New Podcast Release: Dui Toledo
The latest episode of "Lives Well Lived," the podcast I co-host with Kasia de Lazari-Radek, is now available.
In this episode, Kasia and I had the pleasure of speaking with Dui Toledo, a remarkable individual with a compelling life story. Here are some highlights from our conversation, lightly edited for clarity. You can listen to the full episode now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your preferred platform.
On Career Beginnings:
Kasia de Lazari-Radek: “How was the school for you in São Paulo?”
Dui Toledo: “It was very bad. It was the type of school where there would be fights all the time, sometimes with knives. And these are like kids, seven to fifteen years old... I had several times where I had to run from school to home. Teachers would be threatened sometimes... My family was super poor... Later on, I went to another school that was a little better... When I was 10, my family started to get some money, and I got transferred to another school.”
On Managing Time and Priorities:
Dui Toledo: For me, tracking time is a really crucial part of managing your time properly and living a deliberate life. So that’s how I spend my life and how I ensure that I’m actually spending it in this way."
Peter Singer: “So how do you divide your free hours when you are not in bed – 105 hours a week, you calculate?”
Dui Toledo: “I exercise for more than five hours... I do strength training and I do Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, which I really love. I also spend time writing, at least five hours a week, usually a little bit more... Then I have my time allocated to work... There is reading... Anywhere between two hours and three hours a day... By the end of the week, I’m anywhere between twelve to fifteen hours of reading books... I also practice the guitar... I also study philosophy with Kasia, which is one of the highlights of my every other week as well.”
On Reading and Continuous Learning:
Kasia de Lazari-Radek: “So how do you choose the books that you read and how do you choose authors?”
Dui Toledo: “One thing that changes when you read a lot is that it doesn't matter as much... If you’re reading like three books a week and four books a week, like ten books a month, it doesn’t make as big a difference that some of the books you read in a year have not been great. I don’t have this thing like some people, who are “completionists”... Sometimes I’ll skim the book... I just put it aside... I have a huge backlog... It’s not a problem... The cost of a book is not really what you pay for the book itself... The really important asset you have for spending in books is time...”
Peter Singer: So, so let me perhaps, wind up in, in this way, if I can summarize what you've been saying, about a life well lived, it has an Aristotelian flavor to it, I would say in that, firstly, it's a life in which you have, strength and health. It's a life in which you have skills, And competence, you develop those, so that's like personal virtues that you develop, personal qualities. you do that in the context of, close and loving relationships with others. And you use the strengths and the skills and the competence and the life that you have living with others to make a positive contribution to other people or more broadly, other sentient beings. very much is that a reasonable summary of how you would see a life well lived?
Dui Toledo: That's a good summary. Yes, at least how I'm thinking about it right now. Again, it develops. But also it is a very virtue ethics perspective of things, but it doesn't mean that I'm like a virtue ethicist and not a consequentialist, but I think there is also something there where, and you know this too with like rule consequentialism, where it can be a lot easier sometimes for you to guide your day to day actions.
By trying to find what type of virtues or characteristics or however you want to describe them will lead to the best consequence than it can be by trying to make all of those calculations a priori. So I would also kind of caveat what I'm saying with, I think there's a lot of that too, where if you're thinking about the ultimate goal of ensuring, the best kind of, the availability of sentience for all humans.
This is more of a set of characteristics that I believe can better prepare us for that world more so than the thing in of itself. So it's like how you apply the overall goal of humanity to how you actually go about living your day to day.