Speaker 1: Pushkin from the second I opened my eyes. Each morning,
Speaker 1: I'm locked in a battle with a persistent and persuasive adversary,
Speaker 1: someone who seems dead set on preventing me from practicing
Speaker 1: all of the happiness techniques I teach you about in
Speaker 1: this podcast. I want to plan my day so I
Speaker 1: don't feel time pressured, and I want to meditate an
Speaker 1: exercise every morning, and I want to do random acts
Speaker 1: of kindness throughout the day. But my nemesis is right
Speaker 1: there encouraging me to do the exact opposite, arguing that
Speaker 1: I should sleep in, or I should buy something nice
Speaker 1: for myself, or I should add yet one more event
Speaker 1: to my already packed schedule just to prove to people
Speaker 1: that I'm a hard worker. Of course, the person sabotaging
Speaker 1: me is me, or maybe more accurately, a few rogue
Speaker 1: parts of me, once that I really want to control better.
Speaker 1: And I bet I'm not alone. The tempt patients that
Speaker 1: divert us from doing things that will make us happy
Speaker 1: are everywhere, and they're available twenty four seven. But the
Speaker 1: people who first thought deeply about the internal battles we
Speaker 1: all face lived centuries before smartphones, movie streaming services, and
Speaker 1: calendar alerts the ancient Greeks, and one think are In particular,
Speaker 1: Plato came up with some profoundly important insights about our
Speaker 1: divided selves more than two thousand years ago. As in
Speaker 1: other episodes of this the mini season of the Happiness Lab,
Speaker 1: I want to explore some of the well being concepts
Speaker 1: that the ancient philosophies and great religions got right, old
Speaker 1: school tips that are borne out by the science, and
Speaker 1: ones that have personally helped me in my own quest
Speaker 1: to be happier. So welcome to Happiness Lessons of the
Speaker 1: Ancients with me, Doctor Laurie Santos. One of the things
Speaker 1: I've realized is that I am inevitably going to be
Speaker 1: tempted if I work with my phone next to me,
Speaker 1: I'll be getting texts. This is my friend and Yale
Speaker 1: colleague to Mark Kendler. When I sit down at my
Speaker 1: desk to write, I actually turn off the Wi Fi
Speaker 1: receiver on my computer so that I won't even be
Speaker 1: tempted to look at the other things while I'm getting
Speaker 1: the work done. Tomorrow and I often trade notes about
Speaker 1: how to stay happy and productive as busy academics, But
Speaker 1: Tomorrow brings something very special to these conversations. She teaches
Speaker 1: a class at Yale called Philosophy and the Science of
Speaker 1: Human Nature, and Plato's ideas are central to her curriculum.
Speaker 1: So I asked tomorrow to give us Plato one oh one.
Speaker 1: So Plato was one of the really cool ancient philosophers
Speaker 1: in Athens who gave rise to the Western philosophical tradition.
Speaker 1: And he ran basically a university which was called the Academy,
Speaker 1: where young men from Athenian families would come and engage
Speaker 1: in unbelievably intellectually interesting conversations with one another and with Plato,
Speaker 1: and with plato teacher Socrates about the deepest questions of
Speaker 1: the age. And one of the students at Plato's academy
Speaker 1: was a guy named Aristotle. So this was like a
Speaker 1: pretty legit thing to do if you were like a
Speaker 1: rich Athenian guy and wanted to get educated. It didn't
Speaker 1: have the formal structure of degree granting. It wasn't that
Speaker 1: you would go there for four years, but it was
Speaker 1: the place where people went if they wanted to understand
Speaker 1: fundamental ideas, if they wanted to think about literature or philosophy,
Speaker 1: or politics or mathematics. Those were the kinds of topics
Speaker 1: that you could explore at Plato's academy, and Plato was
Speaker 1: kind of the guy to learn from, in part because
Speaker 1: he thought so deeply about so many different topics. But
Speaker 1: today we're going to kind of focus in on Plato's
Speaker 1: ideas for happiness and how we can control this self,
Speaker 1: which was something he thought about a lot, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: So one of the things that's really interesting about ancient
Speaker 1: Greek philosophy is that they connected all sorts of topics
Speaker 1: that we think of as distinct from one another. So
Speaker 1: the question of how can you be happy was a
Speaker 1: fundamental question in ancient philosophy because they were thinking about
Speaker 1: what's the appropriate relation between the individual and their society,
Speaker 1: and what's the nature of beauty and what's the nature
Speaker 1: of truth? And so Plato would be teaching all of
Speaker 1: those things, everything from mathematics to metaphysics to political theory.
Speaker 1: But part of the reason for exploring that set of
Speaker 1: topics was so that you could understand how is it
Speaker 1: possible for an individual human being to flourish, How can
Speaker 1: they best align themselves so that they understand the nature
Speaker 1: of the world and are most receptive to the world's excellence.
Speaker 1: And so Plato didn't just think about this or obviously
Speaker 1: he was a writer who created lots of influential books
Speaker 1: on this. So talk to me about the importance of
Speaker 1: one of the books that we're going to dig into
Speaker 1: a little bit today, which is The Republic. So Plato
Speaker 1: wrote all his books in the form of of plays,
Speaker 1: and they were plays where his teacher, Socrates was the
Speaker 1: main character, and then various young men who were students
Speaker 1: at the university were in conversation with Socrates about questions.
Speaker 1: And so one of the most famous of the dialogues
Speaker 1: or books that Plato wrote is a book called The Republic,
Speaker 1: and it has ten chapters, and it's kind of a
Speaker 1: theory of everything. It describes what's the fundamental nature of
Speaker 1: the universe, how did it come into being? It talks
Speaker 1: about how mathematics underpins all of physical reality. Then it
Speaker 1: talks about physics, it talks about how we understand truth.
Speaker 1: But it does all of that by telling the story
Speaker 1: of what the ideal society would look like. What would
Speaker 1: a society look like in which human beings are best
Speaker 1: able to flourish. That's the question that Plato asks, and
Speaker 1: it turns out, in order to answer that, he has
Speaker 1: to explore everything from mathematics to political theory, and in
Speaker 1: those stories, Plato tells one of my favorite stories from
Speaker 1: the ancient Greek times, which is the story of Leontius.
Speaker 1: What was the story of Leontius and why was it
Speaker 1: so important for thinking about human nature? So let me
Speaker 1: just start by telling the story using Plato's words from
Speaker 1: the Republican. Then I'll give you the moral of it.
Speaker 1: So the story goes like this. Leontius was walking along
Speaker 1: the north wall of the city. He saw some corpses
Speaker 1: lying at the foot of the wall. He had an
Speaker 1: appetite to look at them, but at the same time
Speaker 1: he was disgusted and turned away. For a time, he
Speaker 1: struggled with himself and covered his face, but finally, overpowered
Speaker 1: by the appetite, he pushed his eyes wide open and
Speaker 1: rushed towards the dead bodies, saying, look for yourselves, you
Speaker 1: evil eyes, take your fill of this beautiful site. So
Speaker 1: Plato tells this story at a point in the Republic
Speaker 1: where he's trying to have his listeners understand that within
Speaker 1: every human being, there are multiple parts pulling the person
Speaker 1: in multiple directions. He wants to show you that you,
Speaker 1: like everyone else, are filled with internal strife. And so
Speaker 1: the story that he tells is basically the story of
Speaker 1: a rubber necker on a highway. Leontius is walking home, right,
Speaker 1: He's supposed to go efficiently into the north gate of
Speaker 1: the city, and instead there's a dead body on the
Speaker 1: side of the city wall, and he thinks, like, that's disgusting,
Speaker 1: don't look at that. But part of him, it's just
Speaker 1: fascinated and curious. And the part of him that's fascinated
Speaker 1: and curious keeps pulling him towards the wall. And so
Speaker 1: the story is about the internal tension that Leontius feels,
Speaker 1: his effort to try to control himself, and then the
Speaker 1: phenomenology the experience that he feels of just giving in.
Speaker 1: I can't control my appetite, I can't control my desire
Speaker 1: to go look at these dead and as many of
Speaker 1: us do when we're driving past an accident, he turns
Speaker 1: his head, he looks at the dead bodies, and he
Speaker 1: slows his walk. But the reason I love this story
Speaker 1: so much is that, I mean, it's kind of morbid.
Speaker 1: But the reason I love the story so much is
Speaker 1: that this isn't a tale just about rubber necking. That
Speaker 1: same internal strife that Plato is talking about is what
Speaker 1: I experience in the morning when my alarm goes off
Speaker 1: and I know I want to be committed to getting
Speaker 1: up and hopping on the elliptical or getting up for
Speaker 1: my morning meditation, but my appetite wants me to sleep in.
Speaker 1: That's what he's talking about, right, That's what he's talking about.
Speaker 1: In fact, the reason he tells the story is that
Speaker 1: he wants to set himself up to make the general
Speaker 1: point that human beings are set up inside in such
Speaker 1: a way that even if their best self wants to
Speaker 1: do something, they are always going to feel tensions. They're
Speaker 1: always going to feel pulled in many directions. It can
Speaker 1: be an email that pops up that sends you down
Speaker 1: a rabbit hole on the internet, and Plato's point is
Speaker 1: that human beings inevitably find themselves in situations that they
Speaker 1: feel pulled in multiple directions. One of the reasons Plato
Speaker 1: was really obsessed with this is that he realized that
Speaker 1: you can't just be a rational self, because we have
Speaker 1: these other parts of our mind. You actually have to
Speaker 1: control the rational self To figure this out and he
Speaker 1: had this awesome metaphor that I've actually been telling my
Speaker 1: podcast listeners throughout this whole season about this that involved
Speaker 1: a charioteer, right. Yeah. In fact, he uses different metaphors
Speaker 1: to describe it in different books. In The Republic, which
Speaker 1: is the book that has the layont his story, he
Speaker 1: says that a human being is made up of three parts.
Speaker 1: They're made up of a human being basically their head.
Speaker 1: They're made up of a lion, and they're made up
Speaker 1: of a many headed monster. And the idea is that
Speaker 1: the human being is reason, and the lion is the
Speaker 1: part of you that's kind of proud, and that the
Speaker 1: many headed beast is the part of you that's interested
Speaker 1: in base passions like food and sex. But in another
Speaker 1: one of his books, a book called The Feed Risk,
Speaker 1: he gives an analogy that I think is even more vivid,
Speaker 1: and he says a human being is like a charioteer
Speaker 1: driving a chariot with two horses. One is a noble
Speaker 1: horse and one is a wild horse. And the noble
Speaker 1: horse is the part of a human being, the aspects
Speaker 1: of ourselves that's interested in honor and social interaction and
Speaker 1: what other people think of us. If I'm supposed to
Speaker 1: sit home and do my podcast, but I go out
Speaker 1: because I give into pure pressure, because I care what
Speaker 1: my friends think about me, or I spend a lot
Speaker 1: of time focused on appearance because I want to impress somebody.
Speaker 1: That's the horse of spirit, Whereas the wild horse is
Speaker 1: the part of ourselves that's interested in fundamental desires that
Speaker 1: we share with other non human animals, like the desire
Speaker 1: for food, or the desire to sleep, or take physical
Speaker 1: pleasure in things like sex, to take in nutrition, and
Speaker 1: it needs to ensure that there are future generations. Those
Speaker 1: are the parts of ourselves that he describes in the
Speaker 1: Chariot analogy. But the Chariot ideas like any journey we're
Speaker 1: on towards better flourishing, any journey we're on towards becoming
Speaker 1: happier people. One thing we have to do is we
Speaker 1: have to deal with these horses that are kind of
Speaker 1: out of control and running around. It's not just that
Speaker 1: we have to deal with these horses. Basically what moves
Speaker 1: us is the fact that we have fundamental passions and desires.
Speaker 1: The metaphors really a powerful one because it says it's
Speaker 1: not like, oh, if we could just have the person
Speaker 1: part of ourselves, we'd be done with things. The story
Speaker 1: says human beings are the kinds of creatures who are
Speaker 1: propelled forward by physical desires and by social desires, and
Speaker 1: the key to human flourishing, the way to move fast
Speaker 1: on the path through life is to make sure that
Speaker 1: you're in control of those horses, that the parts of
Speaker 1: you that are passion and energy are pulling you in
Speaker 1: the direction that you want to go instead of in
Speaker 1: some wild other direction that they're being pulled. And so
Speaker 1: if we want to become happier people, we need to
Speaker 1: figure out how to deal with this chariot system. We
Speaker 1: need to get our charioteer to rein in these horses
Speaker 1: and to let them bring us on our journey in
Speaker 1: a really productive way. And we'll deal with that question
Speaker 1: of how we actually do that well when the happiness
Speaker 1: lab returns in a moment. So Plato was obsessed with
Speaker 1: this idea that if we really want to be happier people,
Speaker 1: we really need to rein in our desires and our
Speaker 1: passions and really use them in the right ways. But
Speaker 1: how do we do that? What did Plato figure out
Speaker 1: and how does that drive with modern science. Let's start
Speaker 1: by talking about the first horse, the horse of appetite.
Speaker 1: What did Plato think about how we could kind of
Speaker 1: rein in appetite in a productive way. Plato really took
Speaker 1: this metaphor seriously. He saw it as illuminating because he
Speaker 1: recognized what contemporary science has recognized, which is a big
Speaker 1: part of human beings, is non human beings that is
Speaker 1: a big part of ourselves are animals. So Plato basically
Speaker 1: recognized that the best way to deal with the parts
Speaker 1: of ourselves that are like animals is by dealing with
Speaker 1: them in the way that we deal with things that
Speaker 1: are animals. So imagine you have a dog and you
Speaker 1: don't want the dog to eat some delicious kind of food.
Speaker 1: The best way to keep the dog from eating that
Speaker 1: food is not to put the food in front of
Speaker 1: the dog. The second best way might be to put
Speaker 1: a muzzle on the dog. And your very last choice
Speaker 1: is going to be to try to train up your
Speaker 1: dogs so that it doesn't give in to that temptation.
Speaker 1: So Plato had the same insight with regard to human
Speaker 1: beings themselves. If you want to keep the horse of appetite,
Speaker 1: the part of yourself that's tempted. The best idea is
Speaker 1: to avoid temptations. If you can't do that, then when
Speaker 1: you're in the presence of temptations, you should keep yourself
Speaker 1: from looking at them. And only in the most difficult
Speaker 1: situations where you can't keep the temptations away and you
Speaker 1: can't keep your attention away from the temptations, only then
Speaker 1: should you try to do it through certain kinds of
Speaker 1: self control. And this is super important, right because I
Speaker 1: think you know, one of the things that Plato is
Speaker 1: saying to us is that it's not going to work
Speaker 1: to try to control our appetite just through reflective processes alone. Right,
Speaker 1: Like just repeatedly telling myself, like you know, I'm an
Speaker 1: happiness expert, like I should get up in the morning
Speaker 1: and like, you know, go work out. Like that doesn't
Speaker 1: work as well, right, Like I need cues to remind
Speaker 1: me to work out. I need to have my shoes out,
Speaker 1: I need to have my gratitude journal where I can
Speaker 1: see it. I need to pretend like this appetite part
Speaker 1: of me is like a dog that I'm basically trying
Speaker 1: to train in the simplest way possible. Right, And idiots
Speaker 1: in many ways literally true that is the things that
Speaker 1: are attracting you to food that smells tempting are the
Speaker 1: exac same features of your brain that a non human
Speaker 1: animal has that's attracting it to food that smells excellent.
Speaker 1: And in fact, there's a very good reason for it.
Speaker 1: We've evolved to be responsive to food that provides nutrition
Speaker 1: to us. And so Plato's point is, in many ways,
Speaker 1: there's nothing you can do about the fact that you
Speaker 1: will feel tempted. So your job is to figure out
Speaker 1: to the extent that you can reduce the temptations, use
Speaker 1: the cues, and if you can't, only then do you
Speaker 1: use the willpower of the charioteer. You don't have enough
Speaker 1: strengthen the reins to do it. Always by the reins,
Speaker 1: you've got to get the horse to cooperate. And what's
Speaker 1: amazing is that there's like thousands of years ago, but
Speaker 1: basically Plato is foreshadowing everything that we know about the
Speaker 1: modern science of habit formation. Right, Like, the easiest way
Speaker 1: to kind of get yourself to control your appetite is
Speaker 1: to get rid of the thing that you don't want
Speaker 1: to be tempted by, you know, whether that's your phone
Speaker 1: or the internet or fattening food or whatever it happens
Speaker 1: to be. Is just to get that out of there.
Speaker 1: And by the same token, if there's something you want
Speaker 1: your brain to do, make it really obvious in the situation, right,
Speaker 1: you know, put your gratitude journal out there, like make
Speaker 1: your gym shoes available. That's right. The easier you make
Speaker 1: it for yourself to do it automatically, the better off
Speaker 1: you're going to be. In fact, there's a famous Greek
Speaker 1: story that's in a book by Homer called The Odyssey,
Speaker 1: and it's the story of this guy Ulysses. He's trying
Speaker 1: to get home and he's going past an island where
Speaker 1: there's really tempting music, and he knows that if you
Speaker 1: hear that music, you're inclined to jump off the ship
Speaker 1: and join the singers because the music is so beautiful.
Speaker 1: And in the story Homer tells two ways of getting
Speaker 1: past that temptation. The oarsmen who are rowing the boat
Speaker 1: block their ears so that they can't hear the sound.
Speaker 1: And Ulysses, who wants to hear the sound but not
Speaker 1: be able to act on it, has his soldiers tie
Speaker 1: him to the mast of the ship. So that story
Speaker 1: is like Plato's story of the Horse. The horse is
Speaker 1: always going to be tempted. So if you have a
Speaker 1: temptation and you haven't put a mechanism in place, either
Speaker 1: to take it out of sight or to control yourself
Speaker 1: in the face of it, it's going to be really,
Speaker 1: really hard to avoid it. But all of the strategies
Speaker 1: that you're describing make the alternate activity salient rather than
Speaker 1: the one you want to avoid or take away access.
Speaker 1: Put your phone in a ziplock bag so you can't
Speaker 1: touch it, turn off the Wi Fi on your internet,
Speaker 1: don't have chocolate in the house. All of those are
Speaker 1: exactly the strategies that the ancient Greeks were using. In
Speaker 1: Homer's case, that story is almost eight thousand years old.
Speaker 1: All of these strategies, even though they're so ancient, like,
Speaker 1: what science is finding is that if you use them,
Speaker 1: you're going to actually be successful at regulating your appetite.
Speaker 1: It is a recognition of something that is so deeply
Speaker 1: part of human nature and human experience that basically every
Speaker 1: world wisdom tradition tries to describe it in some way.
Speaker 1: The Buddhist tradition has an analogy of a rider and
Speaker 1: an elephant, and it's the same idea. It's the idea
Speaker 1: that part of you is pulled in one direction and
Speaker 1: that there's a huge set of desires and passions which
Speaker 1: pull in other directions. And many world religions are about
Speaker 1: building structures that help you regulate those forces and energies,
Speaker 1: and a lot of the things that modern science shows
Speaker 1: to be effective mechanisms are actually there in religious traditions.
Speaker 1: You build rules around what kind of food you can
Speaker 1: eat when in a religion, and it's exactly the same
Speaker 1: insight that you see in the modern science. In addition
Speaker 1: to the modern science saying that these are really good strategies,
Speaker 1: the other thing that we know science typically is that
Speaker 1: people who are good at regulating their appetites they do
Speaker 1: that because they use these strategies. Yeah, one of the
Speaker 1: things that's really interesting is that people who are best
Speaker 1: at self control are actually best at setting up situations
Speaker 1: in which they don't have to exercise self control. So
Speaker 1: a kid who's good at doing homework isn't good at
Speaker 1: not looking at the phone that's right in front of
Speaker 1: them while they're doing homework. What that kid is good
Speaker 1: at is setting up their room in such a way
Speaker 1: that they aren't tempted by the phone in the first place.
Speaker 1: The more effective somebody is at what we think of
Speaker 1: as self control and self regulation, the more likely it
Speaker 1: is that they seldom put themselves into situations where they
Speaker 1: even feel tempted. And that's why I love the charioteer
Speaker 1: metaphor and why I keep telling my podcast listeners about
Speaker 1: it in this mini season, is that I get that
Speaker 1: intuition so much from the metaphor, right, Like it's a
Speaker 1: pain to be holding onto these reins, as this appetite
Speaker 1: horse is going crazy, Like that requires a lot of work.
Speaker 1: But if you just put blinders on the horse, you know,
Speaker 1: if you can just help the horse, then you don't
Speaker 1: have to worry about like holding onto these reins super hard,
Speaker 1: because the horse is just going to be behaving correctly anyway.
Speaker 1: It's exactly right, set yourself up in situations where you
Speaker 1: don't have to expend all your chariot to your energy
Speaker 1: controlling these horses. So that was what Plato thought about
Speaker 1: the appetite horse, right, this horse that's kind of going
Speaker 1: for you know, like food and like all the kind
Speaker 1: of physical pleasures. But Plato also worried about a different horse,
Speaker 1: which is this horse of spirit, right, which is kind
Speaker 1: of like, you know, that's the horse that leads me
Speaker 1: astray every time I'm trying to like ease myself off
Speaker 1: of social media or not react to some dumb fomo
Speaker 1: instinct or so on. Did Plato also give us some
Speaker 1: insight about how we could control of that horse? The
Speaker 1: best way to control the horse of spirit, the horse
Speaker 1: of honor, is by cultivating habits that are going to
Speaker 1: become the natural way that that horse behaves. So, if
Speaker 1: you think about it, the horse of appetite is never
Speaker 1: going to change what it's attracted to. The horse of
Speaker 1: spirit is a trainable horse. And in fact, one of
Speaker 1: the distinctions that Plato makes when he presents the metaphor
Speaker 1: is that he says the horse of appetite cannot be
Speaker 1: controlled except through punishment, whereas the horse of spirit can
Speaker 1: be controlled through argument and explanation. And so how does
Speaker 1: the sort of training work, right, Like, how do we
Speaker 1: actually train up our spirit horse over time? Yeah? So
Speaker 1: one of the interesting things about how we train up
Speaker 1: our spirit horse is that what we try to do
Speaker 1: is to make it natural and pleasurable for the spirit
Speaker 1: horse to do the thing that we want it reflectively
Speaker 1: to do. And one of the nice things about human
Speaker 1: beings is that we enjoy a certain sort of familiarity
Speaker 1: that when we get good at something, we take pleasure
Speaker 1: in doing it. So if you train your spirit horse
Speaker 1: actually to take pleasure, you sit down and you write
Speaker 1: in your gratitude journal every day and you just cover
Speaker 1: Actually writing in this makes me feel connected to people.
Speaker 1: That's a way of co opting the energy of the
Speaker 1: spirit horse so that it takes you along your pathway
Speaker 1: without you having to steer it using the reins. And
Speaker 1: so Plato really thought that this was something that we
Speaker 1: could do with the right sorts of strategies, right, Like,
Speaker 1: did you get a sense that Plato himself did it
Speaker 1: or that his students did it. So Plato had this
Speaker 1: incredible university, right, I mean, it was the first place
Speaker 1: people came together. And it is true that the academy
Speaker 1: it was just this enclosure outside of Athens. I think
Speaker 1: what drew people there originally was the possibility of social interaction.
Speaker 1: It was a kind of high prestige space to be in.
Speaker 1: All the cool kids were hanging out there, and then
Speaker 1: all the cool kids were hanging out there, and then
Speaker 1: Plato taught him some math, and then he taught him
Speaker 1: some metaphysics, and then he taught him some political theory.
Speaker 1: And so there's a way in which the fact that
Speaker 1: human beings are social beings is what allowed Plato to
Speaker 1: create this academy where people came together and then once
Speaker 1: they were with each other, they could take pleasure in
Speaker 1: interacting with each other and thinking about ideas. That's cool.
Speaker 1: So Plato was basically using the spirit horse of their
Speaker 1: students to like, you know, drag their charioteer to the
Speaker 1: academy and then they could learn all this good stuff exactly.
Speaker 1: And then the chariotier gets to the academy, it learns
Speaker 1: all the stuff, and then it realizes that this was
Speaker 1: in fact attacked it that played off its spiritual So,
Speaker 1: as someone who teaches Plato, are there ways that you've
Speaker 1: used his insight to train your own horses? Oh? I
Speaker 1: would say just about everything in my life comes from
Speaker 1: the insights that I've gotten from thinking about the ways
Speaker 1: in which these habits can structure our lives. So during
Speaker 1: the quarantine, my family made a habit. I had unexpectedly
Speaker 1: two kids home from school who had been living away,
Speaker 1: and we just made it a routine that every night
Speaker 1: at seven thirty we would eat dinner together as a family,
Speaker 1: and it just came to feel like a fact about
Speaker 1: the world. It wasn't like we had to think about
Speaker 1: should we go downstairs at seven thirty. We just made
Speaker 1: it part of our family's routine, and as a consequence,
Speaker 1: we spent time with each other. And then we remembered
Speaker 1: we like being with one another, And then it stopped
Speaker 1: seeming like something governed by the watch and just started
Speaker 1: seeming like what it is that we wanted to do naturally.
Speaker 1: We wanted to go down we wanted to eat together,
Speaker 1: and we wanted to spend time with one another. It
Speaker 1: seemed like the Greeks were of fantastic at recognizing not
Speaker 1: just that we have these worrying parts of ourselves, but
Speaker 1: they also gave us some insight into how we could
Speaker 1: control those different parts over time to flourish a little
Speaker 1: bit better. Kind of what was the next steps, Like
Speaker 1: what did the Greeks kind of leave in terms of
Speaker 1: their legacy for the next thinkers to come around and
Speaker 1: sort out. Yeah, so there's real insight if we'd played
Speaker 1: an Aristotle about how to control drives in ourselves but
Speaker 1: you don't get in Plato and Aristotle explicitly the thought
Speaker 1: that actually the charioteer can do the same sort of
Speaker 1: tricks on itself. And one of the things that you
Speaker 1: start getting in a tradition that starts just a couple
Speaker 1: hundred years later, in writers like Epictitis, is the idea
Speaker 1: that in fact, you can control how it is that
Speaker 1: you represent the world to yourself, and that you can
Speaker 1: think about things as being in your control or out
Speaker 1: of your control. You can frame something as letting it
Speaker 1: bother you or not letting it bother you, and that
Speaker 1: that frame can be self fulfilling. If you decide that
Speaker 1: somebody else's disapproval doesn't matter to you, you actually make
Speaker 1: it the case that somebody else's disapproval doesn't matter to you,
Speaker 1: and you don't find that thought explicitly articulated until you
Speaker 1: get to this subsequent tradition. I love hearing Tamarro explaining
Speaker 1: the ideas of the ancient Greeks. Their stories are so
Speaker 1: vivid and a tiny bit gory too. But as well
Speaker 1: as being entertaining, Plato's work brings me great comfort. I'm
Speaker 1: constantly beating myself up about not sticking to my goals
Speaker 1: and giving into temptation. Plato helps me understand that my
Speaker 1: horses are just doing what comes naturally. Once I realized
Speaker 1: all this, driving my chariot became far less exhausting and
Speaker 1: a lot more fun. In the next episode of Happiness
Speaker 1: Lessons of the Ancients, we're going to take Tamar's suggestion
Speaker 1: and explore a school of philosophy that was built on
Speaker 1: the foundation of Plato and Aristotle. So I hope you'll
Speaker 1: join me next time in Ancient Rome. The Happiness Lab
Speaker 1: is co written and produced by Ryan Dilley. The show
Speaker 1: was mastered by Evan Viola, and our original music was
Speaker 1: composed by Zachary Silver. Special thanks to the entire Pushkin crew,
Speaker 1: including Mia LaBelle, Carlie Migliori, Heather Faine, Sophie Crane, mc gibbon,
Speaker 1: Merik Sandler, Jacob Weisberg, and my agent, Ben Davis. The
Speaker 1: Happiness Lab is brought to you by Pushkin Industries and me,
Speaker 1: Doctor Laurie Santos