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Welcome to the Daily Stood Podcast where each day we bring you a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength, insight, and wisdom every day life.

Each one of these passages is based on the 2000 year old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more you can visit us at DailyStood.com.

Hey, it's Ryan Hall. They welcome to another episode of the Daily Stood Podcast. If you would ask me 15 years ago, would I be doing a podcast with today's guest?

I probably would have said what's a podcast, but I would have been very excited because this book, The Moral Animal by Robert Wright, was a total quake book game changer for me.

It introduced me to the concepts of evolutionary psychology and so much more. I didn't know that many years later he'd write another favorite book of mine, why Buddhism is true.

Robert has been a longtime influence of me, I think a modern philosopher and a political thinker of great value. He also has a newsletter that I strongly recommend.

It's one of the few that I get every day called Mindful Resistance. You can check that out. Mindfulresistance.net.

The idea of being that, and this is a very stoic idea, we have to be politically engaged. We have to be civically involved. But how do we do that rationally? How do we do it courageously? But also how do we do it without making ourselves miserable and unhappy and giving into despair?

We don't get particularly political in today's episode. We do talk about the idea of being involved in politics, which of course is essential to the stoics, Marx-relius, and Seneca most of all. And we talk about being a creative, controlling your own destiny and the temptations and the distractions of social media.

I loved this interview almost as much as the book. It was weird preparing for this interview. Here's like, I'm going to have these little flags here. Here's some highlighted passages. Here's an arrow. Note I made to myself.

It was like having a quick, as I prepared for the interview, having like a quick little conversation with myself 15 years ago, which felt surreal. And I feel lucky to be in this position. I feel lucky that you guys are listening. Enjoy this interview with the great Robert Wright. Check out Mindfulresistance.net. And you can follow him on Twitter at atrobertrider.org.

I wanted to start this by going way back. This is my copy of the moral animal, which I bought in 2005. Wow. That looks as if someone's actually read that.

Look, I'm going to go through it. I'm going to pick some sections that I highlighted 15 years ago, because as I was going back through it to prepare for this interview, something I found a passage that I think one might think what does the ideas in the moral animal, which is, which is my favorite book of years connect to your work on Buddhism.

I thought, I thought this passage ties to something I just had someone on the podcast talking about. You say, we are built to be effective animals, not happy ones. Of course, we're designed to pursue happiness and the attainment of Darwinian goals, sex, status, and so on often brings happiness, at least for a while.

The frequent absence of happiness is what keeps us pursuing it and thus makes us productive. Darwin's heightened fear of criticism kept him almost chronically distanced from serenity, and therefore kept him busy trying to reach it.

Yeah, it's kind of the problem that Buddhism highlights, I think, which is that we always want more. We always want things to be a little better than they are. I mean, gratification happens, and that's part of the engineering of natural selection is that we do feel good upon attaining goals. It's just that the gratification is designed to evaporate so that we will keep pursuing goals.

Yeah, I was, I was, I've used this example of someone like Elon Musk. If Elon Musk was happy at PayPal, that would be good for Elon Musk, but probably bad both for capitalism and for the world. So the system, it's almost as if we've designed the perfect system to optimize for achievement and accomplishment.

And the exact opposite of the system that you would want for human happiness or contentment.

Pretty much. I mean, I guess the exact opposite would be for us to always be depressed and, or and anxious, and it's not quite that bad. We do, you know, we do get these little rewards doled out to us.

But it's true that I think people of high achievement very often are people for whom the gratification is particularly fleeting.

And so, you know, that's kind of bad news for them in a way.

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