This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello my fellow suffering beings how we doing you may have noticed either through meditation or

through just being alive that your mind is out of control. You've got all sorts of

things you want to do, habits you want to establish, goals you want to achieve, and yet you often don't manage

to do them.

You have all sorts of things you don't want to do, procrastinate, lose your temper, whatever,

and often you end up doing those things anyway.

We talk a lot on this show about how the Buddha had tons of strategies for taming the monkey mind

but so did the ancient Greek philosophers about whom we don't talk that much.

So today we've got a professor from Yale who's studied these ancient philosophers extensively

and has come up with a very clear and practical way to apply these ancient secrets of happiness to our modern lives.

Tamara Gendler is Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Vincent J. Sculli Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Psychology and

Cognitive Science at Yale University. Her online course philosophy and the

science of human nature has hundreds of thousands of views and an updated version will be on the

Corsair website this spring.

In this conversation we talk about the tension between our animal nature and

our spiritual slash intellectual nature, how to define concepts such as virtue, morality, and the soul,

whether living a moral life actually makes you happy, the similarities and differences

between ancient Greek philosophy and Buddhism and how Tamar applies all of this in her own life.

But first time for some BSP, blatant self-promotion I want to tell you about a big series

we're kicking off here in the new year.

It's called the non-negotiables.

We have lined up a whole cavalcade of stars,

...