The One You Feed - Unlocking the Wisdom of Dogs: What They Know About a Good Life with Mark Rowland

Episode Date: March 21, 2025

In this episode, Mark Rowland attempts to unlock the wisdom of dogs and discusses what they know about living a good life. He takes on some of life’s biggest, weightiest questions, like, what is meaning, how should we live, and explores them through the lens of our four-legged companions. It’s about philosophy. It’s about dogs, and it’s about the age old question of how to live a good life. Key Takeaways: Dogs live without the burden of reflection, which allows them to be fully present and undivided. Meaning in life is more important than the meaning of life—it’s found through alignment with who we are. Dogs are natural philosophers, offering insights through their simplicity and joy in daily life. Humans live two lives—lived and examined—while dogs live one, leading to greater contentment. Dogs embrace small pleasures with full-hearted joy, something humans often overlook. Love is central to a meaningful life, whether expressed through connection, passion, or presence. For full show notes, click here! If you enjoyed this episode with Mark Rowland, check out these other episodes: How to Find Zest in Life with Dr. John Kaag Shamanism and Spirituality with John Mabry How Perception Creates Reality with John Perkins Connect with the show: Follow us on YouTube: @TheOneYouFeedPod Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify Follow us on Instagram See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I don't think dogs do that, you know, I picked up this stick on the walk, should I have picked up that other one? I don't think they do that kind of thing. So we have two lives because of this ability to reflect and the dog just has one. I think it's probably more or less inevitable that the dog's going to love its one life more than we love our two lives. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true.

And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living.

This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. If you know me, you know that I love dogs. In many ways, it seems that the secret to a good life might be something that our dogs already know. Today, we're talking with philosopher and author Mark Rowlands, whose book, The Word of Dog, does something remarkable. It takes some of life's biggest, weightiest questions, like what is meaning, how should we live, and explores them through the lens of our four-legged companions. For me, this conversation hit right at the heart of When You Feed Sweet Spot. It's about philosophy, it's about dogs, and it's about the age-old

question of how to live a good life. That's a phrase I first uttered in this show's intro over a decade ago, and one I've been chasing ever since. Mark argues that reflection, the very thing that makes us human, is both our greatest strength and our biggest trap. We talked about why meaning in life matters more than the meaning of life and how dogs, those blissfully unaware, joy-chasing creatures, might just be the natural philosophers we all need. By the end of this episode, you might just see your dog as more than a best friend, but as a mentor. I'm Eric Zimmer and this is the one you feed. Reality TV and social media have love all wrong.

So what really makes relationships last on this episode of dope labs poet and relationship expert young Pueblo breaks down the psychology of love and provides eye-opening insights and advice. We all need you should not be postponing your happiness. Your greatest happiness is not necessarily going to like come from a relationship. Your partner should add to your happiness, but your happiness is really coming from within you.

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your podcasts. Hi, Mark. Welcome to the show. Thanks, Eric. I'm delighted to be here. Thanks for inviting me. I'm excited to talk to you. And I saw the title of your latest book, which is called The Word of Dog, What our Canine Companions Can Teach Us About Living a Good Life.

I knew I wanted to talk to you right away because A, we love dogs, B, the book has some philosophy, which we like. And when I recorded the intro to this show, oh God, 11 and a half years ago at this point, I actually used that phrase in it, how to live a good life. So you sort of just hit the absolute Venn diagram for one you feed guests. And I really enjoyed the book, which we're going to get to in a second. But before we start, we'll start like we always do with the parable. In the parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild and they say, in life there are two wolves inside

of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf which represents things like kindness and bravery and love and the other is a bad wolf which represents things like greed and hatred and fear and the grandchild stops, they think about it for a second, they look up at their grandparent and they say, well which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parallel means to you in your life and in the work that you do.

What's really interesting about that parable is, and this is the philosophy me now coming out, so I apologize for that. Who is the feeder? So the feeder is the one who chooses which wolf to feed. But then the question is, well, why would he or she choose one wolf rather than the other? If they choose the bad wolf, then it seems they're already in some way aligned with that wolf. If they choose the good wolf, then they're already in some way aligned with that wolf. In that sense, the feeder collapses into the wolf because the feeder is already aligned

with one of the wolves. And so there is no feeder independently of the wolves. It's a very interesting idea. I think we can jump off and sort of talk from there. Most of us though, we'll have the experience of we're at a decision point or a choice point of some sort. And we recognize these two things, right? It could be the old classic devil and angel on your shoulder or whatever it is. But this feeling of being divided seems very common to being human. So talk to me about alignment in that sense. The feeling of being divided, I mean, I think the crucial question is how much significance do you allot to that feeling? Does it show that your choice is a free one? You exist

independently of your choices. You can choose the good wolf, you can choose the bad wolf. Or are your choices already made by who and what you are? That's interesting. In another of your books, it might have been the Philosopher and the Wolf, you talk about memory. And you say that there's a common way of thinking of memory, as in what we actually remember. And you say that these are not really the key. There's a deeper and more... I'm just going to read what you said. A deeper and more important way of remembering. A form of memory that no one ever thought to dignify with a name.

This is a memory of a past that one ever thought to dignify with a name. This is a memory of a past that has written itself on you in your character and in the life which you bring this character to bear. So that's what you're talking about here, right? To what degree in the moment we think we're making a choice, how free is that choice? Because it is certainly influenced by and conditioned by everything that's come before. Yeah, that's right. I mean, our memory, I mean, don't get me started on memory, actually. My next book is on memory. But so memory is fascinating and much, much stranger than we ever thought. In the context of this parable, though, I think the question is, to what extent are

we defined by our choices versus do we exist independently of our choices? So the parable supposes that there's a person who can choose one or the other wolf. If that's right, then it seems we would have to exist prior to and independently of our choices. We exist and then we make the choices. Now, the alternate view is, well, we're made up. We are constituted by our choices. There's no real choice in that second sense, I suspect.

Is there a middle ground though? At least it seems to me, and I don't want to turn this into a discussion of free will, right? But a middle ground seems to me to be absolutely, I am deeply influenced by my past, by my memories, by my conditioning. They actually very much constrain the choices

that are available to me actually in the physical world based on what's happened before, but also inside of me to a certain degree. I talk about this a lot or I think about this a lot because I'm a recovering drug addict and the discussion about this seems to bifurcate into a couple camps also. One is the addict has no choice. They are completely in the grips of this thing. The other is this is all just a choice. The addict should just stop doing this, right?

And for me, I found that a middle ground is what allows me to function, right? That I can say, well, yes, I am, you know, at the moment, many, many years away from it. So now my level of choice is completely different to what I had then. So I seem to have had less choice, but there was still some choice. It certainly seems that way. It's a very strange view, you know, that in fact choice is an illusion, there's no such thing.

I don't know. I really don't know. It's a tricky question and it depends on what we mean by choices. The underlying idea maybe is that there's a difference between your past fixing what you do and your past influencing what you do. Yes. That's a good way of saying it. That's a crucial distinction. So then the question is, well, how do we understand influencing? And is there a way of understanding it? Because the worry, right, is always, well, okay, on the one hand, you've got your past fixes what you do, it determines what you do, you have no choice. The other view is, oh, no,

the past just influences what you do. But what does influence mean? Because what we don't want is for influence simply to mean random. Some people think, for example, that we're free to the extent that our actions are not caused by anything. I think that's a very strange and troubling view because, imagine what it would be like for your actions not to be caused by anything. You just simply find yourself doing something. So the actions have to come from you to be free in some sense.

Then the worry is, well, if that's right, how do we understand what it means for an action to come from you without you determining that action? Because if the actions simply emanate from you in the sense that what you are, who you are makes those actions inevitable, then there's no freedom there either. So we need some kind of middle ground between what you are, who you are, making you act, determining your actions. That's the idea. But we need to understand what influence means without appealing to randomness. That isn't going to work. It's one of the hardest problems of philosophy. I think it is. I mean, this is how I think about it. And again, I'm a dabbler in philosophy.

And I also recognize that my arguments ultimately for me end up trying to be what's useful in living a life, not what's technically, theoretically true. But I don't think it's random. But I also don't think you can unwind it enough to really be clear. So for example, I could say when I'm around men of, you know, my father's age and they look a little bit angry, I get really afraid, right? And I can make a story that says that's because my dad was angry when I was a kid. And there's probably some truth in that. But there's probably a whole lot else going on in there that I just like to your point, memories that I can't even recall. I don't know what things shaped me in

what way because I think everything is doing a very subtle shaping. So I don't think it's exactly random, but I also don't think you can solve the equation backwards and actually sort out all the variables completely. Yeah. Well, I mean, with memory, I mean, since I wrote that passage that you quoted, I discovered that I'd been anticipated by the German-speaking poet Reiner Maria Rilke, who had this fantastic passage in a book called The Notebooks of Moll de Loret's Brig. It was his only excursion into the art form of a novel. He was a poet by trade. And he talks about the most important memories are the ones you have to have the patience to forget them. Once you have the patience to forget them, then eventually they'll return, but they'll

return in a different form. They won't return as memories, they'll return as something else. So he talked about memories being glance and gesture, blood, not to be distinguished from who we are. I think there's something deeply right about that. Memories of the standard sort, so-called episodic memories, don't we say, I remember this, I remember doing this, I remember doing that. They're just the sort of tip of an iceberg and a far more significant way we're linked to our past is by way of

things that used to be memories but have now come back in a different form. So moods, for example, emotions, you're not quite sure where they're coming from. They're coming from somewhere. They're coming from memories that you once had, but they become something else. I call them realkin memories, but it's not clear that they're really memories. We can think of them as post memories, if you like. That's, I think, is the most significant link to the past. Now, where that leaves us with the question of free will is again, just another very tricky question. I don't know. Yeah. I'm going to pivot us towards your book. And we've been doing some philosophizing here

to start this episode off. And one of the core ideas in the book is that dogs are natural philosophers. Talk to me about what you mean by that. Well, the claim that dogs are natural philosophers, it was originally made by Socrates, the ancient Greek philosopher, but he was joking. He didn't take it seriously. Basically, it was a bad pun on his part. Bad dogs liking what they know and not liking what they don't know. He wasn't really being serious. But I think there's actually something to it. It's not entirely clear why that is, but I suspect that the philosophical worries and anxieties are sometimes a bit like diseases, diseases that we suffer from. And dogs, being dogs, not human, they don't suffer from the

same diseases as us. The disease model of philosophy is associated with Ludwig Wittgenstein. So, you know, dogs get pavo, we don't. We have philosophical worries, dogs don't. And so that was one of the kind of intuitions that drove the writing of the book, I suppose. I was struck by this initially when Everyday Shadow, who was a German shepherd, Shadow and I go for a walk on the canal that runs behind a house. And in the mornings lined up along the bank of the canal will be scores In the mornings, lined up along the back of the canal will be scores of iguanas lined up at fairly regular intervals. Under the shadow, he takes off hundreds of yards north. The iguanas just peel off into the water, swim to the other side, and climb up the other bank and stay there for the rest

of the day. So the very next morning they're back again and Shadowstar begins this process of exiling the iguanas all over again. And it struck me eventually, I mean, it took me a long time, but you know, wheels turn slowly sometimes. And it struck me eventually, this was a bit like the myth of Sisyphus, where Sisyphus was a mortal who offended the gods. The gods punished him by making him roll a large rock up a hill for all eternity. When he gets to the top, the rock slips from his grasp, rolls back down to the bottom, and he has to start all over again. So the idea is if you replace the rock with the iguanas, then you've got pretty much the same sort of situation here.

Now, Sisyphus, when philosophers talk about this myth, he figures in two ways. The first is as the epitome of a meaningless existence. All we've got is just repetitive activity. It aims only at its own repetition. There's nothing that will count as success or failure. So a meaningless existence. But secondly, Sisyphus is also taken as an allegory for human life. We fight our way to work in the morning maybe and then we spend eight hours or so in this place where we do various things with mixed results, probably quite modest results, and results that will soon be wiped away by time's passage. Then we fight our way home again

in the evening, perhaps at home waiting for us to children, perhaps not, you know, but if there are, then in a few years time, they will have grown up and will probably do the same kinds of things that we did. And so every day in our lives seems like one of Sisyphus' steps up the hill. We leave it eventually to our children, but it's the same overall idea. Cheery stuff. Cheery stuff. Yeah. And this is the challenge of Sisyphus then.

Sisyphus's life is meaningless and our lives are recognizably Sisyphean. But it struck me that actually, this again, was I think probably the most significant intuition which guided me writing this book at all was that Shadow was immune to this problem. This was probably the most meaningful part of his day. And so I said, well, I suppose that's right because this was was just an intuition on my part, this is the most part of his day. How would things have to be in order for that to be true? And this basically started the various themes I talk about in the book. Yeah, it's a fascinating way of looking at things. And I do think this is a deep philosophical

question for all of us, or a spiritual question some people would frame it as, but it is in the face of the fact that pretty much everything we do will be erased by the sands of time. And you know, how does anything actually matter within that? And you talk about Socrates in a second way and you say, you know, Socrates supposedly said the unexamined life is not worth living. And then you sort of challenge that idea by saying, well, is a dog's life not worth living? And you come to a very different conclusion. Yeah. Yeah. So I suspect that there are certain aspects of a dog's life that make it just as meaningful and perhaps more meaningful than our lives. But by meaning, I mean, there's two ways. I think what we've got to get clear is what this talk of meaning in life. I mean, when people talk to meaning

in life, they used to think of some kind of external purpose. Let's suppose it was supplied by God. God says, right, you know, this is why I'm creating you humans. This is what you're here for. That's your purpose. It's not meaning in that sense, right, that the book is talking about. It's what some in that sense, right, that the book is talking about. It's what some people call meaning in life rather than meaning of life. But the idea is, what's required for you to experience your life as meaningful? And this is the problem with this, because when you look at our lives from a suitable vantage point, then it seems our lives are going to be meaningless. Why would you think

this repetitive activity that in the end achieves very little or nothing are going to be meaningless. Why would we think this repetitive activity that in the end achieves very little or nothing is going to be the basis of a meaningful life? That then is the basic question. What's required for there to be meaning in life? And dogs differ from us in certain ways. I think the fundamental difference is that dogs have one life and we have two. This results from from developing a capacity or ability that is present in dogs and going to me or not at all. This ability is reflection understood as the ability to think about yourself about what you doing about why doing it, and your life as a whole. Once you have this ability, and I think it's a characteristically human ability, it's not present in other animals.

Put it this way, it's much more present in us than other animals. We're the world heavyweight champions of reflect. Once you have this ability, then your life kind of splits into two. There's the life that you live in the standard way and there is the life that you think about, that you scrutinize, that you evaluate, that you judge, that you agonize over and so on. The road less traveled, for example, is a standard human anxiety. I made this choice, but should I have made this other one? I don't think dogs do that. I picked up this stick on the walk, should I have picked up that other one? I don't think they do that

kind of thing. So, we have two lives because of this ability to reflect. And the dog just has one. I think it's probably more or less inevitable that the dog's going to love his one life more than we love our two lives. Music Sonoro and iHeart's MyCultura Podcast Network present The Set Up, a new romantic comedy podcast starring Harvey Yen and Christian Navarro. The Set Up follows a lonely museum curator searching for love. But when the perfect man walks into his life. Well, I guess I'm saying I like you. You like me?

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Listen to Soul Incarcerated on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Bob Pitman, Chairman and CEO of iHeart Media. I'm excited to share my podcast with you, Math and Magic, Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing. This week, I'm talking to the CEO of Moderna, Stéphane Bancel, about how he led his team through unprecedented times to create, test, and distribute a COVID vaccine all in less than a year. He becomes a human decision to decide to throw by the window your business strategy and to

do what you think is the right thing for the world. Join me as we uncover innovations in data and analytics, the math, and the ever important creative spark, the magic. Listen to Math and Magic, stories from the frontiers of marketing on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. So I want to spend a minute on reflection here, and then I think we should go back to meaning. This ability for reflection, we have Socrates saying, supposedly saying, or coming out of that school of thought, that the examined life is the only life that's worth living. But we have another pillar of Western thought that actually argues kind of the opposite, which is the only life that's worth living. But we have another pillar of Western thought

that actually argues kind of the opposite, which is the biblical story of Adam and Eve and the fall. And you say in the book that you find yourself, strangely enough, siding more with the Adam and Eve view of our ability to have reflection versus the Socrates view. Yes. It did strike me as ironic, you know, someone who spent his life doing philosophy and here I am saying, wait a minute. I mean, one thing we can take away from the story of the fall, you know, and I start the book with Milton's account of Adam and Eve, they become self-aware and consequently very quickly become ashamed, right? If they were a god, then it's pretty clear what his view of reflection would be.

Right. I mean, this is the whole banishment from the Garden of Eden, the angel with a flaming sword to make sure you don't get back in, that kind of thing. So it's clear what his view of reflection would be. I tend to think of stories like this as attempts to say something, not describe something that's literally true, but to say something that's nevertheless important. And I think what's important is that existence is always a game of swings and roundabouts. What you gain from some things, you also inevitably lose.

So reflection has been great for us, it's allowed us to do all the things we've done, dominate the planet, all these sorts of things, in large part because we are reflective creatures. But there are also drawbacks and there are certain things that we've lost because of this ability to reflect. And that's what the book is about, I suppose. I mean, you can see this just from looking at any dog having a remotely good day. They take a sort of joy, a delight in the marginally positive that seems to be beyond us. For example, every day at a certain point in the afternoon, I will go and pick up my

younger son from school. I'll say to Shadow, he's not around so I can say it now without any repercussions, do you want to come with? Then he will explode into a sort of paroxysm of delight, running, jumping on sofas, grabbing his leash and trying to insert his head through the slip knot. He's a smart dog. He's been doing this for years and years. He knows nothing much is going to happen. We're going to get in the car, we're going to drive to the school, we're going to pick up my son, drive back, come back in the house. There's no dog parks, there's no chasing iguanas or any kind of that. At best, it's marginally

positive. Getting out of the house and seeing things as he drives past, this is slightly better, marginally better than being in the house. But he takes such a sort of delight in the marginally positive. This is something that we humans just can't do. No, not very well. As I read your book, I was thinking a lot about, I've done a lot of training in Zen Buddhism. And if I were to summarize what Zen is trying to get at, I think, and certainly what my teacher emphasized was a line that you said, which is basically not being divided, like that your whole being is pointed in a direction and more so that that emerges

somewhat naturally and the Zen idea is if you achieve enough, I don't know what word we want to use, insight, wisdom, that you're now not in this constant self-doubt game, the constant reflecting, weighing everything, right? And your actions emerge out of a place of wholeness and you engage in them in a wholehearted way, which ideally points you closer to where a dog is than where maybe the average anxiety-ridden human is. Right. No, that's very interesting. I wish I knew more about Zen Buddhism. It does sound like the kind of thing I wanted to argue in the book, yeah. Before we dive back into the conversation, let me ask you something.

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getting back on track. I said we would hop back to meaning and here's where I kind of want to hop back because this is the phrase that you used in the book and it was one of the ones that, you know, rang my internal Zen alarm which is that meaning in life arises when what you are and what you do coincide, which is a slightly different way of saying what I just said. Do you see dogs pointing a direction for us in how we actually begin to have who we are and what we do become more together or for us to be less divided. Yes, there's the optimistic me and the pessimistic me and usually the pessimistic me wins. So

the pessimistic me says, no, we can't be dogs. There's no possibility. We're irredeemably banished from the garden because of our capacity to reflect. And so the very best we can do is just what's important to you is dependent on what's necessary. And this is kind of dependent on or indexed to certain things happening in your life, depending on where you are in your life. But there are certain sorts of moments where you can just incorporate a little bit of dog into your life. Here's one example. Again, it's part of the marginal positivity theme, but it's slightly

more grim than the other one. So back in April last year, Shadow and I were out for a run. We were a few miles from home and he gave out a loud shriek and dropped to the ground. His back legs were completely paralyzed. The vet thinks it was a spinal embolism, a stroke, where a bit of cartilage from his spine has somehow worked its way into his blood supply. The blood supply was cut off to the spine and as a result, he was completely paralyzed in his back legs. It lasted five to 10 minutes. I'm not sure of the exact time because I was panicking. But there's one thing he did when he was in that state, which I suspect it'll always stick with me precisely because it's the sort of thing I need now.

When he fell, he was lying in the sun. For a dog in Miami, you don't want to be lying in the sun, really. So what he did, he wouldn't let me help at all because he was very frightened, I think, you know. But he used his front legs to drag himself into the shade, about 20 feet into the shade he did that. I thought this is a fantastic lesson. What's the operating idea? Well, the idea is this is awful, right?

This is absolutely awful what's happened, but at least now in this moment, I'm slightly better off than I was in the moment before. I was talking about what people need at different parts. When you get to a certain age, and I'm there pretty much, you kind of understand your strengths and weaknesses. And so, the overall possible end game start to appear, right? Oh, perhaps this will get me, you know, this is more likely to get me than that. Probably something else might get me, you know, but it's something, you know, you start to see the general outline of the end. And that can be overwhelming.

It's a difficult realization. But one kind of antidote to it is this, well, okay, let's try and make each moment just a little bit better than the one before and then let the end sort of take care of itself eventually. Yeah. I've often said if there was a God and I got a moment with God, after I got through some of the biggest questions, or if I had a wish, I would say, can I just be a dog for like an hour? I just want to know what is it like to be a dog? Because they do operate, it seems, in such a very different place than we do and yet they completely coexist with us. Every

once in a while I'm struck by the strangeness of it. I'm like, this is a completely different species who is my best companion. It's an unusual thing. Yeah, it certainly is. And I don't know how we manage it and I don't know how they manage it, really. It all depends on similarity and difference and what's driving everything. Is it because they're so similar to us that we can be best friends with them? Or is it precisely because they're different from us that they supply something that's missing that we can be best friends with? Maybe it's a bit of both, I don't know. Yeah, I think it probably is a bit of both. But I do think, you know, pointing to their

being natural philosophers and not being reflective, it's one thing I can say is that my relationships with my dogs feel very straightforward. I lost my baby about a year and a half, two years, I don't know. I think it's actually been just about two years, a little over. And it's interesting, like grieving a dog for me has been a different experience because it's very straightforward. It's very sad. There's a lot of grief, but there's not a lot of complicated feelings around like, did we say the right things to each other? Should we have done more of this? You know, it's

just simple. But our human relationships are not that way. Even really good ones are not simple in that way. And so I think that's one of the things about dogs that I love is that the relationship with them seems very simple. But you say something in the book early on and then you come back to it much later. And I think it's sort of the core argument, ultimately. And you say the more love there is in a life, whether through relationships, passions or experiences, the more meaning that life contains. And that's the language dogs are speaking. Say more about that.

Yes. So the book was, on one level at least, it was a sort of extended exploration of the idea of meaning in life. And the conclusion I arrived at, spoiler alert, was what meaning is when happiness erupts or is a direct expression of what you are. I imagine the case of Sisyphus who was happy because the gods decided to be a little bit more merciful. So the rock, the hill, all non-negotiable, they kept that. But what they did, they messed with his head to make him like doing this. So, he loved nothing more than rolling rocks up hills.

I don't think that's a good way of thinking about meaning. And if that's right, it shows that meaning is not simply the same thing as happiness. So, happy Sisyphus is also a deluded dupe or stooge of the gods. The reason this is not meaningful is that his happiness is not an expression of who he is. The gods have messed around with him and that's where the happiness is coming from. It's not an expression of who he is. I argue in the book that meaning in life exists wherever happiness is an expression of an individual. When Shadow is chasing the iguanas along the canal, this is an expression of an individual. So when Shadow is chasing the iguanas along the canal, this is an expression of what he is. I mean, because of his nature, the generations,

the history that have gone into making him, this happiness he seems to exude when he's doing this is an expression of who he is, where who he is has been determined or shaped or influenced by his history. Wherever you have this eruption of happiness that stems from your nature, I think that's what meaning Sonoro and I Hearts My Kultura podcast network present The Set Up, a new romantic comedy podcast starring Harvey Guillen and Christian Navarro. The Set Up follows a lonely museum curator searching for love. But when the perfect man walks into his life. Well, I guess I'm saying I like you. You like me?

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Okay, we're rolling. One, two, three, four. I'm Jamie Petrus, music and culture writer. For the past five years, I've been talking to the band's three surviving members. They're out of prison now and in their 70s. Their past behind them. But they also have some unfinished business.

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Hi, I'm Bob Pitman, Chairman and CEO of iHeart Media. I'm excited to share my podcast with you, Math and Magic, Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing. This week, I'm talking to the CEO of Moderna, Stephane Bancel, about how he led his team through unprecedented times to create, test, and distribute a COVID vaccine all in less than a year. He becomes a human decision to decide to throw by the window your business strategy

and to do what you think is the right thing for the world. Join me as we uncover innovations in data and analytics, the math and the ever important creative spark, the magic. Listen to Math and Magic, stories from the frontiers of marketing on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. You're positing that meaning comes together when both happiness and that happiness emerging naturally from your nature is together. To tweeze this apart, you gave the example of happiness that you think is meaningless, which is the equivalent of somebody messes with your brain to make you happy. Someone comes into my brain, puts an electrode in that just keeps hitting the

happiness button. And that's not particularly meaningful. I will be happy. And whether I would choose to do that or not, I might. I'm not sure on this question, depending on the day, but it's not meaningful. But we also see people who appear to be acting out of their nature. Like when I was an addict, I was on some level acting out of what my nature was at that moment, right? Yeah. Now again, this would get into the question of what's my true nature? What's my condition nature? What's my wounded nature? But I wouldn't argue in any way shape or form that that was a meaningful life.

I really think your definition is really interesting. I often think about meaning in this way. It is a non-intellectual way of doing it, which is that if you and I were to engage in a debate right now about whether one dog getting run over by a car is an important thing. I mean, some part of me would be like, well, yeah, but then you'd go, but look, there's billions of dogs on the planet. There's always been billions of dogs. We've got more dogs than we need. Like, this is trivial. This is not a big deal in the grand scheme of things intellectually. And I can't best that

argument. Ultimately, I kind of have to be like, well, yeah, I guess really it doesn't. But if I walked outside right now and I saw a dog that argument. Ultimately, I kind of have to be like, well, yeah, I guess really it doesn't. But if I walked outside right now and I saw a dog that had been hit by a car laying in front of me, you couldn't talk me out of believing that me taking care of that dog was the most important thing. And so I think that's pointing at what you're talking about, where the meaning is emerging from who I am, not from my intellect. Right. I think the problem for we humans, right, is that there is such a thing as who I am, as who you are, but it's a lot more slippery, it's a lot more attenuated than it is in the

case of animals. Because we're always these two different things. I think you articulated what these are very, very nicely actually. On the one hand, we're creatures who can take the big picture, right? And from this perspective, the medieval philosophers used to call it perspective of eternity, subspeciae eternitatis. From this perspective, you and I were just insignificant extras in this whole cosmic play. You and I were both sort of

unremarkable people living unremarkable lives, just like everybody else. And so when we die, well, that's just one death amongst sort of billions. What does it matter? So that's the view from the outside, if you like. But the view from the inside was no, life matters. We're hubs of meaningfulness, significance, all these sorts of things. And the case of the dog that you described is the difference between taking an outside view of it's just one more dog. You can take exactly the same sort of view of human beings, just one more dog. But there's a view from the inside. And then from the inside, things matter in a way they can't matter from the outside. So the reason we're so confused,

I think, is because this was a point made by the philosopher Thomas Nagel a long time ago, 50 years ago now. We know both of these views can't be true, right? Either we're significant or we're not. We can't be both. So these views can't both be true. But it seems to us strongly that both of them are true and therefore we can't both be true. But it seems to us strongly that both of them are true. And therefore, we can't find a way, respectable way of abandoning either one. This is another area where Zen is interesting, because Zen talks a lot about this idea of the relative and the absolute. The absolute would be sort of that, that big view of everything. It's just all dust in the wind to quote another thing, right? But Zen would posit there's actually a beauty and a freedom to be found in that. It also talks about

the relative, which is our day-to-day lives as we experience them and live them. And Zen makes the point of they actually believe they are both true and they are both actually different sides of the same coin and that to be able to move back and forth between them fluidly is an attribute. Be able to take both those perspectives, the big perspective, which is like, well, you know, we're all going to die and the earth's going to get engulfed by the sun at some point. So literally how this interview with Mark is going is completely unimportant. And at the exact same moment, it's important to me, it's important to you, hopefully somebody listening it's important to and it feels that way. So it seems like maybe philosophers don't like

that kind of answer because it feels like a cheat. I think they would like that kind of answer is finding a way to live the answers. It's always difficult to explain why two sides of the same coin, but what exactly does that mean? Yeah, yeah, totally, totally. So I can see the value of the attempt. Yeah, this is what the human condition is. Because we're reflective creatures, because we're such creatures, we have these two different views. They're very difficult to reconcile. But the key to living is to try and find a way of reconciling them.

Right. Dogs don't have that problem because they just have one view. Do you think that reflection has become more ingrained in us as time has gone on? Because certainly we can look back to your reference in the medieval period and we could say that from what we know, most people believed a certain set of things and didn't spend a whole lot of time debating whether those things were true. They weren't about trying to live them. But today we live in a very different world where I would say that the average person, I'm not going gonna say average person, there are a whole lot of people who don't know what to believe or what they believe, which opens up an existential crisis of meaning because I can't say that life means this because God said it means this, right? And so have we become more reflective? Have we just had more ideas dropped into our space? Like, how do you think about that? I'm one of those people that I don't really know

what I'm thinking until I write it down. That's why I became a writer, basically. I wanted to know what it is I was thinking. I think the ability to put things in a stable external form, writing is a sort of obvious example, expands our capacities to reflect on ourselves because most obviously we can remember what we were thinking about ourselves yesterday and then

we can add things to it and so on and so on. I think probably external systems of information storage where the information can be about ourselves as well as other things enhances our ability to reflect. That would be a difference between us and the Middle Ages where people's grasp of writing be about ourselves as well as other things, enhances our ability to reflect. So that would be a difference between us and the Middle Ages where people's grasp of writing was a lot less. Yep. So ultimately, I think that you arrived in a place where you felt that the meaning of life that dogs arrive at is that love is really the thing. So share with me a little bit more

about coming to that and how you think about it and how you try and bring that into your own life. When I see Shadow chasing the iguanas up and down the canal, he loves what he's doing in a way that's very, very difficult for me to replicate, to generate that level of delight. It's something he does every day, routinely. That's love. It's the love of what you do and thereby the love of life. So whenever this kind of love erupts from you is an expression of what you are, that I think is where we find meaning in life. And that's ultimately the connection between meaning and love. It doesn't necessarily

mean love of others. That's certainly part of it, but it's the love of life where life is a series of things you do. Before we wrap up, I want you to think about this. Have you ever ended the day feeling like your choices didn't quite match the person you wanted to be? Maybe it was autopilot mode or self-doubt that made it harder to stick to your goals. And that's exactly why I created the 6 Saboteurs of Self-Control. It's a free guide to help you recognize the hidden patterns that hold you back and give you simple, effective strategies to break through them.

If you're ready to take back control and start making lasting changes, download your copy now at OneUFeed.net slash ebook. Let's make those shifts happen starting today. OneYouFeed.net slash ebook. Having that realization and seeing that in shadow, how have you found ways to bring that into your life? I mean, again, knowing you're not going to be shadow, right? What's sort of one thing you do that helps you get closer to that?

I try to find periods of time in any week, say, where I will find things that I love doing and do just because I love doing them. Because the guiding thought is that if you think of work, right, as an activity that you do for something else, you work because you want to get paid, right? So, that's an activity that has an external reward. I mean, what dogs are really, really good at is picking up on the things that have internal rewards, where the reward is the activity itself. And the way we live, many of us, our lives are kind of outposts of our work. Our lives are dominated by activity where we're doing something in order to get something else. So I think that probably one of the keys to a happy life, and this is something

I've learned from dogs over the years, is to try and find ways. What we're talking about is playing. It's play, right? Where play is activity whose reward is internal to the activity itself. The more you can bring little bits of this into your life, the less your life becomes dominated by work, I think probably the happier and more meaningful your life would be. Or to the extent that you can internalize what you're doing for work and do it out of a different place. That's kind of the ultimate, right? And again, a lot of people don't have that luxury. I think it is a luxury. No, exactly. No.

But I think there are always ways to imbue what we do with a slightly different spirit. Back to Zen, right? One of the things we do in Zen is called work practice where you do something like washing the dishes or sweeping the floor, but you try and do it with single-pointed attention. Those things actually can go from being rote and tedious to kind of enjoyable when you orient that way. Yeah, put it in the terms I sort of define then that what you're doing is converting what ordinarily would be work into play. Yes. That's, I think, what we should try and do. Mark, that's a beautiful place to wrap up. I really enjoyed your book and we'll have links in the show notes to where listeners can get it. And thank you for joining us.

Thank you. It was a great pleasure. Thank you very much for inviting me. Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought-provoking, I'd love for you to share it with a friend. Sharing from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don't have a big budget, and I'm certainly not a celebrity, but we have something even

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and promises to make all my dreams come true. Let's not forget that David Blum was a professional con artist. So you didn't stand a chance. But my dreams soon turned into a nightmare. I'm Caroline D'amore. Listen as I take down my scammer on Once Upon a Con on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey sis, it's Dr. Joy from Therapy for Black Girls. We've had 400 episodes of conversations, growth, and healing. So we're celebrating. Join us for a special episode with internationally recognized yogi Chelsea Jackson Roberts as she shares wisdom on mindfulness, movement, and motherhood. I waited later to have children and I still have exactly what I knew that I wanted. You don't want to miss this special episode. Listen to Therapy for Black Girls on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Reality TV and social media have love all wrong. So what really makes relationships last? On this episode of Dope Labs, poet and relationship expert Young Pueblo breaks down the psychology of love and provides eye-opening insights and advice we all need. You should not be postponing your happiness.

Your greatest happiness is not necessarily going to come from a relationship. Your partner should add to your happiness, but your happiness is really coming from within you. Listen to Dope Labs on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.