Discovering The Formula For True Happiness | Max Joseph (Pt. 2)

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2:01Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are and also to find peace and wisdom in their actual lives. But first, we've got a quick message from one of our sponsors.

2:50Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I think this is the first intro I've recorded since I got the news. I took my kids to jujitsu last week. I'm sitting there on the couch watching them roll around and wrestle, and my phone starts blowing up a little bit and uh i didn't want to check it yet i wanted to be present for that i uh i drove them we switched with my wife i got him in the office and uh i'll play you a clip of that conversation right now ryan congratulations well what's the what's the word your number one new york times number one new york times advice ahead of all other books no way doesn't get any better than that no it doesn't It doesn't.

3:38This is number two, right? This is the second time? You've had several number ones, but I guess, what, in the series, this is the first time. No, no, I mean, so still this hit number one, and then this is the second number one New York Times. I don't think I've hit it any other times, because for discipline, it was number two, right? Yes, I think that's correct. Oh, man. There's something about hitting a target as a byproduct of doing what you were trying to do as opposed to aiming at said thing. Like, this is nice, but not the main goal. The main goal was to do the book and to get it to people, and then this is a byproduct.

4:18You know, you did brilliantly with the book. Connecting with the audience, I think the way you put it forward, people are really engaging in. So this doesn't get old, my friend. No, no. Congratulations to you. You know, after Belichick won his first Super Bowl, someone said, you know, what do we do next? And he said, we win more of them. And I don't know if that's exactly the right vibe, but I'm going to go work on the wisdom book a little bit as a celebration. Absolutely. So enjoy, and you're really a bright light in the world of publishing now, everybody thinks this book is timely and they're really excited for you.

5:05Oh, that's amazing. All right. Well, Steve, thank you for everything that you've done and for making it happen. And as I was saying, when we had dinner, I don't think either of us would have guessed this 13 years ago. It's been a marvelous journey and we're just getting started. All right. Thanks. Talk soon. Have a good night. So anyways, I wanted to say thank you to everyone who made that possible. Thanks to all of you who pre-ordered the book. Thank you to everyone at The Painted Porch and Penguin Random House, our warehouse in Illinois, my wife, my family, everyone who's a part of Brass Check and Daily Stoic for getting the books out there.

5:41Thank you for physically packaging and mailing all of those books. Thank you, all of you who ordered it, of course. And thanks to everyone who's reading it. I hope you love the book. I was really proud of it. And this is something that makes me happy. I try not to let external things determine whether I'm happy or not. But it's funny. I was watching Max Joseph. That's my guest of today's episode. I was watching his amazing documentary on happiness. And he has this theory that like sort of happiness is these buckets and like sort of crushing it at work is one of those buckets. Personal relationships is one.

6:19Health is one. It's a fascinating documentary that I really, really enjoyed. It's totally free on YouTube. Here's a little clip of that, which I'll play. It's no secret that everyone's struggling with their mental health. U.S. Surgeon General has called it an urgent public health crisis. So I'm setting off on a journey around the world and through the mysteries of science. It's a really powerful fMRI machine. To seek out world experts. The Times call me probably the happiest man in the world. That's a big cross to bear. And figure out once and for all what happiness is all about. I'm on the pursuit of happiness and I know that I'll be mine once again.

7:01I'll be good. The pursuit of happiness. So anyways, Max Joseph, awesome documentarian. He's got a great documentary that has Robert Greene in it that you can watch. He's in that famous Make It Count video that my friend Casey Neistat did. and you can also see him in the show Catfish, the first several seasons. Just an overall awesome dude who I was really excited to have on the podcast. I wanted to go to a screening of the doc at my friend Tim Urban's house, but I wasn't able to make it. So instead he and I had this two-parter conversation, which I am excited to bring to you now. Again, thanks to everyone who bought the new book.

7:41If you haven't bought it yet, you can still grab it. The bonuses are at dailystoic.com slash justice. Anyways, I hope everyone's well and I'm going to celebrate a little bit and then I'm back to work on the new book.

8:04You have this great graphic in the happiness doc of like the seven, what are they? Six neurotransmitter. What are they? Are those beakers? No, test tubes. Yeah, you illustrated this test tubes, but I've got to imagine that was a moment where you're like, oh, that's kind of the narrative device of the concept. And that's your way. Basically, you got this guy on camera, and he probably explained to you a theory using a metaphor. And you're like, oh, there we go. Yeah. I mean, when you're interviewing specialists or experts, they're coming at you with a bunch of metaphors. They've done all the hard work.

8:39I mean, I am not an expert. I'm a tourist. Sure. And I get to I mean, that's what I love about making doc stuff is I get to kind of immerse in a particular topic for, you know, a couple of years and meet people and kind of cherry pick, you know, ideas and stuff. And then and then I get to synthesize them without the pretension, without having to assume the pretension of being an expert myself. Yes. And so I'm both like shielded from like, well, they're not my theories. I'm just explaining it. I'm, you know, there's a kind of Promethean or Robin Hood feeling of I'm stealing from the rich to give to the poor.

9:23But there's this moment where you're like, oh, this is my way in. Usually when I'm doing my sort of research, I'm like, here are the themes that I want to talk about. And it's when I come up with the story that captures that thing that's really exciting. And then it's extra exciting when I go, I think there's, you know, like I'm vaguely remembering or I have this sense like this person from what I know of like their history would be good. And then you get into the material and you're like, holy fuck, it's like way better than I thought. Like it perfectly makes my argument. And I bet you had that where you're like, I want to interview this person.

9:58And there's this whole process by which you're getting them to agree. You're scheduling. They're sitting down. You're blocking the shots. Then you start to ask the questions and there's this warm up and then there's the moment where they tell you more than you could have hoped to hear from them. That's probably what keeps you going, right? Definitely. Yeah. I mean, that happened on bookstores. And in fact, it kind of happens with all of these. Like the front section of each of these docs I've been making, like the bookstore one, I was in Seattle for a wedding and I went to Elliott Bay bookstore and I had my camera and my tripod because I knew I wanted my plan was to make just a two minute film about why I like bookstores.

10:45Yeah, that was it. Sure. It was not ambitious. And I was just because I was so overloaded. Anytime I go into a bookstore, even your bookstore right now, I'm like, I have this urge to capture what's so beautiful about it. And so I got that footage and then I went home and I started editing it. And as I'm editing it together, I'm like, this is flat. Like, where is this going? Like, this is nothing. Yeah. This is just literally just like shots of bookstores. But what what am I getting? Like, what is the feeling? Like, why did I feel the need to do this? And then I started to unpack the, oh, it's kind of the overwhelming anxiety of seeing all this beautiful stuff.

11:29I'm looking at these books behind you. You know there's good shit in there. Yeah. And there's this urge. There's both an excitement and an anxiety that I'm, an excitement to consume it all, but an anxiety that I won't be able to. And then I was like, what is that about? And then I was like, oh, my God, this is not a two minute video. This is like this is a much deeper, bigger exploration. And, you know, that front part of these videos is kind of like where I start. Yeah, sure. And then, yeah, with this happiness thing, I've been blessed in a lot of ways. I have a lot of things that I should be happy about every day that should fill my my cup, so to speak, the metaphorical cup.

12:11and that cup seems to have a hole at the bottom of it, right? Like I have an amazing wife. I have a great dog. I've been able to, you know, eke out a career doing what I love. And it's not enough. It's not enough. Sure. And I want more. Yeah, the fundamental human drive, which is that we always think if I get this thing, then I'll be good. And it's never been good for anyone. Although we do suspect for other people, they are like, oh, it's because I'm just not at the right level. And then it's good. Right. I could be like so-and-so, I would be good. Right. If these three things happened, then I could rest easy at night and feel satisfied in my soul.

12:56But what you learn by just talking to people who have climbed those mountains is like they're no less restless than they were before. yes that drive is is constant yes and so that hole that's in and i say the hole in my heart like what's that about right and and so that was kind of the the starting point it's and i also know that there's something there because i talk to friends and stuff about it and they're like i feel i feel the same way and no one's like i'm so happy everything's working i'm so satisfied life is so great i just and anyone who does say that i'm kind of like you're you're full of shit when And you also, when you read history, you go, you're like, why were these great people so miserable?

13:42And was the misery the driver of the greatness? You know, there's a Stefan Zweig quote. He's this novelist who also wrote these great biographies. And I think he was talking about Magellan. And he said, he also wrote this book called The World of Yesterday, which is about Europe right before World War I breaks out. But he goes, never in the history of humanity has a conqueror been surfeited by conquests. like never has the conqueror gotten there and been like yes i knew it would do it for you know it just doesn't happen we the thing moves right and yeah i thought that was very striking about the intro i was curious too uh because you you have been very successful in what you do but i think we show this like you have this thing that you think is going to be your big thing you have that movie you think it's going to be going to do everything for you and then it doesn't hit the way that you want it to hit.

14:34And then you have this choice. We all have this choice where you go, okay, if it had done what I wanted, then I would have been happy. Or you can go, oh, it was never going to give me what I needed. And I think conversely, people who do get it still face the same choice, right? Because it doesn't do it for them. And they go, it's because I need to do more or it's because it was never going to do it for me. So life is constantly like trying to get us to have this understanding that you're never going to fix internal stuff with external accomplishments. And then we have this magical ability to just like misread what the lesson is and then just keep doing the same thing over and over again.

15:15Yeah, I mean, totally. I do feel like if that movie had done well, I certainly would have had an easier mental health journey for the last nine years. But maybe not. Like, we acclimate to good things really, like, really quickly. And we dwell on negative things for a long time, right? And somewhere in there is like the lessons of grit and resilience and all that stuff. Like, don't dwell on your failures so much that like you can't, you know, move on or try again. But don't ignore them entirely so that you don't study what went wrong. And you could have had that exact experience that the guy in your doc has.

16:04I'm forgetting the doctor's name. Yeah, Axel Bouchon. Yeah, where he's like calls his wife to tell her the huge news. And she's like, I'm out. Like, I'm leaving you. That happened. I mean, like I was making Catfish and doing making We Are Your Friends at the same time. And it was intense. Like, I had no time for anything. In fact, we were on the road. I was editing on my laptop. I would like we would shoot during the day and then I would edit at night. I would sleep for like three hours and then we would shoot again. And I was like coming apart at the seams. and then I finally finished the movie and I was like, oh, here it is, deliverance, finally.

16:45I can sleep, redemption. And my wife was pretty upset that I had basically not been around. These are finite wells that you're tapping. Right. And then the movie didn't do well. So it's like that didn't pay off. Yeah. And then the, so then the time. And then you're like, now I need you to support me as I pick up the pieces of my broken psyche. It's like, what? No, you used it all up over here. Right, yeah, I used up all my credits. And yeah, and then you're like, well, what really matters, right? Like, we're always, we are walking around. And I think we are in America in particular, like we're caught in a bind, right?

17:27We're smart enough and we're educated enough and we consume enough information to know that there is like a better way to be living our lives. But we're also so immersed in the waters. We've grown up in the waters of achievement and like - And we're competing with other people. Yeah. Competition and accomplishment-based self-worth. Yes. Which is kind of the fundamental problem that I have and that I imagine a lot of people have. It's Like, yes, we are the sum of our accomplishments. And like, yeah, you go to school for like, you know, you go through 20 years of schooling or something to get you to like, okay, then you graduate and it's like time to achieve, baby.

18:17Like now you're in it now. We gave you everything. Yeah, what kind of car do you drive? Yeah. Like how big is your house, you know? Or it's not, it doesn't have to be monetary. It could just be like, you know, how many books have you published on this subject? How well are you respected in your field? Like your field might not be a well-paying field. And in fact, I found that like documentary filmmaking is not a particularly well-paying field, that it makes the people in it like that much more competitive. Like the laurels are like people will stab you in the back even harder and faster. Yeah, because the pie is so much smaller.

18:58And it's still relative, right? So even if like, look, if you play in the NBA, you're measuring who is the best in terms of hundreds of millions of dollars. But if you're in academia, you're measuring it in terms of thousands of dollars or how many assistants you have. But you're still measuring, right? And you're still going, yeah, they don't have a 5 ,000 or 50 ,000 square foot mansion, but you still go, well, their apartment is nicer than mine, you know, or whatever. They drive a nice—you're still—humans inevitably find some way to turn everything into a status competition. That's what we do.

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21:40So my wife is Brazilian. And so I go down to Brazil a lot and I go to parties and get togethers and no one is talking about work. Yeah. No one's asking me, what do you do? I mean, like, I'll bring it up because that's all I have to talk about. I don't have your personality. I don't have anything else. I'm kind of dying for someone to be like, tell me about that last project you did. Yeah, it's like I have to compete. Here's a regular person. You know, like, fuck. I got nothing. I don't have any hobbies. I've optimized my whole life around achieving in this one. I mean, like, I don't I'm not even a sports fan.

22:22Like that would at least give me something to talk about beyond. You got to really get into coffee or something. Right. You know, I started surfing, but by the way, I'm like, I suck. So it's like, I can't, I'm not very good. So it's, you don't want to bring up things that you're not that good at, but it's nice to be in a culture where your value is not just tied to like, well, what did you do in the last two years? And like, and like, how relevant are you? And it's just the inherent value of just you as a human being. It's like not a human doing. I just like you. You give off a good vibe and you ask good questions and I like talking to you.

23:01And I'm not saying Brazil has it all figured out. They got their own set of problems. You don't live there. You could, but you don't. No, and it's easy to romanticize a place that you visit once in a while. But different places have different sets of problems. And our problem in the U.S., and unfortunately, because we are such an exporter of culture, Like we are the only thing we do. Yeah. We are marketing and exporting our problem everywhere. Yeah. The thing where you're often like the thing that you're most unbalanced about is the thing you you have the excess of. Right. You're so you're exporting.

23:33It's like I thought the most powerful part of the metaphor that you have in the thing, which which really stopped me cold because I think it's a tendency we have. So like I don't think it's a controversial argument. Right. To go like, OK, there's these different buckets or different beakers or whatever you want to call that you have to fill up to be happy, right? And obviously, career and success is one, pleasure is one, whatever. But you go, there's no evidence that shows that a surplus in one can fill up the other or compensate for the other. So what tends to happen is you're good or successful at the thing you have the abundance of, right?

24:08And so you just do more and more and more of that, trying to fill these other right buckets or holes and and it's it's not only not working it can actually suck the joy and meaning out of the the the singular thing right so the workaholic just is alienating the family and so they're just well work's the only thing that makes sense so they're working and they're sucking the joy out of the work strain as they're so yeah empty everywhere else i can like describe the do you want yeah so yeah they're essentially and this is not like i didn't come up with this science. I'm reporting on it. But basically, there are six neurotransmitters that represent our positive reward systems.

24:50In different combinations, they represent all of our positive emotions. And they evolved in a specific order. There's dopamine, which has allowed us to be motivated to find food. That came first. Then there's testosterone, which helped with you know, reproduction, right? So you need dopamine for finding food. You need testosterone to reproduce. Then there was serotonin, which is like recognition and it's pride, which helps in reproduction. And you're the best food gatherer. Right, right. It's like, yeah, someone thinks I'm the best or like you're being chosen or you're choosing someone else based on how good they are at a certain thing.

25:36So that's serotonin. It's recognition. Then there's oxytocin, which is you're having these kids. You need to basically be able to. It's like family and connection. You need to take care of them. You need to love them in order to, you know, human children need 18 years before their brains are formed. We need a drug or a neurotransmitter to help us take care of our kids. Then there's cannabinoids. So whereas oxytocin is like family love, cannabinoids is friendship love. And that then, you know, that comes hand in hand with community, with cooperation, working together. Without cannabinoids, that's not possible.

26:16And then there's opioids. Opioids is like pleasure and gratitude. So you have these six neurotransmitters. And the thing is, is that you can't fill one up so much that it then fills up the other, the others. So this even goes to like if you're taking an SSRI. Yeah. Like, you know, I take. You still got to exercise. You can't be you got to go out and see human beings. You can't take so much Zoloft that it fills up your six buckets. Zoloft is only going to fill up your serotonin bucket. Yeah. And sure, it might it might fill all the way up to the top, but you still have other buckets you need to fill.

27:01Yeah. Same thing with making money and success. Money and success are tied to dopamine and serotonin. So we're kind of like stuck, at least I am, but I think a lot of people are stuck in this like we just are we're just chasing dopamine and serotonin, dopamine and serotonin. And we're ignoring cannabinoids, oxytocin, opioids and testosterone. If you're a sex addict, then you're just hammering on on testosterone and you're ignoring the others. So, you know, it's the key. The key is balance, right? Which is such a cliche, but at least like you can see what the things you need to balance are. Well, so the Stoic virtues are courage, justice, wisdom, and then the middle one is temperance.

27:50So it's funny, like when I talk to people about it, I usually render that as discipline because that's like what people want more of, right? It's the more palatable way into that. But temperance, the idea of balance, the right amount of things, the other word for this is sofrosine, like the knowledge of what the right amount of a thing is, like what are the things worth having and then what's the right amount of those things that's really like the key balance we don't spend a lot of time talking with people about it teaching people about it and the problem is as you said a lot of our heroes are fundamentally like imbalanced in those things that's why they became heroic at that thing you don't become the greatest football player in the world or the richest person in the world because you're balanced out no you you decided fuck the other neurotransmitters, this is the only one that matters.

28:39And then people look at that and they go, oh, I'll do what that person's doing. And you're just mimicking a fundamentally unbalanced person. Right. And the further we get in history, the more imbalanced they get. There was a moment in the Renaissance where they were looking back at the Stoics, where Leonardo is all of them at once. You know, that is, he's an artist and a scientist. And there is something to that for sure. But what I actually found interesting, and they're going to come out and they're not going to have numbers, but it's in the philosophy episode. So each episode - Is that the one I saw?

29:16Yeah. Okay. The first episode that came out is on, is the science of happiness, neuroscience. Then there's an episode on the philosophy, the philosophies of happiness. And what I actually like kind of didn't fully realize or appreciate is that so much of our conceptions of well-being and happiness and even Maslow's pyramid and hierarchy and all that stuff, he never said pyramid. Even though we show it as a pyramid, he actually never said that. It's all individual based. Right. Even Aristotle's treatise, it's all about how to become the best person. And it gives short shrift, or at least we don't put the emphasis on the serving of the community.

30:05Like how much our happiness is actually tied up in being one of a group of people. Yes. And I think especially here in the West and certainly in America with our foundational myth of the rugged individual, like there's this I'm going to become self-sufficient, right, or self-reliance, Emerson, right? I'm going to become so self-reliant and self-sufficient that I can say, fuck you to everyone else. I can do my thing. I'm going to become self-actualized. And then I'm going to, you know, I'm going to stand on top of that mountain. But what's so amazing about Emerson, the irony of Emerson, so he writes this thing on self-reliance.

30:43He's like the most generous person of all time. Like Whitman doesn't have a career without Emerson, Melville and Hawthorne. And he creates this scene. And the scene is like, he had a rich spouse and he had invested well. He was like this guy, his cup runneth over and he shared, you know, and he was this. And then I think obviously one of the benefits of art is that, although artists tend to be selfish people, is there is something generous about it, right? You're making this thing for other people. You're sharing what you know and what you care about. And there's something – I love the irony of Emerson being this incredibly generous person with this awesome coaching tree of all these other artists coming off it.

31:28And so, yeah, it's funny. We tend to – we look at these philosophies. We look at stoicism also as this individualistic philosophy of self-mastery. And then what did all of them do? Like they entered politics where they like in politics, not in the, I'm going to be the most powerful man in the world politics, but they're like, no, no, no, your duty is to serve. Right. And you have to participate. You can't withdraw from the world. And to me, that's where that other virtue of stoicism comes in, the idea of justice. There's this beautiful image in stoicism. They say, so you're born self-interested.

32:00So these are called the circles of hierocles. So you're born inherently self-interested as a baby. You're just like, gimme, gimme, gimme. You care about yourself. Then you care about your mom because you can't survive without your mom. Then your dad and then your family. You get these circles that come around you of people and things that you care about. And then ultimately, there's the biggest circle, which is just like the future of humanity or animals, plants, the environment. And he basically says that the work of philosophy is to pull the outer rings inwards. And when I was watching your doc, the sort of we-ness or the all-ness of where philosophy is supposed to get you.

32:37And by the way, where religion is also supposed to get you. Like how you treat the least of my brethren is how you treat me. We are attracted to philosophy and religion because we think it'll help us with our problems. So we have these blinders on. We don't see that the fundamental message of all of the schools is to stop caring about yourself and to care about other people. This is also in 12 step, right? It's like you come there because you have a problem. They tell you, we can help you with your problem. And they're like, but by the way, you have to accept the acknowledge the existence of a higher power.

33:08And then you have to start being of service. Like that's the fundamental pivot of all of it. It's like, I can solve your problems by you thinking about your problems less. Right. Well, you're theoretically supposed to like kind of figure out the deficit. You're supposed to get through your problems. But then once you're through your problems, there's a whole other structure above that, even in Maslow's hierarchy. Right. Like the first two rungs at the bottom are deficits. Right. It's like you need roof over your head. You need like a house for protection. Conquer nature. And then but then once you're there, then it's about building on top of that.

33:44And like what's interesting about the neuroscience of happiness and and what's also crazy about it, because Axel is like breaking new ground. There's a lot that's being done now with F MRIs, like with high Tesla numbers that allow you to really look in real time at what's going on in the brain, brain activity when you, you know, with different prompts. And it like his argument, which is really fascinating, is that like the brain evolved with an architecture that points in a very specific direction. Like if these six neurotransmitters are basically the reward system we have in our brain, then all we need to do is follow them.

34:28Yeah. Instead of just following the cultural mandate of our respective cultures in America, it's money, success, and being respected in your field. If it's more just like, oh, it's figuring out which of these – which things in your life fill up your six buckets. And that if you followed that, then you get there. And of course, those six buckets are totally tied to Aristotle's hedonism and eudaimonia. But it's like hedonism becomes hanging out with friends, laughing, enjoying. It's not orgies and opium. Right, right. Exactly. It's like it's much more pedestrian and quotidian. And then on the other, the eudaimonia, which is like your purpose.

35:17And I think that we overdo purpose, like, or we misinterpret it. I personally, I'm just talking about myself, like, what is my, is my purpose to be a filmmaker? Is it to like, am I doing it right? Am I serving? Am I following my passion into like, purpose is great and all, but like, you can't go full, you can't just go full on purpose. Or we have to, because I'm thinking about this for the book I'm going to do. it's like we take this idea of like purpose. So if he's defining happiness as human flourishing, which I think is better, right? Because happiness is a problematic word because we think that's like laughing and having fun or something.

35:57But we take it as human flourishing. Then yeah, the problem is our Western understanding of flourishing being like very successful master of your universe, right? But if you take human flourishing more as being like a great well-rounded human being, like if I told you this person is the greatest ever at what they do, but they have neglected their family, they're a dick to people they pass on the street, you'd be like, there's a deficiency there that's marring the beauty of the flourishing, or you could say that's not flourishing because you're so bad in this other area, right? And so if we take a human as being this person who, yeah, a certain amount of mastery, but then also a certain amount of positive contributions to humanity, what is their role as a daughter or husband or wife or mother or father, you know, you can't read the Greeks and not hear them really talk about a lot about your role and obligations as a citizen, right?

36:53Because the city was so much smaller, everyone had to like pitch in in a way that now you ask someone what your responsibilities are as a citizen, they're like, well, maybe voting. And by the way, only 50 % of us do that. But the idea that you have to, you are obligated to contribute and that that's showing up at a city council meeting or picking up a tree that fell across the road, that this is also human flourishing. I think if we see it more as you do in the doc of this, these different buckets we're filling, that you can't be flourishing if you're woefully deficient in any of the things, then maybe we get it closer to what they meant.

37:33Totally. Yeah. I mean, flourishing, it's a great word. It is vague and leaves a lot of room for interpretation. And like you could say, well, financially flourishing and charity and like I'm working on a thing about democracy now. Yeah. Like kind of like happiness, but about democracy and these questions of participation, you know, serving duty like service. It's it's not something like what is our obligation as citizens? You know, I donate money. Right. They had a much more expansive role of how this thing was going to work. And it's funny, I have a quote in the new book from Pericles where he's saying like, one person's disengagement is only possible by someone else's increased engagement.

38:19And so there's also this thing by not doing your duty, you're actually ceding the fields to the people you don't want to be participating. You know what I mean? I don't just mean people who disagree with you. But like, if the system is not filled by people who are relatively well-rounded and They've been successful in other ways. They're, you know, they've got a family and they've got this. What you're doing is you're basically like the most ambitious monsters, fame-hungry, like sociopathic individuals. They just fill that space.

39:05we've got you covered how about card readers you can rely on anywhere you sell thanks have a good one yep that too want one place to manage all your online and in-person sales that's kind of our thing wherever you sell businesses that grow grow with shopify sign up for your one dollar a month trial at shopify.com slash listen shopify.com slash listen again with brazil there's an interesting comparison because they have mandatory voting that doesn't seem to have solved anything no well because mandatory voting where you have a lot of uneducated electorate and and high levels of poverty like becomes a worse problem like but we should have mandatory voting yes like but we also in order to have in order for mandatory voting to work you need otherwise you just have a mob that you can whip up right so you need you need better education too like you can't have you can't have voting and participation without education and like ideally without moral education right like values these these courage temperance justice like you know uh humility humanity like these are moral we don't teach moral education no because like well that the the i got a book i'll give you in the store but the the founders were assuming like hey we're gonna leave you we're gonna not delineate any of these rights so you can do do it or not but they expected you to have a sort of personal moral code and understanding of what is good and not good for a human to be and to do to balance out what they're not explicitly codifying in the law and you're realizing that the American democratic system has all these unwritten norms or expectations that were based on certain cultural values, that the right is now trying to say we're all religious, but they weren't.

41:00They were based on the classical ideas, which predate these religious ideas. But the idea was like, they expected you to not do it because it was wrong, not do it because it was legal or illegal and that that was this governing assumption, which is almost certainly not the case anymore. And that's a huge problem. Right. They assume that just people would be ashamed to act so awfully and like to be so amoral that they would just, you know, when they expected ambition to be a check against ambition. So they'd be like, sure, you're going to get a Donald Trump or whomever every once in a while. But most of the people attracted to it are going to be good, right?

41:43But even Martin Luther King made that gamble. And Gandhi did too. The whole idea of nonviolent protest was to basically invite outrageous things to happen to you and use the press almost like the filming of these meetings. The gamble was that this would outrage the general public and their moral code. And it did. Yes. Although he also, he writes this thing called If I Were a Czech. And he's like saying that if he lived in the Czech Republic, or was it Czechoslovakia? Then whatever. He was like, this is how I would have resisted Hitler. And you read the essay and it makes sense. And then you go, I don't think it would have worked.

42:29Right. Because like what he was fundamentally appealing to, not that the British are wonderful people and they certainly weren't as a colonial power, but he was appealing to a conscience that was successful in that case. It took, you know, 40 years or it took a very long time, but like, and a lot of atrocities to get it to finally nail just as it did in the civil rights movement. But yeah, it only works if the assumption that human beings or cultures are decent is true. And sometimes that's not true because things have gone so far in one direction and then it maybe doesn't work. Yeah. I mean, like, I don't know if it would work now.

43:09Yeah, I don't either. I mean, if you read, there's this article called The Cruelty is the Point. And it sort of explains like the whole political movement in the United States right now, which is like, it's not that they don't think that it's bad, it's that they support it because it's bad. They like that it upsets a group of the other. But that's only because they're so upset. Right. They've already descended into a level of unhappiness that they feel that the only way to like elevate themselves is to. Well, if you feel like you're aggrieved and persecuted, you don't. That's how you justify doing it to other people.

43:52Right. That's the that's the terribleness of that cycle is that you you tell yourself that you're the not that you're the kicked upon minority who's standing up for yourself as opposed to being the overwhelming majority who is kicking the shit out of the little guy. Well, I'm I'm curious, like, so the third episode in this happiness series is about philosophy and there is a bunch of stuff there from classical stuff. What did you think? I mean, like, I'm sure you had some thoughts. Well, the thing, I think you got most of that right and I enjoyed it, but I was actually, you interview Jill, what's her name?

44:29Flippovich. I love her. And her argument that, which I think I'm thinking more about just in my own life and is the way that in which our happiness or our fulfillment or flourishing comes at the expense of other people. And so to me, that's a big part of the virtue of justice is thinking about where we externalize. And there's a joke where like, you know, like women become like CEOs or leaders and they go, I realized I needed a wife. You know, like they're realizing like, oh, like the men that they're competing with or are working with have this enormous advantage, this sort of structural setup that is designed to encourage them to go out and do things.

45:17By the way, a lot of female executives that I know do, like the man does provide that stuff. Like they are taking the division of labor. is reversed. No, but having to do that and realizing like, oh, okay, you illustrate it well with the hierarchy, but we just sort of take these things for granted. Someone's going to take care of this so I can go do this other stuff. And I thought that was really... You can see this in couples. You can see this in cultures. Right. Jill talks more... I mean, she also spoke about the way marginalized communities are often filling in this role too, like housekeepers.

45:54you know the spartans are this race of great warriors right and they they don't have time for philosophy or art they're just the greatest warriors and we owe our humanity we owe western civilization to this resistance at thermopylae which is in the movie 300 but they they resist you know sort of uh eastern tyranny that's what allows you know sort of democracy to flourish all this stuff. But fundamentally, they run a slave-based society where they all train in the arts of war. And there's this race of people called the helots who do all the farming, all the housework, all the stuff, right? And yeah, just thinking about how you look at even the founding of America, right?

46:39Like, where are they having time to just think about these ideas? How is George Washington just leading an unpaid revolution of troops? It's because somebody at home is manning the plantation. They're slaves and women and poor people who... So I think to me, it's this ethical, moral, and then logistical question of like, how do you set up a society? How do you run your personal life and then a culture in a way that everyone is allowed to succeed that doesn't get into the fantasy of Marxism or something? Denmark. Yeah, where you're thinking about how do we structure this so there's not somebody whose happiness is dependent on their boot being on somebody else's neck.

47:23Right. Well, there is a total correlation between, you know, obviously income inequality and violence. Yeah. Like the more income inequality there is, the angrier people are and the more they're willing to, you know, commit violence to, you know, bring those two things closer together. So there's an episode, too, about Scandinavia. Interesting. And Scandinavia is often at the very top of the list of the World Happiness Report. So I was like, that was a natural place for me to go. Well, I think they even go like, oh, okay, like why is America's birth rate so low? And it's like, it's because it's so hard to have kids.

48:01It's super hard to have kids. Our whole society is like not set up to have kids. We don't have subsidies or childcare, healthcare. And then you look at these Scandinavian countries and you go, well, they have it all. They have the dream thing. And their fertility rate sucks too. And it's because exactly what Jill is talking about, which is still the cultural assumptions are such that, you know, some people's flourishing is dependent on other people's flourishing. And it's mostly a male female breakdown. Denmark, Scandinavia has this thing called Yante's law. And Yante's law is like, don't think you're better than anyone else.

48:33And there's pluses and minuses to that. Like what's interesting, and this isn't all in the kind of the Denmark episode, which is that like there were so many interesting things about Scandinavia that, yes, they have universal health care, free education, great maternity paternity leave that allows men and women to divide the labor of raising children together and allows men to have relationships with their children. And so there's all that. But on top of that, like, they don't have the hustle killing it culture. Yeah. In fact, like, if – and I asked a lot of people. They're like, if you work past 5 p.m., people are like, what's wrong with you?

49:15Like, can you not get your work done in the hours allotted? It's very hard to do great work, you know, that way. And if you're like – you know, the idea of like working over the weekend to get ahead for the next week, they're like – again, they're like, is there something wrong with you? And you have like all these scheduled community activities there. Like everyone's in these clubs. There's like the soccer club. There's this club. There's that club. You can't like just pop into a restaurant on a Friday night in Copenhagen or Aarhus, which is the other place I went to. Like these places are reserved.

49:52Like people are making reservations. They're planning it out. They're taking a really active role in their social their social planners. And also, like, there's no blingy, like, conspicuous consumption there. It's very frowned upon. So, like, the idea of getting super rich and then, like, bragging about it or working really hard and making a big deal about how much you worked over the weekend, like how hard you're hustling. It's like ugly. Interesting. It's like they have a tampening mechanism to basically keep everyone equal and balanced. Right. And that doesn't necessarily create like massive joy.

50:36Yeah. The happiness in Scandinavia is not like the exuberance. They're putting a floor but also a ceiling on it. Yeah. And then it all depends on us paying for the world's defense budget. You know what I mean? Right. There's no military. Right. But the people there do feel, I think the human flourishing is maximized on a policy level. Yeah. Right. Except where's the beautiful works of art or, you know, the groundbreaking philosophy, you know, like it's a weird, you control for these. No one's got the dials perfect. No. Yeah. No, and that's why the world is like – I mean, right. You need to look at it in the context of the rest of the world too, right?

51:25Because like other people will – America certainly has got like – We dialed in a couple of them. Really good. Ambition, drive, like progress. Yeah.

51:38Unbridled success and progress. But like they're paying 55 % income tax, which is super high. But they're getting a lot back. Like if you're super wealthy in the US, you're also paying about 50 % income tax. But you ain't getting anything back. No, I know. It's crazy. So I do think that there are these great lessons we can learn from these other places. For sure. You want to go check out some books? Yeah. All right, let's do it. Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it.

52:21And I'll see you next episode.