The Daily Stoic - Persuasion Expert: "You Can TRAIN Your Mind to See the Positive" | Jay Heinrichs (PT. 2)

Episode Date: November 8, 2025

It takes a trained mind to see wonder and awe in the middle of everyday struggles. In today’s PT. 2 episode, Ryan and persuasion expert Jay Heinrichs dive deeper into discipline, the power of our inner dialogue, and what it really means to have agency. Jay shares the story of having breakfast with the Dalai Lama and how the Stoics, Buddhists, Aristotle, and even Taylor Swift all point to the same truth about how we see and respond to life. Jay Heinrichs is a New York Times bestselling author of Thank You For Arguing and is a persuasion and conflict consultant. Middlebury College has named him a Professor of the Practice in Rhetoric and Oratory. Jay has conducted influence strategy and training for clients as varied as Kaiser Permanente, Harvard, the European Speechwriters Association, Southwest Airlines, and NASA. He has overseen the remake and staff recruiting of more than a dozen magazines. Pick up a copy of Jay’s latest book Aristotle’s Guide to Self-Persuasion: How Ancient Rhetoric, Taylor Swift, and Your Own Soul Can Help You Change Your Life Follow Jay on Instagram @JayHeinrichs and check out more of his work at www.jayheinrichs.com🏛 The 2025 LIVE session of Stoicism 101: Ancient Philosophy For Your Actual Life starts November 10th. Don’t miss your chance to join us! Read on for more about the unique opportunities you get from joining the LIVE course.📖 Wisdom Takes Work by Ryan Holiday is out NOW! Grab a copy here: https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/wisdom-takes-work👉 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/🎥 Watch the video episodes on The Daily Stoic YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/📱 Follow us:  Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space, when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal, and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring. Hey, everyone, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic podcast. I hope all is well with you. As I said, in part one of this episode, we've been digging our way out of the Wisdom Takes Work. I appreciate all the support. I appreciate the patience, most of all, like basically everything

that could go wrong did go wrong. So we were a little delayed getting them out. I'm sorry. I appreciate the sport. Believe me, it was not for lack of trying and it was not for lack of caring. My main priority is to get the books in your hands. And I hate that they took a little bit longer than we wanted. And obviously, all I'm all in focus on right now is getting them out. Actually, we're all downstairs packaging books right now. I just came upstairs to record this really fast. Right now, what we can do is get the books out. And then we'll obviously make some changes and improvements going forward. But let's get to today's episode. Jay Heinrich, who wrote this book, Aristotle's Guide to Self Persuasion, which I think is really, really interesting. He said, I turned 70 a month after

publication, and I've been happier than I've ever been. It's not all about rhetoric, but the voice in my head is a good deal jollier than it used to be. I think that's super important, right? Aristotle said that human flourishing, that was his sort of definition of happiness. But that that was the point of life. That was the highest form of human excellence was to, like, have a good life that not exactly felt good, but that was good for the person living in. Life can be dark, like it can be painful, things can go wrong. You're going to be digging yourself out of a giant pile of work, as we've been doing. But that voice in your head shouldn't be kicking the shit out of you. In fact, there's a famous story about Cleanthes, the Stoke. He's walking

through Athens one day and he sees a man talking to himself. He's talking to himself quite angrily. Cleanthes stops him and says, hey, I want you to know you're not talking to a bad person. And I actually think the Stoics don't get enough credit in this regard, that that Stoicism was supposed to help you with that inner voice, that inner discussion, that it wasn't about whipping yourself. And that's what we're going to talk about in today's episode. Jay Heinrichs is a New York Times bestselling author of Thank You for Arguing. He is a persuasion and conflict consultant. He is a professor of the practice of rhetoric and oratory at Middlebury College.

He's conducted influence and strategy training for clients like Kaiser Permanente, Harvard, the European Speechwriters Association, Southwest Airlines, and NASA. In part two of this episode, Jay tells us about meeting the Dalai Lama, which he met as a very young man. We talk about the agency we have in our own lives, particularly over whether we're feeling a sense of wonder or the pain of suffering. talking about the magic of rhetoric and what the Stoics can teach us about that. And then, of course, one of my favorite topics. We talk about Taylor Swift. You can grab a signed copy of Aristotle's Guide to Self Persuasion at the Painted Porch, or you can check it out anywhere books are sold. You can follow Jay on Instagram at Jay Heinrichs and check out more at jahynricks.com. The idea that you need to be able to push through things and you need to persevere. and you need to do the right thing and do things for others, all of that, kind of sucks. I mean, it's much better.

I read in my book, this only sounds like a digression. Yeah. Maybe it is. When I was in college, I edited the newspaper, I think, because nobody else wanted to. Yeah, I was an editor for my college newspaper, too. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah. That's a fun job, by the way.

It was, yeah. It's my first. I had an office. I did too. You know, it's like, all of a sudden, you're like, punching way above your weight. because it's all funded by the university. You feel like you're getting to sort of pretend to be this thing that it's going to take a long time to earn your second office.

Yes. You know what I mean? Yeah, it's kind of a come down when you graduate. Yeah, yeah. Well, so because I was the editor, there was this guy, this person who had been invited to the college on a tour. This was back in 1975, 1975, I think, a long time ago. I was invited to meet this guy for breakfast called the Dalai Lama.

And I had no clue who he was. I mean, at the time, he wasn't that well-known. I mean, I should have known. I was, she or ignorant, so my part. My news editor, much smarter than I was. What school was this? Middlebury College in Vermont. Yeah.

Small liberal school. But also a very internationally oriented school. I think that's why he was there. But it was also a Rockefeller, who is a professor of religion, who I think had some influence who had invited him. So it was going to be Professor Rockefeller, the Dalai Lama, a trans, an interpreter, and me. And I wasn't going to go because it was early. I was in college. I wanted to sleep in. My news editor saw this invitation and said, no, no, no, this guy's, the Dalai Lama is a real guy. And, you know, he's even maybe worship. I think he's kind of a god.

Sure. So I wanted to see what a god eats for breakfast. That's what drove me to go. No discipline on my Yes. And the thing is, I was really unimpressed. Yeah. It was years before I really realized what was going on there. I mean, the guy was just this guy in a robe with nerdy glasses that were unfashionable even back then. I don't think he ate anything. Yeah.

And he'd laughed the whole time. Yeah. He was just giggling all this time. I thought, this is the most unsurious person I've ever met. Like, this is a VIP? Yeah. Like this guy who's supposed to be the wisest man in the world or something, why would you worship a guy like that? which I thought, you know, Chris is not a god exactly.

Anyway, years later, I'm in Washington, D.C. in a real job. Yeah. And somebody said, hey, the Dalai Lama is coming to Washington without thinking, I said, yeah, I had breakfast with him. And, of course, crickets. I mean, the conversation stops. Everybody turns to me like, what? Yeah. And I realized I had nothing to say about the guy.

Now, the reason I brought this up was that, was he practicing a discipline? probably, right? Sure. An intense one. And yet it wasn't, you've gotten the sense all his life. This guy is the leader of a banished state. He had to be smuggled out of Tibet by the CIA. This guy is a world leader. Must be a disciplined guy. Never mind the whole Buddhism part. Yeah. Or is it Taoism. Anyway, he gives no appearance of that. It's a sheer joy. Now, we do know that the Epicureans and the Buddhists had a lot of conversations together. The two clearly very much influenced each other. And the thing is about Epicureanism, as you point out, you prepare yourself to the life you want to live in order maybe even to prevent not just suffering but trying too hard. And I got the sense that Dalai Lama. I mean, just sitting with me, probably you didn't have to try at all.

Well, the height of most things is a kind of effortlessness and ease, right? And there's probably something there too, although one of the lessons I'm taking from your story is we hold these people up as these sort of magnificent holy figures. And then it's like, what kind of VIP is he if he's having lunch with this, or breakfast with this kid at Middlebury College? Like, you know, there's something you can kind of, and Marxus does us in meditation where he kind of just tries to take things down a peg, you know? And he goes, like, you think this person's so important or whatever. And then you go, like, what do they have to do? What's their actual day. And then you go, oh, yeah, the president's calling into Fox and Friends. Like, you know, and you go,

oh, it's at some level, it's all the same bullshit that is life, you know? And although we can hold things up and sort of venerate them, there's no real escaping, just the fundamental indignities of being a person. That's true. What's the expression? No man is a hero to his valet. Yeah, like he was They were like, what are you doing today? I got to go have breakfast with this kid. Like, you know, I don't know why. You can imagine him giggling when he said it, though. That's like, you know, he had achieved, clearly has achieved atyxia.

Yes. As the Epicureans call it. Of course. Which is this idea of overcoming all the fears of life and getting to that kind of even keel. Now, that does take a certain what? Relationship with your soul? The work of a life, yeah. Yeah, work. I'm sure it does take a certain amount of work. My mission is to make sure I do as little

work as possible. Building up these sort of easy habits that lead to more. And they've done wonders for me, by the way. I can, I still can run. Yeah. And I'm happier now than I not only was before, but I think than I've ever been, in part because I keep saying these stupid peens to myself and I have a set of habits where I now work out an hour and a half to two hours a day. And it feels like super fun stuff. I learn all the time, which is fun for me. And I listen to audiobooks like yours. Well, it is interesting, you know, when you watch like a really great athlete, maybe even like in something wrestling or jihitsu, you think there's just really, you know.

And actually, the better you get at it, the less strain and stress there is, it's, it's, it's, this it's something much more fluid and effortless because you know not just where everything goes but you've also realized what's the minimum effective dose here so you're not having to do any more than you need to to do uh because you can't i think especially as you get older you realize hey i can't spare the excess right like uh and so you you just get to a place where it's kind all perfectly balanced. Like when you're young or if you're just genetically gifted, you know, maybe you get by on this kind of brute strength or on sort of doing it inefficiently. But as you get older, it's all about reducing drag, you know. And I think about this not just physically.

Like I'm realizing like, hey, I've got to like follow less stuff, have less opinions about things, be more focused on my stuff because my stuff has gotten hard. I've also gotten, you know, like, I'm just exhausted. So it's like, I got to, you got to winnow your focus down. The Stoics talk about this idea of a smooth flow of life. And like, like, one of my favorite quotes I've been thinking about a lot recently from, from Epictetus, he's saying, like, how do I know that you're making progress in this philosophy? He says, you're having fewer arguments. If you're going through, like, just arguing with people, disagreeing with people, getting in, you know, spats or fights, you apparently have excess energy.

right? And good for you, but I can't imagine that lasts. And so I think part of it is this kind of just efficiency that you get into. Yeah, that's such a great way of putting it. There's another concept that's related to this, back to J-Light Savings. Yeah. But I was just thinking the Tour de France just concluded this past Sunday, and Tade Pogacar, probably the greatest cyclist in history, just one for the fourth time. If you look at Tate Pogacar, that's a great example. His trainers literally have to hold him back because he just wants to attack with such delight. He's always got a smile on his face, and that is one painful sport, I could say. It's like the worst sport, yeah.

It is a worse sport. You're climbing mountains with a stupid bike and then going down them at 50 miles an hour. All that being sad, the Greeks had this idea during chariot races. The really smart Greek was the one who holds back and looks for the opening. Yes. And so that's this sense of chiros, which they actually had a god for. which is this idea of opportunity. And, you know, crisis can create that kind of opportunity.

You've written about that, but not necessarily from a chirotic standpoint. I feel like we just got our Halloween decorations up, and now the next holiday season is here. It's hard to believe it, but Thanksgiving is nearly here. We're big at decorating here at the holiday household, as you can imagine, and Wayfair can help make holiday prep easy by having all your home needs in one place. Their Black Friday sale is the perfect time to score huge deals on all things home. Starting October 30th, you can shop Wayfares can't miss Black Friday deals all month long. And with Wayfair's fast and easy shipping, you won't have to wait long.

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on this podcast. Indeed.com slash daily stoic terms and conditions apply. If you're hiring, do it the right way with Indeed. It's interesting. My book on disciplines, I did this series on the cardinal virtues of courage, discipline, justice, wisdom, courage, or sorry, discipline also sometimes rendered as temperance. But the other word they had for it is Safrasine. And the image for Sofrasine was often chariot racer. And the idea, of, you know, it's not just whipping the horses to make them go faster, but also raining them in, right? And you think of, you think about running one of these rickety chariots. You've got two or three or four horses on them. It's much more in art than it is strength, you know? And that, that sort of, again, we tend to think of discipline as pushing and faster and more and relentlessness. But actually, you know, it's about, you know, not just looking for the opening, but like, so I just, I just, I just ran a marathon and, and, um, good for you. I did it in Greece. I did the original

marathon. Oh. But, but I came out of the gate, like, when I look back at it, what I did, I was so excited when I started that, uh, my first, like, four miles were just a smidge faster than they needed to be, and I really paid for it on the back half. And so again, you think that discipline is like, you go out. If that's too fast, then you got to find. gas somewhere, but that's not what it is, right? It's really about, I think discipline is so often or all these suppersating is mostly about the restraint, the sort of keeping it within the bounds that you need towards some idea of kind of being able to sustain the performance that you are trying to perform at. Yeah, I had the same problem in my first marathon. There is a governor

which has to do with discipline. Like you are following something and that kind of a governor, and Aristotle called that governor two things, the soul, which is not necessarily, I mean, this is where I find it a lot easier to think of my soul as something that, me, but somehow separate from me. Yeah. So it allows a certain forgiveness factor when I don't follow as well, because then I can promise that I'll do better to this, you know, superior soul, which can be so annoying sometimes. But also at the same time, this idea of governor, the other concept is mediocre.

Yeah. The golden mean. Yes. And, you know, which in America is anathema. Yeah. Why would you do that? I mean, you take something for your headache and it says extreme, whatever. The Greeks would have appalled that.

That would sound like poison. Follow your passion. Find your passion. Again, not, yes. It is interesting how we've sometimes flipped some of this ancient wisdom on its head. We do the exact opposite of what the really sport people told us to do. Which can lead us to bad things. Totally.

Far away from Adiraxia or Apothea. Yes. No, I think Adiraxia is a better word. I think apothea, you know, the problem with it is it's sort of the root of apathy, which has this negative content. I think they're the same word. You know what I mean? It's about a kind of freedom from disturbance. It's the smooth flow of life. It's getting to a place where it doesn't matter what's happening in the outside world. It doesn't matter if you're doing something harder or not doing something harder. You're at that kind of even keel. You have command of yourself. I think a slight difference, and I may be wrong about this, but I like to think that the Epicureans allowed some passions that they would have super fun with. And one of them was Thalmistan, this idea of this sense of wonder and joy at something. I write in my book about double rainbow guy. Do you remember him? There's so many means for that guy. You know, he was looking at this double rainbow and he was feeling such over the top. Joy is hilarious. Yes. And yet, he was a experienced something that the Epicureans wrote about, that you need to be open to this. I mean,

Montaigne came up with this term that I translate as liberality, this openness to that kind of joy, which can be completely over the top. I mean, there are drugs for that now. Yeah. But I actually had that experience when I climbed Bruneer. Yeah. We did a really hard route because I was with people who had been former guides on the mountain. And up there, your ego kind of vanishes the way some psychedelic drugs will do for you. The same thing happened when I reached the top of Mount Musilock. I felt such joy that I didn't even look at my watch when I first came, I mean, hit the watch to get the time, but I didn't look at it. It didn't get recorded on the watch. Did you even do it? I'm the same thing. I'm like, sometimes my watch will die and I'll be like,

what was the point of the exercise that I just did? I didn't get to record it in this magical app that I'll never check. Well, this was a while ago. So it was a, it was a time makes Iron Man. So it wasn't an app. But I mean, even you're tracking your time. Like the winning was doing it. And then here you are going like, well, I got to make sure I get the exact time that I have Yeah. So the moment I hit it, I hit the button. And I didn't look. I felt I didn't need to because I was just felt this overwhelming sense of joy and gratitude. Yeah. It was, it was just this marvelous feeling. And it's one that actually, neurologists say that feeling, if you do it right, some people call it the zone, you know, it lasts. It can last. Now, I'll tell you, it took me a while

to figure out how to write this book. Yeah. Because how do I write a self-help book when I didn't want to write one? That would, and how do I not discipline myself? So it took me 10 years to figure out how to do this thing. So this happened when I turned 58 and I'm about to turn 70. It was that long ago. Yeah. And yet, that feeling, I still have it. It is unfair to, the Epicureans because we take them at their word that sort of pleasure is important what we're in pursuit of and we forget how they actually defined pleasure it was pleasure it's like you're talking about i i was taking my dog for a walk night before last sun setting i'm listening to music i'm watching the sun come down i live in this dirt road and i'm eating a plum cot have you ever

had a plum cot it's a combination of eating a plum and an apricot some new fruit i never heard of and i just i'm like this is the fucking best this is bet you know This is amazing. This is like overwhelming how amazing it was. And it's like I'm eating a piece of fruit going for a walk. This isn't, you know, I'm not taking drugs. I haven't just sold a company for a billion dollars. I haven't just won an Olympic medal.

You know, I'm not an orgy. It's not a sensual overwhelming pleasure. But we have this letter from Epicurus where he's like waxing rhapsodically about this like pot of cheese that a friend sent him. Like the pleasures that Epicurus was talking. talking about were relatively minor. And it was this ability sort of like a poet or like someone who knows how to express gratitude or maybe he's just had a second chance at life is appreciating this small thing. And then the way I thought of Epicura's after is I, as I got back to the house, we had like a little box of them. I was like, I'm not going to eat another one. Do you know

when you eat too much fruit? That's discipline. But you know, like you're right. You eat a peach and it's good. And then you eat a second peach and you're like, oh, my stomach hurts. I was like, I'm going to take the fact that I enjoyed this thing, and it was delicious, and then maybe I'll have another one tomorrow. And that, too, again, we don't give Epicurus credit. His point was, if you drink to the point of having a hangover, you have to include the hangover in your equation of whether that was a pleasurable experience or not. Yes.

Yes. That's a very chirotic point. Yes. This idea that you have to think about the timing of things, which is having a different idea of time. It's not something that just evolves naturally, but you have some control over. But let me ask you, why did you feel that way? I mean, you, someone else eating that fruit, walk in the dog sunset, pretty quotidian kind of moment here. Why did you feel that way? What do you think led to it? Well, I think philosophically, this is something you cultivate. And I think you

see this in meditations. Mark Surrealis has these beautiful observations. Not, you know, he's not on the top of Mount Olympus looking down, which maybe he saw, or he's not on the acropolis, looking at, you know, one of the highest achievements in sort of architecture and engineering. He's like, look at the way this stock of grain is bending low under its weight, right? It's ripe. Or he's talking about looking at this all of that I'm picking. He makes these sort of observations about these ordinary things, but he's doing it like a poet. Like a poet cultivates the ability to see beauty in seemingly mundane.

things. And I think philosophy does this too, and it might have been Aristotle. One of the, one of them says, you know, both the poet and the philosopher are concerned with wonder. Like, it's the ability to see this thing in a way that maybe a person who's not trained or is trained to take it for granted is not going to see. So I think, obviously, the fruit I'm eating is great. The sunset is beautiful. But it's the decision and the cultivation of the ability to sort of really put it all together and then to sort of feel that feeling. To me, that's the art of it. Because if you're distracted, if you're busy, if you're ruminating on something that happened earlier, or you are obsessing anxiously over something that might happen in the future,

what you're doing is making that sort of ordinary slash extraordinary moment impossible. And so I do think that that is a skill. It's a discipline to be able to. to experience those sort of moments and to note them and then to savor them, not just while you're experiencing them, but, you know, in a journal, in a book, and a work of art, that's to me the whole game. That's interesting. So in a sense, both wonder and suffering have a certain agency to them. Yes.

You had a dog in that hunt, literally. Yeah. Well, Epictetus is like every situation has two handles and you choose which one you're going to grab. Yeah. And so you can go, hey, the world is falling apart. We have a madman in the White House. The economy looks uncertain. My marriage is struggling. You could ruminate on all these existential or self-indulgent things. Or you could be like, all is well in the world. I'm on a dirt road eating a fruit walking my dog. This is life. You know, life is good. And I actually, I try to do that, you know, writing, you're talking about. Writing is painful. Finishing books is usually great. Like having a book is awesome, but the process of doing it can suck. But I, I talked to a number of professional athletes and all of them talked about how much they sort of missed playing and how they wished

they'd enjoyed playing more while they were so competitive that all they were thinking about is games that they didn't. And so I decided several years ago to be like, hey, I'm, I get to do what I love. This is a dream. I'm going to try to think about that on a regular basis and not indulge in this kind of pity party or how easy it can be to complain or be made miserable by this thing that, by the way, I'm choosing to do, you know, and I don't have to do. If I really hate it this much, I should do something else. And so I do feel like I actively practice deciding what I'm going to, which handle I'm going to grab, you know, different experiences by. You know, I love hearing that.

I mean, you've achieved a level of wisdom that I took a lot longer and maybe still haven't achieved. Thank you. I get it in fleeting moments. Well, that was a great moment. I don't know why this reminds me, but you could tell me why it does. Some years ago, a magazine assigned me a piece about the origins of democracy. How much fun is that? So I went to Syracuse, New York for the Seneca Confederation.

Yeah, Seneca Falls. The Iroquois Confederation. Oh, got it, got it was, you know, Syracuse. But the London and to Rome and Athens, and in Athens. You don't want to sign many pieces like that anymore, multiple flights for a magazine piece. No, you know, obviously it was a triumph and expense account. Yes, yes, yes, yes. So, and super fun.

So I found myself in Athens, and I was actually looking for the Knicks, the P-N-Y-X-Nix. the original speakers platform where Demosthenes himself had spoken down to the Hoypolo, 3,000 people sitting on benches not always politely. And you know what's interesting? I was there in the evening.

Have you been there? So if you get up on the platform of someone, this was some years ago, so there was no fencing, there was no signage. It took me forever to find the thing. So there is the Acropolis, you know, the sacred temple to Athena,

down below. was the agorra, the marketplace, sacred, profane. Yep. And so I get up there. I am standing where Demosonies had done in this carved out rock. And so, of course, being a good American, I began reciting the Gettysburg Address. And it was such a glorious moment. But I wasn't feeling that wonder exactly.

I was thinking, this is amazing. Yeah. This is so great for my story. I was thinking the wrong thing. Then I noticed, and no one was there. Yeah. Then I noticed a woman, a middle-aged woman. woman walking her dog down below. And she looks up and she gives the most European gesture that

American can't get. It's like this shrug. And it's like, I must have been like the 50. She lived nearby. She must have heard 50 Americans reciting the Gettysburg Address up on the Knicks. That's when I felt the absolute joy. Yes. Because I thought it had become background noise or ordinary to her and to you, there was still something sacred and special and magical about it because you have fresh eyes. Yes, but also to something that was funny and, you know, gets me back to the Dalai Lama. I was giggling up there on the, on that platform and it made everything better. Suddenly, the glow of the sunset got better. Explain that to me. Why do you think that? You're being sort of fully present. You're locked in in a way. Yeah, there is something that can

be troubling as a writer because you sort of, you're both hyper observant and aware of what's happening, but then there's this sort of, how am I going to use this lens that's actually taking you out of the moment a little bit? Right. And to just go, hey, I'm just going to experience this thing. Yeah, I think you're right. It took me away from the meta, you know, this idea that there was a story in the back of my head that I was trying to put together while I was doing it. Yes, yeah. It's like you have the back part of your brain, these sort of gears are turning and clicking, going like, here's how I'm going to turn this into a thing. And what you're not doing is experiencing the thing. I think for people who can't relate to this, this is like ordinary. It's like when you're at a concert and you're like, oh, I got to film this part. Or you're seeing fireworks. You're never going to use this. What are you doing? Just be there for the thing. Right. There's that expression. What is it? If you didn't get a picture, it didn't happen. Yes. Yes. Yeah, which is so anathema to the very idea of being present.

Totally. Yeah. Can you just be there for the moment? And I do think philosophically that's what they were, they were all working on. And I got to imagine that lady's experience. I mean, when you see the Acropolis or you see some of these things for the first time, it's magnificent. I assume even Socrates and Aristotle and Plato were like, oh, yeah, I didn't notice that. You know, like, it probably bled into the background for them. I was just in Greece and we were walking up the sacred way to the temple of Apollo that the Oracle was. And it just, it hit me like, this is incredible now as ruins. What must it have been like when this was not just white marble? Everything was gleaming and gold and the sun must have been hitting it. And you weren't jaded thinking like, oh, I've seen a 150-story building. Like this would have been literally the apex of civilization's artistic, architectural, logistical capacity just right here. and you would have believed it was, you know, I mean, they thought there's literally the center of the universe, the naval there. So it would have been just a profoundly overwhelming experience.

I think about this, you know, when you go to Europe and you stand in one of these cathedrals, you go, oh, this is amazing. But I try to go like, what did this feel like to a peasant in the 14th century, you know, like, who had never been more than 100 miles from this exact spot? Like, it must have been existentially, spiritually, emotionally overwhelming in every conceivable way. Well, so a lot of brilliant rhetoricians through the centuries, including up through the 20th century, wrote about magic, the rhetoric of magic. So you have your visual rhetoric, which you just described, but also, you know, obviously the vocal rhetoric as well. and this combination of sensual circumstances, but also the actual language that was used

while they were walking up the sacred way. They were chanting things. Rhythmically, and it was magical stuff that actually caused the gods to pay attention that would transform people's spiritual behavior and how their minds were working. There's so much great neuroscience now going on to try to figure out what were the charms and you how were they expressed. And, you know,

that leads back to what I was trying to do with myself in a really amateurish way. Yeah. But I'll tell you, even when I was trying to think in terms of charms as magic and this idea that if I could make my soul be charming to myself, which Aristotle, you know, spent a lot of time describing as the ideal ethos is actually magical. Yeah. Like you can be. become almost what a god does to have its a triming effect on you, glamoring you is that, you know, the vampires would say. Well, speaking of magic, I mean, I think music is magic. Like, you think about as a writer, the work you have to do could be a culmination of decades of your ability to do.

it. And then you listen to some song written by some 22-year-olds, and the first three notes contain more power and emotion than you will ever must. Like, just there's something magical about music. And so I thought, I mean, obviously Taylor Swift is in the cover here. Where do you think music comes in as far as self-persuasion? Well, it's funny, mention that because, you know, if you then go back, you take a favorite songs, it's just so beautiful and so much meaning in them. Then you read the lyrics. Yeah. They can be so, utterly lame. Yes.

Taylor Swift, I find really interesting because I actually used her as an exemplary soul or a person who is really in touch with her soul. And Taylor Swift from the get-go was, by the way, I have to name drop here. I mean, we already did. But I was the first editor ever to put her on the cover of a magazine. Really? And when I tell that, it was the Southwest Airlines magazine. And, you know, I had a Wrangler who, and I said, you look.

a lot of where people love country music, go find a country music star that will be the next star. And this brilliant Wrangler said, here's a 17-year-old. Wow. We need her mother's permission. We put Taylor in the corner. And, of course, like, that meant nothing. She knows no, he has no idea who I am. And yet, I'll tell you what, nothing I have done in life will charm, magically charm a 16-year-old.

That's funny. As much as my name dropping Taylor Swift. Now, that being said, what. what I think is great. There was a moment in her life that I think every Stoic would truly understand when who's the, I can't do names, who's the rap star who, Kanye West. Kanye West, the VMAs, got up, you know, I'm going to let you finish. And then just grab the stage. She was crushed by that. She was still a teenager. It really set her back. And yet there was this kind of determination that behind us. And she herself put that in some of her lyrics.

know in her songs later. So what she was doing was practicing the magical charm of being herself, of expressing her soul in such a way that they seemed like they were one. And Aristotle called that charisma, which comes from the same Greek as, you know, charm, karma, or from song. It all is deeply related. So this magic of expression, how you express yourself through the rhythm or music. She did it all. I mean, there are foreign powers that are begging her to come to improve their economies by giving a concert. No, no, it's crazy. I tell the story in the updated edition of The Obstacles Away when she finds out her masters are being sold. And she really can't afford to buy them or she doesn't want to buy them. Whatever. She found this to be an injustice. And you can,

you know, obviously some people have parsed and they feel like it's a bit self-indulmonary. But the point is she felt like she was getting screwed over by the music industry. And it changed her relationship with her own back catalog. And the decision to go, hey, all right, I'm just going to re-record my back catalog. And I'm going to update the music and I'm going to do new art and I'm going to make it this thing. I mean, she was already one of, if not the biggest pop star in the world. And she's become bigger than we conceived of a musician being able to be because of this thing. It all stems from the decision to re-record the music because what happens is for basically two or three

consecutive years. All her old stuff is coming back out. It's being rediscovered by the existing fans. It's being discovered for the first time by new fans. The eras tour is a tour that makes sense because you can see now there are these different eras of the music and it becomes the biggest grossing tour of all time. It becomes, you know, all the albums becomes on the biggest albums of all time. That doesn't, when you want to talk about the obstacle being the way, that doesn't happen if this seemingly bad thing doesn't happen first. And then the choice to respond, like the Stoics say,

we don't control what happens, we control how we respond to what happens. She decided to do this thing. No one said you have to do this. She would have been financially, musically, artistically, totally fine. She would have been in the boat of most artists who don't own their catalog if she just said,

this sucks, I don't like it. I mean, she could have spent the next couple years just complaining about it in interviews, like there's so, or she could have said, you know what, I've made enough money, I'm done, right? She could have taken though a ball and went home. There's all these different ways that you could respond. And the way she does respond, she, I think it's not just this sort of public relations jiu-jitsu. It's not just this marketing genius. It's not just creatively interesting. But I also think she uses it to go to your point about self-persuasion. She decides to interpret it as this sort of motivating thing.

that Michael Jordan would perceive slights and use them to motivate himself. I'm going to humiliate this person because of what they did to me. And it becomes this thing that just catapults her to a totally different level. I think when we say the obstacle means is the way, it's about responding to the things that life deals you that way. I would go one better on that. I mean, all that is really true and so well said. She saw herself getting away from herself.

So she literally resumed ownership of Taylor Swift. What is Taylor Swift but her music? She went to own it, and that's owning herself. She has such a great relationship. Aristotle would say she bought her soul back. She got in close touch expressing this deep sense of obligation, the phyllis that you have for someone else. Yeah.

And that being her own soul. That's why I thought she was the greatest exemplar of the Aristotelian soul I could come up with. Well, then the irony is she makes so much money. she then does buy, she just bought back all the rights to the original catalogs like a few months ago. And so now she owns the new catalog and the old catalog. And she went down to Hades and found her shades and brought them back. Yeah, no, it's, it's, it's lovely. And that's, that's what I think being an artist is a metaphor in the sense that shit happens to you, both professionally and personally and your job is to turn that into more work, right?

It's to let it change and inform you who you are as a person, positively and negatively, and then to channel that into the creative work. Like one of my mentors, Robert Green, the writer, he said, you know, the good news about the path you've chosen, decided to be a writer, he said, it's all material. He's like, from this point forward, everything that happens to you is material. and, you know, I think about that all the time. I have shitty conversations, stuff happens, and I go, okay, like, I just lost a bunch of money in this investment, so that sucks.

I'm going to learn a lesson from that. But also, I make the money back in the book I write out of it or, right, and this is both literally and figuratively true. How do you use the things that happened to you? Oh, that's so great. That reminds you, when my wife went into labor, we were living in a suburb. suburb of Washington, D.C., and Bethesda, and she was giving birth at a hospital that had no parking.

So we were going to take the metro. What could go wrong? The metro stops between stations while she's in labor, and then the power goes out. Okay. Now, before the power goes out, she had looked around, as she always does, she's in touch with her soul than I will ever be. She had noticed that there's a bunch of Mennonite girls in this thing. She says two things to me.

First, she says, well, I bet those Mennonites would. know what to do in case this baby starts coming out. Between these things, I'm like trying to control my emotions. Yes, sure. The second thing she said is, and think of the story you're going to write. Yeah. Isn't it great to be a writer because you get to do that? Right. Right. And so, again, I think this is a metaphor. You go, something happens, right? You run a company, and then this thing happens and the company starts to fall apart and you get screwed and You've got to be able to say to yourself, this is making me a better leader, executive, human being. In some way, this is preparing me for a future thing to go, I'm going to use this in some way.

That's what it's about. Yeah, that's where the agency is, right? You know, that gives me into storytelling because not all of us are storytellers. I am so grateful to get to be one. Yeah. But even somebody who doesn't, if it doesn't, if you see your life as a kind of plot that hasn't ended. Yeah.

You can kind of see if you, like in my book, I talk about the beat system of screenwriter, which apparently screenwriters don't use. But it's great to think about how to tell a story. There are action beats and things that take places. And as Aristotle said, every story is three acts. So when you see yourself that way, you can see that there's a kind of progress where you, bad things have to happen for a decent movie to come about. And then if you're rooting for the hero.

and you hope for a happy end thing, that's you, and you have some agency in how to write that part of your life. I think of the investments I failed to make, I would be so rich to that, like many people. I remember the year after college, a friend of my staying with her in Burlington, Vermont, and she said, there's this great ice cream, it was midwinter. You know where I'm coming here. And it was out of this gas station, these two rude, not entirely clean guys were, like, there was a long line. in fact, because they're so bad at serving ice cream. The ice cream, by the way, was great. But as we're leaving, I said to my friend Diane, you know what?

Service is everything. These guys would be out of business within a year. Of course, that was Ben and Jerry. Some years later, I was in a new job, and they were still using word processors in this time when the IBM PC was king. And I said, we need to buy computers. We have no budget for it. What should we do?

And my business manager said, there's this grad student in us. in Texas where we're speaking. And we were the first bulk purchase from Michael Dow. Wow. And the reason he did it is he had this brilliant idea of contacting repair shops around the country to assure people that the computer would be fixed, which it never needed. Yes. But that was what allowed us to buy something other than IBMPC at like a third of the price.

Lee, my business manager, came back to me and he said, this guy, Michael Dell, is looking for investors at the $10,000. level. And I'm like, I don't have $10,000. You crazy. Some grad student in the University of Texas. Lee did that. I retired early. He lives in this beautiful place in Vermont now. And of course, I didn't do that. Now, that's part of my story. Yes. Like, I am not an investor. I tell stories about how I fail to invest. And what I learned from doing that, and do I regret it, if I had been the kind of person who would jump on the chance to give a grad student $10,000, think about how many $10,000 I would have blown, right?

I would have invested in crypto at exactly the wrong time. So, I mean, all of this is part of my story. Where does that lead to in the end? I die happy. My children will have very little money. That's amazing. You want to go check out some books in the bookstore? I love to.

Thanks so much for listening. 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.