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

0:00I'm recording this on a Monday, and Monday is our grocery store day in our family. I usually pick my kids up from school and we go over to Whole Foods, get all our groceries for the week. Although here very shortly, we're going to go over there to get our Thanksgiving turkey because they've got a bunch of great options. Turkeys start at$1.49 a pound if you have Prime with organic birds at$2.99 a pound. And they only carry no antibiotic ever turkeys that will bring quality to your table at a great price. Whole Foods has great everyday prices on all your Thanksgiving essentials, whether you celebrate with a massive family or just a few close friends.

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2:45Welcome to the weekend edition of The Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these Stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space, when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal, and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring.

3:36Hey everyone, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. Hope all is well with you. As I said in part one of this episode, we've been digging our way out of the Wisdom Takes Work launch. I appreciate all the support. I appreciate the patience, most of all. Like basically everything that could go wrong did go wrong. So we were a little delayed getting them out. I'm sorry. I appreciate the support. Believe me, it was not for lack of trying and it was not for lack of caring. My main priority is to get the books in your hands. And I hate that they took a little bit longer than we wanted.

4:12And obviously, all I'm focused on right now is getting them out. I'm just taking them. Actually, we're all downstairs packaging books right now. I just came upstairs to record this really fast. Right now, all we can do is get the books out. And then we'll obviously make some changes and improvements going forward. But let's get to today's episode. Jay Heinrich, who wrote this book, Aristotle's Guide to Self-Persuasion, which I think is really, really interesting. He said, I turned 70 a month after publication, and I've been happier than I've ever been. It's not all about rhetoric, but the voice in my head is a good deal jollier than it used to be.

4:48I think that's super important, right? Aristotle said that human flourishing, that was his sort of definition of happiness, but that that was the point of life. That was the highest form of human excellence, was to have a good life that not exactly felt good, but that was good for the person living it. Life can be dark. Life can be painful. Things can go wrong. You're going to be digging yourself out of a giant pile of work, as we've been doing. But that voice in your head shouldn't be kicking the shit out of you. In fact, there's a famous story about Cleanthes, the Stoic. He's walking through Athens one day and he sees a man talking to himself.

5:23He's talking to himself quite angrily. Cleanthes stops him and says, hey, I want you to know you're not talking to a bad person. And I actually think the Stoics don't get enough credit in this regard, that Stoicism was supposed to help you with that inner voice, that inner discussion, that it wasn't about whipping yourself. And that's what we're going to talk about in today's episode. Jay Heinrichs is a New York Times bestselling author of Thank You for Arguing. He's a persuasion and conflict consultant. He is a professor of the practice of rhetoric and oratory at Middlebury College. He's conducted influence and strategy training for clients like Kaiser Permanente, Harvard, the European Speechwriters Association, Southwest Airlines, and NASA.

6:05In part two of this episode, Jay tells us about meeting the Dalai Lama, which he met as a very young man. We talk about the agency we have in our own lives, particularly over whether we're feeling a sense of wonder or the pain of suffering. Talk about the magic of rhetoric and what the Stoics can teach us about that. And then, of course, one of my favorite topics, we talk about Taylor Swift. You can grab a signed copy of Aristotle's Guide to Self-Persuasion at the Painted Porch, or you can check it out anywhere books are sold. You can follow Jay on Instagram at Jay Heinrichs and check out more at jheinrichs.com.

6:43The idea that you need to be able to push through things and you need to persevere and you need to do the right thing and do things for others, all of that kind of sucks. I mean, And it's much better. I write in my book, this only sounds like a digression. Yeah. Maybe it is. When I was in college, I edited the newspaper, I think, because nobody else wanted to. Yeah. I was an editor for my college newspaper too. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah. Yeah. That's a fun job, by the way. It was. Yeah. It's my first... I had an office. I did too. You know, it's like all of a sudden you're like punching way above your weight because it's all funded by the university.

7:20You feel like you're getting to sort of pretend to be this thing that it's going to take a long time to earn your second office. Yes. You know what I mean? Yeah, it's kind of a come down when you graduate. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, so because I was the editor, there was this guy, this person who had been invited to the college on a tour. This was back in 1975, I think, a long time ago. I was invited to meet this guy for breakfast called the Dalai Lama. And I had no clue who he was. I mean, at the time, he wasn't that well known. I mean, I should have known. I was sheer ignorance on my part. My news editor, much smarter than I was.

8:03What school was this? Middlebury College in Vermont. Yeah. Small liberal school. But also a very internationally oriented school. I think that's why he was there. But it was also a Rockefeller who was a professor of religion, who I think has some influence, who invited him. So it was going to be Professor Rockefeller, the Dalai Lama, an interpreter, and me. And I wasn't going to go because it was early. I was in college. I wanted to sleep in. My news editor saw this invitation and said, no, no, no. This guy, the Dalai Lama is a real guy. And he's even maybe worship. I think he's kind of a god.

8:38Sure. So I wanted to see what a god eats for breakfast. That's what drove me to go. No discipline on my part. Yes. And the thing is, I was really unimpressed. Yeah. It was years before I really realized what was going on there. I mean, the guy was just this guy in a robe with nerdy glasses that were unfashionable even back then. I don't think he ate anything. Yeah. And he'd laugh the whole time. Yeah. He was just giggling all the time. I thought, this is the most unserious person I've ever met. This is a VIP? Yeah. Like this guy who's supposed to be the wisest man in the world or something? Why would you worship a guy like that?

9:12Which I thought, you know, of course, he's not a god exactly. Anyway, years later, I'm in Washington, D.C. in a real job. Yeah. And somebody said, hey, the Dalai Lama is coming to Washington. Without thinking, I said, yeah, I had breakfast with him. And of course, crickets. I mean, the conversation stops. Everybody turns to me like, what? Yeah. And I realized I had nothing to say about the guy. Now, the reason I brought this up was that, was he practicing a discipline? Probably, right? Sure. An intense one. And yet it wasn't, you've gotten the sense all his life, this guy is the leader of a banished state.

9:52Yes. He had to be smuggled out of Tibet by the CIA. Yeah. This guy is a world leader, must be a disciplined guy. Yeah. Never mind the whole Buddhism part. Yeah. Or is it Taoism? Anyway, he gives no appearance of that. It's a sheer joy. Now, we do know that the Epicureans and the Buddhists had a lot of conversations together. The two clearly very much influenced each other. And the thing is about Epicureanism, as you point out, you prepare yourself to the life you want to live in order maybe even to prevent not just suffering, but trying too hard. And I got this as the Dalai Lama. I mean, just sitting with me, probably you didn't have to try at all.

10:36Well, the height of most things is a kind of effortlessness and ease, right? And there's probably something there too. Although one of the lessons I'm taking from your story is we hold these people up as these sort of magnificent holy figures. And then it's like, what kind of VIP is he if he's having lunch with this or breakfast with this kid at Middlebury College? Like, you know, there's something you can kind of, and Mark's just does this in meditations where he kind of just tries to take things down a peg, you know, and he goes like, you think this person's so important or whatever. And then you go like, what do they have to do?

11:10What's their actual day? And then you go, oh, yeah, the president's calling into Fox and Friends. Like, you know, and you go, oh, it's at some level, it's all the same bullshit that is life, you know, and although we can hold things up and sort of venerate them, there's no real escaping just the fundamental indignities of being a person. That's true. What's the expression? No man is a hero to his valet. Yeah. Like he was there like, what are you doing today? He's like, I gotta go have breakfast with this kid. You know, I don't know why, you know? You can imagine him giggling while he said it though.

11:45That's like - You know, he had achieved, clearly has achieved ataraxia. Yes. As the Epicureans call it. Of course. Which is this idea of overcoming all the fears of life and getting to that kind of even keel. Now, that does take a certain what? Relationship with your soul? Work of life, yeah. Yeah, work. I'm sure it does take a certain amount of work. My mission is to make sure I do as little work as possible. Building up these sort of easy habits that lead to more. And they've done wonders for me, by the way. I can, I still can run. Yeah. And I'm happier now than I not only was before, but I think than I've ever been in part because I keep saying these stupid pians to myself.

12:32And I have a set of habits where I now work out an hour and a half to two hours a day. And it feels like super fun stuff. I learn all the time, which is fun for me. And I listen to audio books like yours. Well, it is interesting, you know, when you watch like a really great athlete, maybe in like in something wrestling or jujitsu, you think there's a really, you know, And actually, the better you get at it, the less strain and stress there is. It's something much more fluid and effortless because you know not just where everything goes, but you've also realized what's the minimum effective dose here.

13:13So you're not having to do any more than you need to do because you can't, I think especially as you get older, you realize, hey, I can't spare the excess. Right. Like and so you just get to a place where it's kind of all perfectly balanced, like when you're young or if you're just genetically gifted, you know, maybe you get by on this kind of brute strength or on on sort of doing it inefficiently. But as you get older, it's all about reducing drag. And I think about this not just physically. I'm realizing like, hey, I've got to follow less stuff, have less opinions about things, be more focused on my stuff because my stuff has gotten harder.

14:00I've also gotten – I'm just exhausted. So it's like you've got to winnow your focus down. The Stoics talk about this idea of a smooth flow of life. And like one of my favorite quotes I've been thinking about a lot recently from Epictetus, he's saying like, how do I know that you're making progress in this philosophy? He says, you're having fewer arguments. If you're going through life just arguing with people, disagreeing with people, getting in, you know, spats or fights, you apparently have excess energy, right? And good for you, but I can't imagine that lasts. And so I think part of it is this kind of just efficiency that you get into.

14:40Yeah, that's such a great way of putting it. There's another concept that's related to this, back to Jay Light Savings. Yeah. But I was just thinking the Tour de France just concluded this past Sunday. And Tadej Pogacar, probably the greatest cyclist in history, just won for the fourth time. If you look at Tadej Pogacar, that's a great example. His trainers literally have to hold him back because he just wants to attack. Yeah. With such delight. He's always got a smile on his face. And that is one painful sport, I could say. It's like the worst sport. It is a worst sport. You're climbing mountains with a stupid bike and then going down them at 50 miles an hour.

15:16All that being said, the Greeks had this idea during chariot races, the really smart Greek was the one who holds back and looks for the opening. Yes. And so that's this sense of kairos, which they actually had a god for, which is this idea of opportunity. Yeah. And, you know, crisis can create that kind of opportunity. You've written about that, but not necessarily from a chirotic standpoint.

15:45We just took our kids to an outdoor performance at The Nutcracker. They had a snow cone. And then they went insane in the car ride home. And one of the things I try to remind myself when that's happening is that I don't control my kids' behavior, especially when they're too far gone like that. but I do control how I respond, right? That's stoicism, but it's also what Dr. Becky talks about. Dr. Becky is a clinical psychologist and a best-selling author, and she founded Good Inside, which is there to give parents practical, actionable tools for handling those everyday challenges with confidence.

16:20My wife introduced me to Dr. Becky's books. I love them. I've recommended them a million times. I've had her on the podcast. And as it happens, Dr. Becky is hosting two live Q &A events for good inside members. I am one of them. She signed me up for it about a year and a half ago. I've loved it ever since. On December 1st, you can join Dr. Becky for her How Not to Raise Assholes event, which is about avoiding entitlement and raising kind, empathetic kids. And on December 15th, she's hosting her How Not to Lose It over the holidays event, which I'm sure we could all use. As I said, I'm a big fan of Dr.

16:57Becky. She's been a great influence for me as a parent and just as a human being. And Daily Stoic listeners can join for 15 % off with code STOIC15. You just got to head over to goodinside.com to catch the events. Look, when you're hiring, you don't want just anyone. You need the right person with the right background who can move your business forward. And when I need candidates who match what we're looking for at Daily Stoic for any of my businesses, we trust Indeed Sponsored Jobs, because when you're hiring, Indeed is all you need. You can give your job the best chance to be seen with Indeed's Sponsored Jobs.

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18:44It's interesting, my book on disciplines, I did this series on the cardinal virtues of courage, discipline, justice, wisdom, courage, or sorry, discipline also sometimes rendered as temperance. But the other word they had for it is safrosine. And the image for safrosine was often chariot racer. And the idea of, you know, it's not just whipping the horses to make them go faster, but also reining them in, right? And you think about running one of these rickety chariots, you've got two or three or four horses on them. It's much more an art than it is strength, you know? And that sort of, again, we tend to think of discipline as pushing and faster and more and relentlessness.

19:30But actually, you know, it's about, you know, not just looking for the opening, But like, so I just ran a marathon and - Good for you. I did it in Greece. I did the original marathon. Oh. But I came out of the gate, like when I look back at it, what I did, I was so excited when I started that my first like four miles were just a smidge faster than they needed to be. And I really paid for it on the back half. And so again, you think that discipline is like, you go out, if that's too fast, then you got to find the gas somewhere. But that's not what it is, right? It's really about, I think discipline is so often, or all these opportunities, is mostly about the restraint, the sort of keeping it within the bounds that you need towards some idea of kind of being able to sustain the performance that you are trying to perform at.

20:22Yeah, I had the same problem in my first marathon. There is a governor, which has to do with discipline. Like you are following something and that kind of governor. And Aristotle called that governor two things, the soul, which is not necessarily – I mean, this is where I find it a lot easier to think of my soul as something that me, but somehow separate from me. So it allows a certain forgiveness factor when I don't follow as well because then I can promise that I'll do better to this superior soul, which can be so annoying sometimes. But also at the same time, this idea of governor, the other concept is mediocrity.

21:01Yeah. The golden mean. Yes. And you know, which in America is anathema. Why would you do that? You take something for your headache and it says extreme, whatever. The Greeks would have appalled that. That would sound like poison. Follow your passion, find your passion. Exactly. Yes. It is interesting how we've sometimes flipped some of this ancient wisdom on its head. We do the exact opposite of what the really smart people told us to do. Which can lead us to bad things. Totally. Far away from ataraxia or apatheia. Yes. No, I think ataraxia is a better word. I think apatheia, you know, the problem with it is it's sort of the root word of apathy, which has this negative country.

21:39I think they're the same word. You know what I mean? It's about a kind of freedom from disturbance. It's the smooth flow of life. It's getting to a place where it doesn't matter what's happening in the outside world. it doesn't matter if you're doing something hard or not doing something hard, you're at that kind of even keel. You have command of yourself. There is, I think, a slight difference, and I may be wrong about this, but I like to think that the Epicureans allowed some passions that they would have super fun with. And one of them was Thalmiston, this idea of this sense of wonder and joy at something.

22:17I write in my book about Double Rainbow Guy. Do you remember him? There's so many means for that guy. You know, he was looking at this double rainbow and he was feeling such over the top joy. It was hilarious. Yes. And yet he was experiencing something that the Epicureans wrote about, that you need to be open to this. I mean, Montaigne came up with this term that I translate as liberality, this openness to that kind of joy, which can be completely over the top. I mean, there are drugs for that now. Yeah. But I actually had that experience when I climbed Rainier. We did a really hard route because I was with people who had been former guides on the mountain.

22:55And up there, your ego kind of vanishes the way some psychedelic drugs will do for you. The same thing happened when I reached the top of Mount Musalak. I felt such joy that I didn't even look at my watch when I first came. I mean, hit the watch to get the time, but I didn't look at it. It didn't get recorded on the watch. Did you even do it? I'm the same thing. I'm like, sometimes my watch will die and I'll be like, what was the point of the exercise that I just did? Yes. I didn't get to record it in this magical app that I'll never check. Well, this was a while ago. So it was a Timex Ironman.

23:31So it wasn't an app. But I mean, even you're tracking your time. Like the winning was doing it. And then here you are going like, well, I got to make sure I get the exact time that I have. Yeah. So the moment I hit it, I hit the button and I didn't look. I felt I didn't need to because I was just felt this overwhelming sense of joy and gratitude. Yeah. It was just this marvelous feeling. And it's one that actually, neurologists say that feeling, if you do it right, some people call it the zone, you know, it lasts. It can last. Now, I'll tell you, it took me a while to figure out how to write this book.

24:04Yeah. Because how do I write a self-help book when I didn't want to write one? And how do I not discipline myself? So it took me 10 years to figure out how to do this thing. So this happened when I turned 58 and I'm about to turn 70. It was that long ago. And yet that feeling, I still have it. It is unfair to the Epicureans because we take them at their word. It's sort of pleasure is important, what we're in pursuit of. And we forget how they actually defined pleasure. It was pleasure. It's like, you're talking about, I was taking my dog for a walk the night before last, sun setting. I'm listening to music.

24:43I'm watching the sun come down. I live in this dirt road and I'm eating a plum cot. Have you ever had a plum cot? It's like a combination of eating a plum and an apricot, some new fruit I'd never heard of. And I just, I'm like, this is the fucking best. This is best. You know, this is amazing. This is like overwhelming how amazing it was. And it's like, I'm eating a piece of fruit going for a walk. This isn't, you know, I'm not taking drugs. I haven't just sold a company for a billion dollars. I haven't just won an Olympic medal. You know, I'm not in an orgy. It's not a sensual, overwhelming pleasure, but we have this letter from Epicurus where he's like waxing rhapsodically about this like pot of cheese that a friend sent him.

25:24Like the pleasures that Epicurus was talking about were relatively minor. And it was this ability sort of like a poet or like someone who knows how to express gratitude or maybe he's just had a second chance at life is appreciating this small thing. And then the way I thought of Epicurus after is as I got back to the house, we had like a little box of them. I was like, I'm not gonna eat another one. Do you know when you eat too much fruit? And you're just like - But you know, like - You're right. You eat a peach and it's good. And then you eat a second peach and you're like, oh, my stomach hurts.

25:56I was like, I'm gonna take the fact that I enjoyed this thing and it was delicious. And then maybe I'll have another one tomorrow. And that too, again, we don't give Epicurus credit. His point was, if you drink to the point of having a hangover, you have to include the hangover in your equation of whether that was a pleasurable experience or not. Yes, that's a very kairotic point. Yes. This idea that you have to think about the timing of things, which is having a different idea of time. It's not something that just evolves naturally, but you have some control over. But let me ask you, why did you feel that way?

26:34I mean, someone else eating that fruit, walking the dog, sunset, pretty quotidian kind of moment here. Why did you feel that way? What do you think led to it? Well, I think philosophically, this is something you cultivate. And I think you see this in meditations. Marcus Surrealis has these beautiful observations. He's not on the top of Mount Olympus looking down, which maybe he saw, or he's not on the Acropolis looking at, you know, one of the highest achievements in sort of architecture and engineering. He's like, look at the way this stock of grain is bending low under its weight, right? It's ripe.

27:11Or he's talking about looking at this olive that I'm picking. He makes these sort of observations about these ordinary things, but he's doing it like a poet. Like a poet cultivates the ability to see beauty in seemingly mundane things. And I think philosophy does this too, and it might have been Aristotle, one of them says, you know, both the poet and the philosopher are concerned with wonder. Like, it's the ability to see this thing in a way that maybe a person who's not trained or is trained to take it for granted is not going to see. So I think, obviously, the fruit I'm eating is great, the sunset is beautiful, but it's the decision and the cultivation of the ability to sort of really put it all together and then to sort of feel that feeling.

27:58To me, that's the art of it. Because if you're distracted, if you're busy, if you're ruminating on something that happened earlier, or you are obsessing anxiously over something that might happen in the future, what you're doing is making that sort of ordinary slash extraordinary moment impossible. And so I do think that that is a skill, it's a discipline to be able to experience those sort of moments and to note them and then to savor them, not just while you're experiencing them, but in a journal, in a book, in a work of art, that's to me the whole game. That's interesting. So in a sense, both wonder and suffering have a certain agency to them.

28:43Yes. You had a dog in that hunt, literally. Yeah. Well, Epictetus is like every situation has two handles and you choose which one you're gonna grab. And so you can go, hey, the world is falling apart. We have a madman in the White House. The economy looks uncertain. My marriage is struggling. You could ruminate on all these existential or self-indulgent things. Or you could be like, all is well in the world. I'm on a dirt road eating a fruit, walking my dog. This is life. You know, life is good. And I actually, I try to do that, you know, writing, we were talking about writing is painful. Finishing books is usually great.

29:24Like having a book is awesome, but the process of doing it can suck. But I, having, I talked to a number of professional athletes and all of them talked about how much they sort of missed playing and how they wished they'd enjoyed playing more. They were so competitive that all they were thinking about is games that they didn't. And so I decided several years ago to be like, hey, I get to do what I love. This is a dream. I'm going to try to think about that on a regular basis and not indulge in this kind of pity party or how easy it can be to complain or be made miserable by this thing that, by the way, I'm choosing to do, you know, and I don't have to do.

30:08If I really hate it this much, I should do something else. And so I do feel like I actively practice deciding what I'm going to, which handle I'm going to grab, you know, different experiences by. You know, I love hearing that. I mean, you've achieved a level of wisdom that I took a lot longer and maybe still haven't achieved. Thank you. I get it in fleeting moments. Well, that was a great moment. I don't know why this reminds me, but you could tell me why it does. Some years ago, a magazine assigned me a piece about the origins of democracy. How much fun is that? Yeah. So I went to Syracuse, New York for the Seneca Confederation.

30:46Yeah, Seneca Falls. The Iroquois Confederation. Oh, got it. It was, you know, Syracuse. But to London and to Rome and Athens. And in Athens - You don't assign many pieces like that anymore. Multiple flights for a magazine piece? No. Oh, and you know, obviously it was a triumphant expense accounting. Yes, yes, yes, yes. So, and super fun. So I found myself in Athens and I was actually looking for the Nix, the P-N-Y-X Nix, the original speakers platform where Demosthenes himself had spoken down to the 3 ,000 people sitting on benches, not always politely. And you know what's interesting? I was there in the evening.

31:28Have you been there? So if you get up on the platform itself, and this was some years ago, so there was no fencing. There was no signage. It took me forever to find the thing. So there is the Acropolis, the sacred temple to Athena. Down below was the Agora, the marketplace, sacred, profane. And so I get up there. I am standing where Demosthenes had stood in this carved out rock. And so, of course, being a good American, I began reciting the Gettysburg Address. And it was such a glorious moment, but I wasn't feeling that wonder exactly. I was thinking, this is amazing. Yeah. This is so great for my story.

32:08Sure, sure. I was thinking the wrong thing. Then I noticed, and no one was there. Yeah. Then I noticed a woman, a middle-aged woman, walking her dog down below. And she looks up and she gives the most European gesture that American can give. It's like this shrug. Yeah. And it's like, I must have been like the 50. She lived nearby. Yeah. She must have heard 50 Americans reciting the Gettysburg Address up on the Knicks. That's when I felt the absolute joy. Yes. Because I thought - It had become background noise or ordinary to her and to you, there was still something sacred and special and magical about it because you have fresh eyes.

32:49Yes. But also just something that was funny and gets me back to the Dalai Lama. I was giggling up there on that platform and it made everything better. Suddenly the glow of the sunset got better. Explain that to me. Why do you think that? You're being sort of fully present. You're locked in in a way. There is something that can be troubling as a writer because you sort of, you're both hyper observant and aware of what's happening. But then there's this sort of, how am I going to use this lens that's actually taking you out of the moment a little bit. And to just go, hey, I'm just going to experience this thing.

33:32Yeah, I think you're right. It took me away from the meta. This idea that there was a story in the back of my head that I was trying to put together while I was doing it. Yes. Yeah. It's like you have the back part of your brain, these sort of gears are turning and clicking, going like, here's how I'm going to turn this into a thing. And what you're not doing is experiencing the thing. I think for people who can't relate to this, this is like ordinary, It's like when you're at a concert and you're like, oh, I got to film this part. Or you're seeing fireworks. You're never going to use this. What are you doing?

34:00Just be there for the thing. Right. There's that expression. What is it? If you didn't get a picture, it didn't happen. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Which is so anathema to the very idea of being present. Totally. Yeah. Can you just be there for the moment? And I do think philosophically, that's what they were all working on. And I got to imagine that lady's experience. I mean, when you see the Acropolis or you see some of these things for the first time, it's magnificent. I assume even Socrates and Aristotle and Plato were like, oh, yeah, I didn't notice that. You know, like it probably bled into the background for them.

34:34I was just in Greece and we were walking up the sacred way to the Temple of Apollo where the Oracle was. And it just, it hit me like, this is incredible now as ruins. What must it have been like when this was not just white marble, everything was gleaming and gold and the sun must have been hitting it. And you weren't jaded thinking like, oh, I've seen a 150 story build. Like this would have been literally the apex of civilization's artistic, architectural, logistical capacity just right here. And you would have believed it was, you know, I mean, they thought there's literally the center of the universe, the navel there.

35:14So it would have been just a profoundly overwhelming experience. I think about this, You know, when you go to Europe and you stand in one of these cathedrals, you go, oh, this is amazing. But I try to go like, what did this feel like to a peasant in the 14th century? You know, like who had never been more than 100 miles from this exact spot. Like it must have been existentially, spiritually, emotionally overwhelming in every conceivable way. Well, so a lot of brilliant rhetoricians through the centuries, including up through the 20th century, wrote about magic, the rhetoric of magic. So you have your visual rhetoric, which you just described, but also, you know, obviously the vocal rhetoric as well.

35:57And this combination of sensual circumstances, but also the actual language that was used while they were walking up the sacred way. They were chanting things. Yeah, yeah, right. Rhythmically. And it was magical stuff that actually caused the gods to pay attention, that would transform people's spiritual behavior and how their minds were working. There's so much great neuroscience now going on to try to figure out what were the charms and how were they expressed. And, you know, that leads back to what I was trying to do with myself in a really amateurish way. But I'll tell you, even when I was trying to think in terms of charms as magic and this idea that if I could make my soul be charming to myself, Yeah.

36:50Which Aristotle, you know, spent a lot of time describing as the ideal ethos is actually magical. Yeah. Like you can become almost what a god does to have its charming effect on you, glamoring you, as the vampires would say.

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38:49Well, speaking of magic, I mean, I think music is magic. Like you think about as a writer, the work you have to do could be a culmination of decades of your ability to do it. and then you listen to some song written by some 22-year-olds and the first three notes contain more power and emotion than you will ever must, like just there's something magical about music. And so I thought, I mean, obviously Taylor Swift is in the cover here. Where do you think music comes in as far as self-persuasion? Well, it's funny you mention that because if you then go back, you take your favorite songs, they're so beautiful and so much meaning in them.

39:26Then you read the lyrics. Yeah. They can be so utterly lame. Taylor Swift I find really interesting because I actually used her as an exemplary soul or a person who is really in touch with her soul. And Taylor Swift from the get-go was – by the way, I have to name drop here. I mean we already did. But I was the first editor ever to put her on the cover of a magazine. Really? What magazine? It was the Southwest Airlines magazine. And, you know, I had a Wrangler who, and I said, look, a lot of our people love country music. Go find a country music star that will be the next star. And this brilliant Wrangler said, here's a 17-year-old.

40:08Wow. We need her mother's permission. We put Taylor in the corner. And, of course, like, that meant nothing. She has no idea who I am. And yet, I'll tell you what, nothing I have done in life will charm, magically charm a 16-year-old. That's funny. As much as my name dropping Taylor Swift. Now, that being said, what I think is great, there was a moment in her life that I think every Stoic would truly understand when, who is the, I can't do names, who's the rap star who... Kanye West. Kanye West, the VMAs. Yeah. Got up, you know, I'm gonna let you finish. Yeah. And then just grabbed the stage. She was crushed by that.

40:50She was still a teenager. Right. It really set her back. And yet there was this kind of determination that behind us, and she herself put that in some of her lyrics, you know, in her songs later. So what she was doing was practicing the magical charm of being herself, of expressing her soul in such a way that they seemed like they were one. And Aristotle called that charisma, which comes from the same Greek as, you know, charm, karma, or from song. It all is deeply related. So this magic of expression, how you express yourself through the rhythm or music, she did it all. I mean, there are foreign powers that are begging her to come to improve their economies by giving a concert.

41:36No, no, it's crazy. I tell the story in the updated edition of The Obstacles Away when she finds out her masters are being sold and she really can't afford to buy them or she doesn't want to buy them, whatever. She found this to be an injustice. this. And you can, you know, obviously some people have parsed and they feel like it's a bit self-indulgent. But the point is she felt like she was getting screwed over by the music industry. And she, it changed her relationship with her own back catalog. And the decision to go, hey, all right, I'm just going to rerecord my back catalog and I'm going to update the music and I'm going to do new art and I'm going to make it this thing.

42:10I mean, she was already one of, if not the biggest pop star in the world. And she's become bigger than we conceived of a musician being able to be because of this. It all stems from the decision to re-record the music because what happens is for basically two or three consecutive years, all her old stuff is coming back out. It's being rediscovered by the existing fans. It's being discovered for the first time by new fans. The Eras Tour is a tour that makes sense because you can see now there are these different eras of the music and it becomes the biggest grossing tour of all time. It becomes, you know, all the albums becomes one of the biggest albums of all time.

42:50That doesn't, when you want to talk about the obstacle being the way, that doesn't happen if this seemingly bad thing doesn't happen first. And then the choice to respond, like the Stoics say, we don't control what happens, we control how we respond to what happens. She decided to do this thing. No one said you have to do this. She would have been financially, musically, artistically totally fine. And she would have been in the boat of most artists who don't own their catalog if she just said, this sucks, I don't like it. I mean, she could have spent the next couple of years just complaining about it in interviews.

43:26Or she could have said, you know what? I've made enough money. I'm done. Right? She could have taken the ball and went home. There's all these different ways that you could respond. And the way she does respond, I think it's not just this sort of public relations jujitsu. It's not just this marketing genius. It's not just creatively interesting. But I also think she uses it to go to your point about self-persuasion. She decides to interpret it as this sort of motivating thing in the way that Michael Jordan would perceive slights and use them to motivate himself. I'm going to humiliate this person because of what they did to me.

44:02And it becomes this thing that just catapults her to a totally different level. I think when we say the obstacle is the way, it's about responding to the things that life deals you that way. I would go one better on that. I mean, all that is really true and so well said. She saw herself getting away from herself. So she literally resumed ownership of Taylor Swift. What is Taylor Swift but her music? Yeah. She went to own it, and that's owning herself. She has such a great relationship. Aristotle would say she bought her soul back. She got in close touch expressing this deep sense of obligation, the phylos that you have for someone else.

44:44Yeah. And that being her own soul. And that's why I thought she was the greatest exemplar of the Aristotelian soul I could come up with. Well, then the irony is she makes so much money that she then does buy back, she just bought back all the rights to the original catalog. Yes. like a few months ago. And so now she owns the new catalog and the old catalog. Yeah, she went down to Hades and found her shades and brought them back. Yeah, no, it's lovely. And that's what I think, being an artist is a metaphor in the sense that shit happens to you, both professionally and personally, and your job is to turn that into more work, right?

45:27It's to let it change and inform who you are as a person, positively and negatively, and then to channel that into the creative work. Like one of my mentors, Robert Green, the writer, he said, you know, the good news about the path you've chosen, decided to be a writer, he said, it's all material. He's like, from this point forward, everything that happens to you is material. And, you know, I think about that all the time. I have shitty conversations, stuff happens and I go, okay, like I just lost a bunch of money in this investment. So that sucks. I'm going to learn a lesson from that. But also I make the money back in the book I write out of it or write.

46:07And this is both literally and figuratively true. How do you use the things that happen to you? Oh, that's so great. That's the job. It reminds me of when my wife went into labor, we were living in a suburb of Washington, DC in Bethesda. And she was giving birth at a hospital that had no parking. So we were going to take the Metro. What could go wrong? The Metro stops between stations while she's in labor, and then the power goes out. Now, before the power goes out, she had looked around as she always does. She's in touch with her soul than I will ever be. She had noticed that there's a bunch of Mennonite girls in this thing.

46:44She says two things to me. First, she says, well, I bet those Mennonites would know what to do in case this baby starts coming out. Between these things, I'm like trying to control my emotions. Yes, sure. The second thing she said is, and think of the story you're gonna write. Yeah. Isn't it great to be a writer? Because you get to do that. Right, right. And so, again, I think this is a metaphor. You go, something happens, right? You run a company and then this thing happens and the company starts to fall apart and you get screwed. You got to be able to say to yourself, this is making me a better leader, executive, human being.

47:23In some way, this is preparing me for a future thing to go, I'm going to use this in some way. That's what it's about. Yeah, yeah. That's where the agency is, right? Yes. You know, that gets me into storytelling because not all of us are storytellers. Yes. I am so grateful to get to be one. Yeah. But even somebody who doesn't, if you see your life as a kind of plot that hasn't ended, you can kind of see if you – like in my book, I talk about the beat system of screenwriting, which apparently screenwriters don't use. But it's great to think about how to tell a story. There are action beats and things that take places.

47:59And as Aristotle said, every story is three acts. So when you see yourself that way, you can see that there's a kind of progress where bad things have to happen for a decent movie to come about. And then if you're rooting for the hero and you hope for a happy ending, that's you. And you have some agency in how to write that part of your life. I think of the investments I failed to make. I would be so rich today, like many people. I remember the year after college, a friend of mine was staying with her in Burlington, Vermont. And she said, there's this great ice cream. It was midwinter. You know where I'm calling you.

48:36And it was out of this gas station. These two rude, not entirely clean guys were like, there was a long line in fact, because they're so bad at serving ice cream. The ice cream, by the way, was great. But as we're leaving, I said to my friend, Diane, you know what? Service is everything. These guys will be out of business within a year. Of course, that was Ben and Jerry. Some years later, I was in a new job and they were still using word processors at a time when the IBM PC was king. And I said, we need to buy computers. We have no budget for it. What should we do? And my business manager said, there's this grad student in Austin, Texas, where we're speaking.

49:17And we were the first bulk purchase from Michael Dow. Wow. And the reason he did it is that he had this brilliant idea of contacting repair shops around the country to assure people that the computer would be fixed, which it never needed. But that was what allowed us to buy something other than IBM PC at like a third of the price. Lee, my business manager, came back to me and he said, this guy, Michael Dell, is looking for investors at the$10 ,000 level. And I'm like, I don't have$10 ,000. You crazy, some grad student at the University of Texas. Lee did that. Wow. Retired early, lives in this beautiful place in Vermont now.

49:57And of course, I didn't do that. Now, that's part of my story. Yes. Like, I am not an investor. I tell stories about how I failed to invest. And what I learned from doing that, and do I regret it? If I had been the kind of person who would jump on the chance to give a grad student$10 ,000, think about how many$10 ,000 I would have blown, right? I would have invested in crypto at exactly the wrong time. So, I mean, all of this is part of my story. Where does that lead to in the end? I die happy. My children will have very little money. That's amazing. You want to go check out some books in the bookstore?

50:33I'd love to.

50:39Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it, and I'll see you next episode.