SPENCER: Greg, welcome.

GREGORY: Thanks for having me.

SPENCER: Do you think that we still have a lot to learn from Greco-Roman philosophies?

GREGORY: I think I do, but I also think it's kind of an open question, because those philosophies do have a lot of presumptions, some of which people may find interesting, enticing, or reasonable, and some may find confusing and completely nonsensical. So I guess the answer to the question is, it depends on what you think of some of the underlying common presumptions.

SPENCER: It's kind of remarkable that work done so incredibly long ago could still have implications in the modern world.

GREGORY: Yeah, I agree to some extent, and some of that is accidental, and some of it is because of historical connections. Part of it is that the human psyche probably hasn't changed too much, at least at its fundamental level, over the past several thousand years. And then, in addition to that, a lot of the ancient world still touches on ideas that we hold today through historical connections, such as Epicureanism's connection, which is one of the philosophies that we'll be discussing today, its connection to utilitarianism, and Stoicism's connection to cognitive behavior therapy.

SPENCER: It seems that Stoicism, in particular, is having a moment, maybe Greco-Roman philosophy more broadly. Do you think that's true, that it's becoming increasingly popular?

GREGORY: Based on the amount of AI-generated content I've seen on YouTube about Stoicism, I would say probably. Yeah, it's been crazy. So yeah, I think that it has been, for the most part, with Stoicism taking the lead. Part of me thinks that is somewhat historically contingent as well. Part of the reason Massimo Pigliucci and Meredith Alexander Kunz wrote our current book, Beyond Stoicism, is to get more of the practicable stuff out there for people to become more familiar with the options that the ancient Greco-Roman world gives people.

SPENCER: Right. Because many people have only heard of Stoicism. They don't realize that there are competing philosophies that might have stuff to offer us.

GREGORY: Yeah, and some of that is for good reason. One of the ones which I actually think is really practicable and am surprised more people don't look into is Cyrenaicism. I'm surprised, in one sense, because it is so practical, and that's essentially the philosophy that physical pleasure is the highest good, and they go about things in a unique and interesting way. But also, it only lasted maybe 100 years, a little bit less. So in another sense, it's not so surprising that that hasn't risen to public consciousness, but other ones have kind of been floated up to the consciousness. People generally know about Epicureanism and Stoicism, but both of those terms have also been corrupted through time. We have the words stoic and epicurean in our modern parlance, but those words mean different things than the philosophies.

SPENCER: So we'll get into details of some of the different philosophies in a little bit, but let's start with conceptions of what is a good life that come from Greco-Roman philosophers.

GREGORY: That's the big question they ask themselves, and at the end of the day, you could think of all of these different philosophies as trying to answer that question and coming to different conclusions. A lot of them, if not all of them, had one idea in common, which is the Greek word eudaimonia. Some of your audience is probably familiar with it because it has come into positive psychology and is in the sphere of people who are into flourishing, positive psychology, and the like. It is a term that is a little bit strange and has a long Greek history that changed dramatically when the philosophers started becoming active around the time of Socrates, or perhaps a little bit before.

SPENCER: So was there a standard definition that was agreed on, or was there a lot of debate about what it really means?

GREGORY: I think that's an interesting question. There was a lot of debate because they all cashed it out in the same way. A lot of the philosophers presumed that eudaimonia was the thing that everybody wanted in their lives. That was the thing they were going for. Nobody would disagree with that. Nobody would say, "Hey, you want some eudaimonia?" and people would say, "Nah, no, thank you." That would just be weird. The thing is, all these different philosophies then start cashing out that term in different ways. You could think of it in terms of our word happiness, and in fact, that's how eudaimonia is often translated. I think it's a bad translation, and we can get into that. You could think of it in terms of happiness. Everybody wants to be happy, which seems, at least on its face, like a non-controversial statement. But when I say happy, the idea that forms in your head or the listener's head may be very different. So when I say the term happy, or when you use the word happy, what does that mean to you? Can you flesh it out?

SPENCER: Yeah, I tend to take the component approach of thinking of it as there's life satisfaction, which is your overall valuation of your life, overall how good do you feel your life is? And then there's the moment-to-moment sensation, how happy in terms of a feeling or emotion do I feel right at this moment? To what extent do I not feel suffering at this moment? I think those two things are correlated but can be quite different from each other.

GREGORY: Yeah. And that also raises the question of whether those two things can be collapsed on the same scale, in a sense. I raise that point because at the end of the day, when you're trying to live your life, you're like, "What do I want to do today? Should I go to the gym?" Well, going to the gym's uncomfortable. I really don't like that, but will it somehow feed into your overall life project? That's an open question. Every time you make a decision, it's kind of an on-off thing. It's a single scale on which you're making a decision; you have to do something in the world. If you have two different metrics that are incommensurable, such as well-being and happiness, then that raises the question of how do you live a good life? Because you have to choose between two incommensurable metrics. So do you have any idea of how you would mush them together?

SPENCER: Well, my own personal life philosophy actually goes down to values. I call it valueism. I think of it as the idea that we all have many values that we care about, and some of those values, a small number of them, are intrinsic. We care about them for their own sake, not as a means to other ends. In my life philosophy, a good life is about trying to figure out what your intrinsic values are, and then using effective means to get the things you intrinsically value and create them in the world. When the values come in conflict with each other, as they often do, because seeking one intrinsic value might prevent you from seeking another, or even directly be worse for another, or at least use time that you could spend seeking another, then you have to go back to your values and think about how much do I care about this value, this amount of this value, versus that amount of that value? That just comes to sort of internal values judgment that you're making.

GREGORY: So it seems like you may have a whole bunch of different things that are fairly disparate from each other, like mental tranquility versus physique versus emotional happiness and things like that; they all collapse down because one values them. Presumably these are some kinds of larger or broader desires about how to act in the world and how to live one's life, and then it collapses down to value. The Greeks had something a little bit similar. A lot of them circle around one single value, often called the telos or end, which is where we get the word teleology from. One of the weird presumptions that I brought up at the beginning from Greco-Roman philosophy, at least a lot of them, is that there is a single best thing to pursue. They had different reasons for arguing this. It could be physical pleasure, it could be mental tranquility, it could be something else entirely. This was a background presumption in Greco-Roman thought, and that could be seen as value. In fact, one of the ancient definitions of telos was something to the effect of that it was the thing for which you valued for its own sake, that comes from Cicero. There's also an ancient dictionary that I think had something similar in it that came from Plato's Academy. It seems similar, but I'm curious what you think of this idea of telos and this one thing leading to a good life.

SPENCER: Yeah, it's confusing when you talk about there being a single end or single purpose to life, because often the word purpose implies that something was created for a reason. "What's the purpose of a fork? It's to use it to put food into your mouth." Well, why is that the purpose of a fork? Because someone created the fork for a reason. It has a function given to it by its creator. If you talk about a universe and you don't assume there's a creator, then what does it mean for there to be a purpose? If we evolve through evolution, does evolution give us our purpose? We might have certain traits because evolution caused those traits to be favored and therefore propagated, or natural selection favored certain traits and caused them to get propagated. But that doesn't mean it's a purpose in the sense of, "Therefore we should live our life that way." So I struggle with what people really mean by purpose, unless they're saying purpose given to it by something that created it.

GREGORY: And that's understandable. I kind of used to have that problem too, and I still do, to some extent. I have mixed feelings on the idea of teleology. But part of what helped me a little bit is seeing some of the academic debate around Aristotle, where this idea was really fleshed out as one of Aristotle's four causes of teleology, that something is moving toward a final end. It's interesting to note that there's at least some debate in the academic literature that Aristotle's teleology wasn't meant to be this divine thing, this divine force of nature that was pushing stuff forward, but perhaps simply a mode of explanation. In the context of where Aristotle's talking about it in physics, he is talking about sufficient explanations and gives the four causes as providing a sufficient explanation. So it may not be this weird, magical force of nature so much as an explanation. When we're saying what we want to do or how we want to live our lives, part of what we're probably searching for are explanations or justifications for actions. That view of teleology helps make things make a little more sense to me.

SPENCER: Could you give an example of that? What kind of purpose are you referring to?

GREGORY: So, for instance, as an example of living one's life, it could be, I want to help the most people relieve their mental suffering, in which case that would be one example of a telos for life, in a sense. But we could also speak about telos for other things as well. Aristotle brought up the example of horses. This is another thing that helped me figure out what teleology was, in a sense, because we have this concept of "healthy" for each kind of thing. We know the difference between a wilting plant and a flourishing plant. A flourishing plant has plump green leaves and is consistently growing, whereas a plant with brown leaves that is wilted is a more sickly plant. A lot of modern philosophers have brought up this idea of teleology and connected it to health. We have ideas of what are more optimal versions of different things. Teleology, another way to think about it, is to become the best version of that thing as possible.

SPENCER: So how did different Greco-Roman philosophies approach deciding on what telos should be pursued?

GREGORY: They kind of went through two different main routes. This ignores a few of them, but it's a good first step. A couple of them, specifically Stoicism and Epicureanism, seem to appeal to nature, specifically human nature, and how we are built and what kind of beings we are. Then others, like Cyrenaicism and Pyrrhonism, kind of more appealed to epistemology, what we can actually know, and how we should live our lives based on what we can actually know.

SPENCER: And where did eudaimonia fit into these pictures?

GREGORY: Everybody kind of wants eudaimonia, and they all kind of agreed on that. The question is, how can you get there? What is possible for the kinds of beings we are? Cyrenaicism is kind of like one of the easiest examples. Generally, we just know that pleasure feels good, and we go toward it, and pain feels bad, and we go away from it. The Cyrenaics argued that a lot of the other stuff that we think about and concern ourselves with in the world is much fainter in our minds. They brought out the example of torture. When you want to try to force somebody to do something, you can call them names, but that's not nearly as effective as inflicting physical pain. This kind of pierces, this kind of sinks into your mind and is much sharper and more apparent to our minds than others. Based on this, that pain and pleasure are the things that really glow in our minds and are most apparent, they then based their philosophy on trying to get the most amount of pleasure while minimizing pain. Since physical pleasure is much more apparent than mental pleasure, they then argued that physical pleasure is the highest good and a Eudaimonic life is a life that is maximally filled with physical pleasure.

SPENCER: So then would they say that telos is to pursue physical pleasure?

GREGORY: Because they're skeptics, there's a technical difference. If you try to think of a future pleasure, just sit there and try to imagine it. It is not as apparent as actually getting the pleasure in the moment. They specified the telos as momentary physical pleasure. The Cyrenaic life is going moment to moment, living in the moment, trying to grab as much physical pleasure as possible. Mental pleasure is okay too, but it's much more faint, so get it if you can, but don't break your back over it.

SPENCER: Do each of these other philosophies you mentioned have such a clear goal as seeking physical pleasure? Or do they approach things really differently?

GREGORY: I would say maybe Pyrrhonian skepticism is the odd one out, because one of the goals of Pyrrhonian skepticism is their view of eudaimonia, which is something called ataraxia, or mental tranquility. It is the Greek word that described in ancient texts the ideal mental state of a soldier going into battle; they're just chill. That's what the Pyrrhonian skeptics want to go for. They thought eudaimonia was achieving ataraxia through doubting non-apparent things, things that you don't see through your senses. So any ideas, just don't worry about it too much. Worrying about ideas and philosophical things is the cause of mental stress. By dropping your worries about that kind of stuff, by dropping your worries about non-apparent things, you'll ultimately achieve mental tranquility. That is eudaimonia, ataraxia for the Pyrrhonian skeptics. Now there's a technical aspect in that they would say that telos may be a thing that is not apparent, so don't worry about what that is. Just go after mental tranquility in the methods they suggest, and you'll live a good life.

SPENCER: That's so interesting. So it sounds like Cyrenaicism says to pursue physical pleasure moment-to-moment, and then you've got Pyrrhonism, which says to pursue mental tranquility. What is Epicureanism telling you to pursue?

GREGORY: Epicureanism also wants you to pursue pleasure but they're going to argue with the Cyrenaics, and they rest their arguments on human nature. They say that as we grow up, pleasure and pain are apparent things we want and don't want respectively, just like the Cyrenaics do. But through what they claim to be empirical study of how these pleasures occur and their benefits, what actually is the highest pleasure is not physical pleasure. You hear some stuff in the jhana circles of people who are doing Buddhist meditation and jhana hacking about this phenomenon called pīti, or you could think of it as kind of orgasmic pleasure, where it is so pleasurable it becomes overwhelming, and too much of it would not actually be pleasurable in a sense anymore. The Epicureans noticed that and said that the Cyrenaics were empirically wrong about the nature of pleasure. Instead, they thought that the higher, better pleasure was mental pleasure. They argued that mental pleasure actually occurs through the complete removal of mental distress; that completely removing mental distress is a pleasure in itself. It's a nice, smooth pleasure. You could bring it up whenever you want. For instance, Epicurus was writing to a friend on his deathbed. He was dying a painful death, and he said, "I'm in pain, but I'm okay, because I can recall our friendship and our memories. This brings me mental pleasure, so this physical pain is nothing." That's an Epicurean technique of recalling mental pleasure on demand. This mental pleasure, because it can be brought up on demand, is smooth and not jarring. For those reasons, mental pleasure is the highest thing to pursue, and a life of mental pleasure is what leads to eudaimonia. You get the highest, most consistent mental pleasure by removing all mental distress.

SPENCER: How does removing mental distress relate to the goal of Pyrrhonism of mental tranquility? Because it sounds kind of similar.

GREGORY: It is, except pleasure is not the thing that is to be pursued. The Pyrrhonian skeptics thought that mental distress came about by being confused about things and seeing that people have different opinions about stuff. People are always in conflict and argument in the world, and this can lead to mental upset. But they don't necessarily purely cash it out in terms of pleasure as the highest good. They would consider that a dogma, which, if you held onto that and believed it and tried to pursue it, would lead to frustration, and you'd actually be getting in the way of a good life by being frustrated and not being able to reliably get mental tranquility when you want it. So you have to, paradoxically, not want it in order to get it to some degree.

SPENCER: So, is it fair to say that for each of these philosophies, there's a thing that they're saying you should be trying to achieve or get or experience, and then there's a set of strategies that they say or how you actually get there?

GREGORY: I think that's fair.

SPENCER: And then where does Stoicism fit into the picture?

GREGORY: So Stoicism has another goal.They say that eudaimonia is made by living a virtuous life, and that is different from all the others. So far, we've kind of talked about pleasure and mental tranquility, and a lot of people get into Stoicism because they hear that you can become bulletproof, invincible, and have a mentally tranquil life, and that is a sort of side effect of stoic practice. But that's actually not the goal. The founder of Stoicism said the goal was a very mysterious phrase, and the Stoics had to use this as a rhetorical technique to get people in. They said these weird things, and they said that the goal is to live according to nature. What that actually means is pretty complicated, but the way I summarize the aim of Stoicism, the telos of Stoicism, is to be the best human being and version of you that you can be.

SPENCER: It's so odd because it's so out of sync with the way people usually talk about it, where it seems like it's a set of techniques for just making it so that you can deal with the difficulties in life.

GREGORY: Yeah, I agree. During my later part of talking about Stoicism, I've been dedicating myself to trying to fight against that, because it actually leads to a kind of dark Stoicism, in my view, where you can create, if these techniques work, which is an assumption, and it makes you more resilient, it has the possibility of creating a bunch of what I call resilient assholes, which is not what Stoicism's goal is. I don't want to make assholes any more resilient. I'd rather them not be resilient. But, if it's interesting, I could trace what I think is the genealogy of how this occurred, how this weird misunderstanding occurred, because it's understandable given what's out there, but it also really distorts the philosophy in my view.

SPENCER: Yeah, I'd love to have you do that. From my own perspective, you hear people say things like, "Oh, well, you should imagine that every day you could die and everything could be taken from you, and you should be grateful that you get one more day with the things you have." That makes it seem all about being ready for suffering and being totally immune to it.

GREGORY: Yeah. And funny factoid, the Stoics did not invent that technique, sometimes called premeditatio malorum, to make it sound Latin and therefore legit, or premeditation of adversity. That is actually traceable, probably to the Cyrenaics. Cicero, who was extremely familiar with the Stoics, mentions that the Cyrenaics came up with this technique in order to decrease mental stress. So this is not a Stoic technique. This also raises the interesting possible side tangent of whether these philosophies are actually doing anything unique or if you can just swap these techniques between them and plug and play.

SPENCER: Yeah. So tell us, how did it come to be that stoicism was associated with these kinds of methods?

GREGORY: I think how I trace it is, a lot of people are familiar with Epictetus, the so-called dichotomy of control. The dichotomy of control is a term that was coined, to my knowledge, by William Irvine in his book A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy. This is taken from Epictetus' famous phrase in the Enchiridion, or the Handbook, which is a short, condensed version of Epictetus' version of Stoicism. In the Handbook, he says, "Some things are up to us, and other things are not." It's sometimes translated as "Some things are under control and other things are not," or "Some things are in our power, or other things are not." But I think the Greek is more consistent with "Some things are up to us or not." Because the Enchiridion is this condensed version of Stoicism, it's meant to be a highly compact thing, possibly to remind people who already know the theory of the basics, in order to keep it in memory. That's a hypothesis, not a fact. I compare the Enchiridion Epictetus' Handbook, to cocaine, compared to the discourses, which is cocoa leaves. This is concentrated, dangerous stuff, and sometimes it's very easy to misinterpret it because it is so condensed. This got into the public consciousness in part through Albert Ellis, for instance, who quoted some of these ideas to his clients when he was doing one of the early forms of cognitive behavior therapy called Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy. This dichotomy of control came about because Epictetus then says, "You'll be crushed if you want things that are not up to you, and you'll be okay if you want things that are." What is hidden from this is that this is one aspect of Epictetus' three-step program for Stoicism that the scholar Pierre Hadot calls the Three Disciplines. This is the first step in order to gain control of a subset of emotions called the Passions. Once you do that, you're then supposed to take the next step, which is now that you have some reins on your unhealthy emotions, you're supposed to become a better person and help the world. A lot of people just don't get it there. They're just like, "I want freedom. I want to be bulletproof, and that is the way to do it." I think the translation issue and focusing on Epictetus in just those few sentences led to thinking it's all about resilience, and that's all there is to it.

SPENCER: So basically, it sounds like it's a multi-step process, but people think that step one is the whole process.

GREGORY: Yep, that's how I would summarize it. Everybody's starting at fresh, stopping at freshman level.

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SPENCER: And so what is this dark Stoicism?

GREGORY: So in general, dark Stoicism, as I would call it, is giving resilience to people who are not necessarily trying to better themselves and be better human beings. If Stoicism and these techniques actually work to make people more resilient, and they don't try to then cause less harm and possibly help others and develop themselves as human beings pro-socially, then they could simply become resilient and then, for instance, be resilient to the cries of their victims and say, "Oh, you know, too bad. Your cries of pity are nothing to me."

SPENCER: So before we get to the later septic Stoicism, how does the first step work exactly?

GREGORY: Epictetus summarizes this very succinctly and well in saying that it has two main components. One transfers one's aversions from the external to the internal, and one dampens desire as much as possible. Because of this desire component, the scholar Pierre Hadot calls this the discipline of desire. Epictetus in the Discourses calls it the first discipline, or the first thing to do overall, the first topic. How you cash that out is instead of worrying about what happens, for instance, if I am going on a podcast and I'm worried about how I'm going to perform. That is an aversion to an external because the performance at the end of the day is not completely up to me, meaning it doesn't come from a small scale subset of my mentality. We could possibly get into stoic psychology a little bit more, too, but I'll just say, "It's not completely up to me." That's good enough for now. The performance is not up to me. Anxiety and worry in stoic psychology come from the fact that I am putting value on something that does not actually have that value, and that's why I'm worried. As a practicing stoic, I would say, "Oh, I'm nervous about my podcast performance." That's a clue to me that I must be valuing something external. Instead, I'm going to do what Epictetus says and transfer my aversions from the external to the internal, which means, instead of saying, "Ugh, my podcast performance may suck," I say, "Ugh, I'm judging external things. I want to be a better person and stop worrying about stuff like that." Now that I'm worrying about my mental steps instead of the external performance, I could then choose from an array of stoic techniques to try to continually focus on my mentality as opposed to externality.

SPENCER: So could you unpack that transferring from external to internal a little more? What does this philosophy say about what's wrong with being anxious about going on a podcast? Why is that inherently externalized? And then what does it mean to make it internalized?

GREGORY: They are making a specific empirical claim. The Stoics believed in actual value; value is a somewhat objective thing, and it is kind of a fact of human psychology. According to the Stoics, anxiety will occur when you're valuing something that's not actually valuable or not good because you may not be able to completely control its outcome. What's bad about it is that it creates this subset of emotions called the Passions, and one of the goals of Stoicism is to eliminate this subset of harmful emotions that are called the Passions.

SPENCER: But are they conflating anything that's outside of you or outside of your control with being not valuable? I'm confused how those things are connected, because you can imagine things could be outside your control but still be valuable.

GREGORY: Yes. So the Stoics had a pretty precise theory of value, and it gets kind of technical kind of fast. They divided things up into two kinds of values. One was good and bad, and they had a pretty high bar for what was good or bad. One of the summaries of Stoicism is that virtue is the only good. That is a claim that the Stoics make that they argue for. They argue for this based on a kind of analysis of what good things actually are and how we use the term. A quick way to argue that virtue is the only good is to lean on something you find in Socrates, in Euthydemus, where Socrates argues that one's character is something that one carries with you wherever you go, and no matter what circumstances you find yourself in, your character, a good character will always serve you. In fact, you could put things to better use if you have a good character. A common example I give is a lot of people think health is a good. Now, we could test that stoically by saying, if you had two people of two different characters, like Malala Yousafzai and Adolf Hitler, would they both put their health to good use in equal ways in order to help themselves and others? The Stoics claim and argue that it is probably better to have people of bad character be not healthy, not wealthy, not popular. Things like health are not a good, nor are popularity or wealth, because they can cause harm or benefit to both the individual and others, whereas a good character will simply benefit everybody around you, whether you are in poverty or whether you're wealthy.

SPENCER: Okay, got it. So they're basically saying the only thing that's valuable are the virtues, and the virtues lie within you, so anything external is therefore not a value. If you're worried about something external, then the next step is to notice that you're actually worried about something that's not valuable, rather than to focus on how to get the thing that's not valuable.

GREGORY: Yep, that is a good first approximation. The Stoics also said that things that are not good or bad are in this third weird category called Indifference, and these indifferents have a second level value. I think it's called lexicographic valuing in modern decision theory, where you have two different levels of value that are not commensurate, and one always trumps the other. So good and bad, which the Stoics argue is character, always trumps other kinds of value. But that doesn't mean there aren't other kinds of value. What you try to do as a practicing Stoic is focus on your character and put these externals in perspective. You don't ignore them, and that's another part of how Stoicism gets misinterpreted. It's just like, "I don't care about anything." Actually, what you're trying to do when you practice is put those things to good use by helping yourself and others around you in a prosocial way. That's how you practice Stoicism. That brings you to the second discipline of Epictetus as well.

SPENCER: Got it. So what is the next step in the process?

GREGORY: So the next step Pierre Hadot calls the Discipline of Action, and that consists of two main things: to act intentionally instead of in a knee-jerk fashion, and to act prosocially. Pro-socially doesn't mean that introverts can be stoics — I'm an introvert, so I guess I'm arguably stoic — but instead, it just means trying not to hurt people when you can, and as much as you're able, slowly growing your circles of concern over time in order to help more.

SPENCER: Got it. So you kind of build up this resilience to the world, and then you focus on pro-social action and increasing your circle of concern. Is that right?

GREGORY: Yep, that sounds about right.

SPENCER: And is there a third step after that?

GREGORY: Yep, the third and final step is the icing on the cake. Pierre Hadot names the Discipline of Ascent. Epictetus says that this doesn't teach you anything new. You're still focused on the desires, trying to dampen your desires for things not up to you, as well as being more prosocial and intentional; you're just doing it on a moment-to-moment and more rigorous basis. Epictetus says that this is for people who are advanced, that you've already made progress in the first two, and he makes the somewhat outrageous claim that you could do this, even if you become really good at this, you could do it while you're asleep or drunk or melancholic, which is an ancient Greek term for mental illness more broadly. And so this third discipline is like the hard training, where you look at your moment-to-moment experience in a more rigorous way and try to really solidify the rough habits that you built up in the first two disciplines.

SPENCER: So is it kind of the idea that if you meditate and practice mindfulness, you want to take that mindfulness and apply it to daily life, where it starts to imbue moment-to-moment experience, except for Stoicism instead of mindfulness?

GREGORY: Yeah, I would kind of say, if you want to make that mapping, it's kind of the other way around. I kind of imagine or practice the first two disciplines as intentional practice, where it's like, "Oh, I'm having trouble with, for instance, public speaking. Let me go to Toastmasters and drill this and get over that by working with it." Whereas, "I envision the Discipline of Ascent, the final thing, as more moment-to-moment in the world, stuff like when it occurs, I have to practice catching and working with it quickly." So it's a little bit the opposite of what you mentioned about on the cushion practice going off the cushion. I would kind of reverse that for Stoicism and put the first two disciplines as a rough analogy for being off the cushion first, and then you do it on the cushion, in a sense.

SPENCER: Okay, so we've talked about these four different Greco-Roman philosophies. We've talked about Stoicism, which is about having a virtuous life, Epicureanism, which is about pleasure, but through a very particular lens of removing mental distress, Pyrrhonism, which is about trying to achieve mental tranquility, but again, through a very specific lens of avoiding doubting non-apparent things or avoiding being confused. And then we talked about Cyrenaicism, where physical pleasure is the highest good. Maybe that's the simplest of them. So these are four different systems, four different goals. How do you think about your own belief system with regard to these? Is there one of these you favor?

GREGORY: Yeah. I personally favor Stoicism, but I actually came into Buddhism first. So I came kind of on the mix of Theravada-ish Buddhism along with Stoicism, which fills some gaps. I appreciate some of the other philosophies, and I overall think that more people would benefit by choosing or looking at these philosophies more closely. But overall, I consider myself more akin to or more aligned with Stoicism, with Buddhism.

SPENCER: Where do you see Stoicism filling in gaps in Buddhist philosophy?

GREGORY: It depends. In my Buddhist philosophy and in my own personal journey, I tended to shop around for Buddhism early on and went to all sorts of different Buddhist Sanghas, ultimately settling on Theravada Buddhism, primarily more akin to the Thai Forest Tradition and early Buddhism. I look at that because it provided me with a good balance of guidance for life and meditation. It kind of met my personality traits and what I was looking for. That form of Buddhism has a very simple form of ethics, where ethics comes through essentially just following certain rules, like the five precepts: don't kill, don't steal, no sexual misconduct, no intoxicants, and no lying. Those are very simple, straightforward, deontological rules to follow. There are some nuances to ethics, but I noticed that some people who practice this also wanted to be politically involved. When I was looking at the early scriptures, I found relatively little guidance for this. I wanted to be more active in the world, whereas the kind of Buddhism I aligned with mostly seemed to advocate for a more withdrawn version of the world. I kind of put Stoicism in to largely flesh out Buddhist ethics as it's seen in the early suttas for lay people.

SPENCER: And does that mean using its ideas of trying to become virtuous and trying to take virtuous actions?

GREGORY: Yeah. It's more engaged, I would say, than what I see in the early suttas. Buddhism gives you ways to gain mental tranquility in a much more subtle way, and I actually align more with their model of psychology than I do with Stoicism. However, Stoicism gives me the tools to be more active. I've been more involved in certain political movements over the past few years, and I credit that to Stoicism because it allows me to maintain some form of mental tranquility while also giving me the motivation to go and try to change the world in ways that I think would make it better.

SPENCER: You mentioned to me before that you feel that these systems are often treated as collections of life hacks. You can read a self-help book with the tricks and tips from Stoicism, but you think that they're better thought of as life philosophies. What do you mean by that?

GREGORY: I think that these philosophies you mentioned all give you a value system to follow, which contrasts with other things like self-help and therapy. I find that self-help generally tends to want to maximize something that you already desire, and its secondary goal, if it's a goal at all, is to actually change your values and desires. Whereas, if you notice, all the four philosophies that we mentioned previously come packaged with a value that, if one thinks it's a good idea to pursue, one could then try to follow that value. All the techniques and tricks that come along with those philosophies are in alignment with that kind of North Star guiding your life, which is pleasure, physical pleasure as the highest good, or building character, and virtue as the highest good. Whatever it is, you have a signpost to follow. To quote the stoic philosopher Seneca, "If you don't have a port to sail to, no wind is favorable." Meaning that a lot of times, people are buffeted by circumstances around them, and their desires fluctuate and change. I think a life philosophy has a lot to offer in terms of providing guidance on how to get one's life going in a consistent direction.

SPENCER: If you treat it as a bunch of life hacks, we still haven't figured out what you're aiming for. What are you trying to do with these life hacks? Maybe you have a vague sense, but if you crystallize what you're really aiming for in life, then maybe you can pursue it in a more effective way.

GREGORY: It gives you some time to think about what you are really aiming for. Once you go for it, you then have a consistent, coherent set of practices to help you get there. Whereas, if you want self-help, some self-help could be useful. Generally, I think that mental pain is not useful for the large majority of people, so things like life hacks or general techniques to reduce it generally make the world a better place. But at the same time, the resilient asshole problem I brought up earlier, sometimes people will not question their values and simply pick up life hacks to be more effective in where they're going. If where they're going leads to a life that they later regret or causes pain to people around them, then that could be a problem that comes with life hacks.

SPENCER: The way you present these philosophies in a really intriguing way, and I've never heard someone present it this way before, but it sounds essentially like people who are deciding on what is good and then just saying, "Okay, now that we know what good is, or we have an opinion on what good is, how do we optimize for that thing?" and then developing some techniques to optimize in a very strategic way for that very narrow form of good, which I guess they would say is not narrow. I guess it's good.

GREGORY: Yeah. And I think that's one of the benefits of knowing about this, even if you think all this teleology, Eudaimonia stuff is a bunch of crap. Sitting down and thinking about what actually is good and how you know that is probably a useful exercise in itself. And also there's the interesting question that I really don't have an answer to: how would you know you're sailing to the wrong port, so to speak? It's a kind of chicken and egg problem, and I don't know if you have any thoughts about this, but how would you know if you chose the wrong philosophy of life? If it's causing you physical pain, well, hey, then you're presuming that physical pain is bad. But what makes you think that that's actually the case? And so there's an interesting problem there. But I think the process of engaging in this kind of thought about what is good and why is a useful step for many people.

SPENCER: Did the Greco-Roman philosophers tend to think that there was an objective answer to this question? Because it seems like they did, and I think that's where I would diverge with them in thinking that there even is or could be an objective answer.

GREGORY: Many of them did. Some of them didn't. For instance, the skeptics would think that that is a non-evident question, and so don't worry about it. You'll live a good life by just not worrying about that, in fact. So don't get in your own way. But a lot of people did think there was an objective answer, and that's one of those weird things of Greco-Roman philosophy that you may or may not agree with. And that's something to keep in mind. I think turning to some modern philosophers for fleshing that idea out. For instance, Philippa Foot and her very short and interesting book Natural Goodness kind of goes into a more modernized version of how these Greco-Roman ideas could make sense in light of modern science.

SPENCER: Because I don't think there's an objective answer to what's valuable that pushes me pretty hard towards leaning on introspection and thinking about, "Well, what's valuable to me," and then trying to get clear on that question, "What do I really mean by valuable?" Now, at least, I'm asking an empirical question about my own psychology, rather than asking a question that may not have any answer. At least empirical questions have answers.

GREGORY: Yeah. Taking a look at that, I ultimately think that's what I agree with. Some of the Epicureans and Stoics, ancient versions, would disagree. They would say that human nature is a certain way, and if we look empirically at human development, there's kind of an ideal version of a flourishing human being, and their philosophies will get you there. Though their philosophies contradicted each other, so one of them may be right, the other wrong, or both of them are wrong, and they kind of argued for their objectively best philosophy for human beings to follow. I ultimately do lean in your direction, in that I think that our fundamental values are not rational or irrational, but 'arational.' It is a pseudo question to ask whether one's fundamental values make sense, and instead, one has to simply look and see what they are through the empirical study of oneself, by trying things and seeing how your life develops and whether it's in a direction that ultimately feels suitable for you.

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SPENCER: I sense that one part of your message is that there's actually a lot more interesting stuff in Greco-Roman philosophy than gets attention. For example, I think most people have not even heard of some of these other philosophies like Pyrrhonism. So, if we go through these, could you just tell us some of the value that you see in them? What do you see as being valuable in Pyrrhonism that people should be more aware of?

GREGORY: Pyrrhonism and Stoicism, surprisingly, I think their practice, day-to-day, is very similar in that, doubt more. If I want to sum it up in two sentences, doubt more, especially in this day and age, doubt both not only the external stuff, but also the first ideas that pop into your head. As a Stoic, these things are called impressions. Epictetus tells us repeatedly to take a look at your first impression and say, "Wait a minute. Is this really true? Is what I'm claiming is valuable, or what is assumed is valuable in this first impression actually the case, according to theory? Let me see." Pyrrhonism would suggest something very similar. Pyrrhonism also offers some interesting techniques in order to instill doubt in yourself in situations you find stressful. There are several ways of self-argumentation in order to reach equipollence, where you kind of no longer know what's true, and then you just let it go and you feel better about it. So I would say Pyrrhonism, the main takeaway that people could get is doubt more, both externally and also your first impressions of things, and see how it goes.

SPENCER: Is Pyrrhonian skepticism a specific method, or was it talking about the attitude that was had in Pyrrhonism?

GREGORY: It is both an attitude of philosophy of epistemology, but also has some methods associated with it.

SPENCER: Could you describe one of the methods?

GREGORY: One thing they had is the five modes of doubt, where one tries to argue with oneself in order to become less certain about one's beliefs. There are five modes, and these are the five modes of one of the skeptics called Agrippa. It also comes in modern epistemology; people know Agrippa's trilemma, which is three of these five modes. When you are thinking about something that you are upset about, you can bring one of the two modes into play, which are disagreement or relativity. For instance, if you're upset about a specific political event that is going on in the world, let's just bring up one, the war in Ukraine, just a random example. You could talk about how people disagree and try to write out why some people see the war in one way and some people see it in another, and then try to justify your version of it. Then you question using disagreement or relativity again, that people can agree or that you could see things from a different relative perspective, and that what's good or bad about what's going on there can change. You then repeat this process, and you'll ultimately find that you reach what's known, even today, as Agrippa's trilemma, that you're either going to hit an infinite regress where you just keep justifying until you get sick of it, you're going to hit an assumption that you can't justify, or you're going to reach a circular argument. This method is meant to reach equipollence and to make you realize that there are many ways to see the same thing, and since it's really hard, and the Pyrrhonian skeptics would say impossible, to know what's really good or bad about everything that's going on, then, you should just let that go.

SPENCER: And then letting go puts you into a state that's closer to what they would say is ideal, essentially accepting that you can't know.

GREGORY: Yep, accepting that you can't know about this, and then you go on and live your life. The other set of techniques that the Pyrrhonian skeptics posited was just a few ways of following common custom and culture. The Pyrrhonian skeptics didn't just sit there and not cook dinner or something, because does the dinner really exist? Can I really get to the fridge? Is this really food? They weren't like that. They advised methods of action in the world, which is essentially just following what's apparent, what other people are doing, and what is common sense. So don't worry about this theoretical, abstract stuff, and instead focus on what's in front of you and live your life. That's the way to ataraxia, according to the Pyrrhonian skeptics.

SPENCER: What about Cyrenaicism? What kind of ideas from that do you think are especially valuable?

GREGORY: I think one of the interesting things comes from the founder's life. When you think of physical pleasure as the highest good, you might assume they would just be doing a lot of drugs, going to raves, and having a lot of sex. But one of the things that the founder, Aristippus of Cyrene, which is why it's called Cyrenaicism, was known for was being cool under pressure; he was just kind of a cool guy. There's this great story of him being shipwrecked, and they lost everything. His shipmates were all upset, and he saw some signs of life on the place where they were shipwrecked. He said, "Oh, boy, there are signs of life." He brought them to a village, and he started chatting philosophy with the villagers. Soon he was so amiable and friendly that they started giving him stuff and inviting him to dinners and things like that. That's the kind of life he led. For people who think that physical pleasure is worthwhile, learning to get physical pleasure from the simple things is one of the guiding principles of Cyrenaicism. I think Aristotle has said something to the effect of, "You are truly wealthy when you can still be wealthy when you lose everything in a shipwreck," or something to that degree. Part of the practice is to find physical pleasure easily. Why put a lot of physical effort into getting physical pleasure? Easy physical pleasure is better than hard. Why sweat it? That kind of training and intentionally doing that could be useful if people want to pursue physical pleasure.

SPENCER: I can see a connection there to, for example, gratitude practices, where people will try to really be grateful for every little pleasure in their life, like their morning tea or coffee, a hug from a family member, etc.

GREGORY: I would put that more akin to savoring than gratitude. The Cyrenaics would say that gratitude is a faint mental pleasure. It's nice if you can get it, but physical pleasure is the good stuff, so go for that. Savoring would be in the moment physical pleasure. If you're doing it and paying attention to it, that's great. Mental pleasure, that's all right too, but don't break your back over it; probably go for physical if you had a choice.

SPENCER: Interesting. So during your tea drinking, you should be paying close attention to how delicious it is, rather than thinking back and being glad you had your morning tea.

GREGORY: Exactly. That would be the Cyrenaicism practice.

SPENCER: And then, what about Epicureanism? What are some things you think we have to learn from that?

GREGORY: I think the value of close-knit, selected communities. The early Epicureans formed their own intentional community just outside of Athens and led simple lives. They didn't indulge in great physical pleasure. In fact, they trained to live as simply as possible so they could concentrate on what's important, which is not striving too hard to have mental tranquility and also getting other mental pleasures through good conversations with people you get along with. Especially in this modern world, I know a lot of people in the rationalist community. In fact, I think I brought this up in the book, specifically as an example of pseudo or quasi-Epicurean parts of philosophy where people form intentional communities and hang out with like-minded people on a regular basis because it's more pleasurable at the end of the day. A lot of people in modern society are very mobile and move around for jobs, and thinking more about community and selecting people you spend time with and spending a large amount of time with them, and the general Epicurean idea of friendship, I think, is very useful.

SPENCER: Are there a bunch of other philosophies that are less well known?

GREGORY: Yeah, there are tons, and some of them are more practical than others. One example is academic skepticism, which is different from Pyrrhonian skepticism. It was a phase in Plato's Academy, and they came up with levels of evidence. It was strictly more an epistemology or way of thinking, and it is proto-Bayesianism. One puts a certain amount of effort into finding out the truth about things depending on what's most important. An interesting takeaway from academic skepticism is that they seem to have invented the value of information, the concept that things are hard to know and that one should work hard to know the things that are super important. For instance, what's good and bad is a super important thing, or what kind of life you really want to lead is an important thing that a lot of effort could be put into with great fruit. So that's just one example.

SPENCER: It's fascinating what a fertile philosophical period it was. Do you think it is fair to say that it had an especially large amount of philosophy produced compared to other times and other places?

GREGORY: It depends on what you mean by philosophy. I'm not sure I feel comfortable. I could take a guess, but I'm not sure I could feel comfortable saying that, because we produce a lot of philosophy nowadays, but people generally don't go to philosophy departments. As William Irvine astutely pointed out in his introduction to A Guide to the Good Life, when you're like, "Ugh, I am not living the life you want to lead, where should I go? Oh, I think I'll go to my local university and talk to a philosophy professor." The professor there is going to tell you about Hegel; they're not going to tell you about how to live a good life, necessarily. So it depends on what you mean by philosophy, because the idea of philosophy has changed over time. Just like the ideas of Epicureanism and Stoicism, which we still have in our modern parlance, have changed over time as well, or even the ideas of happiness, which have changed over time.

SPENCER: Maybe life philosophy is a better way to say it.

GREGORY: I would probably say that overall it was more fertile in that regard, though we still have some great ideas of how to live life through psychology, which was spun off of philosophy in the late 19th, early 20th century. It's just no longer necessarily philosophy, and also the idea of values being part of the package, as opposed to treating psychological distress, seems to have faded a little bit.

SPENCER: Do you think it's fair to say, though, that this kind of Greco-Roman period produced an unusually large number of life philosophies relative to other points in history? Obviously, today, there's so much happening, but in other historical points and other historical places? Do you think it was really unusual?

GREGORY: I think it was somewhat unusual. At the same time, if you take a look at Karen Armstrong's work about the Axial Age, it's a loose argument. But a lot of different cultures, especially if you broaden your view to look at religions, did have flourishing around the same time, within about 300 years. I would point to ancient India as another place where a lot of different life philosophies popped up that were pretty interesting.

SPENCER: Before we wrap up, I want to ask about one more topic, which is that if you look at books on Greco-Roman philosophy today, especially Stoicism, they really are in practice mixing it with lots of other stuff. They're kind of combining it with whatever's in the culture. How do you feel about this? Do you think this is a good thing? Do you think this is a problematic thing?

GREGORY: I think it's both; it could be good, is probably inevitable, and it is possibly bad. I'll go through those one by one, starting perhaps with the bad. That kind of goes back to the question we brought up earlier, of what's good and why. Answering that question is an important thing to do. If you put your energy into mixing stuff together to the point of doing yourself or your life project harm, then perhaps eclecticism is not useful, because by what reasoning, what is your justification for bringing in other things? As an eclectic myself, bringing Stoicism and Buddhism together, these are things I struggle with. There's also a practical bad reason that I could bring up. For instance, sometimes I get confused since I am trying to practice Buddhism and Stoicism simultaneously about what to do in a given moment, because I have two somewhat incommensurate frameworks to work with. If I have an anxious thought pop up in my head, I could do a few things with that. I can practice the first foundation of mindfulness, where I notice how it affects my body, notice its discomfort, and just pay attention to how this anxious thought made my body react. The Buddhist theory is that, in the long run, by seeing how this comes up and how what else I do causes these anxious thoughts to occur, I'll eventually start seeing patterns and naturally adjust. I'd get sick of making myself anxious all the time. That's part of the early Buddhist theory of how that stuff works, anyway. So I could do that. But I could also take the proposition, see what I'm valuing, and ask whether it's true or false, which is a stoic technique that is very antithetical to early Buddhist practice. When I get an anxious thought, what do I do? Sometimes I don't know, and sometimes I fail. That's another danger to practical eclecticism. In terms of the inevitability, Stoicism, for instance, was hodgepodge together from three other different philosophies: Platonism, Megarianism, and Cynicism. In a sense, nothing occurs in a vacuum. Eclecticism is inevitable, and it could be good if you find a hole, if you know where you're going, if you have a good idea of the answer to what is good and what is the good life and why it could be useful, because maybe you find a hole in the philosophy or a flaw in it, in which case eclecticism can help you fill it.

SPENCER: What are some specific ways that you feel your own life has been transformed by these ideas?

GREGORY: In terms of Stoicism, more broadly, I think that getting a little bit more politically involved and forcing myself to get out there. I'm naturally an introvert, so trying to do good in the world and sometimes failing through various modes. The ability to keep on doing that and trying and seeing that as worthwhile is something that I attribute to Stoicism. To go back to the eclecticism stuff that I mentioned before, that is me hopefully fulfilling something I thought I knew was good. I wanted to try to help others, and I knew I had some flaws, and I found Stoicism helped boost my previous Buddhist practice in that regard. That is something that I got out of it. More broadly, the world is so full of ideas of how to live, and it's worth exploring them, because a lot of people have done the legwork, and it's just interesting to see how different people conceive of different things and frame things in terms of good and bad so differently.

SPENCER: I tend to not be someone that focuses so much on history. I'm much more interested in the idea itself, rather than where it came from, who came up with it first, or what it was originally called, et cetera. But you seem to take a very historical perspective, which I find interesting, and talking to you about it is fascinating. I'm wondering, to what extent do you see it as valuable, embedding it in history, rather than extracting the idea itself?

GREGORY: It depends. I would say there are two points of value. One is simply if you're going to manipulate change or reject something, you should understand what it means. Getting back to the misunderstandings of Stoicism, not seeing that when Epictetus says, "Something is up to me or not is actually fundamentally different." I think there's a theory of selfhood in Stoicism that's being glossed over, and not knowing that and where it came from and why Epictetus is saying this could lead to misunderstanding. You could reject Stoicism or accept Stoicism based on false presumption. To flesh out understanding of what people were saying, I think it's essential, and one can apply history and key points in order to get that. But knowing that Stoicism was founded by Zeno or whatever doesn't strongly matter unless you want to learn more. History also can sometimes, but not always, lead to crafting one's own different life philosophies. To take a more recent example, I find Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals pretty interesting. He's tracing how we use moral language and stuff like that, and that ultimately feeds into his own life philosophy, which is not quite coherent, as far as I can tell, but has a lot of interesting ideas that orbit around each other. In that case, he takes his own historical approach to looking at how moral words developed, and you could argue about the factuality, but the fact that he is trying to craft a new life based on history is an interesting example of how it could be put to use.

SPENCER: It seems that words just have a tendency to change over time. The exact word we use for a given thing might be different 100 years ago, and even more different 200 years ago, et cetera. You can imagine that modern stoics are just talking about a different thing than the original stoics. I'm wondering, to what extent do you think that's true? Is there sort of a new Stoicism that's actually just not the same philosophy, but it is a coherent philosophy?

GREGORY: Yeah. We're kind of forging it today. Massimo Pigliucci has a website called Stoanova, which is exactly that kind of thing. There's a book written by an academic called A New Stoicism by Lawrence Becker, who tries to give new theoretical foundations to Stoicism, given that science has changed dramatically over the past couple of millennia. Yes, there are two different questions there, so people can build on Stoicism. Stoicism was not a coherent philosophy that everybody was talking about in the exact same way, even back in the day. The ancient stoics were arguing with each other, and we saw plenty of evidence of that. It was a philosophy, not a religion with a pope. There was disagreement, and we can disagree with aspects of it in modern times. The question of what to change, why, and how helpful those changes are is an open question that's still going on today. There are two broad tents of modern Stoicism. One is traditional stoics who think we should believe in the stoic God in order to make sense of Stoicism and practice it today, which is a kind of pantheistic God, whereas there are more atheistic people like myself who think that Stoicism still survives and does just fine, even if we drop that concept. In a sense, yeah, it's still being built today, and we're living through it. I also hope that as more people find these other philosophies, more people put more work into adapting them in the modern world as well.

SPENCER: In addition to a philosophy just shifting or words changing, you might think it would be possible that science could give us insights into how to make the philosophy better. For example, some of the philosophies might be based on empirical claims. We might find that those empirical claims aren't quite right, and then if we correct them, it changes the strategies or the approach.

GREGORY: Yep. I'm on a small team that just submitted a paper to try to measure Stoicism using a stoic scale based on stoic philosophy. That is a slow process that could possibly be useful. But there is an open question of trying to map these ancient concepts onto modern concepts, and how well those mappings hold. For instance, the stoics thought that we had this seat of our consciousness, which they called prohairesis or the hegemonikon. Some modern stoics claim that's the prefrontal cortex, and it's unclear how we know that those are such different concepts. Does that mapping really hold? You can make guesses like that, but I would treat them with skepticism and consider them just as guesses. I do agree that empiricism should and could feed into philosophies of life, and I look forward to seeing more of that and hopefully being a small part of it as well.

SPENCER: What does your Stoicism scale measure?

GREGORY: It was put together by a team at the nonprofit Modern Stoicism, and it measures a whole bunch of different things related to stoic theory, including stoic physics and the belief in a pantheistic God, all the way through beliefs about the helpfulness or harmfulness of certain emotions that the stoics would call passion, such as anger, and how one is prosocial. We try to capture the entire spectrum, or a good chunk of the spectrum, of stoic philosophy qua philosophy.

SPENCER: You can get a measurement of how stoic someone is in a broad sense.

GREGORY: It collapses to seven different factors. We could also then see which aspects of Stoicism, first of all, which interventions could possibly change aspects of Stoicism, as well as what are stronger correlates of other validated metrics, such as positive and negative affects and stuff like that.

SPENCER: Final question for you, if someone's interested in what we talked about today, where would you suggest they begin if they want to learn more about these Greco-Roman philosophies, especially in terms of using them as life philosophies rather than just as historical interesting events.

GREGORY: Yeah. So I think that that's the reason why I put my current book with Massimo Pigliucci and Meredith Kunz, Beyond Stoicism, because we didn't really see a book like this. The book goes over a lot of these philosophies, including some more obscure ones that may be harder to practice in today's world, like Pythagoreanism and Neoplatonism. That kind of hits the nail on the head, and that's where we put it out because we wanted people to be able to start practicing these. There are also a lot of other great books for specific philosophies, but that depends on the philosophy. Some of them, like Cyrenaicism, it's hard to find good specific practical books on, so I'd probably say Beyond Stoicism is a good place to start.

SPENCER: Great. We'll put a link in the show notes. Greg, great to chat with you. Thanks so much for coming on.

GREGORY: Thank you for the invite, Spencer.

[outro]

JOSH: I have a question for you, Spencer. So on a recent episode, we were talking with Elizabeth Cox about stories and how they change the world. I was recently talking to a Christian friend who has not been recycling, but they want to start recycling. And for them, recycling is important because they want to take care of the earth, which is God's creation. And I was wondering, do you think this kind of messaging, this kind of tapping into these kinds of stories is useful and good for furthering climate change action?

SPENCER: I think that there are a lot of issues where there are multiple sets of values that can get you the same conclusion. And I think that it's not obvious that conservatives shouldn't be trying to protect the planet from climate change, right? I don't think there's anything inherently progressive about wanting to protect the planet from climate change. So I think what happens is partly that sometimes an issue kind of gets coded as being from one political group, and that can lead to a situation where one group is on one side, one group is on the other, which is really unfortunate. And also, some as the messaging tends to gravitate towards one group or the other, a lot of the messaging around climate change maybe appeals more to progressives. But yeah, I think [for] many different issues in society, there's a different framing that could be used for progressives and conservatives to help both sides see the value and importance of that issue.