Heroic Chat with Tom Morris: To Do Something Together We Could Have Never Done Alone

Hey Heroes. Today's episode features a mastery level chat with one of our friends and world class experts sharing how they show up as the best version of themselves. This heroic chat with Brian was recorded live in front of a virtual audience of heroic community members and coaches. To learn more about this series as well as how you can join Brian's daily live coaching sessions at 1:01pm Central Time. Plus get access to a ton more to help you move from theory to practice to mastery and express the best, most heroic version of yourself. Head to Heroic Us today and if you like this episode, please leave a positive review and hit the subscribe button wherever you get your podcasts. Now here's your host, Brian Johnson.

Heroes, it is 1:01pm plus one central time. Great to see you. It is day one. We have a special guest today, my beloved Uncle T. Tom Morris. I consider Tom one of the As I was on the trail pouring rain, Spoiler alert. We will have tech difficulties today. Starlink does not operate well in heavy thunderstorm weather, so expect that we will use it as an opportunity to breathe, etc. But I'm on the trail in the rain thinking about how am I going to introduce Tom? And the simplest way to put it is Tom is one of the greatest living philosophers. Period. So Tom has a dual PhD from Yale in Philosophy and Religious Studies. I heard of Tom from John Mackey, who of course we connected with. You know, a month or two ago John told me, I've read every single thing by this guy. You got to read his stuff. Goosebumps. I take John Mackey's recommendations very, very strongly to begin with. And that type of recommendation got me into Tom's work. And you know, Tom and I have since become friends. We playfully say he's my uncle. You know, I'm blessed to consider myself his nephew. We're so aligned. And if you look at the app and search for Morris, what you'll find is 15 plus ones in which I reference Tom. And if he if he isn't in second place all time for most philosopher's notes, he's close. I think only Eknath Eswaron, maybe Steven Pressfield match my notes on Tom. We have true success, which is phenomenal. I mean, it's a philosopher's conception of what true success would look like. And as you may expect, it is Eudaimonia via Arete. And again, as I was reading Tom as a as a younger man, and you'll see I shaved the beard. I feel like I just shaved 15 years off of my face Went to go try to groom it yesterday, that didn't go so well. So I decided to start again cuenca style. Excuse me. Plato's Lemonade Stand comes in. Help with that, squeeze that lemon. Anyway, we've got true success. We've got Superheroes in philosophy, the Everyday Patriot. His most recent book, the Art of Achievement. Another great book, the Stoic Art of Living, Plato's Lemonade Stand. So again, Tom, absolutely adore you both as a public philosopher and just as a human being. You have such a an enthusiasm and a joy for life to go with your deep, deep practical wisdom. So it's just been a joy to get to know you better and to spend more time time with you and just thrilled to have you here today and be able to connect, talk more about your hero's journey and all that good stuff.

Back at you brother, in every possible way or nephew as the case may be. I'm just so glad to share this time with you, you guys, I'm so proud of what all of you are doing. I see familiar faces here on the screen already. It's a blessing to me that you're here. We're going to have a wonderful time together today. Brian and I have amazing text message streams back and forth every now and then and it's just so good to see him and to see you all here together. Let's share some of our insights, some of our wisdom, even our struggles. And Brian and I are going to be talking for a while then we want everybody to sort of feel free to, you know, chip in and, and ask something, say something, interact with us. I'm just really happy to be here.

Bless you. You're good, sir. So we're going to go. You know, Tom has longer time today so we'll do our thing and then we'll have the Q and A. So have that mind as we get to work. And I put Tom on the spot two seconds before we came on. I said, hey, you ever do any kind of guided meditations? We've been doing that. He's like, well no, I've never done one before but we can do it. Great. So Tom, if you will, let's drop in and you know, just spend a minute or two connecting to our best selves. However you feel inspired to guide us in the moment.

That's great, man. Well, I really learned about you guys. I was never a good meditator. I would try for 30 seconds and then, you know, a grocery list would appear. Something I otherwise would never care about. All the places in my house that need to be cleaned, you know, the dogs that need to go to the vet. I mean, try to meditate for 30 seconds and then the entire world gets dumped into your cranium, you know? But In February of 2011, I had an unusual experience. I want to share with you some of the fruits as we calm our minds and collect ourselves for our time together. Today I just had breakfast and a movie started playing in my head. An experience I really never had before. Vivid fantasy guy, a daydreamer. I'd never had the fullness of this experience of an old man and a young boy sitting against a tree in the desert in Egypt in 1934. I'm seeing in my kitchen, they're having an amazing conversation. All of a sudden, I run upstairs to where I am now. I start typing. It becomes a book. The first of eight novels set in Egypt featuring a Gandalf, a Dumbledore, and Obi Wan Kenobi, who taught me meditation. He said that we need to get beyond the chatter of the conscious mind. We need to get beyond the clutter. We need to go deep where the real treasure is to be found. And it's almost like he knew I used to play in bands. I used to play guitar. So I think he implanted in my head this fictional character, an image of turning down the volume control from wherever it is to zero and get out of your own way for a moment. You know, I was. I was not real good at that. Empty yourself. In all the great spiritual traditions, there's a metaphor of emptiness. If we can just let it all go for a moment, all the chatter, all the clutter, all the concerns for later in the day and next week and this weekend, if we can just take a few moments together to take in that beautiful, rich and rewarding silence that too often patiently waits for us when we don't answer. Let's just take a moment and listen to the silence. If you need to take a couple of breaths, a deep breath in and out. And notice is any part of your body tense, need to relax your shoulders, your arms, do you need to move, stretch something just to relax it? Go as deep as you like. Steepest. The moment allows you, invites you to go. Embrace it. And then you can return without the distractions, without the diversions, with that pure consciousness we share with each other as one of the greatest gifts. Thanks. Thanks, Brian.

Thank you. My goodness. Not a bad first time through there, Tom. I very much enjoyed that. And I'm very happy I asked you to do that. I. I want to. That was awesome. I want to start by asking you to. And again, I'm going to share my little screen here so you all can see what I'm doing. I'm typing Tom back into Morris, back into the little search bar. I'm opening up the note. True success. Tom, tell us what true success is. Let's start at the very top, then we're going to talk about you and how you've strived to embody the. The wisdom in the book. But let's start there. How do we define true success?

You know, we define it first of all by seeing how many people have gotten it wrong over the centuries and millennia, right? Chasing things that didn't satisfy them, chasing things that didn't help them make their mark in the world. There's so many people in our time who just have this mindset of, well, it's success has got to be wealth or fame or power or status or stuff like that, right? I mean, that's the people we view as successful in our world. I used to tell my students at Notre Dame, I used to give them a little simple 3D model for success. I said, success is all about discovering your talents, developing those talents, and then deploying them into the world for the good of others as well as yourself. True success is a deeply satisfying, sustainable journey, more than an endpoint. It's a process of bringing the best of who you are to the most of what the world needs around you. And it's the most deeply gratifying thing you can experience. I love it when I see people drop those things they've been falsely chasing and pursuing success properly. And sometimes those things come, sometimes great wealth, great power, great fame, great status. Nothing wrong with those things as side effects of your proper adventure. If they come great, handle them well, but if they don't, can be just as good. Handle that situation well. Most of the great philosophers, I think, have seen wisdom as being almost always about what we embrace and what we release. You know, most people get it wrong. Releasing things they ought to embrace, embracing things they ought to release. Wisdom is discernment, to tell the difference. And when we embrace all the right things and when we release all the things that we should not be clutching tightly, we free ourselves, we liberate ourselves to be our best, do our best, feel our best, become our best, and thereby lift up those around us. That's true success.

All right, well, we're done. That was great. We have completed our time together today. We've covered what we need to do. Everybody just replay that a few more Times, anytime you wonder what we're here to do. And there we go. Does that sound familiar? As the game that we know we need to play, objective one, you got to step outside of the cultural conditioning, stop playing the game we've been seduced to play. Play the ultimate game well, which is to be the best version of ourselves, as we like to say more and more consistently, never perfectly in service to something bigger than ourselves. Now, Tom, I already shared this, so I'm going to ask you for permission to share it again. Yeah, you're writing a new book. Can we talk about that briefly?

Yeah, sure.

Okay.

Anything, man.

I got to know. I'm like, I haven't asked Tom if I can share this, but I'm pretty sure he's good. Tom's. Tom, literally is the philosopher who wrote Philosophy for Dummies to put it in perspective. So he was a professor at Notre Dame forever, One of the most popular professors on campus. Then he became the public philosopher for Disney. And he also is the guy that wrote Philosophy for Dummies. And he's currently working on Stoicism for Dummies, which is fantastic. And as part of that, I believe you're creating a chapter related to this, and I would like you to tell us about that and its importance in the process of being the best version of ourselves such that we can experience true success.

Yeah, see, Brian had no idea when I saw the forearm that it would end up being in a Four Dummies book, right? Not Tattoos for Dummies. Stoicism for Dummies. The back story on all this is that it was 1998. I was speaking to 2500 drugstore executives in Palm Beach, Florida, at the Breakers Hotel. True Success, actually, that topic. And a week later, I get a phone call from a woman who says, hey, I was in your audience at the breakers last week in Palm Beach. My boyfriend is executive vice president of CVS Drugstores. He invited me to your talk, and I'm the acquisitions editor for all the Dummies books. You have to write Philosophy for Dummies. And I said, well, whoa, whoa. Don't you guys do, like, gardening books and stuff like that? I mean, Philosophy for Dummies? She said, yeah, yeah, but we're going to launch a new Lifetime learning. We've asked the curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Thomas Hoving, to do Art for Dummies. And if you will do Philosophy for Dummies, you guys will launch this new adventure we're on to bring the humanities, the arts, and the sciences into people's lives at every stage. I said, well, that's awesome. So I did Philosophy for Dummies, and two months ago, they called me out of the blue and said, stoicism is this big thing all over the world right now, in the military and entertainment, in business, in sports. Would you write Stoicism for Dummies for us? And I said, okay, that's. That's kind of my formula for life. You all, whenever you're asked to do something you weren't planning to do, but it sounds really interesting, say yes. Don't say, well, you're calling the wrong guy. There are all these experts on stoicism, like Donald Robertson and other people who've written a lot about it. I just say yes, you know, because you never know you're going to go through a phase when you say yes to something new. And this is going to bring us to Brian's tattoo. I'm. I'm not off topic here. You're going to say yes to something that comes out of the blue, and it's going to look like a wonderful opportunity, and you're going to get so excited about it, and then pretty soon as you begin to work on it, it will be a major pain in the ass. Everything worth doing goes through a major pain in the ass phase. And guess what? Most people, that's when they drop out. But the people who hang in have a chance to discover the next phase, which is the amazing adventure phase. That's the phase I'm on right now, having made it through weeks and weeks of the other phase, where it was way more work than I thought I was taking on. So I've already written in a month now. I've written four chapters for this book. This will be available before Christmas, believe it or not. They're in a real hurry with this one. I've written four of my chapters. I've got a co author for the first time, a guy invited to do half the book. One of my former graduate students, teaching assistants in Philosophy 101 at Notre Dame. He's doing historical chapters. He's this great historian of philosophy. I'm doing more conceptual chapters. That's kind of my thing. So we're partnering up, which is going to be a part about. It's going to be important to us today, the. The role of partnerships in our lives. I consider Brian, in a lot of ways, a partner. I think he. He views me that way, too. I think you're. You're coming to see each other as part. We'll say more about that. But the chapter I was writing the other day when. When Brian and I started talking about something, I think I just text him out of the blue, like, how big is that tattoo on your arm? Arete. Arete is. Is the, as you know, all of you know, Greek word for virtue, for excellence, for all kinds of positive things. And I'm doing a chapter on the relationship between that and happiness. The stoic philosophers believe that happiness is all about virtue, is all about excellence. And so in filling that out, I just thought, you know what? This revival of interest in stoicism is tracking a revival of interest in other things, too, from the ancient world. Like arete. Right. The heroic. Right. That's an ancient concept. And so I want to. I want to. I want to say something in the book about Brian's tattoo. And so I said, hey, dude, how big is this tattoo? He said, let me get out of measuring tape. And he measures. So it's an inch high letter, big block letters. You guys have seen an inch high, 4 inches long. And I say, oh, man, that's amazing. And then he says, you know what's really amazing? And my phone gets flooded with pictures of other people's. All right. Tattoos. It's like, yes, yes. What. What do you put on your arm? Is it that new girlfriend, boyfriend, that new fad that you're going to say, oh, how do I get this off 10 years from now? Right. Or is it going to be something that stands the test of time? So. So Brian is not. Is not only going to be featured in my the New Stoicism for Dummies, which will be in every bookstore all over the world in December. His arm is going to be featured in his story. And I just asked him the other day, can we do a picture of it in the book? And they said, yeah, you got to get his permission and the tattoo artist's permission, but, yeah, sure, we should do that.

That is fantastic. I hadn't heard that part of the arc. It's so good. I am so excited to be in Stoicism for Dummies forever. So good. And then the, you know, the flood of texts were, you know, and I haven't sent you the most recent one, I don't think, but we just got a newest one. A beautiful woman who got a beautiful tattoo that is the feminine equivalent of my, you know, masculine here with a, you know, a heart and a rose and just this beautiful expression. So fun. And just to step back for a moment. So a lot of people think that philosophers are curmudgeons. They're not particularly enthusiastic. They're not particularly, you know, joyful, let alone stoic philosophers. And Tom, of course, is a practicing philosopher, so he's very humble. He's written a book on stoicism. He is, in many ways, he's a practicing philosopher, of which Stoicism is the central. One of the central threads, not the exclusive. But can you feel Tom's soul force? Can you feel his eudaimonic joy and that deep sense of enthusiasm? This is what it looks like to practice our philosophy, to have that. That. That joy as the byproduct and expression of a life well lived. And I just want to highlight that because when you're in Tom's presence right now, we can feel it. It's even more palpable. And I have goosebumps yet again. In his physical presence. In his physical presence, there's this boyish soul force, just buoyant joy that's grounded in the gravitas of wisdom that's hard to capture, but this is it. Like, this is a beautiful, idiosyncratic expression. And Tom, just want to celebrate that in you. And now I want to shine a light on your journey, so however you want to frame it. But I'd like to hear more about your hero's journey, your heroic quest. You mentioned the fact that any good hero's journey, you know, starts with enthusiasm, tends to go down into the valley of what did I say I would do then? You come through the adventure and come up. But I'd just like to hear whatever stories you think would be interesting and relevant for us that were formative for you, that might shed light for all of us as we navigate our heroic quests.

Oh, yeah, and thank you. Absolutely. And thank you, Brian, for those words about the joy. Because I once had a Student in Philosophy 101 at Notre Dame whose dad was the director of photography for Baywatch, the famous TV show for all its seasons, and he directed a lot of films. And she helped me in the startup of my Institute for Human Values. And she once went to a talk I gave. She had watched a lot of videos, and she once went to a talk I gave, and she said, look, I was. I was in your class at Notre Dame, but I'd almost forgotten as the years passed. When you do philosophy in a room, it's like the air changes in the room. There's something going on that can't be captured in video. I said, thank you for saying that. I think it's just the pure joy I feel with ideas in my heart as well, as in my mind, philosophy for too long has been a head game. For about 100 years in most universities it's been a head game. Only when it's a matter of the heart does it really have its power. And that's something we can all embody, that's something we can all live. It's not just exclusive to a few people. But Brian mentioned the curmudgeonly nature of some philosophy professors. Well, he's apparently met my old intro philosophy professor.

I want to play, I want to play, I want to play a little ping pong on that because this is so relevant. And I would offer. It's the mind, the heart which comes through the soul expression and that you daimon, the good soul.

Yes.

And it is palpable in presence. It's palpable right now too. And this is, you know, the whole point of showing up at 1:01pm Central Time is to help our community get what we call their soul Force 2 101. So it's a phrase that Gandhi coined Satyagraha, truth force, love force, virtue force, soul force. Martin Luther King talked about it in his I have a dream speech, etc. But this is it. And, and when I think of Epictetus and the intensity with which he lectured that we can feel in the Discourses in Kyridian, like you can feel his energy in that.

And it's, that's what his students said, Brian. That's what Aryan said when he was writing the Discourses. At the beginning of the Discourses he says if you basically, if you could have just been there, there is. This happens, right? There's this thing that happens. And, and I feel that same way about you. You know, when we had dinner together not too long ago, I just came away and you know, I've loved you for a long time as a, as a, as a real brother in arms with what we're trying to do in the world. But there's something about personal presence and that's why you all. I encourage you anytime Brian holds a thing where you can get together, you can come and be in each other's physical presence. That's going to be magical, that's going to be something special. And it's so different from what most people think of as philosophy. That old philosophy professor that you'd see in the hallway and you say good morning and he'd spend two min proven you wrong, right? I mean that's not what we're talking about, right? And about 30 seconds into that you would think, yeah, maybe I was a little hasty about saying that we're talking about something very different here. We're talking about a whole soul force, as Brian says. We're talking about that diamond. We're talking about that inner you, that inner being, that inner soul or self that can glow with the wisdom of the ages. And that's what it's for. And in fact, the Stoics love that image. They say there can be a fire inside you, which is so great that no matter how much trash gets dumped on it, that's just fuel for the fire. If people have a tiny little flame, a great load of trash dumped on it will extinguish it. But if your flame is big, it's just fuel for the fire. You know, that's an important thing for me. It's not like either any of us lives a life without trouble and challenge, difficulty, hardship. But if your flame is bright enough, it's always somehow fuel for the fire. To make you grow brighter, to make you so that you can warm the lives of others.

Tears, bumps, yet again. So then to bring us back. So I got excited there because the people were feeling your joy and they're feeling your soul force, they're feeling your moral charisma, to use another phrase, that you're a man who's so passionate about these ideas and they aren't just in your head. You're practicing them. And as a result, you feel the joy. But they feel your joy of being alive and sharing your life with them and having done the hard work to discover your talents and purpose, to develop your talents and purpose, and then to deploy your talents and purpose and service to something bigger than yourself. So now, going back to your arc, I'm going to put myself on mute so I can hear your story. But tell us about your heroic quests, formative moments, guides, buddies, etc.

Well, it started in the most unexpected way, right? We all come into this world really small, but we don't have to stay small. I grew up in a house about as big as this room, 800 square foot rented house. And we didn't have much, you know, I had one pair of shoes, I ate two meals a day. I had some struggles early in life. And my mother said there's no money for college, so figure out what kind of job you want to do. And out of the blue, my high school nominated me for a Morehead scholarship at UNC Chapel Hill, which is now Morehead Cane. So I had all of college paid for, plus all expenses involved in college. Not just tuition, everything. And it's like, really, my mother said, major in business, be a lawyer. You can have a stable life that way. And so I tried, but my heart kept going in other directions. To philosophy, religious studies, art history, painting, the humanities. And so I realized at a certain point, I can't fight this. I can't fight who I am. I have to follow who I am. I have to follow this path. And despite my. My mother did her best, you know, although I would get these questions every time I went home. Who is ever going to pay you to know this stuff? You know? So I. She passed away before I was able to say mom, maybe everybody, almost everybody, at a time when I was traveling to give speeches all over the world, 400 to 500 airplanes a year. But Brian asked about my journey. Well, I just had to follow my heart and follow my instincts. And I went to graduate school. I got into Yale, I think, because I was a Morehead scholar, maybe the biggest mistake they ever made, let somebody in, because I didn't want to follow any of the rules. I just wanted to do things my own way. And pretty soon the folks at Yale realized, well, we should just let him do his own thing. So I was the second guy ever to get a double PhD in Philosophy and religious studies. And again, I did that in my own way. I thought I was going to be a classroom professor. Why? Because I had learned to make good grades as a student, but I didn't know the excitement of ideas. I had two professors who woke me up to the excitement of wisdom, and I wanted to do that for other people. It happened to me in a classroom. So I figured, well, that's where I need to be. I need to be in the classroom. And so I had an amazing 15 years at the University of Notre Dame. I was able to pioneer new areas of philosophy just because I thought, why? Why isn't anybody talking about this? Why isn't anybody working on that? And rather than sort of fitting in with what other people said I should be doing, I just decided to launch some brand new things, which all these years later, now, this was the early 80s. I just found out recently that these areas I launched in my own work and got and talked other people into doing it. They're now a huge established area of philosophy that didn't exist prior to me just aggravating people half to death to turn their attention to some new stuff. I'm telling you that because you don't have to find a path that's already cleared for your interests and your loves, sometimes you have to Be the path maker. And that's okay too. And it doesn't have to be some big thing. So the years from now, universities around the world are studying some kind of thing you've started thinking about. There is no big and small in the life of the spirit. Everything is big, right? I mean, we gotta stop letting the world tell us what's big and important and what's not. Often reality, as Plato tried to tell us with his allegory of the cave, reality is real, different from appearances. And if you were doing the things that we're talking about today, you're going to live your hero's journey in such a way that will be huge. Regardless of whether it looks big by traditional metrics or not, you'll know what the real metrics are. So I was at the top of my game at Notre Dame, but I felt that little soul voice. I felt that little voice through the daimon. I felt that little inner voice. Socrates said his inner voice just warned him what not to do. Well, mine was a little bossier and told me what I should be doing. And that is to say, leave being a full professor with a job guaranteed for life and launch out in a job that nobody else had. Being a public philosopher. Listen, in the early 90s, there weren't public, maybe one, there was one guy, but he was at a university still. He was doing public Facing philosophy. Mortimer J. Adler. But he was at a university. But I was felt a sense of calling to leave the institutional structure altogether, just to hang out a shingle. I'm a philosopher. Let me know if I can be of any help. It's like, really, this is like the ultimate midlife crisis. Everybody thought, why don't you just buy a red convertible and get. Get it out of your system? You know, you're leaving your job, you're moving to the beach in North Carolina. You're what? You're what you know, but you have to do what you. You have to do what you. The people who make the biggest difference in the world are not the people who try to fit in, but the people who try to be most authentically themselves with the energy and the force that's in them for good. To bring goodness into the world, whether it's ever come packaged that way or not, right? But along the way, I had those two professors at Chapel Hill who kind of showed me something new. I had a professor at Yale who showed me something new. I had some people when I was a young assistant professor at Notre Dame, I had two of the most famous people in My discipline welcome me into academia in a gracious and generous way that gave me the confidence that I could make a difference.

So.

No matter what you're doing, if you're a few steps down the road from somebody else you meet, welcome them graciously onto the path, and you can be amazed at what's going to happen as a result. So that was 27 and a half years ago that I left Notre Dame. And people say, well, how do you know this? Six months from now, people are going to. Businesses are going to still be interested in you as a philosopher, what you have to say. How do you know this is going to last? Well, I said, I don't. I just know I'm supposed to do it. And y'. All. I had been afraid to fly for nine years before I launched on this new adventure. There were nine years I didn't get on an airplane, and then all of a sudden, I was on 400 to 500 airplanes a year. And what? Some of the other professors at Notre Dame before I left said, wait a minute. You all of a sudden think flying is safe? I said, no, all of a sudden I think I'm supposed to do it. That's the thing about following your passion, your purpose, your sense of calling. It's almost like everything else fades into the shadows and, you know, what you have to do. In fact, books along the way. I didn't discover the classics until I was about my mid-50s. I was just interested in logic and concepts. I wasn't really interested in the history of the human adventure until I was. I read Don Quixote because I had come across interviews with famous novelists where they said. Where they were asked, what's the greatest novel ever written? And a bizarre number of them said, don Quixote. Really? I've never read Don Quixote. Just so happened a new translation had just come out. 900 pages, okay? That's why I've never read it. So I got a copy. And I remember saying to my wife, I have not read all the great novels of the world, so I'm in no position to say I know why these guys said, this is the world's greatest novel, but I get it. I get it. Then Moby Dick. Then the doors were kicked open. And I think I've mentioned before in one of our sessions that two years ago, I read the Odyssey four times, cover to cover. Homer's Odyssey. I read the Iliad that year, two times, cover to cover. I'd read the Odyssey once or twice before I read the Iliad. Maybe once before, but I realized on repeated readings, which before an author writes anything, if it's going to be any good at all, they've really thought about it a lot. CS Lewis said, if a book is not worth reading twice, it wasn't worth reading once. When I read the Odyssey four times, I all of a sudden understood it and understood it in ways that nobody that in secondary literature doesn't say anything about it. But there are two things. Let me just tell you two quick things that have helped me in my journey immensely. One is the Odyssey is about the power of purpose. Odysseus has a purpose based in his deepest values to get home to the family he loves, no matter what he encounters along the way, every imaginable obstacle and unimaginable obstacles he's able to endure and overcome because of his sense of purpose. The Iliad. Nobody ever told me this is about the power of partnership. When it falls apart at the beginning of the book between the general Agamemnon and the chief warrior Achilles, their partnership falls apart because of selfishness. Oh, he's getting more than he deserves. I'm not getting as much as I deserve. I need more. I'm going to take something away from him. All of a sudden, everything falls apart and lots of people die. Then later in the book, you see positive partnerships working really, really, really, really well. It's a book about the power of partnership. Now, if you take those two things, and we're talking about who are the most ancient books in Western culture, if you take those two things, the power of purpose and the power of partnership, and you bring them together, that's where you have the magic happen. And that's why so many other great books are about purpose or partnership. Dracula. It's about the power of partnership. Some guy trains himself for centuries to be unconquerable. A bunch of friends get together and take him down. Three Musketeers is about four people who go up against an evil that seems so powerful nobody can resist it, and they take it down together. Over and over and over through all of human history, there have been books and poems written about partnerships. Beowulf, the story of the great warrior, is really a book about the power of partnership. What happens when you don't have it, and what could happen if you do. I could go on and on, but a classic becomes a classic because it's got deep wisdom in it, and sometimes we have to dig to get that wisdom. The first hundred pages of the Odyssey don't seem to be about Odysseus. What is this about? The first hundred pages are mostly about Telemachus, his son. His son, 20 years old. And why is the first hundred pages about him? Where's my dad? Where's my dad? Is my dad alive or dead? He's been gone for 20 years. You know, I don't even know. I never don't even remember what my dad looks like. He's got to be dead by now, right? Every stranger who shows up on Ithaca, he says, do you know my dad, Odysseus? Is he dead or alive? And so one day, Athena comes in, the goddess, I think. She's disguised as an old man, and she comes in as a guest. A stranger arriving at Ithaca. Telemachus comes up. Hey, stranger. Do you know my dad, Odysseus? Is he alive or dead? And she knows exactly that. He's alive, and she knows where he is, and she knows what he's doing. He's her favorite. But she says, you know what you need to do, Telemachus? You need to get a good ship and a really strong crew, because there's this guy you need to ask that question to, and he lives a long way from here. It's going to be a dangerous voyage, but really, you need to make it. And then there's another guy a little bit farther away than him. You need to ask him, too. Between the two of them, I think they can answer your question. Well, she can answer all these questions by herself. Here's what I came to understand on the fourth reading of the Odyssey. He thinks he needs information. She knows he needs transformation. And it's only a challenging journey that will make that happen. That's true of all of us. Think of anything in your life that you're unsure about. You think you need information. Often you need transformation. And so what we're talking about today is how do you go from theory to practice? How do you go from practice to mastery? How do you, in other words, engage in that transformation? How do you find it? How do you go through it? How do you benefit from it? And how do you bring it to others as the gift you're here to offer? Telemachus goes through the transformation and ends up being the partner his father needs at the end of the adventure. That's something here for us all. Purpose, transformation, partnership. Really, really important ideas. In my journey, they've been everything. You know, I've had great times, unbelievable times. I've had experiences no philosopher in all of human history has ever had. And I've had terrible difficulties as well. I've had all kinds of tragedies. I've had to confront all kinds of problems. You know, you get to a certain point in your life where you think, hey, I'm doing a lot right now, so trouble probably can't find me anymore. I've changed. I mean, trouble could find me when I had hair, but I'm at a point in my life where trouble won't even recognize me anymore. Guess what? Trouble knows how to see through any disguise. So we're not talking about a transformation that will give you a perfect life. We're transferring. We're talking about a transformation that will give you a powerful life for good, for all the good that matters in the world, and for the good that you're here to live and embody and share. So. So my journey has involved a lot of uncertainty, a lot of unexpected things. I've drawn from the Stoics, I've drawn from a lot of other philosophers. But the Stoics have had a real impact on true success, on the book the Art of Achievement. Not just my book, the Stoic Art of living from 20 years ago, but even on the novels, the oasis within, the first little novel that leads to all the big novels, all through those novels. Plato's Lemonade Stand, the 2020 book that a lot of companies have told me changed everything for them with dealing with the pandemic and difficulties. And the first half of that book is about dealing with the change that comes into your life. So Plato's Lemonade Stand, when life hands you lemons, make lemonade. When I grew up, everybody was saying it, but nobody said how. Turns out the philosophers had amazing transformative wisdom about this. So the book, Plato's Lemonade Stand, it has two parts. Part one is about dealing with the lemons that come your way. Right then they do dealing with the making lemonade, dealing with the change that comes into your life unbidden, and. And it's dealing with the change that happens to you. Part two of the book is dealing with the change that will happen only because of you. And those two things together is the yin and yang. Those two things together are powerful, a powerful combination. And just like we talked about earlier, discover your talents, develop those talents, deploy them in the world for the good of yourself. It doesn't end there, because as you're deploying your talents, you're discovering new talents, and you're developing those talents, you're deploying them to the world. It's what they call a vicious circles opposite, a virtuous circle or spiral upward. And the same thing Happens with the change that happens to you and the change that will only happen because of you. As you're launching change, stuff's going to come into your life you didn't expect, and you have to deal with that which allows you to launch more change. And it's, again, a virtuous spiral. We can use these mechanisms well, only if we understand them. And that's why we talk ideas. That's why we talk theory, is to create the possibility of practices that will lead us in the direction of mastery. And it's not just reading philosophy books. It's reading great world literature, poetry, novels, all kinds of things that can give us just that insight we've been waiting for and didn't know where to find. And so if we can help each other find those breadcrumbs that lead us along the proper path, we do each other a magnificent favor. And that's part of why we're here. To seed those partnerships, to do something together we could never have done alone. That's what it's all about.

Hey, Hiro, have you heard the news about Brian's book? Arete, activate your heroic potential head to Heroic US Book to learn more and get your copy, as well as check out exclusive content and bonuses. That's Heroic US Book. Now back to today's episode.

We should get you talking about something you're excited about. Tom, I love it in you. I put up Plato's lemonade stand. Check out the notes on the that. The way that I kind of reframe your conversation on that is what we call anti fragility, where you get stronger with every obstacle you face and just love the operationalization. There's some insanely good quotes from the ancient stoics in that about, you know, the challenges being virtues, opportunities, etc. We could talk about. And pull about a thousand threads from what you just said. I'm going to kind of dance around a few of them. We'll see where we go. But purpose, transformation, partnership. You mentioned the theory to practice, to mastery. And then we continue with together today. And then you talked about a theme that you and I were texting about, which is a thing I've been thinking a lot about. A lot of the people here today on our side are heroic coaches. And I've been reframing what it means to be a coach within the context of a hero on their heroic quest. So, you know, to break down the hero's journey into its simplest components, the hero hears a call like you heard. Not business philosophy, not professor anymore. I got to get on the plane. I got to be a teacher outside of the university. You heard a call to adventure, right? So the first step is the hero hears it, which requires us to turn off the social media and all the other inputs long enough to listen to that call. Quiet voice. And then to answer it. Okay, so the hero answers the call, their call to adventure begins. Then what? Then they get a guide and they get buddies. Then what? Well, as part of that, they go face the dragons. They win, they learn. They win, they learn, they win, they learn. Eight years on the sea, 20 years later, Odysseus style. They finally do what they wanted to do, right? Then what? Then the third part is they return to their normal world. World with the boon, which of course is their transformed consciousness. So the way I'm telling that story now is the hero sets out on their quest for one simple reason. To conquer their own inner dragons and to return with the boon that is their consciousness, such that they can become the guides to others who are beginning their quest. And I want to connect it to Harry Potter, briefly. I know you wrote a book about Harry Potter and then talk about it in the context of the partnerships that, you know, the buddies form and the Fellowship of the Ring or Harry with Ron and Hermione. So the way I'm framing it is Harry gets Dumbledore as his guide, then he gets Hermione and Ron as buddies, then they go out and they go through a couple of cycles, enough cycles on their own journeys to become guides to the Hogwarts students. And it's through their guidance and mentorship that together they're able to defeat vice with virtue in their fictional world. And so this is heroic in a now big nutshell is can we get the individuals here today? And you said this to me in one of your gracious notes, can we train enough heroes to go out, conquer their own demons, become stronger in the process, such that they can become the guides for those people in their lives, their, their kids, their friends, their family, their communities, their clients, if they're professional coaches or HR executives, et cetera. I just want to hear you talk about whatever arises for you as I share that frame, because it's very alive for me and Michael and our team right now. What do you think about when I say that?

Well, I think it's been so powerful in the sweep of human literature because it's so powerful in our lives. That's why it came to be a theme. And so I mentioned, for example, Beowulf before, who violates that sequence. He just tries to do everything himself. He's really talented. He's really great. Nobody can stand up against him. A neighboring kingdom has a problem. They've built a banquet hall. And every night this monster shows up and kills people in the banquet hall every night. I mean, why people keep coming back has always been the question to me, right? I would get carry out delivery. I'm not going to the banquet hall next Thursday night. People get killed every time they show up there. He goes and takes care of the problem by himself. He kills the monster. It's a difficult battle. He kills the monster. The monster has a mother who's even more powerful who finds out this happening. She comes against Beowulf. He goes against the second monster and almost gets killed himself. But he manages to vanquish the second monster, barely, barely. So he says, you know, I got, I'm good, you know, I can do this stuff. He becomes king of his own realm. And so everything he's called upon to do as king, he's got an army. But he'll. And he'll take his army with him. He'll say, you guys come over here and watch this. Stand over here, watch me. Everything's about him. He's not guiding others as to how they. He's not training others. He's not helping them work on their own practices, their own mastery. He wants them as spectators to his exploits. And then the ultimate thing happens. A dragon in their kingdom. And he goes up, he takes his army like always. You guys stand over here where it's safe and watch me do this. And he takes on more than he can deal with. And at the last minute, right before he's killed a young man, Wigliff runs up to help him. They take down the dragon together, but not before the dragon can kill Beowulf. If he had just cultivated other Wigliffs, if he had just taken them into the battle with him rather than doing it by himself. If he had been a guide, if he had been a servant, a helper, an encouragement, an inspirer, not just a show off. I mean, the poem tells us he was a great guy in a lot of ways. He was not an evil character. He was a good guy. But he made a crucial mistake. And he should have realized it was the mistake at the beginning of the story that each of the monsters made. They each came up against him by themselves. If they had partnered up, they could have taken him down. But he ends up making the same mistake that his victims made. Because it's a mistake that our egos all too often goad us into making. Let's don't try to do this by ourselves. Let's try to do this with each other. Let's plug into that power of partnership that the hero's journey is supposed to be, Preparing us to take a leading role in. It's okay to be a little out front when your time comes for that, but be out front not for the spectators to admire, but for other heroes to follow and come into their own so that you can be so proud of what you then see them go on to accomplish. Perhaps greater than you had accomplished, but not because it's always a part of what you had accomplished. If you play the right role, it's awesome. Oh, geez.

Again. I got tears in my eyes. Where's the microphone to drop one more time? All right, well, we could. We're going to let that stand right there. And beautiful, beautiful, beautiful commentary. And when I look at everyone here today and feel our shared commitment to being here. We're here every day, you know, and there's so many people that are here every day or listening every day. And the power of community, the power of coming together and supporting one another and playing our roles well, you know, and committing to up and using that. We haven't talked about this. Let's go here briefly, Then I want to go to your particular practices quickly, and then we'll do the q a. So, you know, on this arm, obviously, I've got heroic. And have we talked directly about the ancient etymology of the word hero? I don't know if we've had that conversation. Have we?

You know, very briefly. I think it was at dinner. We had the dinner together in november. I think we talked very, very briefly about. Because a lot of people don't understand it. And I was introduced to it when I did the book superheroes in philosophy that my son suggested I do. And I said, I'll do it only if you do it. And he said, what do you mean? And I said, we're going to get new essays about the great superhero characters. Half the essays from famous philosophers I know, but the other half of the essays is your job. Get it from all the creators of the superhero comics and the movies and the TV shows and. And these people creating, you know, the. The top batman writer, the top superman writer, the. The person who brought smallville to tv. The person who. They all joined us with this book that we launched at comic con san Diego with 100,000 people in costume. We were the only guys not in costume the whole three days in san diego.

You were in costume. Tom, you're distressed, philosopher. Let's go.

I had the modern toga. I had the modern toga. But, you know, one of the. I think it was the superman guy. The famous superman guy. Or maybe it was the batman writer who was best known at the time, who said to me, yeah, we got to dig deep to make sure people understand the concept of a hero. That. That. That a hero is not a show off. Right? What we just said about. A hero is a servant, A hero is a helper. Heroes and inspire. A hero is a protector. A hero is a. And I got this long list, and that's what. Since 1938, with the first of the American superhero comics, that's what people were trying to bring into our lives. An understanding of the difference we can all make using these ideals. Right? You're not going to get bit by radioactive spider. You're not. You weren't born on another planet. You weren't. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Of course, Batman's the one who just kind of trains himself, right? I mean, he doesn't have some. Some strange thing happened to him that gives him a supernatural power. He just trains himself through practices which are just structured behaviors around a purpose and which transform you so that you can transform the world. The best practices. Why do we talk about the practice of medicine, the practice of law done well? It's not just a job done well, It's a. It's a cluster of skilled activities around a purpose. And the cool thing about a skilled activity is a skilled behavior is it's the nature of a skill. You can always get better. No matter how bad you were that first day on a golf course or a tennis court, you can get better. No matter how awful you were the first day on a surfboard, you can get better skateboarding, anything. It's a guitar playing. It's a skilled activity. Every practice built around a purpose is a skilled activity that no matter how bad you feel at it when you first start, if you hang in there, you get better. You can especially get better if you apprentice yourself to the masters or as Brian was saying, learning from those guides, Learning from those guides who are a little farther down the road. So that all of a sudden, before you know it, you're the guide a little farther down the road and you're leading others in accelerating their journey through the practice to mastery. And before you know it, they're doing the same thing. So you have mastery grandkids, right? You have multiple generations of masters that you have helped create because of your generosity of Spirit that came as a result of the difficulties of your own practice extended over time in a way that became a delight. That's the thing about my little book, Plato's Lemonade Stand. That's the whole thing about lemons to lemonade. It's not just about bouncing back. It's not just about grit or soldiering on. It's about turning difficulty into delight. The hardest practices can become a delight when done right. And that means the right purposes and with the right partners.

Let's go straight there. So, practices, your practices that have most transformed your life, we like to frame it up in our. What we call the big three. So I playfully frame this nearly the same way every time. Don't agree with Freud on a lot, but I think he got the idea that a good life comes down to two things, work and love. I think that's. That's spot on.

You get that, right?

You're at least 80% there, if not 90%. But then I caveat it with yeah, yeah, yeah. But if your energy isn't where it needs to be and you can't get out of bed in the morning because of poor lifestyle choices, good luck showing up in your work or your love. So we say energy, work, and love. Our big three. Can you tell us the practices that have most changed your life? When you made the theoretical distinction, committed to the practice, attained a certain level of mastery, which is always, obviously ongoing in your energy, your work, and your love.

Yeah. And sometimes the simplest things have the biggest consequences, Right? It's that trying to get a good night's sleep. It's that trying to eat in a healthy way and not overdo it. Y' all just learning not to always go back for seconds. Learning not to always, you know. Yeah, let's get that second bottle of wine. Learning what people have known for millennia, the power of moderation. So you find out what it takes for a good night's sleep. You try to eat well and eat right. You let your body move. Look, in ancient human past, we were hunters and gatherers. When you get inert, like a lot of people do at a certain point in their lives, you're telling your body, okay, we're not hunting and gathering anymore. And so your body actually starts shutting down. But when you're active, when you're engaged, when you try to give yourself the right kind of movement and exercise your body needs, you're telling your body, we're still hunting and gathering. We still need to be our peak. We still need to be our best. My workout partner for 10 years until the pandemic shut down the gym. And we work out now, but we can't every day the way we did for 10 years in the gym before the pre pandemic. He told me the other day he was in a gym, and he was watching a guy work out who was 45 years old. Now my workout partner's 60, and he was watching a guy who's 45. Didn't know it at the time, but he just said, hey, man, I'm glad. Hey, I'm glad you're doing. You're doing bench. Yeah, you're doing a decent amount of weight. And guy said, oh, I used to do more, but, you know, I'm 45 now, so I got to slow down. I got to pull back. I can't do what I used to do. And my friend told me the other day, he said, I told him your story. I said, really? He said, yeah. You think. You think you got to pull back at the age of 45? Let me tell you about my friend Tom Morris, who had never benched until the age of 58, who had never been serious about weight training to the age of 58, and started out benching 85 pounds, and by the time he was 63, was benching 315 pounds. He said, you don't have to slow down when you're 45. He said, man, you need to kick it up when you're 45, because that's when your body really needs the right messages from you. And I said, man, I'm glad to be a good example in some way to people. I learned it because I saw people in my neighborhood who were like 70, 80 years old, who could barely walk down the street, they were so stiff and tight. And I actually met my workout partner because he came up to me one day in the gym. When I started going by myself, I didn't have a partner. So I was doing everything wrong, right? I was. I was lifting wrong, and I was doing too many reps and too light of weight. I was doing everything wrong. So he comes up to me, this guy, and he says, you make more noise than anybody else in this gym. I said, really? I said, you should hear me get up in the morning and walk to the bathroom. I mean, every muscle in my body is tight and achy. And he said, yeah, yeah, yeah. You're the only guy in here who's really trying. I want to be your work workout partner. He said, this guy changed my life. Always encouraging me, always saying, come on, you're looking strong. You can do a little bit more today. Let's do a little bit more. Always getting rid of my excuses. Hey, Tom, I'll see you in here tomorrow. What will Don, it's supposed to rain really hard tomorrow. And we were in the gym. You know what he said? Not in here. There's a guy who's not going to take any excuses, right? We show up, we show up. And. And that helps you have the energy for all the other things you want to do for that work and love energy, right? And you have to kill yourself. I mean, I'm getting higher and higher in bench over those years, going from £100 to £200 to 250 to 300 to 315. I said, Don, look, I'm not going to be 80 years old and benching £800. At some point we've got to be satisfied. And he said, yeah, I know. He said, but just to get you to the point that you are now, which you never could have imagined, and I couldn't have taught me a lesson about human potential. Never sell yourself short with what you could be doing because as Plato taught us, appearances and realities are different. That doesn't mean to hurt yourself. No. Learn moderation in the gym as well as in the restaurant. Right? But be ready to try things. Be ready to take a risk. Be ready to put yourself out. I don't know about that. You might want to give it a try with the right guide so that one day you become a guide. So that when some guy who's 45 years old thinks he's aged out of really trying in the gym, people are going to tell that guy or that woman your story, and it's going to be an inspiration for them to try again. Love it.

Check the box on energy. Give us work. What. What comes to mind for you in terms of most transformative work practices that you've moved from theory to practice to mastery on?

I always remind myself of why I'm doing it right. The work has to be purposive and it doesn't matter what your work is. The most amazing guy I probably ever knew in a job was a janitor at Notre Dame whose job description was to clean the building. Well, his job description in his head was to create an environment where people could flourish, create an environment for greatness. And this guy called himself Brother Jeff Weldon Jeffries. I tell his story in the book if Aristotle Ran General Motors, he was a guy who brought purpose, who brought heart, who brought commitment, who brought big things to his work every day. And he inspired all the PhDs in that building. The one guy who didn't graduate high school was the biggest inspiration for a building of 300 PhDs. We can all do it in the lives of other people, but we have to bring purpose to our work. We have to bring passion to our work. And guess what? We have to give ourselves breaks now and then, too. I feel free to just get up from this desk and go take a walk. Just get up for this stuff. I've got four cats, two dogs, and a wild rabbit in the backyard. At any moment, I'll get up from this desk and I'll say, I'm gonna go feed Foof. He's the rabbit who lives in my backyard for two years now. I go out and slice up some carrots and chop lettuce and spinach and some strawberries and go out and visit with Foof and I. I've learned a lot about life from standing three feet away from that wild rabbit as he enjoys his dinner or as he's in a state of what I call repose. A state that when you get excited enough about things, you can easily forget the importance of repose in your life. The ability to relax, the ability to. What did we talk about a few minutes ago? What to embrace and what to release. Sometimes you have to release work to embrace repose, to go back to work and do it right. So I never hesitate, take a break and then come back refreshed. I'll take a nap if I feel like I need to. I don't do that every day, but there's some days I do. My workout partner does it every day. He also lifts every day, surfs every day, skateboards every day. The guy's a maniac. He gets up, he does cold showers every day. He does arctic plunges in the pool every day. He does everything you wim hof breathing. He does every day. This guy is a. This guy is. He's 60 years old and he looks like the most cut, Buff, 30 year old, 28 year old you've ever seen in your life. He looks like he's one of these shirtless magazine models. He just turned 60 because he takes care of himself and that lets him take care of a lot of other people as well.

We're going to get him on heroic and check out his protocol. Target swipe. Let's go.

Energy, work and love. All right, love.

We've got energy, we've got work. What about love?

It's got to be the most pervasive thing in your life, basically, right? We tend to think of love only with respect to a few special people. And that's important. Those special people are very important to do what you can, right? And you can't always guarantee the consequences, even when you do that consistently, reliably. But what you have to do is go beyond that. The, the Stoics had this amazing thing about mapping our lives with concentric circles. So the innermost circle is your own heart and mind. Get that right or you're not going to get anything else right. Work on that or your work on anything else is not going to be what you, what you want. And then the next circle out is maybe your household, your family, your closest friends. And then maybe the next circle out is your neighborhood or your workpl. Maybe the next circle out is your, your town, your city, and then you know, your region, your state, your nation. But the outermost is the world. All of humanity and all of the world. And the Stoics believed there's a guy you may never have heard of, Heracles, whose name sounds a lot like Hero, right? Heracles, second century Roman. All his stuff was lost in the ages, except one or two ideas he had. One was these concentric circles. And he said everything you do in your innermost circle should be to provide care and support and enhancement for the next circle out. And everything you do in that circle should support the next circle out and the next circle out and the next circle out. And then as you get in these outer circles, you should reach back and help those in the inner circles to do their part of care and concern and contribution. So it's localized, contributory care at every level in your life. And if it's not motivated by love, it's going to fizzle out. It's got to be motivated by the deepest force in order to go the farthest and be the most powerful and, and to power everything you do. That's the renewable resource we all have. That's the ultimate renewable. And if you try to use any other energy in your life as your deepest energy, it's not going to work. That's the renewable energy you need. See love everywhere, see its opportunities everywhere. It has challenges everywhere. But those who back off because of the challenges end up with less than they could have been or accomplished.

I'm going to pick up the microphone one more time and drop it one more time. Beautiful. Thank you. Energy, work, and love. Your hero's journey. So many other themes that, that we touched on, and so many we could have touched on, but this has been a phenomenal first 66 minutes. If anyone would like to ask Tom a question and tap into his wisdom now, please raise your hand.

Oh, and by the way, I have. I have noticed. Thank you everybody for all the things in the chat column and because I'm sort of concentrating on what Brian asked me, I'm not sort of trying to type back and forth, but I'm copying and pasting everything from the chat and I will read every single comment in the chat column later on.

We'll make that easy for you, Tom. We'll give you the. We'll give you the chat kind of feed directly.

Now he tells me after I've written everything down.

So you're amazing. How thoughtful you are with all of that.

I appreciate it.

Before we go to John, Kimmy and Wendy, I want to hear your thoughts on Aristotle's thoughts on putting virtues into practice. Because, as you know, obviously, virtue is everything for us. Eudaimonia, Arete, etc. But this idea of who are you at your best, your identity in your energy, work and love, what virtues does that best version of you embody? And then what specific things do you do to be in integrity with those virtues, to express that identity, is the heart of the heroic app in our coach program, etc. But can you just briefly touch on Aristotle's thoughts through your consciousness on the practice of virtue?

Yeah. Oh, absolutely. Aristotle seemed to understand all virtues as a certain kind of paradigm. And some people think, well, this applies to most virtues, but maybe not to all. But his general formula was pretty interesting. There's something in the world you have to respond to. Your response can either be too little or it can be too much, or it can be just right. I mean, it sounds like what Goldilocks and the Three Bears, right? For example. There's a need in the world that you could help meet. You could do too little, you could be miserly about it, not even try. You could do too much, you could give too much, be profligate about it and give away everything so you don't have any resources left. That's not the virtue generally. It's the midpoint of generosity. So that's how Aristotle understood generosity. It's the midpoint between miserliness and profligacy, which is a word we don't often use. Courage, let's take courage. It's a response to something in the world, a danger, a risk. The too little response is cowardice or timidity. The too much response is foolhardiness or a word that we hardly use, temerity. You know, TV shows like Jackass, you know, people doing just crazy things, right. Adrenaline junkies who do just bizarre, foolish, irrational things. No, no, that's not courage. Courage is the midpoint. It's the proper response. It's not too little and it's not too much. It's the just right response. Aristotle believed about courage that if you don't have that, it's going to be hard for you to have any of the other virtues under pressure. So in a sense that kind of makes it the lead virtue. And it's one you're going to probably get wrong before you get right. In fact, I believe my. One of my professors in college who was an orthodox Jewish rabbi, philosopher of science from Hungary. It's kind of a wild combination who said to me, the Talmud says hardly anybody ever gets anything right until they've gotten it wrong multiple times. So don't pick yourself back up. Right. If in your attempt to deploy a virtue in the world. And there are lots of lists, you know, Aristotle has a list of virtues. Everybody's had their own list of virtues, right. You go through the Stoic virtues and some readings it's like the four cardinal virtues of, you know, courage and honesty and temperance and justice. Or it can be break down to all kinds of smaller virtues and you could make a modern list. I, I've done it in at least one of my books where I made you sort of a list of virtues that kind of took two pages. Right. There are a lot of what is a virtue? The, the Latin virtus, from which we get virtue meant literally. And a lot of people don't know this. Prowess, power, strength. A virtue is supposed to be the strength that you bring to a challenge. It's a form of power, of prowess, of strength. So that arete gets translated in Latin is the virtus. Because they understood that this is what are they is all about. It's about power, prowess, strength. And so, so then French, 10th century French goes virtu or V E R or V I R. It's the same thing. It's your potential, your power, your strength. So that in, in the modern world we hardly. We. If you don't know Brian, you probably have, you know, weren't hearing the word virtue spoken very often in public places. Right. There was a 19th century thing, a kind of a post Shakespearean thing all through the 19th century that associated virtue with a certain attitude towards sexuality and chastity and stuff like that, which had nothing to do really with its classical roots. The classical roots of what virtue is really all about is what do you bring in? What, what are your tools? What are your weapons? What are your strengths? What are your prowess? What is your power that you bring to any challenge? That's what virtue is all about. And, and, and becoming more virtuous means trying to do the right thing, regardless of. And it's usually not the easy thing. And then if you get knocked down, getting back up and trying again and, and learning the discernment of not going too. Doing the too much or the too little, doing the just right. Because some people, when they do the too much, they feel like they're being ultra virtuous. And Aristotle said that can be just as problematic as doing too little. You have to get it right with discernment, you have to get it right. It's an art, it's not a science. But we become better at the art because every art is a skill. Just like with any other skill, we become better at it as we practice it. That's the whole idea of practice.

I love it and I appreciate, as concise as 50 years worth of studying and practice can bring to that long discussion so explicitly. But there's the vice of deficiency, the vice of excess. With each of the virtues, we need to practice it. We need to be willing to make mistakes.

Yes.

Brief. Alexander. Alexander Emerson is into chess. Alexander is very much into chess. He's watching these grandmasters play and there's commentary like it's a sports game. And I'm like, dude, you understand what they're saying? Yeah, I wouldn't be watching it if it wasn't fun. And one of the grandmasters plays another grandmaster makes a very obvious blunder. And I said, look, even the grandmaster makes a blunder. He says, of course they do. They make them. That's how they got good. You know, like to teach me.

Yeah.

And then briefly, you know, as you know. But the first thing we had our product team design was our compass. So on the top of every single part of our app, you find. And we operationalized and modernized the four ancient cardinal virtues.

Yeah.

Wisdom we call temperance. Self mask, which is so much. And, you know, just temperance. It's being able to do what you need to do whether you feel like it or not. And all that good stuff.

Yeah.

And then we took justice. We made it in love again. You study any of these, it's law.

And then of course, it comes down to. Yeah.

You know, moving, you know, to the right toward the battlefield. Right. Then we. In the five virtues of modern science that are most highly correlated to flourishing, which Include attitude, hope, curiosity and zest. And love. Again, which counts twice. Anyway, just to briefly show you that. And then everyone should know that we have tools here that Michael brought to life. We have nearly a hundred of them. And then, of course, quotes that you can get fired up on. I read a set of quotes and commit to a virtue every single day. This was the first thing that we had our team design out of principle, that this is what it's all about, coming back to that virtue. So we'll leave it at that. I actually want to go. Wendy, are you still here? I saw that you had your hand up, and I know that you have some beautiful challenges right now, and I have a sense that if you are still here, your presence would be wonderful and we would learn a lot from you. Lydia, I also want to make sure that we have an opportunity to hear your perspective, given your background with stoicism. I think that'll be really interesting. And then, Kimmy, I want to hear from you, too, so. And then we'll see what we can get beyond that. I know we have a lot of other hands, but Wendy would love to have you join us if you'd still like to. To connect with Tom.

Thanks, baby. Hi, Tom. Thank you so much for coming. And everything you shared, that wisdom was. Was like, mind expanding. I love that.

Thank you so much, Wendy.

Yeah.

Hey, do you know Sister Jean over at Loyola?

No, I don't. Tell me about Sister Jean.

She's 103. She's the chaplain for the men's basketball team, and she's still the chaplain for the men's basketball team and 103. So, anyway, I just wanted to see. Because, you know, she. She knew all about Notre Dame, and she's so heavily into. Bat into.

Well, thanks for mentioning her, because there's no expiration date on what we're talking about here. I have a friend.

Exactly right.

I have a friend who just turned 100 this year. He's a television producer, and he's still producing new shows at the age of 100. And I talked to him a few months ago, and he was like. Like he always was, you know, just going. Just going strong. And it's like, okay, that's an inspiration for all of us. You know, let's. Let's live every day as if it were our last, but playing like we're going to be able to do things for, who knows, as long as Sister Jean.

Yeah. And you have to read her book, what I've Learned My First Hundred Years. It's so great. I'M writing that down anyway. Yeah, so good. And she really knows her sport. It's good. So you talked. I mean, I'm getting to this note here where now I gotta find it. Okay. Turning difficulty into delight. So I need to turn some difficulty into delight here. And one of the things I realized was when I was 14, I had brain cancer. It was not good and my mother was angry that I had it. My dad, you know, went to Malaysia to stay away. My brothers couldn't be involved. Everybody was angry at me and it was just, it was horrible. And so when I got breast cancer at 37, I didn't tell anybody and got through that and then they burnt my heart and I had a stroke and blah, blah, blah. Anyway, so that was, yeah, a lot of challenges. So now my 11 year old, golden, has brain cancer and the challenge. And you know, my husband had a tia. So we're looking at, you know, why did he have that? And I've got some stuff that I'm going to have to deal with too, with my heart. So anyway, it's a lot of challenge and I need to go to the delight part because what I've realized, and I just realized this yesterday, is that the pain that I felt at 14 has come back. So I have a rash. I vomited the other day. I don't vomit. You know, it was like, what's going on? And I realized it yesterday that all of the stuff I felt at that time is coming back through what Murrow is going through.

Yeah.

And so I need to get, I need to release that somehow and, and getting into the delight part with all of this would be really a fantastic gift. I'm not sure that you can give that to me, but I would really love to hear.

Well, first of all, you know what? You, I'm sorry you're going through so much. I mean, you know, there's a sense in which we all do at some point. Right. So you, you're at least going through it now where you can tell the rest of us about it. You can give us a report along the way, which is encouraging to us because look at you. Here you are sitting here having been through all this and you're wanting to know how to deal with it rather than being one of those people who just give up. Right. Which is the worst thing anybody can do. I was reading one of the Stoics the other day who said basically not the exact words, but was making the point that the people who only have good luck, that's the best. That's the worst luck of all, that's the really bad luck, is to only have good luck, because it's only when we're really challenged that we really grow and learn. And the harder the challenge is, the more we have the opportunity to grow from it. In fact, I was telling somebody not too long ago, the worst things that have ever happened in my life have so far always opened doors to the best things, but in ways I never could have expected. And those best things didn't often happen right away, but they would happen down the line. And I realized I couldn't have experienced that great thing had I not gone through that terrible thing. And so we're right to try to eliminate from the world as many of these terrible things as we can, right? We want the progress of medicine, we want the progress of. And yet we still know that human beings go through stuff. You weren't. The reason you've had something come back to you from when you were 14 is you didn't have the wherewithal at the age of 14 to release all that. You just had to put it away. And because you put it away, it was still there. And because it came back, you now at the stage you're at, can find a way to let it go in a way that you couldn't have when you were 14. In fact, you can do that 14 year old a big favor. And that 14 year old has depended on you now to do the work that the 14 year old you couldn't do. And it's a sacred thing that to go through is always difficult, but to have gone through can be transformative. I had the opportunity once to talk to a famous philosopher in England who was a great athlete. Probably when he was around late 30s, early 40s, he had a really tragic accident. I think it was an automobile accident. And he was left quadriplegic from it. And one of my colleagues actually visited him in the hospital in England and he said, surprisingly well, shockingly, he said that if he had the whole thing, his whole life to live over again and could choose this time whether to have the accident or not, he would choose to have it. Because he told my colleague, he said, I have gone to a spiritual depth I never even knew existed, because I have embraced the difficulty and tried to find what it has to teach me. And the lessons have been incalculably valuable. I had the chance to talk to this man on the phone once and it was hard for him to speak a word. So a conversation that would take you or me 30 seconds probably took us 30 minutes. And it was the most amazing testimonial to the power of the human spirit. Now, a little problem I went through recently, which is nothing compared to your problem that you've gone through, so I have. I want to first of all honor that you're going through it and not draw a comparison at all. But it's my tiny little version, my miniscule version was.

Before you do, before you start that, Tom, can I just say.

Sure.

Please don't do that. Because your thing was as important to you and as much to you as my stuff is to me.

Well, thank you.

You're right. There is none. Your stuff is just the same.

Yeah. Right. Thank you. It was. It was two big kidney stones at the age of 50. At the age of 58, two big kidney stones which were so big I had to name them Mick and Keith in favor for the other great big stones. I know. And so it turns out that the same scholarship I went to Chapel Hill on, the guy who invented lithotripsy was. Is my Morehead Kane cousin, as we call each other. So as soon as I was diagnosed, within hours I was talking to the guy who invented the therapy, the treatment for big kidney stones. And so he told me, he made it available to me to go through this lithotripsy. And then the best case scenario is all the little tiny particles they blow the stones into reduced to. They're supposed to kind of gradually leave the building, you know, but all the stones decide to leave the building at the same time, which is what they call in medical expertise, worst case scenario. And I was on the. On the floor all night long, vomiting, and I haven't thrown up once in my whole life. I said, this tastes terrible. I'm never doing this again. And then all night long, and I went through what they say, and my doctor said, well, I've had. I've had 3, 400 women patients roughly with kidney stones. And 398 said it was worse than childbirth. And I said, well, I hope I never experience anything remotely like this again, but I'm so glad I went through it. And he said, okay, you're the only patient I've ever had, maybe of a thousand patients who's ever said that. Could you please explain you're glad you went through it? I said, yeah, man. I never knew what the human spirit could take. I never had a clue. I was in the most pain. I signed it 9.6 on the 10 point scale because I was conscious, right? You got to leave some area to. Before you get to a 10, I said, I'm so glad I experienced a fraction. It blew my mind. How much pain we can take. It blew my mind. And now I have a different perspective on everything. You're not going to scare me with pain because now I know what the human spirit can endure, and probably I just have a fraction of that insight. It was a spiritual growth for me. So I tell you, Wendy, I'll send you a copy of Plato's Lemonade Stand. Just shoot me an address. You know, go to tomfaris.com shoot me address through the contact page. I'll give you a gift copy of Plato's Lemonade Stand. Let's get through this thing we do. You need partners. You don't need to do it alone. You need. You need encouragement. And you can't come out the other side with that bizarre delight that you would never expect when you're in the midst of the darkness. You don't even know the sun's going to rise again. But it will. And you can, too.

I know. Thank you. And I know that if one thing changed in my life, I wouldn't be where I am now. So I can't change in the. Not even one little thing, because I love where I am today.

There you go. You should. It's clear that you should.

Thank you no more, Fatih. We will not unravel our lives by saying no to anything. Joseph Campbell wisely advises us, knowing we are now quickly approaching our time. And I know that some with their hands up will not get an opportunity to chat today. But Woody, I want to hear your thoughts. And then, Tom, if you can do a bullet round, that'd be awesome. Just super quick, Lydia, frame it up quick. Tom, frame it back quick. And then I want to hear from at least Kimmy as well. And then we'll see where we're at. Angelina, John, we're going to owe you one. But, Lydia, super quick.

Tom, I say in the chat that you're my new best friend and guide. So nice to meet you.

Nice to meet you.

So I call myself a sweary stoic coach. What I do is I coach people irreverently using stoic techniques on how to calm the f down. That's basically my goal. And I just. I thank you so much for how you've aligned everything, because sometimes the reverence is what it takes. That's why Stutz is one of my heroes. But just the story you've put here to go from courage to Brian, what you just said, Amor fatih, which is what I have tattooed with a poppy that symbolizes death. Memento mori. Anamora fati there. But just how wrong that thread is.

Yeah.

And when you're in the midst of a shitstorm or anything to know that you're probably on that line. Courage and amor fati. Because it takes courage to love your fate.

Yeah.

And through loving your fate, you're also testing your own courage. So that is one of the things that just came out of me today. And I'm just going to like, run around the house screaming. And my poor children tonight, they're going to be like, shush. But. So I just really want to thank you for that.

Nice.

Amazing. And now I've got to write a blog. Thanks.

Thank you. I mean, amen to all you said. Thank you for doing what you do in the lives of people. Because we have these ancient techniques, we have this ancient wisdom, these ancient perspectives and reminders and. And mental twists that we can use in our lives to such great effect. And people are living as if they've got to make up everything themselves, you know, as if no tools already exist out there for us. So thank you for bringing this wisdom into people's lives.

Brilliant. And Alicia says, can't wait to read the blog post. I can't either. And I can't wait for you to share that on heroic, by the way. That is going to be heroic. Coming. End of June v1.

Q3.

Q3. Exciting. So great. Great to see you, buddy. I didn't know you had kids. That makes you even cooler. Not that you weren't already. Extremely cool. Kimmy. Let's see if we can frame it up real quick and we'll do the same. Little quick. Speed, speed round.

Hi everyone. Tom, thank you so much for being here and also for being so available and real on Facebook and Instagram. So it's. It's a real delight to see you day posting and interacting with our profiles.

So that's great. Thank you so much. Thanks for, for being there on. On social media platforms as a. As a ray of sunshine yourself. Because every morning, that's part of my daily practice, while I'm waking my brain up, I try to. I look at a picture, a beautiful picture, a strange picture, a stimulating picture. And. And so what does it say to me? And I'll post a sentence or a paragraph online. And the reason I do that is not just to jumpstart my own brain, but to see what people say and what people teach me about those ideas. And it's just wonderful. Thank you for being a part of that.

Absolutely. Thank You. So I wrote my question. It's when it comes to what you say yes to, given your high awareness of being in the flow, how do you approach how you plan ahead with goals one to five or ten years from now? How specific do you get while leaving room for flexibility in the direction of your destiny?

Ah, that's good. It's like what I like to call flexible firmness. There's a lot of things in life that you're really firm about, like your basic values and the virtues you want to express in the world, but you're flexible about how you do that. There are certain things about your sense of purpose in the world that you're firm about and then you should be flexible about the way you deploy that. If you see obstacles or opportunities, right? And sometimes they come disguised as the others, you know. And my father used to say, I remember in college I said to my father, everybody's trying to pick a major and they're asking the same question. All my friends asking, what do I want to do for the rest of my life? And my father said, well, that's the wrong question to ask. And I said, well, what's the right question? He said, what do I want to do next? He said, the rest of your life is going to take care of itself. My father said, now here's a high school graduate, never went to college with Constant reader. My father said, life is supposed to be a series of adventures. The ones you've been on so far have prepared you for the next ones yet to come in ways often that you can't even possibly imagine. Trust the journey, live the adventure. So set your near goal, have some long term goals, that's great, but the most important things is what's in front of you now. And maybe they will lead you to those long term goals in amazingly effective ways. And maybe they will teach you about those long term goals that, oh, you're a little off on, that you need to adjust a little bit because you're learning as you go. Aristotle said we learn as we do, right? So goal setting is never just to lock us in. Goal setting is to let us go doing something from which we will learn and grow so that we can know next what we need to do to help us learn and grow and you know, never engraved in stone. Our goal setting is supposed to be a kind of a library operating thing, not something to shut us down and to put it put the blinders on us, but it's supposed to be opening us up as we go. So that's a great Question. I mean, that's so important to be thinking about. A lot of people don't try to learn from the relation between the long term and the short term. They'll just kind of knock off one of those. Let's just forget about the long term. Let's just see. Do what seems right now or they'll do. I'm folks so focused on the long term, I'm sort of half blind to what's going on around me. You don't want either of those things. You want almost. The Aristotelian virtue here would be right. The right harmony and balance of those two things.

Thank you.

That's awesome.

That is awesome. All right, cool. Tom, we. How we doing? 92 minutes in. You got it?

We're good.

Got soul force. All right, so then Angelina, John, super tight frame. And then I'm going to tightly frame something. I just had a hit of what you just said of firmness. You know, I'm like, oh, I got to write a plus one. Then I'm like, we've flirted in the past with having other people produce plus ones with us and for us, right? And I'm like, oh, shoot, I'm hitting 1500 on my own. Tom, we're going to have a chat outside as being perhaps one of the first guest plus one creators to do a series that we feature you for a week or whatever. And then I just had the thought of all the other complimentary stuff because I don't need to write that. What you just described is so good. Flexible firmness and imagining that I had just exploded.

By the way, by the way, talk about flexible firmness and the wisdom we're talking about. Congratulations to Emerson for recently having some great experience. I've heard about. Word has gotten to Wilmington, North Carolina, about this chess expertise. I'm glad that you took me out to dinner rather than letting me face him across the chessboard. I could have been really embarrassed that evening.

It was a good move for both of us. That kid, he won his division for the state championships. But we've been talking about who he's becoming, you know, and the opportunity, the context for him to talk about is. But bless you and let's go. All right, let's do John then. And John, super tight frame. Heroically laconic. Let's go.

Oh, is somebody on mute?

Can you unmute while you do that? Angelina, you're on. John, you come after. Angelina gives it to us.

Okay, Great. Wow. I am so. This is such a big moment for me just to be with both of You. I am speechless. Thank you so much for putting so much heart and soul into philosophy and this meaningful work. It means so much. It's so powerful, and I'm so grateful. I can't believe I'm in this zoom room with you. And I'm gonna try to frame my question. So I was listening to your talk, and, you know, I feel like I've been on this journey that I feel the fire in me. I am naturally very ambitious, and I have a good sense of power, of purpose. Because it sounds like you're narrowed it down to three big things like the power of purpose, the power of transformation, and partnership. And so I think what Brian would say. The heroic gods have provided a lot of opportunities, opportunities for me to practice my philosophy. I've been practicing, like, the stoic approach. And I. I found myself losing the partner in my life that affected me in so many ways, and my family that. How do you think? I think I have a strong sense of agency. So in some ways, when I looked at this, three aspects. The power of purpose, the power of transformation. There is. It almost like there's a lot of that. You can step into that. And how do you manage that when the partnership. You lose that partnership. And how do you recover and manage all of that when the fire is strong, you know, the transformation. I don't know if I'm framing it well, but this is where I'm at.

You are. And it's an interesting thing about loss. No loss is easy. Some loss is permanent. Some loss is temporary. Some losses to make way for a great gain that we can't see when we see the loss. It's almost like what Einstein and other scientists have had to say over the decades about problems. Problems are much easier to spot than the solutions to those problems. We see the problems first. We don't see the solutions right away. And we often can be tempted to give up. Or that creates a kind of an emotional confusion in us, which is okay, because confusion is often the doorway to clarity. We have to go through the confusion first before we get to the clarity. And when it comes to. And if you. It occurred to me, if we. If we even want to mnemonic about purpose, partnership, and transformation, make the transformation process. Because then we got purpose, partnership, and process, a process of transformation. We never have everything equally available to us at all times. And so we work with what we have. Sometimes we have a bit of each of those things available to us at a time. Sometimes we have a lot of those three things, but we never have. We almost Never have everything equally available to us at all times. So you work with what you have. And when there is a loss, there is a stoic perspective that, you know, the common sense version is when one door closes and another door opens. There are different kinds of partnerships and sometimes a very valued partnership when it is being lost, whether temporarily or permanently, you don't say, okay, well then no partnership. Now I'm on a solo venture. You find other sorts of partners and they help you through the next phase of your adventure. But that's like my father's perspective. It's almost like a nothing is forever perspective. The flip side of which is each adventure leads to the next one, often in ways you can't imagine. And even the adventures that seem really rough, even the adventures that seem really difficult to involve more suffering than promise, they can be very different from what they initially seem in the long run. Consequences. And that's why philosophers like the Stoics were always trying to get us to think about the long run. Even their main rivals in the ancient world, the Epicureans, have a bad rap in the modern world. They were often trying to get people to think about long term stuff. Don't over indulge in the pleasures of the world right now with no thought for tomorrow. And, and, and don't think that your sufferings of today can't be also preparing you for the pleasures of tomorrow. So, so take a big picture perspective and just let go of some of the appearances that make you struggle. Now just say, I don't know, I can't figure this out yet. I don't know why this is happening. I don't know exactly what I'm going to do with it, but first thing I want to do is kind of let it go a little bit, let it go a little bit. I'm going to get beyond the clutter in the chatter of the conscious mind because the conscious mind is like a bird and trying to get out of a cage, trying to figure this out. Calm the bird down, calm the mind down. And then sometimes insight will bubble up. There will be just what you need to do, which you can't imagine that you had been able to think of this. But it was only when you quiet everything else that you allow that insight to come into your life that will bless you with just the path forward you're supposed to take right now at least I've really seen that happen in my life, in a lot of people's lives for a very long time now. So I'm pretty confident about it.

Beautiful. Bless You.

It can be a blessing. It can be a blessing in the, in the future. All the, all the tough stuff you go through right now is going to open you up in ways that. One of the best professors at Yale wrote a book called the Wounded Healer because he thought that you can't truly be a healer unless you've been deeply wounded yourself. So whenever anybody I know is going through something really tough, I say, man, you must be getting prepared for some really amazing things.

Thank you so much. Can I ask you a really brief, practical.

Sure, go ahead.

In regards to that, this idea of embracing and releasing, which sounds like, you know, part of your advice is this, Is there a specific question that you ask yourself when you. To make that decision? In the moment when you get flooded and you say, do I embrace this or release this? Like, how do you navigate that?

Typically, the question arises when you've been doing one of those two things already and it doesn't seem to be working. And you say to me, I say to myself, okay, I'm really holding on tight to this thing. Is that helping? Has that produced good consequences so far? If not, maybe I should let it go for a while and see if that's the better approach or another, it could go the opposite way. There's something I've just been releasing and letting go, and guess what? It's not any better and I'm not any better, and maybe things are worse. And so maybe that's not the approach I should have taken. Let's go try the other one. So it's a little bit of a matter of self monitoring. You know, Dr. Phil got famous for one question. How's that working for you? Right. He always used to ask everybody that same question. Well, we need to ask ourselves something similar to that about embracing and releasing. Because when something that doesn't seem to be working, it's not always the healthiest thing to keep doing it. So we say ourselves, okay, I've been, I've been thinking through this thing with my conscious mind for so long, and I can't find a way out. I can't find a solution to the puzzle. And so that means to me, I, I turn down the volume on the conscious mind. I'm just going to let the unconscious work on this for a while. I'm going to go play with the dogs, or I'm going to feed the cat, or I'm going to go be with the bunny and repose in the backyard. I'm gonna take a walk in nature. A therapist at Yale once told me a Psychologist, a psychiatrist at Yale, said that the only department that she had never seen anybody from, and she thought they. Nobody had ever come to the psych for counseling. From the Forestry department. She said whenever they have a problem, to take a walk in the woods. And so I try to expose myself to nature every day, even when I'm not having a particular problem on my mind, but especially if I am, because you could be spoken to on a deeper level than words, and they can give you the healing perspectives and insights that are just what you need. So be patient with yourself, be patient with the situation, and give yourself that dose of nature that may just be the remedy.

Thank you. From the gurus in the room.

So good. And one of the frames of the ancient philosopher was that they're a physician of the soul. And I just. I was just struck by that. With your dual PhDs, the Doctor of Philosophy and Religious studies, like, this is good medicine for the soul. And you've got great bedside manner, you've got great practical tips, and it's a joy to watch you in action. All right, continuing our marathon. You got. You got legs for one more there, Tom.

Let's get one more.

Let's go.

This is it. And John, frame it up nice and tight.

Thank you.

Yes, I'm certainly feeling the healing. Hi, Tom. Thanks again.

So.

So in terms of the partnership and of the overcoming the vices that we all share, what is the best way that we can have the right. What are the right purposes and what.

Are the right activities for us to gather together around? Yeah. Yeah. You know, one thing I never hear people talking about or really, really rarely is the power of listening for finding the right partners in your life. Often it's the power of listening. Listening as a spiritual discipline. In fact, somebody told me that Brian might ask me today about who my heroes are. And I've mentioned some of them. But one guy, one wanted to mention that I haven't mentioned is a guy I have a direct connection with. He and I are supposed to meet in the next few weeks, but I haven't met him in person yet. But he's like one of my modern heroes. He's this African American musician. He was boogie woogie, blues, piano player with. Who was it? Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry, B.B. king, the Platters, the Drifters. The list goes on and on. But he's come into prominence now because he was playing in a bar in Maryland, I think it was, or Virginia. And a guy comes up to him and said, well, how'd you learn to play the piano? Like that you're as good as Jerry Lee Lewis. I've never heard anybody as good as Jerry Lee Lewis. He said, well, we learned from the same guy, from the same guys. And he said, what are you talking about? These black musicians in Mississippi, we learned from them. He said, jerry Lee Lewis didn't learn how to play football for me, black man. And he, a black man says, oh, yeah, I know Jerry Lee. I've played with Jerry Lee. We learned from the very same people. He's. Are you kidding me? Turns out this guy's a member of the clan. And make a long story short, yeah, Daryl learned how to listen to people with very different points of view from him. And this guy, Klansman who was challenging his story about who he. Who he learned to play from and who Jerry Lee Lewis learned to play. This guy ends up asking Daryl Davis to be the godfather of his daughter. And this guy ends up leaving the clan and given his robe to Daryl. And they end up being partners, buddies. After the Unite for the Right rally where a guy had had revived the Ku Klux Klan in Maryland, Daryl got in touch with this guy and said, I want to meet you. I want to talk to you. I want to find out about your life. I want to listen to your story. I want to find out why you believe what you believe and why you think what you think. And. And Daryl just listened. He asked questions and just listen, just listen, just listen. Until the man wanted to ask him questions and listen to him. And pretty soon, before you know it, the guy brings his girlfriend and they go with Daryl through the Smithsonian through African American history exhibit. And the guys, Daryl's listening to this guy, and the guy's listening to Daryl. And then before you know it, the guy and his girlfriend, that day, a few months down the road, they decide to get married. And her dad's paralyzed and can't walk her down the aisle. So the guy they asked to walk her down the aisle is Daryl Davis. He's gotten. They say two to 400 people have left white supremacist violent organizations because Daryl Davis knows how to listen and cares to listen. My answer to your question was is that with the purpose of really hearing people, really listening to people, we find those partners we need for the next stage of the journey. And sometimes they don't look at all like what we thought they would have looked like. But together we do powerful things if we've learned to listen well. So thanks for asking that, man. That's such an important question.

Great.

Thank you. Yeah, you bet.

Well, that's how it's done, folks. Thank you. John, great question. Kimmy, bless you. Lydia, bless you. Heidi, of course. Angelina. And you, Tom, you are a incredible human being. Trading text with Michael, I'm like, dude, Tom's insanely great. Is anyone else here besides me right now on the team? I don't know if anybody wants to break up on the other side of this. If you do, we will, I think, be able to do that. But, Tom, thank you. Bless you for dedicating your life to being the exemplar, the eudaimon that would make Aristotle and the stoics proud. As an embodiment of this philosophy. Be in that deep sense of practice to joy that's such an inspiration to all of us. Cannot wait to amplify your wisdom even more within our community. I saw you on the social platform as Kimmy, and you were going back and forth and just doing everything we can to. To continue to support you in getting your wisdom out there. Yeah. Speechless. Bless you.

Me too. Yeah. You know, Brian, thank you for building this community, for the things that you all do already, for the incalculably wonderful things you will do in the future and for bringing me along for the ride. I just love you guys, and I love all of you. Everybody I've met, everybody who's corresponded with me, everybody who's invited me a little bit into their lives. You've enriched my life immensely. So thank you so much.

As we like to say day one. Let's go, hero. The fun has just begun, and it's getting better every day. All right, Go enjoy your go. Feed the rabb with you in spirit and until we can connect again in real person, in real time.

That's great. Thank you all so much.

The uncle. Well, team, I don't know how it gets any better than that. Get out of here, Tom. Just kidding.

I'm trying, man.

Doug, I want to stay. Stay, dude. Oh, my goodness. All right, Michael's here. Michael, do you know how to break people up, or is that outside of your pay grade as well? I do know how to do that, but Zach is also here with the. I think the screen. The cool, beautiful screen graphic, but amen on Tom. That was fantastic. Brian. I'll send you his hero portraits. You can get that over to him. Did we get a haircut in between the start and finish of that, or is that already in a cold shower? So that's solid. That was a solid two hours right there. I did this one myself. I hope it looks pretty clean. It looks fantastic. Fantastic as I've said many times, if I was a man who had hair envy, I would have it for you. Then I literally thought of you, coach Rick, as I was shaving my beard. Sad face. Like, there it goes. And our other Robert, other beard aficionados. Aki, you've got a nice beard. I haven't complimented before. All right, Michael, Zach, who's going to take the lead for us as we transition? Obviously, we've gone long, so bless all of you who are here. Impressive numbers. Let's take a breath together. And then if you want to stay team clean shaven, Brian. So is my wife. So is my wife. I like the clean look. David, I appreciate that you missed the reason why Brian ditched the beard. Well, I got to share that again because that's very important. I went to go try to, you know, get the beard groomed, and I was just. Just an epic fail. And I'm literally midway through. I'm like, this thing's coming off. This looks ridiculous. Eleanor's there waiting patiently for me, and she says I could have done a better job unsolicitedly. Well, I don't know about that, but that's good. So anyway, here we go. I feel like I shaved 15 years off. Let's go. All right, let's enjoy a breath. Love you too, Wendy. Appreciate the voids votes for the. For the clean shave. Shaking out.

Oh.

In any tension that may have arisen unconsciously as we soak in the wisdom, the self mastery, the deep love, the courage, the gratitude, the hope, the curiosity, the zest, and the deep, deep, deep eudaimonic joy that Tom brought today and demonstrated today and helped us feel as we felt his soul force coming together in partnership, moving from theory to practice to mastery together today. Such a joy to be with you. Thank you for creating the community container through which we can do this. This isn't the same with me and Tom having a conversation. It's nothing compared to us being here live together, exploring these ideas way before we got to the questions. Just feeling your presence here creates a field effect. As Phil would say, that's. That to me, is palpable. So bless you for being here and bringing your soul force and helping us just go to that next level. If you would like to stay on and connect with others, please stay on and we will connect you. Otherwise, we will see you tomorrow, 101pm Central Time. Look forward to building the fire that is our soul force on the heroic app. When someone does something that you want to celebrate, you will not like it. You Will not love it. You will not thumbs up it. You will add a fire to the post. And the metaphor goosebumps is exactly what Tom said. Michael and I had to craft it with Metamabot. What do we want there? We want it to be different. Do we have anything at all? Because a lot of times that creates a social comparison and we're still looking at the counts on it, right? Is that something we want to publicly show or is it just. No, no, no. It's just a fire that's getting lit. The individual who receives it gets to see it. But the idea there, metaphorically and philosophically and practically, was help one another build the fire such that everything becomes fuel for it and we warm those around us with the heat of our blaze. So thought that was a fun parallel there. And I'm getting giddy as we get closer and closer to the social launch. I can feel it. Cannot wait to see everyone there. Andrita, nice to see you. I enjoyed your presence today quite a bit. I was kind of scrolling through and looking at everyone, and I connected with you. You may not have known, but you and I were connecting more than once through our time together. So bless you, Michael. Is Zach here? Is he going to take the lead or would you like to do so? Let me know. Yeah. Team, we got Calman. What do we got? Let's go. Cowman's here. Okay, cool. Calman. Thank you, brother. Thank you.

Hey, Hiro. We hope you enjoyed this heroic chat to learn more about this series, as well as how you can join Brian's daily live coaching sessions at 1:01pm Central Time. Plus get access to a ton more to help you move from theory to practice to mastery and express the best, most heroic version of yourself. Head to heroic us today. And if you liked this episode, please leave a positive review and hit the subscribe button on your platform of choice. Have a fantastic day.