I thought was interesting is I did a lot of research on Gandhi for the justice book.

And it was actually, so people know, you know, civil disobedience. So they think there's this through line from Emer, from Thoreau to Gandhi, who were not that far apart in time. But actually, Gandhi finds out about Thoreau through Tolstoy. And you go, oh, okay, this is how it's all floating around. and that it was his, it was Tolstoy's religious thinking. Like, as far as we know, Gandhi doesn't read any of Tolstoy's fiction, but he reads his sort of spiritual and religious writings,

and that's partly what inspires, like, the movement that changed the world. And then we get the civil rights movement from there. It's just incredible. And the Dostoevsky stuff that is really coming back right now. And by the way, the probably the most interesting thing that informs a lot of the stuff from Tolstoy's is autobiography. Yeah. Where he talks about his near suicide at 51.

And he's looking for meaning. He's looking for me. I have a book coming out on meaning in March, at the end of March called The Meaning of Your Life. And one of the main first big chapter starts with the story of Tolstoy, where he says, I thought I could find meaning through my writing, and I couldn't.

And then I tried to find meaning. By the way, one of the best and biggest to ever do it. And he was like, it didn't work. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature four times. I mean, that's how, by the way, how new he is. Yes. The people, it's like 1910, you know. But he says, and then I look to,

biology and science, which we were in this technocratic moment then, which Dostoevsky called the Palace of Crystal, which meant all a mathematically worked out world awful oligai. And he said, I looked for in biology and science and he studied deciduously and he couldn't find meaning there. And he concluded that meaning didn't exist and since his, by the way, he had 13 kids. And so he had a lot going on. And, and, and he said, I concluded that life had no meaning. It was meaningless. And so I had nothing left to kill myself. Right. So he goes off to just like, to a little village. This is a little tiny little village.

And he just lived doing the peasants who, he was a super famous rich guy. Yeah. Nobody knew who he was. Yeah. Like, nobody knew who he was. And they were just going, they were illiterate,

and they were farmers, and they were just going to church and saying their prayers and living their family lives and having their parties and having a good time and all that. And he realized, oh, oh, meaning is love.

Yes. Meaning is love for God. Meaning is love for your family. Meaning is authentic friendship. Meaning is actually working for other people by sanctifying your work through what you do. If it's, you know, plowing the field. And he said he understood meaning after that. And that's how he found meaning in his own life was by actually living his life in real life

as opposed to using highfalutin ideas to try to find it somehow out in the ether. Which is ultimately, man, that's us too. Sure. You know, it's us too. It's like, you know, your grandfather, grandfather holiday. you know, he never, I guarantee you, never came home from work and, you know, said to your grandma, honey, I had a panic attack behind the mule today. Yeah.

He is too busy. Well, because he was too busy living. Yes. And he understood the meaning of his life. That's a very Tolstoy-esque idea, very Dostoevsky-esque idea, that's that people are starting to rediscover in these Russian existentialists, Christian existentialists. So maybe to bring it to a close, talking about meaning, talking about the existential vacuum, maybe we conclude with

Frankl, Victor Franklin. Man Search for Meaning his most famous book, of course. Yeah. Yeah. Well, he starts by quoting Nietzsche. And the introduction of the book, he quotes Nietzsche.

And everybody says it's Victor Frankel because it sounds like Victor Frankl. It's Nietzsche. A man can, what does he say? He can bear any what, as long as he has a why. Yeah. And Nietzsche in concept.

But of course, Victor Frankl, his whole point was that meaning is everything. Yeah. That if you don't know the meaning of a life, there is no reason for life. And, you know, that's one of the three pillars of happiness. There is enjoyment. There is satisfaction.

But meaning is absolutely the most important. And that's, of course, the one that is most absent today is meaning, the why of what we're actually doing. That's why, I dare say, besides the fact that you're just an incredibly good writer, people want your stuff. Because they want meaning. They're looking for the meaning of their lives. And they can't find it in all the bobbles and doodads and gougas and nonsense. that the distracting world is giving them. So this new book that I've got talks about

how we've changed our brains that we've walled off, literally, physically the parts of our brain that we need to assess questions of meaning. And the only way we can do that is by going back and living more like Grandpa Holiday but with Ryan Holiday's books. But also I think maybe a through line

between most of the philosophics was particularly the Eastern ones who talk about it so much more specifically. Victor Frankl is saying, and then of course his experience is confirming it, there is none of these things without suffering. You have to transform suffering into meaning. That's the trick of the human experience.

And in fact, if you don't suffer, there is no meaning, which, of course, is one of the biggest mistakes that we make in the therapy industrial complex today is to say that if you're sad and anxious, there's a pathology that needs to be fixed. Yeah. You know, I tell my students, they're studying at Harvard. If they're not sad and anxious, they need therapy.

Right. You know, that's the truth of the matter. And unless they lean into it, I mean, the great trick, the great stoic trick, the great Christian trick, the great trick of life is not just to start each day and say, I'm grateful for the things that I'm going to enjoy this day, is to say, I'm grateful for the suffering

that will befall me this day, bring it on. Yes, I can handle it. That's what resilience is. No, I'm going to learn from it. It's not even just, I can handle it. It's just that my life, it's like I will, I am not fully alive unless I have aversive experiences and I'm dealing with them like a responsible,

grown-up, fully developed person. Yeah. And that's our goal. That's the goal. And if meaning can be derived from suffering, then it means you can be happy and thrive in any condition and any kind of life. If happiness can only come from things going very well, then it's only available to a small percentage of people,

a small percentage of the time. It's a much more resilient and robust formula. That's right. And that's why, that's where Epicureanism gets it wrong, is that it's got one pillar of the happiness formula. And there are a lot of people who are really, I mean, it's like they take what they see to be stoicism and they push it to the, okay, if it's not hurting me, I don't like it anymore. But that's wrong too. Sure. I mean, that's incorrect. That's also an misunderstanding of stoicism, of course. But that's why Epicureanism is an incomplete philosophy for the human person, in my view, because it doesn't understand that core fact, that we are, and again, this gets about. back to my Christianity. Why does God allow these things to happen? Because they must. Because we actually can't become the people that we're supposed to be. We can't be fully alive. Who was it? It was Saint Irenaeus who said in the fourth century, the glory of God is a man fully alive. And today it would be translated as a person fully alive. Of course, there's no gender exclusivity about this. You're not alive. That's the glory of God if you're actually not having a full range of human

experiences. And if your whole goal in life, your philosophy and practical life strategy is to eliminate the normal parts of life that you don't like, you're dead. You're dead. And that's one of the reasons that people can't find meaning today is because they're being told that. Well, I think we did it. We did about 2,500 years of ancient philosophy in one hour and 22 minutes. I think this is quite a master class we just did. And, you know, it's like a folk, sorry for all the stuff I got wrong. That's all I can say. I'm just a French horn player who got a PhD. as a social scientist. There's a lot I don't know. Well, I don't even have a PhD. So this is just us, as we said, remixing things we've heard from other people. But I think that's what philosophy is.

Philosophy is not specializing in arcane or specific period, right? Philosophy should be a survey course of all of the wisdom, the sum total of wisdom of 5,000 years of human experience. That's what it's supposed to be. Yeah, I think that's right. And we can title this, Ryan and Arthur, sourdough. Well, you want to check out some books? I got some of you. All right. 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.