Sean Murray  02:37

One thing about the Great Books is they’ve survived the test of time. I think there’s a lot of value in that. It was Nassim Taleb, who opened my eyes to a kind of Lindy Effect. The Lindy Effect is something like if something has been around for 100 years, it’s much more likely to be around for another 100 years. And so, if Aristotle’s been around for 2,300 years or whatnot, he’s probably going to be around for another 2,300 years. To think that people, the scribes in the Middle Ages, had to write this stuff out by hand to copy it, they weren’t just going to copy any old garbage. So the stuff that had value lasted.

Scott Hambrick  03:19

When the barbarians came to sack Rome, you got the good stuff. You could only grab something quick, and get the heck out. In some cases, these books would’ve gotten people killed. People hid them and copied them and saved them, so that their grandkids, their posterity, could have them.

Sean Murray  03:34

How did you get interested in the Great Books? And what was your entry point?

Scott Hambrick  03:38

I’ve always been a reader, and I had tried to read some of these things. The example I give most is the Republic. I tried to read the Republic when I was 16 or 17 years old. It was not accessible to me at that time. It went on, and I got a degree at the University of Oklahoma in a science background. I’m a Microbiology and Chemistry kind of guy. Later on, I had some kids. When we were talking about homeschooling those kids, we researched how we might best do that, and found out about The Trivium: The Liberal Arts of Logic, Grammar, and Rhetoric. I need that.

My education really wasn’t education. It’s training. I mean, a lot of people would say, “Oh, it’s education.” But I think a very specialized, very specific training in a certain discipline is not a liberal education, where you learn how to learn. Take chemistry, you’re not going to learn how to learn. They’re going to bottle-feed you organic chemistry.

I wanted [liberal education], so I started researching how one might best do that as an adult, and found that I probably didn’t want to learn Latin. I was droning on a business, had 20 employees, and a couple of kids on the ground; stuff to do. I found this Great Books approach and thought, “That’s doable for a busy guy with a wife and some kids and all that,” and started a Great Books group here in my home. We meet on the third Thursday of the month. I’ve been doing it now for almost five years, and the guys that are in that group love it. It’s one of the most important things they do every month, and they never miss it.

One of the guys in the group is Brett McKay of The Art of Manliness. Brett approached me, “Yeah, you need to do this. This needs to get out to a whole bunch of more people.” He kind of elbowed me into going ahead and creating a platform for our broader online community, and we started onlinegreatbooks.com in January of 2018. It’s been running a little over two years, and about 600 people are reading these books and discussing them in seminars every month.

Sean Murray  05:27

The group that you started there in Tulsa was based on a model that was established by Mortimer Adler in the 1950s. He had a fascinating background. Maybe you can talk about the history of this movement to read the Great Books, when it started, why it started, and who was behind it.

Scott Hambrick  05:46

In the early 1900s, there was a guy named John Erskine at Columbia in the classics department, who advocated reading. Well, they were having an age-old problem: “The kids these days can’t read.” At that time, what they meant was the kids can’t read Homer in Greek. What they meant at that time was they can’t read Caesar in Latin. And Erskine said, “Well, yeah, you’re right. What are we going to do? Let’s go, and let them read them in translation, and do that. And let’s have the credit seminars over those things.” They kicked that off, and it kind of died because of World War I. When these GIs started coming home, he started running Great Books classes for soldiers. Essentially, adults were returning from the war, and it was very successful. One of his students, not one of the GIs, was Mortimer Adler.

Adler became enamored with the whole project. He never graduated from Columbia. They were making him get some Physical Education (PE) credits, but he refused, so he never graduated. He just left. Robert Hutchins at the University of Chicago hired Adler. And Adler started what they called the Basic Program there, which was mostly what Erskine had been doing.

Adler was a force of nature. He lived to be 100 years old, almost. I think he lived to be 99 years old and he was just tireless. He was frontline all the time in television shows. He was just a public intellectual. He had a television show, in California in the ’50s, about The Great Ideas, and just wanted everybody in the United States to do this. He eventually went to the Encyclopedia Britannica Company, and got them to publish the 54-volume Great Books of the Western World set because he thought that if you are going to be people who govern, you need to know these things. You need to know the ideas and the issues in these books. So he pushed that stuff tirelessly. He wrote a book in 1940 called, How to Read a Book. I’ve stolen from him liberally.

Sean Murray  07:32

Well, that’s what he wanted, right? He was like an open-source before there was open-source. He was trying to create these reading groups out there in American society for people to gather, read together, discuss, and learn.

When you grapple with these books, I think it’s important to have people around you to kind of motivate and inspire you in ways. But also to be dialectic to discuss, to expound your own thoughts about what you’re reading, and to hear someone else’s perspective. And through that, you’re going to learn. Adler understood that and was trying to start these groups, which I think was great. So that was in the ’40s to the ’60s. I never heard about a group like that growing up. You’re sort of revising it. Did it go into…? Where did it go? Did it just kind of die out? And are we getting back to it or what?

Scott Hambrick  08:28

Well, it certainly lost some popularity. Encyclopedia Britannica continued to produce the set into the ’90s. I think it was in its third edition, and they would sell them door-to-door. There were still Great Books groups at your local library or maybe meeting in the fellowship hall at the church down the street. But there certainly was by the ’80s, probably only 5% of the number of groups than there had been in the late ’50s.

He eventually helped found the Great Books Foundation, the mission of which is ostensibly to get people to do this. There are colleges all over the country that are still trying to do this, you know? The most famous one I think, or the best one, is probably St. John’s College. It was founded by Stringfellow Barr and Scott Buchanan in the late 30s. Actually, it wasn’t founded. They got control of that university by peaceful means, and they revised it as a Great Books school. The students there, Johnny’s, they call them to this day. The whole curriculum is a Great Books curriculum. There’s that one, St. Thomas Aquinas College in California, Hillsdale College. There are a number of them that still do this, and there’s almost a direct family tree back to John Erskine in all of those places.

The liberal arts departments are dying all over the country. Universities are actually dying. They don’t know it yet, but they’re on their way out, at least in their current form. And we’re kind of stepping into that gap. That’s not what I intended to do. I just wanted more people to read, but I’m finding out that people are really, really hungry for it, and there’s just nowhere else to go.

Sean Murray  09:55

Well, in this show, we talk about living a good life. How do we do that? How do we live a life that’s flourishing? How do we live a life of meaning? Of purpose? How do we get the most out of every day? A lot of that wisdom is, when you follow it back, it leads back to these great authors and the great works. If we’re interested in living the good life, where would you point people to? Or is it that you have to read the whole canon?

Scott Hambrick  10:25

I don’t think so. I think that you can read a few of Plato, and go a long way there. I think you could read The Symposium, where Socrates and his friends are laying around drinking and talking about what love is, and learn quite a bit about it. I think you can learn a little bit from the discussions of how to build a just society in the Republic, and then Aristotle, I think, his Ethics and Politics.

Sean Murray  10:48

I’d like to give our listeners an idea of what it’s like to sit in on one of these discussion groups and get a taste for the kind of dialogue and questioning that happens. In Aristotle’s great work, Nicomachean Ethics: Book I Chapter 7, he has a famous discussion about what it means to live a good life. Maybe you could take us through that.

Scott Hambrick  11:09

When you say, “I want to live a good life,” there’s a lot packed in there. What is life? What is good? Is that actually the purpose of a human being– to live a good life? There’s a lot assumed in there when you throw a question like that out. I think it’s important to dig in there, and figure out what you think all of those things are: life, good living, and higher purposes before you can even start to formulate a plan. Those early guys, particularly Plato, Aristotle, and then maybe Aquinas, asked all the questions properly, and they gave some darn good answers. You may not agree, but they set a really great example for answering those questions and how you might approach them.

Aristotle tackles, “If you’re going to live a ‘good life,’ what does that mean? Does that mean you just like to eat a lot of great food? To buy a bunch of stuff? That you have all the sex partners you want? What does it really mean? How do you do that? Is it about your sense of experience? Is it about ease? What’s it about?” And he says it’s about…we call it happiness but the Greeks called it eudaimonia. Do you hear these stories about how Eskimos have like 500 words for snow because there’s such a nuanced understanding of snow? They needed all that language resolution to actually talk about it. Those Greeks are like that about love and happiness.

That gets us all these arrows and a *inaudible*. There are all these different kinds of love and have different kinds of happiness that they talk about. We don’t really have enough words for it. They call it eudaimonia. And that eudaimonic happiness is a sort of deep fulfillment. It’s not really joyful. It’s not laughter because you submitted a good joke. It’s just this deep, abiding fulfillment that frankly, only humans can have. He outlines that and why that might be our highest purpose. And I think his main argument for why that would be our highest purpose is because you don’t want happiness for any other reason. Like you might want to eat a good meal. So you don’t starve, and so that you could continue life. Almost anything you do has another reason behind it.

Sean Murray  13:19

There are some things that we do just because it’s good in itself.

Scott Hambrick  13:26

It’s good in and of itself.

Sean Murray  13:28

Yeah, and that’s what Aristotle sort of got down to bedrock with.

Scott Hambrick  13:33

Right. Some people say it’s kind of a tautology. He’d say, no, it’s good because it’s good. I get it, but it’s bedrock. There are contradictions and things that are not provable, when you get to bedrock. Axioms. You just have to take them for granted. We make some good logical arguments for why happiness is the highest good, the best purpose, and the highest purpose of human life. But you have to believe that eudaimonia is the best state for the human. And one of the main proofs, like we just said, is that he says, “We all want it. We want happiness for happiness’s sake only. Not for anything else.”

And I think he has a liberal arts point directly to that. There’s absolutely no freaking reason to read Hamlet, except that it’s just good. If you’re going to build a doghouse, reading Hamlet’s not going to help you make a better dog house. It’s probably not going to make you a better dad; probably not going to help you at work. You probably won’t make any more money, but it’s good in and of itself. [Aristotle] says that it’s when we do those things that we’re at our most excellent. We display our excellence as humans. And I buy that.

Sean Murray  14:43

I think I do, too. I’d buy into that. It’s a good case for reading the good books right there. That it is not only to learn and have wisdom, but, in itself, it is good. It is a higher purpose. It’s a eudaimonic experience to read and contemplate. For that reason alone, it’s worth it.

Scott Hambrick  15:05

It’s distinctively human excellence. It’s something we can only do. You know, those Greeks are big on teleology, like purpose. You can take a rock, and you can hammer a nail in. You can beat a nail into a board, but hammers are really good at it. And you know hammerness from rockness. One of the ways you know that is because of what their final cause and efficient cause is and how good they fit the final cause. Hammers are good at hammering.

One of the excellences of humans is you delve into these liberal arts. Not only are we fit for it, but there’s not even a rock you can pound the nail with. There’s no other way to get Hamlet. There’s not a rabbit that can do it, nor a rock, star, breeze, nor anything else. It’s something that only we can do. Aristotle and even Aquinas say that because we know that it’s good, we’re the only ones to do it. We’re bound to do it. We must do it. And I love that whole calculus. I love that whole way of analyzing and thinking about it.

Sean Murray  16:10

I think Aristotle even makes that example when he talks about what is the chief good. You might say, “Wealth has some goodness qualities,”  but you always accumulate wealth for the purpose of something else: for shelter, for food, for happiness, possibly. And therefore, it’s not going to be the chief good. You can’t bank everything on wealth.

Scott Hambrick  16:36

He says there are preconditions for happiness. You have to have enough wealth. You’ve got to have enough esteem in the community. You can’t walk around ashamed all the time. And he says, if you don’t have friends, if you don’t have enough money or enough wealth, to free up time and to meet your material needs, happiness is going to evade you. But he doesn’t want any of those things in excess either. He’s all about his Aristotelian means. You just need enough, but he says there are preconditions. So you got to watch out for those things.

Sean Murray  17:05

Let’s continue our discussion of Book I, Chapter 7 of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Am I pronouncing that correctly?

Scott Hambrick  17:13

He had a son, Nicomachus, and he wrote this for his boy, so people say Nicomachean Ethics. Nicomachean Ethics, if you’ve not read an Aristotle, can be a heavy lift. But look, Book I, I recommend it. Look, it ain’t a book. It’s a chapter, but they call it, Book I, and then there are some subsections in there. I highly recommend this Book I. Aristotle’s so good. He takes the thoughts of these philosophers that came before him and restates them.

Daniel Dennett calls it “steelmanning.” There’s a strawman, but that’s a fallacy that we don’t care for. But he says, you know, when you’re in a debate with somebody, you want to be able to steelman their argument. You want to be able to state their case so well that your opponent says, “I wish I’d said it that way. Yeah, you’re right.” For about the first half of Book I, Aristotle does that for the people that came before him, particularly Plato.

And then, it’s in the last half of that Book I, where he starts to make his own case for what he thinks needs to go down; anything so that happiness is the highest purpose of man. And I agree. Again, the word happiness just isn’t enough in English. Then, he starts describing things that you might possibly do that might help bring you those things. You have to be virtuous. All your actions need to lead to happiness and not away from happiness. You need to cultivate relationships. Those relationships are going to be based on the appreciation of the other’s virtues.

Then he talks about how you figure out what ethical behavior is, where he describes his Aristotelian mean. He says it’s right in the middle. He’s very geometrical. He says, if there’s a machine gun and you just jump up and brush it, you’d be very, very brave. You’d probably be mowed down and killed instantly. But if you saw a machine gun, and you just crawled to the rear, that’s cowardly. And that’s not good. But right in the middle, there’s bravery that’s tempered by caution and fear, so that you don’t rush into the hail of bullets, but you’re able to get the job done and act in order to save your friends. That spot in the middle, that’s where you want to be. He says you can calculate where it needs to be, and that you get there by practice. The brave guy, he’s always scared. But he always does brave things. And by and by, everybody knows that he’s brave.

Sean Murray  19:32

The important thing about the Great Books is that they force you to think about these things. They encourage you to ask those questions. You made a great point earlier. They have some pretty good answers. You don’t have to necessarily buy into them, but you’re going to see and learn from Aquinas, Aristotle, and Plato, who threw out some pretty good arguments about how to think about, and how to approach, some of these really big questions. I don’t think we ask the questions enough in our society.

Scott Hambrick  19:59

Your mom squeezes you out. Four or five years later, they put you in a school that the government runs. I call it minimum security incarceration. They put you on release. You can go home at night but need to come back. You do that for 12 to 13 years, and then they put you in school. The whole time, it’s about getting a job; fighting to keep it; doing what you’re supposed to do; writing your name in the top right-hand corner; standing up, when they ring the bell, so they don’t ring the other bell; getting in line; doing whatever. And then get a job, fight to keep it, get a 30-year mortgage paid $20 extra every month. Pay it off three years early, and at 67 years old, you can get social security and stuff.

You got to have deep ditches and good guardrails around young people. Maybe that’s a good thing to do. But there’s a point where you have to say, “Wait, is this really my purpose in life? Is it really? Is it really to just amortize mortgages out? Is it really to go to work, beat the lever, crank the handle, and make the money come out?” We have to do it. I mean, Aristotle agrees you have to do it, too. We got to have some of this. We’ve got to have a bit of wealth to buy corn, but at some point, we owe it to ourselves to figure it out.

I worked very, very hard; started a couple of businesses. I’ve done pretty well. I’m 45 now, but when I was a younger guy working 65-85 hours a week, the older guys would say, “Look, man! I mean, your deathbed’s wishing you had worked more.” I thought all about this. These older men that cared about me, the uncles, the mentors, would say that. I don’t know anybody that wishes they worked more and loves it. Most of the guys I know wish they could get out. We need to just quit telling all these young people that work’s the only thing in life. We need to tell them what we need to do, and that the only thing that really matters is relationships. “Work on those. Work on those. Work on those. Have a career so you don’t starve to death, and you can have relationships, but work on those.” But we’re just not doing that. The whole calculus is jacked up and almost nobody is talking about how it might be different or how it might be wrong or what maybe we ought to tell young people.

Sean Murray  21:51

Yeah, I agree with you on the whole idea of valuing relationships. We just don’t value relationships enough. Daniel Gilbert, a Harvard professor, wrote a book on happiness. He has one of my all-time favorite quotes about happiness. He says, “We are happy when we have family. We are happy when we have friends and almost all the other things we think make us happy are actually just ways of getting more family and friends.” And I think Aristotle would agree. Relationships are important.

Scott Hambrick  22:23

Yeah, of course, it is. But you know, other things that we care about or taught to care about more are just so much easier to measure. “Oh, I got a raise!” Whatever. This is so much easier to measure, and you get that instant dopamine. At this point, most things have been reduced to some sort of economic calculus. “We can’t afford to have kids.” Okay, listen, what you’re implying there is that kids have a cash value.

So let’s go, and get the yellow pad out and the sharp pencil, and let’s just put a dollar figure on it. Let’s figure out how much one of them is worth, and let’s get down the kids, right? It’s not even an economic calculus whether or not to have children. I know you need to be able to have enough food. There’s some stuff going on there. I get it, but it’s not strictly that. I mean, I know so many people. They both work, and there’s money. And they’ve got vacations, and they do the things they want to do. And they’re making children an economic decision. But I would say that there is a kind of relationship.

We’re back to relationships. And he [Gilbert] says that friendship and relationships are important. There’s the kind of relationship that can only be had with children. There’re relationships that can only be had with spouses, parents, and siblings. They’re their own thing. And there’s a kind of relationship you can only have with your own child. If you don’t have one, you can’t have it. There’s a piece of that human experience that, if you don’t have a kid, will forever be lost to you. You will have not lived at least that chunk of that human experience. So what’s that worth? Calculate the present value of a child, and let me know.

Sean Murray  23:49

They can’t do it.

Scott Hambrick  23:51

Now you have to have some money, guys. I get it. But it’s not strictly that. There are people that have late-model cars and go on vacation twice a year, and they say they can’t afford a kid. Kids don’t eat much, you know?

Sean Murray  24:01

Yeah, and you don’t get that time back.

Sean Murray  24:04

No.

That’s the thing about the Great Books. As I said, they’re going to force you to grapple with some of these big questions. I have to say I’m intimidated by a lot of these books. I studied math in college. I hung out at the Philosophy department. I had an interest in that, but I didn’t think was very practical. So I went off and studied math, and got into technology. I got married; had kids. I’m growing a family. Very busy.

Scott Hambrick  24:31

Well, I bet that cost you?

Sean Murray  24:33

We did it without even thinking about it, which is great. I’m glad we didn’t overthink it. It was a wonderful decision, and it brought me much happiness. When you think about happiness, you think about family and friends. But at some point, I think I was reintroduced to Homer. Where it started was the Odyssey, then I went back and read the Iliad, and it just sort of got me on a little journey.

First of all, I was surprised at how accessible they were. I built it up in my mind that I can’t just go back and read this without taking a course and having some professor explain it to me. But I picked it up, and I read it. It had some notes. I read the introduction, which was the most confusing part of the whole book. I got going, but still, when I pick up even Aristotle or Plato, they are intimidating. So how do we get over that? And how does your organization, Online Great Books, help us to do that?

Scott Hambrick  25:30

Well, some of these books are intimidating, and some of them rightly so. But I think a lot of that’s due to our conditioning. We go to school, and in the 150 years or so, there’s become like an expert culture. Everything is so specialized that there are experts on everything. And that’s really pretty new. These books used to be for everybody. Of course, there are probably haters out there, saying, “Not everybody was literate.” I get it. But there wasn’t an expert class.

Thomas Jefferson, raised 12-14 years old, was reading Homer, and he’s just a planter son. The Last of the Mohicans was the second-best-selling book in the United States for about 50 years, behind the Bible. That is not an easy book. There were people that would look at the back end of a mule all day, and when the workday was over would read Fenimore Cooper, which is a pretty heavy lift.

So school has kind of taught us that we need an intermediary, that we need somebody to mediate the experience for us and interpret it for us. That’s a new phenomenon. You don’t need it. The books will meet you where you are. I tell people that a kid can read the Iliad. A young 15-year-old can read the Iliad. It’s a really great action story. But an Iraq war veteran is going to get something entirely different from that, or a lady that works as a nurse in the ER, or an older person’s going to read Priam lose his son and feel the battle, and see something about mortality and austerity that the kid wouldn’t see.

The books meet you where you are. I would say, when you pick them up, know that you were probably taught to read by skimming and scanning; know that most of the reading you’ve ever done was probably measured against a deadline. You had a book report due on Friday. You had this thing at work. You had to do whatever. You were strip-mining those things as fast as you can. That’s the way you’ve been doing it, and that’s okay. But this is different. It’s okay to go slow. It’s okay to not understand at all.

My podcast partner on the Online Great Books podcast, Karl Shudt, says that Aristotle’s Metaphysics has more truth per page on it than any other book in history. You can’t read that fast, man. Metaphysics, I’ve been reading it again. It’s about seven pages an hour for me. It’s brutal, so be patient with yourself. Be kind to yourself. If you don’t get it, it’s okay.

Aquinas talks about Aristotle. He calls him, The Philosopher, and then he talks about The Teacher, which I think was evidence that said that he had to read Metaphysics 51 times before he understood it. So listen, it’s okay. Just go in there and get it. Just go do it. And then by and by, you habituate yourself to that virtue, and you become the kind of person that does this. I have found, like I said, that people are really being taught to skim and scan, and we don’t do a good job of close reading.

Scott Hambrick  28:06

At Online Great Books, the first book we read is Mortimer J. Adler’s book, How to Read a Book, and get that thing. It’s still in print. It’s been in print continuously for 75 years now. Go read that thing. And then, we jump into the Iliad. Once we ship a hard copy book of the Iliad to all of our new members, seven days after they get the book, we do some close-reading tutorials. So we get our own little Zoom classroom, and typically our man, Mark Swick, who works with us at Online Great Books, shows people. He just demonstrates how he does close-reading. He cracks open the Iliad. He reads it to them, and he shares his inner monologue as he reads it, so they know how he’s thinking, how he approaches it, and what the pace is like. He shows them the notes he makes, and we just model it for them.

We found that how to read a book and modeling the close readings has been an enormous help. Everybody has the middle horsepower to do it. You just have to get habituated to it. Most of us were excited about something. Maybe you read Julius Caesar in the 10th grade, and you wrote a little report over it, and you were pretty pleased with it. You’re excited about it. You turn it in, and that cow gave you a C. How do you give somebody a C about their paper about Julius Caesar? There’s no just way to do that. Oh, you misspelled this. Listen, you snuffed out the kid’s enthusiasm for it is what you did. And there’s nobody grading this work now, right? Your opinion about it matters, and you’re reading it for your own purposes. You don’t care about what Miss Smith is going to do, and you’re not turning in a paper. you have to uncondition yourself in that way.

Sean Murray  29:40

That’s a really good point. We all experienced that somewhere along the way, not just the grading, but reading under deadline, reading the work that you don’t necessarily want to read at that moment. I see my kids grappling with that now. My son is 15 years old, and my daughter’s 13 years old. They are starting to tackle some bigger works. And Shakespeare and others, they have to do it quickly. It’s not their first choice. If I had to pick up a Shakespeare play, it wouldn’t be the Tempest, which is what they asked my son to read. I would probably start them off with something else, like Romeo and Juliet. But that’s where we come up from, and you make a really good point that we’re now, “Hey. This is your life, you get a chance to tackle these Great Books.” You can start where you want. You can read what you’re interested in. You can go at your own pace, and your opinion and perspective matters. No one’s going to tell you that it’s wrong.

Scott Hambrick  30:31

Yeah, are your kids reading Shakespeare? Or is it a translation?

Sean Murray  30:36

They’re reading it in Shakespeare, but they’re very much quickly going to the SparkNotes version, which has a pretty good translation. It’s funny to think of Shakespeare translated. We never had that. I had to read Shakespeare in Shakespeare. I feel like Shakespeare, we’re sort of losing him. We’re losing the original language because it’s getting less and less accessible. And I can see my kids are gravitating more towards these really fantastic translations that let you lose a little bit.

Scott Hambrick  31:06

The people that are alive today are the last people that will be able to read him without a translation of Shakespeare.

Sean Murray  31:11

You get a lot of value out of reading Shakespeare. I have Shakespeare. His is one of the books on my bookshelf next to my bed, the complete works. It’s kind of hard to read because it’s a really small print, but I like it because I can go to any play I want.

Scott Hambrick  31:25

It’s huge. As you said earlier, the thing you had the most trouble with was the introduction. And we at Online Great Books, and Adler, say, “Do not read secondary materials until you’ve encountered the book for yourself.” For the secondary materials, somebody is going to interpret this for you and poison the well. You’re reading it for your own purposes. Get the secondary source later.

Once you’ve been through the Iliad for a couple of months or even twice, maybe then you can go look up what some other wingnut has to say about it, but you’re sufficient for the purpose. We tell our people, “Don’t read the introduction. Don’t go to SparkNotes. Don’t go to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Don’t do that. Look up matters of fact. When was Socrates born? Where the heck is Troy?” That kind of thing. But we’re growing people. We don’t allow people to mediate our experiences like that. Can you imagine going to a movie, but you’re not going to go to the movie until, you know, somebody tells you what the movie is about?

Sean Murray  32:20

Yeah, that’s a really good point. You don’t read the critique, the three-page essay about the movie before you see the movie. You go to the movie and form your own opinion. And everyone thinks that’s normal.

Scott Hambrick  32:30

To be fair, we listen to reviews. The movie stinks. Okay? But not tell you what the themes in Scorsese’s Casino are before you go in, and about the pink tie de Niro wears in the third scene. No, we don’t do that. We’re sufficient to the task. Why people do that, probably, is because they don’t have any formal training in movies, so they just pop in there with their own intellect and their own eyes and take them on. We can do that with the books as well. These schools have, frankly, taken that premise, but you can get it back.

Sean Murray  33:00

I want to go back to another comment you made about having the time to read. You kind of said, what else are you going to do? Watch the NFL game or whatnot? I find these phones that we have are so addicting. And at night, it’s very easy to just pull up the Wall Street Journal; browse some articles; look at Twitter. Whatever enjoyment you get out of your phone, and it’s very fleeting. It’s like eating junk food. But if I take the time, I put it down, and I pick up an Aristotle or Plato or one of these great books, it’s nutrients for my body, for my brain. It’s hard to do, though. You have to habituate.

I think we all do have the time. I think time is one of the excuses that comes up again and again. And I think we’ve got to address that one straight up and really ask ourselves, “Well, what are you going to do with the time you have?”

Scott Hambrick  33:54

We have to think about what we’re doing with ourselves. We’re going to need to not get in a script or routine, where we can’t have a moment, take our phone out, and open it up. Do you remember? I’m sure you do. We used to go to the bathroom, and we’d read the shampoo bottle. Why do you not have a book there? Why do you look at your stupid phone? I just recently bought a Light Phone 2. It’s a little bitty phone. It’s about the size of a stack of like eight credit cards. And it has an e-ink screen like your Amazon Kindle does. I can text, and I can make phone calls. And that’s it. It’s fantastic. I’ve been an iPhone guy. I got the first one, the first iPhone. I’ve had them ever since, but no more.

Number one, I can’t give those guys $1,000 every two or three years again. Not going to do it. But then, the thing is the phone is carefully engineered to take my time. The way the apps refresh; the colors; everything is carefully tested to maximize your time on the device, your time in the app. They’ve got enormous budgets dedicated to taking my time from me. I’m basically a product that they’re providing to their app developers and the people that use the platform. And I’ve had it. I freaking had it. I saw and bought the Light Phone 2. It’s a fraction of the cost. The form factor’s lovely. It’s just fantastic, and it’s freeing up a couple of hours a day, but I’ve got that screen time thing on your phone.

Sean Murray  35:24

I’ve been depressed sometimes looking at that, thinking there go three hours I’m not getting back from my life.

Scott Hambrick  35:30

People might say, “Well, I need it for work.” Listen, I run an online business and all that. I get it. But I’m way better off to batch all of that stuff I do on my phone in little dribs and drabs throughout the day, when I’m sitting at a full-size desktop computer with a keyboard and two monitors. I can answer an email here and answer an email there, when I screw around with my phone. But if I actually sit down to the computer, I can bang it out in half the time, and I’ve just got so much more time available as a result. Guys, it’s a big deal. Big win. It’s just like unloading a bunch of work.

Sean Murray  36:02

How long have you had this phone?

Scott Hambrick  36:04

I got it right around Christmas time, so it’s at the end of February right now.

Sean Murray  36:08

And how much has it impacted your life?

Scott Hambrick  36:11

Oh, tons. You go to a restaurant, you sit down with your people, and there’s no phone to grab. I lose the phone because I don’t care anymore. These other ones we make sure we hate it if we don’t have pants that we can put the phone in. It influences everything. Now, I lose my phone, which is great, because I don’t really care. At a restaurant, I don’t look at the phone. It doesn’t matter, but they can reach me if they need to. And people can text me if they need to. It will do group text. That was something I really wanted. I want to be able to text my kids and my wife on one thread, and it’ll do that. It’s been fantastic.

Sean Murray  36:42

Reminds me of that story in the Odyssey. To bring it back to the great books, when Odysseus had his sailors lash him, tie him to the mast when he was going back to the Sirens because he knew if he heard the sirens, they were going to lure him away, right? He had his crew put wax in all the crew’s ears. His ears remain unwaxed, so he could hear the sirens, but he knew he had to be constrained. Otherwise, he was going to be lured away. So you’ve essentially lashed yourself to the mast, Scott.

Scott Hambrick  37:11

Yeah, I don’t have the self-discipline to not use that phone.

Sean Murray  37:16

Who does?

Scott Hambrick  37:17

People probably think they do, but I listen to a lot of podcasts, which is great. I mean, people are listening to us. Thank you for listening. But, I mean, how much time was I walking around with earbuds in, when I should have been listening to somebody around me, too? I was really worried that I would miss having my podcatcher here. But no, I listened to fewer podcasts and that’s okay. I get to read more. Clearly, I like podcasts. I mean, here we are weekly. I’m on three shows every week that I host. I don’t know how many hours a week of podcast material I was taking in. 10-15 hours a week, probably? Too much. So it’s been a delight. I’ve filled it up with other things, play a little more cards than I did, and read a little more than I did. It’s been great.

Sean Murray  37:57

And probably just thinking and reflecting. I had Michael Erwin on recently. He wrote a book on solitude, and his definition of solitude is not being by yourself. It’s being one with your own thoughts. So you could be, say, all alone on the top of Mount Rainier, but if you’re listening to a podcast, he wouldn’t consider that solitude. He would say solitude is being alone with your own thoughts, allowing your brain to think through and reflect. He thinks it’s something that we were neglecting. And I believe him. And the phone’s part of the problem.

So that’s a great example of a solution that gets you more time in your day to tackle some of these great books because, just a few pages a night, you can work through some of this stuff, when you have 365 nights out of the year, right? I mean, 10 pages and nights, 3,000 pages, 20 pages, we double that we’re over seven. 7,000 pages of the great books is going to get you a few of them, right?

Scott Hambrick  38:50

That’s probably more than most people with a Liberal Arts Master’s would read. At Online Great Books, we set these reading goals for our people, and then they’re all predicated on reading 30 minutes a day, six days a week. And if it’s Aristotle’s Metaphysics, boy, that ain’t very much. But there are other things that are lighter like the Odyssey. People just contend to just tear through that, devour it, and they might read more. But that’s it. That’s their budget. They find 30 minutes a day, somehow, some way. And I don’t think that’s a big ask. So just see if you can clear the decks and find 30 minutes somehow, somewhere, and work these things in so that we can maybe pursue this deep-seated contentment.

Sean Murray  39:28

Well, how can people find out more about Online Great Books?

Scott Hambrick  39:32

You can listen to the Online Great Books podcasts. We put out every Thursday, where my partner, Karl Schudt and I, ask you something that we think is important. Sometimes it’s one of these Great Books and sometimes it’s Dune. We’re going to do Frank Herbert’s Dune in two pieces here in a couple of weeks. We just recently did one on the Magna Carta, Articles of Confederation, Tom Wolfe, and all kinds of interesting things. You can go check that, or you can go to onlinegreatbooks.com. See what we’ve got going on there, and you can join the VIP waiting list. And when we open enrollment again, we’ll send you a coupon code, and it’ll be 25% off and get you in the door. We don’t have enrollment open every day. We do it about every eight weeks.

Sean Murray  40:09

So every eight weeks, you kind of batch up people, who are on the VIP waiting list, and you batch them into a new group. Is that right? So you can be anywhere in the United States or anywhere in the world and join one of these groups?

Scott Hambrick  40:22

Yeah, the Western Hemisphere’s best. Most of our seminars are either 2 p.m. or 7 p.m. Central Time. So our European friends, get into those 2 p.m. sessions pretty well, but we call them “flights.” On April 13, we’re going to open up Flight 12. We’ll sign up several hundred people, and we’ll put them in similar groups of 15 to 20 each, and that’ll be their seminar forever. They’ll read these books and talk about these books with those people and our seminar hosts for as long as they’re with us. And we have people that have been with us since day one.

I’m a strength coach. I use the starting strength method, and I tell my strength people that six weeks later, everybody you know is going to know that you strength trained. You’re going to look different. You’re going to be stronger than you’ve ever been. And this [enrolling in a Great Books groups] takes a little longer. It takes four or five, six months. But everybody will know that you’ve been changed if you’ve been doing this for four to six months.

Sean Murray  41:13

Well, Scott, this has been a wonderful conversation! I really appreciate you coming on The Good Life.

Scott Hambrick  41:19

Thanks for having me on here, man. I love chatting about it with people.

Outro  41:22

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