00:00:00.000The problem with empathy is that it's easily manipulated.
00:00:05.000Because it's mostly an emotional response, you can easily fool yourself that you're actually in somebody else's shoes while in fact you're not.
00:00:16.560So sympathy means that you are trying to be helpful to other people.
00:00:22.940You're trying to understand how other people might be going through, let's say, a tough time and how you might be helpful.
00:00:28.920But at the same time, you realize you're not them.
00:00:34.300The case of social media, it turns out they're not neutral platforms.
00:00:39.380It's not just a matter of how you use it.
00:00:43.080There's something structurally built into the system that biases behaviors of many people, not everybody necessarily, but a lot of people, in a direction that I think is destructive.
00:00:57.740It is the rise of social media that has made Trump possible, but also has made the outrage culture possible, the easily offended culture possible, et cetera, et cetera.
00:01:08.680I mean, you know, I don't know whether social media is the beginning or the end of civilization.
00:15:11.300You've got to kind of gamify the situation.
00:15:14.380And there is very good evidence, again, from modern science that this actually works.
00:15:18.340If you go ahead in a situation like this, mindfully, so knowing what might happen and having decided ahead of time how to behave,
00:15:27.100your chances of actually behaving in a temperate fashion are much higher than there would have been otherwise.
00:15:33.320Or let's say that you say, well, you know, I realize that I'm not really generous enough.
00:15:39.360Generosity is something I need to work on.
00:15:41.300Okay, well, then you can come up with an exercise on, let's say, once a week or twice a week where you do something like before leaving your house,
00:15:51.560you put some pocket, you know, change in your pockets, and then you give it to the first homeless person that you encounter.
00:16:13.440It's like, as I said, learning a musical instrument.
00:16:15.840Initially, you have to pay attention to every single move of your fingers, let's say, on an alto sax, which is something that I try to master.
00:16:24.660But eventually, you see your fingers just going on their own.
00:16:28.060You know, you don't have to actually think about it explicitly, consciously.
00:17:01.000But the reason I asked you about practical wisdom is that that, to me, seems quite different because when I look around at the world and I look at my own behavior at certain points, I think that is a much harder skill to gamify.
00:17:15.700It is a much harder skill to learn consciously because you don't know that you're making mistakes sometimes.
00:17:24.280And you certainly don't know at the time quite often.
00:17:27.360And especially, you know, one of the things I hear out of what you're saying is the importance of being present.
00:17:31.760Because if you're not present, you won't even notice, A, that you are overeating or making a bad decision or whatever.
00:17:39.400But also, if you're not present, then life sort of happens to you and you never go, well, what was the decision that brought me to the point that I'm at now that I can actually learn from and not be as stupid next time in terms of the bad decision that I've made?
00:17:53.900So how do you gamify and how do you practice practical wisdom?
00:19:10.860There's many – there's different ways of doing philosophical journaling.
00:19:13.860But the one that is most common, arguably, is this.
00:19:18.200Every night before going to bed, you take about five or ten minutes.
00:19:22.780Get yourself into an area of your house that is quiet.
00:19:27.100If you live with somebody else, ask for five or ten minutes of peace.
00:19:31.940And open up your laptop, your tablet, or, you know, Zeus forbid, your actual diary and where you're going to write in handwriting.
00:19:42.660And then for the day, think about anything that happened that might have been problematic, that might have been ethically salient, where you might have made a mistake or you might have done better, et cetera.
00:19:55.920And ask yourself three questions and answer them in writing.
00:20:11.160But asking yourself why – what you did that was wrong is not about, you know, self-flagellation and regret and all that because the Stoics think that, you know, whatever you did, it's in the past.
00:20:26.320But you do want to learn from your mistakes.
00:20:28.040And writing down, thinking, reflecting critically about your mistakes and writing them down helps fixing them literally on paper and in your mind.
00:20:38.100It's like, okay, I need to pay attention to this.
00:20:41.380You also want, conversely, to write about what you did right.
00:20:46.120Because now you've established two points of reference.
00:20:49.320What you want to get away from, your mistakes, and what you're going to work toward more, the stuff that actually you've done right.
00:20:58.400And then the third question in my mind is the most crucial one actually.
00:21:02.080What is it that I could do better the next time around if something like this happens?
00:21:06.160You know, we tend to think of our lives or perhaps some people think of their lives as incredibly varied.
00:21:12.360Oh, you know, the same thing is never going to happen again.
00:21:14.700But in fact, you know, we pretty much get up in the morning during the week and go to work and see the same people and do the same things and then come home and see the same people and do the same things.
00:21:24.180And then during the weekend, we see friends, et cetera, et cetera.
00:21:26.960Our lives are actually far more stable typically than we might necessarily think.
00:21:32.660So the notion is that, therefore, whatever situation you made a mistake in today, let's say one of your colleagues did something, you got really upset, you got angry in a disproportionate fashion, you overreacted or something like that, or your partner.
00:22:08.120And therefore, I know how I need to react.
00:22:11.500That doesn't mean that you're going to be doing it perfectly the second time around, but you are going to be, again, it's about paying attention.
00:22:19.200And so there is actually fairly good evidence, again, from cognitive behavioral therapy and similar approaches to psychotherapy that this thing really does work.
00:22:29.680But, of course, you have to do it regularly.
00:22:31.740I do it every night, but at least several times a week.
00:22:35.680And you have to do it over a prolonged period of time.
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00:24:53.540In my latest book, The Quest for Character, I emphasize that point.
00:24:57.740There's one thing that we ought to be doing, which is teaching character and virtue to our kids.
00:25:03.180And that is the one thing that arguably we almost never do.
00:25:06.360In fact, it's so rare that recently I've seen a documentary that was done focused on one of the exceptions to this general rule.
00:25:16.180The documentary is called Young Plato.
00:25:18.220And it's about the principal of an elementary school in Belfast, in Northern Ireland, who decides that it's going to be a good thing to teach his kids, these elementary school kids, to teach philosophy, practical philosophy.
00:25:34.960And mostly Socrates and the Stoics, although it varies a little bit.
00:26:53.700In fact, again, the analogy is an apt one.
00:26:57.440Yes, you can learn a language or musical instrument as an adult, but it takes a lot of effort, a lot of dedication.
00:27:03.220And you're not going to get likely as good as if you studied as a kid.
00:27:07.940And the same goes for virtue and for behavioral modification, character modification.
00:27:12.820Yes, you can certainly work on it as an adult, but it's going to take you a long time and it's going to yield a little bit of improvement.
00:27:19.620If you start, on the other hand, with kids of elementary school level, then things are very different.
00:27:25.960And, you know, this has been known for a while.
00:27:28.280The ancient Romans talked about the age of reason, which was about seven to eight years old.
00:27:32.980And that's when fathers and teachers started talking to their kids about virtue and character, et cetera, et cetera.
00:27:41.420During the Middle Ages and Renaissance, the Jesuits among the Catholics used to say, give me a child of seven and I will give you a man of 14.
00:27:54.560Because they realized that's the window.
00:27:57.480Now, modern science actually tells us there's some good news there that the window is even a little longer than that.
00:28:03.120But it does start around seven years old, six to seven years old.
00:28:06.740That's the time when kids begin to appreciate, you know, abstract reasoning and engage in more abstract reasoning.
00:28:14.100It's about six, seven, eight years old, depending on the kid.
00:28:17.360But actually, that window is extended, according to modern neuroscience, until your early 20s.
00:28:23.220Because that is when your brain finally settles down, basically, and it becomes pretty much what it stays with you for the rest of your life.
00:28:29.760The human brain is still very plastic, so that's why you can keep learning and improving things.
00:28:35.700But the broad scenario is pretty much set by the early 20s.
00:28:41.160Earlier in women, in girls than in boys, which explains why boys mature later than girls, as most of us realize.
00:28:52.940If you have a daughter or a son, you'll realize that that is the case.
00:28:56.220There is a gap of about three or four years.
00:28:58.380But that only means that you have three or four extra years to work on boys.
00:29:04.000And so, Massimo, let me ask you a provocative question.
00:29:09.440If stoicism, and I actually do think this is true, and it's something I've implemented in my own life.
00:29:17.200But if stoicism is so good, and if it makes your life so much better, when I look around at the world right now, when I look at politics or culture, or Francis and I are both former stand-up comedians, I don't see a lot of stoicism going on.
00:29:34.680Instead, I see a lot of people being taught to constantly criticize and complain about things that are outside of their control, to not act in a temperate way, to not seek justice, and not to seek to treat other people the way they'd want to be treated but to punish.
00:29:52.660You know, we don't teach a lot of practical wisdom, and so on and so forth.
00:29:57.840And particularly in recent years, it seems to me, you know, in politics, which we talk about a lot on both sides of the political spectrum, there is – we like to be victims a lot.
00:30:09.500It's something that we crave, actually.
00:30:11.620And we've – there are people who now make this into an identity.
00:30:37.400So, for instance, as I said before, stoicism is very similar to Buddhism, and there is a pretty good number of Buddhist practitioners around the world.
00:31:31.040And so, if we're not talking – of course, they didn't know anything about evolution, but a modern primatologist would agree that we have very strong pro-social instincts because our survival depends on it.
00:31:44.260That doesn't mean we're always altruistic or it doesn't mean that we don't do things that are good for ourselves.
00:31:49.480But broadly speaking, human beings are naturally pro-social.
00:31:53.600They're naturally cooperative, et cetera, et cetera.
00:31:56.240That's what the stoics meant when they said that we should live in accordance to nature or in agreement with nature.
00:32:03.700We should take seriously the kind of species that human beings are.
00:32:08.440And there are, according to the stoics, at least two fundamental characteristics that differentiate us from most other animal species.
00:32:14.760One, we're incredibly, as I said, highly social, and the other thing, of course, is we're capable of reason at a very high degree, much higher than any other animal species.
00:32:25.100So, for a stoic to live according to nature, it means to use reason to solve your problems and to be social, pro-social, cooperative.
00:32:33.380But they observed the same thing that you just pointed out.
00:32:36.480That is, yeah, but majority of people don't do that.
00:32:39.640And their answer was they're corrupted by the culture in which they grew up.
00:32:44.760Human beings are also very plastic in terms of behavior.
00:32:48.880We absorb whatever culture we grew up with.
00:32:52.460And therefore, the problem, as we would put it today, is structural.
00:32:57.320That is, unless we've changed the structure of society, the incentives at a societal level, our value judgments, our objectives, and the things that we think are good to pursue are not good,
00:33:09.100then we're going to always have an uphill battle.
00:33:11.780Now, stoicism, of course, is a personal philosophy of life, just like Buddhism or Christianity or stuff like that.
00:33:17.940So, it is meant to help those people who realize that, hell, this is not a good thing.
00:33:23.260The kind of values that society shares are not good.
00:33:27.260So, I'm going to need a different framework, a different way of thinking about it.
00:33:32.280And therefore, stoicism is useful in that sense.
00:33:34.960But if we're talking about change in society at large, then we need structural changes.
00:33:39.060And that's a whole different conversation because structural changes are far more difficult to implement than individual ones.
00:33:47.220There is an obvious, at least to me, and again, provocative, but I hope you don't take this personally.
00:33:53.300As a stoic, I know you'll deal with it.
00:33:54.680But there's an obvious flaw in that argument, which is, yes, human beings absolutely are incredibly cooperative.
00:34:03.240But if we look at the history of human beings, which is the best way to analyze how people behave, I think,
00:34:09.400then what we would conclude is human beings are incredibly cooperative while also being incredibly tribal.
00:34:15.380And most of the cooperation happens within the tribe, and a lot of the cooperation frequently happens in order to allow that tribe to defeat another tribe or allow that tribe to get more resources than another tribe.
00:34:28.580So, isn't the problem with all of this that actually human beings are driven also by the tribal instinct, which doesn't really get taken into account by these great virtues?
00:34:40.940You're absolutely right, except for the very last part.
00:34:43.660Again, the Stoics were very aware of this.
00:34:46.600I mean, they lived, you know, Stoicism started in ancient Greece, in Athens, around, you know, the 4th century, the end of the 4th century BCE.
00:34:55.760And at the time, the Greek cities were always warning against each other, right?
00:35:00.720So, Athens versus Sparta versus Corinth versus this versus the other.
00:35:04.740So, they were very aware of this notion that people are prone to cooperate and to help each other within group,
00:35:12.780but on the other hand, they're just as equally prone to, you know, beat the crap out of other groups.
00:35:20.120That is why the Stoic notion is that nature gives us, as they put it, the beginnings of wisdom.
00:35:26.680In other words, it provides us with a basic pro-social instinct.
00:35:30.120But by nature, we apply that instinct.
00:35:33.500And in fact, there is an interesting passage in Cicero where he summarizes the Stoic argument.
00:35:38.780He says that by nature, we apply this instinct of cooperation to our caretakers, you know, our parents, typically, our siblings.
00:35:48.400And then, eventually, we start expanding it to our friends.
00:35:53.020And then, eventually, we expand it to our acquaintances and to people that live with us in our general community.
00:36:00.340And the Stoic point is that's what nature gives you.
00:36:05.480Then reason comes in and says, yeah, but wait a minute.
00:36:09.060The people that live in Sparta are not different from me.
00:36:11.640The people that live on the other side of the planet are not different from me.
00:36:14.620So, I ought to strive to expand further those circles of concerns.
00:36:21.100This is a notion that modern utilitarians also subscribe to, like Peter Singer, for instance.
00:36:27.700He has this idea of the expanding circles of concerns.
00:36:31.100But interestingly, the first time that we know in Western history that image of expanding circles of concern show that the larger circle is humanity itself.
00:36:42.540The first time we find that image is in Aherocles, who was a second-century Stoic philosopher.
00:36:49.580So, yeah, these people have been thinking about it.
00:36:51.680But they also realize that the idea of what they call cosmopolitanism, the notion that we should be thinking of humanity as a big family where we're all brothers and sisters or whatever other gender you subscribe to, it's difficult.
00:37:25.960I just want to kind of get to the bottom of this.
00:37:28.160But if a – I don't know if it's a troop of chimps or whatever the word is, a group of chimps, a tribe of chimps, whatever, lives on a certain piece of land and another tribe of chimps shows up.
00:37:40.000I imagine they don't go, you know, let's embrace each other as friends and brothers and sisters.
00:38:01.280It's certainly true for chimps, who, however, are, of course, different from human beings because they don't actually think about what they're doing.
00:40:01.860So I think that that is a very good objection, but it's already something that actually has been happening.
00:40:07.960Our culture has started to take over or to redirect our instincts about 12,000 years ago with the agricultural revolution.
00:40:17.660Once we started, we invented agriculture.
00:40:20.140We started settling down and creating large settlements, much larger than the typical, you know, group or band that was featured during the Pleistocene.
00:40:32.220And that's when our culture started messing around with our biology.
00:40:36.880And then the notion is, OK, we want to realign the two as much as possible.
00:40:42.440And Massimo, you talk a lot about sympathy and empathy.
00:40:48.620The differences between sympathy and empathy and why the Stoics actually had far more sympathy, shall we say, for one particular value than another.
00:40:59.800Yeah. So part of the problem with sympathy and empathy is that actually there are different and sometimes contrasting definitions of the two terms.
00:41:10.500But for the purposes of this discussion, let's define them this way, if you don't mind.
00:41:15.820Empathy is the idea that you want to somehow put yourself in the shoes, in somebody else's shoes.
00:41:22.760You want to try to feel what that other person is feeling.
00:41:25.800You want to try to, so it's an emotional response.
00:41:28.760Sympathy, on the other hand, it's a little bit more, it also has to do with emotions, but it's a little bit more intellectual because it's the notion that, well, I might not be able to put myself in another person's shoes, but I am a human being.
00:41:44.040So I can imagine that she might not feel OK with this or she might feel, you know, angry or something like that.
00:41:51.360So sympathy is a little bit more detached, but also broader than empathy.
00:41:58.380The Stoics are certainly about cultivating sympathy, but they're wary of empathy.
00:42:04.300And some modern psychologists are as well.
00:42:06.900There was an interesting book that came out a few years ago called Against, Literally Against Empathy by Paul Bloom, who is a psychologist at Yale University.
00:42:48.020And it's even pretentious for you to think that you might be because they have very different experiences.
00:42:54.260And also, it's very easy to manipulate externally.
00:42:57.800For instance, I don't know if you remember, but the first Iraq, when the first Iraq war was about to start,
00:43:04.200one of the things that happened was that we were bombarded with news of the Iraqi soldiers going into hospitals and throwing babies out of incubators on the floor and stuff like that.
00:43:18.500And we all felt empathy for that situation.
00:43:22.820In fact, we felt outrage for that situation.
00:43:27.640It was, you know, completely fake news before fake news was a thing.
00:43:33.680So, it's easy to manipulate somebody emotionally.
00:43:37.360The idea with sympathy, on the other hand, is that your cognition kicks in.
00:43:42.540The Stoic model is that emotions and cognition and reason are not separate.
00:43:47.880They are two aspects of the same thing.
00:43:49.680They are very deeply interconnected so that you can talk to your emotions, in a sense, and reason with your emotions, come to terms with your emotions.
00:43:58.580So, sympathy means that you are trying to be helpful to other people.
00:44:05.360You're trying to understand how other people might be going through, let's say, a tough time and how you might be helpful.
00:44:11.640But at the same time, you realize you're not them.
00:44:16.660And that puts you in a different, you know, different, from a different standpoint.
00:44:21.220You're looking at things from a different standpoint.
00:44:22.660So, yeah, the Stoics were very wary of emotional responses or motion-driven responses, especially anger or fear or things like that.
00:44:33.540But they were, on the other hand, very much into practicing sympathy because practicing sympathy is precisely what allows you to expand those circles of concern that we were talking about earlier.
00:44:46.700I cannot be empathetic with a billion people.
00:44:51.440But I can sympathize with, let's say, hundreds of thousands of people who might be going through the results or, you know, dealing with the results of a flood on the other side of the world or something like that.
00:46:54.120And that therefore means that we make ourselves vulnerable to be manipulated by certain people seeking victim status forever, for instance, as a way to raise their status.
00:47:06.800On this one, I'm with Paul Bloom that I mentioned before.
00:47:10.340That's exactly the argument that it makes against empathy.
00:47:15.300Yes, I think one of the negative turning points of contemporary civilization, for instance, was Facebook's invention of the angry button, which was not by chance at all.
00:47:25.940It was a result of, you know, careful research into what is it that can maximize the number of hits on a particular page so that I can maximize my revenues from advertisements.
00:47:36.660And Facebook researchers discovered that the angry button got eight times more responses than a like button.
00:48:01.100And it was on purpose to, of course, pursue the goals of the corporation that is behind Facebook, not to be helpful to humanity in general or to be helpful even to the individual user.
00:48:13.440So that is one example of how structural changes can hijack natural tendencies and bring us in a direction that we don't necessarily want to go.
00:49:23.280And you must have experienced this as well, being a university professor on campus where you see empathy, in inverted commas, getting weaponized.
00:49:32.260Empathy is a means to shut down somebody who disagrees with you.
00:49:36.760Empathy being used as a way to like, well, we're not.
00:49:39.460I don't want you to say this because this is offensive.
00:49:41.820This could harm this particular person.
00:49:44.980I mean, that's another aspect of this, isn't it?
00:49:48.280I have not honestly seen that much of that particular phenomenon on the campus at City College.
00:49:55.300But, yes, I've heard from colleagues who certainly have experienced something like that.
00:49:59.300And I'm wary of a lot of terms that have been become very popular recently, such as safe spaces and, you know, oh, that's hurtful and so on and so forth.
00:50:10.840Well, there are situations where a safe space is, in fact, a good idea, meaning a space where somebody knows that they are not going to be physically assaulted, for instance.
00:50:20.720That's definitely a good use of a safe space.
00:50:23.560But on a university campus, if by safe space you mean a space where you can present your opinions but not subject to criticism, that seems to me to run exactly counter the whole point of a university.
00:50:37.120I mean, some time ago I read one of my favorite writers from two or three decades ago was Neil Postman, who was a professor at Columbia University.
00:50:48.340And he wrote a great book called Teaching as a Subversive Activity.
00:50:53.680And his point was that if you don't make your students uncomfortable at least several times during the semester, you're just not doing your job.
00:51:50.840So in the quest for character, I have two chapters where I go through two different sets of examples.
00:51:56.500One group is philosophers trying to teach leaders and statesmen about virtue and good behavior, so to speak.
00:52:03.940And those are almost invariably a failure, almost invariably.
00:52:09.560Plato tried twice with two different, you know, statesmen in Syracuse, Dionysus I and Dionysus II, and he almost lost his life in both cases.
00:52:28.800Now, Aristotle did much better with Alexander the Great.
00:52:32.740As it turns out, I tell the story in some detail in the book.
00:52:36.040That was actually one of the success stories.
00:52:38.500But by and large, when philosophers try to come into politics and tell politicians how to do things, it's a disaster.
00:52:48.200The second group, however, is much better.
00:52:50.540These are statesmen themselves, politicians themselves, who realize they want to do the right thing, and therefore they ask the advice and the support of philosophers.
00:53:01.140We have Marcus Aurelius, for instance, who had, you know, Junius Rusticus, who was a Stoic teacher, who influenced him very much.
00:53:10.700We have Plato succeeded on a third attempt with his student Dion, who in turn did become a leader in Syracuse and worked out much better.
00:53:22.060But that's because Dion sought Plato, not the other way around.
00:53:27.680Cato the Younger, who was a Roman senator during the period of the Republic, that also worked very well.
00:53:35.220And Seneca himself, for one thing, because he was also a senator.
00:53:42.960That you can teach virtue to somebody, but you cannot learn it for that person, which, frankly, doesn't come as a surprise to any teacher.
00:53:51.960I mean, you know, when I occasionally get pissed off at my students because I think they're not doing, you know, making enough of an effort, that's exactly what I tell them.
00:53:59.280I can teach you guys, but I cannot learn for you.
00:54:03.240It's, again, going back to the analogy that we were making in the beginning of, you know, learning a musical instrument.
00:54:09.660You can have the best musical teacher in the world, but if you don't practice every day, and if you don't want to practice every day in a mindful fashion, you're not going anywhere.
00:54:19.440And you're certainly not going to Carnegie Hall.
00:54:29.200First, we get rid of most of the current leaders because most of the current leaders are simply not interested in virtual character and stuff like that.
00:54:38.020They have their own agenda, and they're pursuing it in ways that are, I think, largely destructive for the rest of us.
00:54:46.300Now, you said, but that's a tall order.
00:54:50.400But if we're talking about a more or less democratic society like most Western countries are, let's not forget, the buck does stop with us.
00:54:59.880We are the people that elect those people.
00:55:01.740It's very easy and even satisfying to complain about the politicians, right?
00:55:08.780It's like politicians are – like Congress in the United States has a rating, a favorable rating that is barely above that of rapists as a class.
00:55:21.280So it's like, you know, it's an approval rate of like 10 percent or something like that because it's very easy to complain about politicians.
00:55:29.220But who the hell voted these people in there in the first place?
00:55:32.540And I understand that things are not that easy because there are – again, there are two structural problems.
00:55:37.380There's – especially in American politics, there's a lot of money that comes from large corporations.
00:55:42.180Basically, a lot of our politicians are simply bought by large corporations.
00:56:10.260We're not going to get a new generation of people who want to act on behalf of society and do the right thing if we don't teach our children, if we don't bother teaching our children, if we put our children in front of an iPad so that we don't have to bother, you know, being concerned with them.
00:56:27.400I see a lot of parents here in Brooklyn, New York, going around with their children.
00:56:33.640Allegedly, they're having their time with their children.
00:56:35.480But in fact, what happens is that the parent is on a cell phone and the child is doing something else.
00:56:41.700There is no coming together at all because we're all busy doing other things, most of those things being completely irrelevant anyway.
00:56:50.200So those are the two things we need to change.
00:56:53.140We need to think much more carefully about who we elect, especially at a local level, because, you know, I understand the national, like my vote in a national election counts for close to nothing, especially in New York, where there is such a majority of, in this particular case, Democratic voters that it doesn't matter who I vote for.
00:57:13.600It's the Democrats usually get elected.
00:57:16.440The opposite happens, of course, in other states in the country.
00:57:21.100But at the local level, that's a whole different matter because at the local level, you know, elections are won on a basis of hundreds or thousands of votes.
00:57:29.480And so not only one vote counts, but one person who contacts a politician and donates, you know, gives money, but wants to have some conversation.
00:57:38.520Those are actually, those actually make a difference.
00:57:40.920And before one becomes a national politician, usually, often, they start at a local level.
00:57:48.280So, again, it's up to us, but we need to do it in a concerted way, not just one time.
00:57:57.420Massimo, isn't there another dimension to this problem, which is that I agree with you that we're responsible, but I think the way that we're responsible is actually less about politics.
00:58:08.200And I've written about this, about the decline of, we used to call them the big beasts of politics here in the UK.
00:58:15.260There are not as many big beasts anymore.
00:58:17.220And I think one of the reasons is you talk about social media and the 24-hour news cycle and whatever.
00:58:22.700We've got to a point where quite a lot of politicians who would have made it in the past.
00:58:27.380You know, a Winston Churchill, I don't imagine, would get through the current political system because he had too many, the wrong views.
00:58:38.520And he had these character flaws that we might think of.
00:58:41.580And so when we find out that somebody said the wrong word or was a bit insensitive or did this or did that, we filter them out or the media filter them out for us.
00:58:52.460There's a massive outrage on social media.
00:58:54.460People get upset about this person said this or did this or whatever.
00:58:58.240And so you're kind of left with the only people who you're left with are the people who are pretending to be perfect, even though we know that people aren't perfect.
00:59:05.640But it's more about you're not getting anything wrong as opposed to actually having virtue.
00:59:13.200The Churchill probably wouldn't make it.
00:59:14.620In fact, it's kind of funny that you mentioned this because I'm just reading his biography and because I wanted to get a much better understanding not only of the man but of his times.
00:59:23.320I was in London recently with my wife and we went to the war rooms and the Churchill Museum.
00:59:29.760Yeah, I think you're right in that department.
00:59:31.960But at the same time, at least in the United States, and my understanding is possibly in the UK, certainly in Italy, of which I have more of a direct experience, the situation is actually very asymmetrical between the right and the left at this point.
00:59:49.360What you are, what you're pointing, the problem you're pointing out, it's certainly the case in the left, on the left.
00:59:53.900You know, in the United States here, if a left-leaning politician says anything wrong and manages to somehow insult somebody at whatever level, they're out.
01:00:05.360On the right, it's exactly the opposite.
01:00:07.080The more outrageous and insulting you are, the more you get ahead.
01:00:10.280I mean, you know, do I need to mention Trump or Boris?
01:00:14.200I think it's not on all of the right, but yes, I know what you mean.
01:00:17.700It's never all the right, not even all the left.
01:00:19.680By the way, it's not because I want to argue with you, but just to disagree.
01:00:24.840We've had a conservative government for the last 12 years.
01:00:28.460A lot of the damage done to the conservative party and their government has been because somebody has said the wrong thing or had the party in the wrong place or was caught doing this or that.
01:00:38.200So, your point about Trump is absolutely right.
01:00:43.200Trump is a unique individual in that way, I think.
01:00:47.440There may be examples elsewhere of people who, on the populist right, will go out and say something outrageous and that will help them in the eyes of some people.
01:00:56.000I would also maybe argue that, you know, Donald Trump probably lost the last election because of how obnoxious people felt he was too, right?
01:01:10.640But Trump is not – unfortunately, from my perspective, it's not an unusual situation.
01:01:17.500I mean, he certainly is the most egregious example.
01:01:20.140But he has started something, at least here in the United States, so that now we have like more than half of Congress that represents that kind of ethos.
01:01:28.520And that's damaging to the fabric of society.
01:01:58.360So, if what gets you disqualified is to express a perfectly reasonable opinion that happens to insult or whatever, rail up a group of people, that really should not be grounds for disqualification.
01:02:15.180But, if what gets you disqualified is the fact that, you know, you pass laws for the country to behave in one way and then you do exactly the opposite in your private life, well, then you should be disqualified.
01:02:43.860Social psychologist here at NYU, at New York University.
01:02:47.720Jonathan and I usually don't see hide or eye, and we've had these agreements even in print over the years.
01:02:54.340But, recently, he has been pushing this notion that a major source of our contemporary problems is, in fact, the rise of social media.
01:03:04.960Because it is the rise of social media that has made Trump possible, but also has made the outrage culture possible, the easily offended culture possible, et cetera, et cetera.
01:03:24.180And, we really ought to fight back against it.
01:03:27.440Now, fortunately, Elon Musk is doing part of the work for us because he's making such a mess of Twitter that, you know, a lot of people are actually leaving the platform.
01:03:37.000But, the problem is what is the alternative, right?
01:03:41.260So, people are now beginning to throw around ideas about, oh, there's this alternative social platform, et cetera.
01:03:47.740Yeah, but we need to be careful about considering whether the problem isn't the very notion of social media.
01:03:54.180And, not the specifics of Twitter or Facebook or something.
01:03:57.940Yeah, I don't think you're going to put that toothpaste back in the tube, I'm afraid.
01:04:44.040No, I think we're, it's not that we're not talking enough about it, but, sorry, not talking at all about it, but we're definitely not talking enough about it.
01:04:55.100And, I'm sorry, but it does have to do with Musk, not him personally.
01:04:58.080I think we're not talking enough about just how much of our alleged democracies are actually plutocracies.
01:05:05.160That is, how much money there is in politics and basically buys elections.
01:05:09.620One of my favorite examples is a few years ago, the federal government was after Microsoft for an antitrust issue.
01:05:19.580And, what Microsoft responded, the way Microsoft responded was simply to literally buy a senator who introduced legislation, which was written by Microsoft, to cover Microsoft's ass and worked.
01:05:32.680So, if you can do that now, you and I cannot do that.
01:05:35.400We don't have enough millions of dollars to do that sort of stuff.
01:05:38.620That undermines democracy in a really serious fashion, and I think we're not talking enough about that.
01:06:00.420I mean, he was spending a crap ton of money trying to influence politicians to basically implement the laws that would benefit his company.
01:06:08.340We actually don't have that problem nearly as much in the UK because you can't really donate in the same way to political parties and political candidates quite in the same way.
01:06:18.820So, I couldn't agree with you more on that.
01:06:22.040Before we let you go, though, tell everybody where to find your books, where to find your work, and how to access other things that you do.
01:06:31.160The books, of course, can be found anywhere you get books, online or in person.
01:07:09.280How does a good Stoic manage to care enough to want to be virtuous, but not so much that they become overwhelmed by all the things there are to care about?
01:07:24.200I love shopping for new jackets and boots this season.
01:07:27.460And when I do, I always make sure I get cash back with Rakuten.