Question from Natalia. You've mentioned that one way to answer the question, what makes a good life good is to turn to biographies of people whose life you admire. Who do you personally admire? - Well, I have a lot of answers to that question, but why don't I just give you one example of someone I admire and that admiration has been developed and nuanced through the reading of biographies.

And one of my classic examples there is Abraham Lincoln, real influence on me. I'm actually reading John Meacham's new biography of Lincoln and there was light. So I'm about halfway through that. I'm enjoying that one. I've read a lot of Lincoln books, but that one is ranking pretty high up so far.

So I like what he's doing there. All right, so here's the two things I learned about Lincoln through going deep through biographical material that makes him someone I admire. One is the fact that Lincoln was a moral being. I wanna be really clear about what I mean by that.

I don't mean that in the sense that he was a superlative example of morality that even by 21st century standards, we look back at everything he did or think and said, wow, he had found some sort of crystalline, pure morality. He had broken free from any sort of parochial or cultural influences and just saw the abstract platonic light of the perfect moral sentiments.

It's not that his morality was at a very high polished plane, but that he saw his morality as an important part of his life. And he worked on it explicitly throughout his life. He is a moral being. What you get out of reading his biographies is the degree to which he thought that maintaining and evolving his sense of principles and living his life by them was a key project of a life well lived.

A good book that really looks at this is William Lee Miller's "Lincoln's Virtues." Miller, it's a moral biography or an ethical biography, I think he calls it, of Lincoln. And he goes through just the development of how Lincoln repeatedly would interrogate his own underlying principles and evolve them and grow them and nuance them and then let that then speak back to what he was doing in his life and in his political career.

That's what I think was important. He thought that was key. I am more impressed by someone who throughout their life really cares about, struggles with, and tries to evolve and live by a evolving empathetic moral code than I am by someone who maybe has, in isolation, the better moral beliefs but came by it easy.

That they were born at a time where it was just really obvious. And in fact, if you had a different belief, someone would yell at you anyways. There's no strain there. It's the life interrogated. That's really rare. And he really did that. All right, number two, the other thing I've learned about Lincoln, why I admire him, is the fact that he has a purposive intelligence.

P-U-R-P-O-S-I-V-E. I think it was actually William Lee Miller who used that term in talking about Lincoln. What that means by purposive intelligence was he had a brain that worked and he put this brain to work to try to impact the world in positive ways. He saw his brain as an asset and systematically developed this asset to try to get a return out of it, and a particular return in terms of making a positive impact on the world.

It really is an amazing story how this kid, growing up in the depths of early 19th century American poverty, just on the strength of his brain alone, emerged out of this context, backwater Kentucky, barely literate father, dead mother, single father, barely literate, who had him just doing the harshest of manual labors, suspicious of book learning, renting him out to other people for just labor for these other people, you don't get to keep the money.

Lincoln hated that. He emerged from that just off of the strength of his brain, which he developed, and he knew there was something there, and he developed that and applied it. All of his impact comes from the very careful cultivation of this intelligence. You look at his debates with Stephen Douglas.

It's a masterclass in just working through clarity and thinking. Look at his Cooper Union address as he's building up to his potential nomination for the president in 1860. You see here, again, a masterclass in weeks, if not months, of research into the history of the country, building step by step these incredibly logical arguments.

You have to understand how unique this was in its time. The great rhetoricians of the 19th century were pompous, and it was emotional. It was a lot of classical allusions, a lot of Cicero being quoted, and a lot of personal, vindictive, or emotional appeals. It was a lot of trying to get people fired up by appealing and inflaming their passions, and there's a lot of ad hominem going on, and then trying to establish your intelligence.

You look at all these different books I can cite. Lincoln came in and said, "I'm gonna be logical "and incredibly plain spoken. "I'm gonna step by step, like the lawyer he was, "bring you through why the Nebraska Act "is actually against the founder's intentions, "why this would be devastating to the country." Taking down his anti-slavery arguments were not like you would get more from maybe the William Lloyd Garrison, not barn burners, but we're gonna go A to B to C to E, and when we get to F, it's clear that this makes no sense.

That was an incredibly effective rhetorical strategy. It's all based off of purposive intelligence, and it made a massive difference. It was why he got nominated for the Republican ticket, was because he had built this reputation of, he's not out there inflaming people, he's not out there in the 1860 equivalent of Twitter trying to score points for his team.

It's this incredible reasonableness and logic, and there's a moderatism that actually, that's what worked, that's what worked. That's what led to the 13th Amendment. So to me, that was a big inspiration. The way that he cultivated an intelligence to effect change, very systematic. A good book for that, so I'm kind of giving book recommendations around the way, John Stauffer from Harvard, his book "Giants".

What it does, and it's interesting, is he takes Frederick Douglass and Lincoln. Here's two people who are coming out of impossible situations. Douglass' situation, of course, even more impossible, being an Eastern Shore slave on the Eastern Shore. Lincoln, of course, was not a slave, but they were both coming out of these impossible circumstances, and they both, this is what Stauffer really characterizes, is through the development of their mind, how they were able to become, in the end, giants, and their lives became very intertwined.

So that's sort of, giants sort of gets into the intertwining of the lives of Frederick Douglass and Lincoln. So they kind of have these parallel emergences, all about taking these minds, cultivating them, and then putting them systematically towards what they thought was important uses, and then their lives end up becoming quite intertwined.

They were, at some point, at some point, they were almost adversarial. So you get Douglass' famous speech on what the Fourth of July means to a former slave, but they come later in life, that Douglass is an incredible supporter, actually, of Lincoln's very systematic approach, and his very functionalist approach, and let's try to actually make change happen, as opposed to making the people on our side as happy as possible.

And there's a whole interesting story there. One more book recommendation, then, if you like that particular line of thinking, H. W. Brown's "Zealot," which contrasts John Brown and Lincoln, and their approach to antislavery movements. Brown's was very zealous and very pure, and we get a lot of likes on the Twitter, but he ended up not only hung, but actually perhaps even causing issues with the movement.

Lincoln would not be popular on Twitter, but did get the 13th Amendment. So anyways, that's an example, Natalia. Lincoln is someone who I grew to admire through reading as much as possible on him, and picking out these very specific things, which I think have a general application, are generally relevant to a lot of us.

Justin, I actually met someone at the live event. - Mike. - Mike. Mike gave me a recommendation. I gotta read this book. It's about, this sounds so me, it's Lincoln, Civil War, and the role of technology in the Civil War, and how the telegraph and the railroads, and it was actually these really advanced technological systems were so intertwined with Lincoln's managing of the war.

I mean, that's kinda hitting all my buttons probably. - How many Lincoln books do you think you've consumed? Like 30? - Probably not 30. A dozen, I would say. - Have you always been a fan? - I came to him through books. I came to him through, it was my mother-in-law bought me Lincoln's Virtues, and then Miller wrote another book about Lincoln's time in the White House.

I read those. This would have been grad school. And that kinda set me down. Then John Stoffer we knew. So John Stoffer, when I was at MIT, my wife worked at a nonprofit in Watertown with John's wife, and they did, it was an education nonprofit, history education nonprofits. Like John, he was always involved and would do events.

So I remember John Stoffer and Skip Gates from Harvard were always sort of around. And so I remember his book signing party for that book. So we knew John, just knew him from our time in Cambridge, babysat his kids before. So then that book also was exposed to around that same time.

It's a great book. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)