Self -discipline a lot of people undervalue self -discipline you know, you're so Straight and always doing what you want to do.
But when you think about it in a different sense self -discipline means what it means you are controlling the one life that you have to live and then the follow -up question is so if you're not controlling that life who or what is and Why would you allow something else to control the one life you have to
live? What a waste Hello and welcome to the knowledge project podcast.
I'm your host Shane Parrish This podcast sharpens your mind by helping you master the best what other people have already figured out if you're listening to this You're not currently a supporting member if you'd like special member only episodes access before anyone else Transcripts and other member
only content you could join at FS blog slash podcast check out the show notes for an easy -to -click link William Irvine is here today.
He's the author of seven books including a guide to the good life When he's not writing he's a professor of philosophy at Wright State University today.
We're gonna talk about stoicism What is it?
How did it begin? Who are the stoics?
What's their take on failure?
What's their advice on decision making and importantly how we can train ourselves to become more stoic It's time to listen and learn How did you come to write about stoicism in the good life Long story, but here's a short version of it apparently when I turned 50 I was having a mild grade midlife crisis and I
decided I was going to become a Zen Buddhist So, I mean I got the stoicism through Zen Buddhism, which sounds like paradox, but I Started reading about Zen Buddhism and it dawned on me that I could actually not only Satisfy my curiosity and deal with this midlife crisis, but at the same time I could get
a Publication out of it, you know on it being a college professor You always try to get two for the price of one.
So if I could get a publication, that would be great So I decided to extend this into the book that ultimately became the book on desire why we want what we want but to be complete I Needed to show what the alternatives were to Zen Buddhism.
So Zen Buddhism and one way you can construe it.
It's a Philosophy of life what is the grand goal in living and how best to attain that goal and so I thought well What are some other?
Viewpoints on that?
Well Stoics offered a one and I started looking into them.
I had actually encountered the Stoics But doing logic back in college not not in the philosophy classes I took back then this would be in the 1970s because my professor said no It's not the proper business of a philosopher to concern himself with how to live a good life It's about all these timeless
Issues that we've been talking about for two thousand years and you know Well, we're so close to the final breakthrough when we finally figure this out So that's not what the Stoics were about.
But if you want you can study their logic and they were in first century AD they were the prime Logicians of their time and they were very good at propositional logic, which is what makes modern computers in your cell phone Work so it dawned on me once I found out more about stoicism that I actually
First surprised was they are headed at approximately the same grand goal in living and that is a life that's full of to the extent possible of positive emotions like delight and even joy and relatively without negative emotions like anger and anxiety and regret But what where they differed is they had
two radically different strategies for pursuing that goal So if you want to become a Zen Buddhist, you spend a lot of time meditating as a result of that You can you can reduce the number of negative emotions you experience But it's a long -term project because when is that going to happen?
Well, maybe tomorrow or maybe in 30 years, you know could go either way the Stoics Said well, we've got some basic psychological strategies You can put to your work in your life and these aren't obscure things we can explain them to you in a matter of minutes You can test drive them with no one being
any the wiser and if they make a difference great They can transform your life and if they don't make a difference.
Well, then go back to Zen Buddhism.
It's a strange were you know research project I went in thinking I was gonna come out as in Buddhist and came out a stoic instead then thinking this is wonderful stuff I've got to share this with the world.
I decided to write a book guide to the good life Which I imagined would sell maybe 12 copies total, you know with six being purchased by friends Who might or might not actually read it but it turned out that we're in the midst of a stoic Renaissance and I caught it in the early stages So the world has has changed
on that and and I think that's a change for the better.
I Have so many questions to follow up on but I think before we dive into some of the nuances and details Here, it's probably wise to start with what is stoicism?
stoicism is Philosophy ancient philosophers first stoic was a guy named Zeno of Citium who lived in 300 BC He wanted to become a philosopher and back then there was no such thing as academic philosophy so what you would do is you would create a philosophical school and then you would have students in that school
and Presumably, you know, it was like a school of martial arts, you know You attracted students and and they were paying students and that's how you made your living he also did what modern martial arts schools do and that is you can have a pure style of Martial arts but you can mix together different
schools and come up with your own version So Zeno of Citium did basically that he tried a few schools on his own and then he thought you know I think I can get this interesting hybrid It's got some logic in it got some advice for living in it this whole notion of being able to communicate Well got some
science in it this whole batch and and I can have my own school, so he started a school this was in Greece and Unfortunately, most of the things he wrote and his subsequent Greek stoics wrote have been lost But the Romans took it on and put their own spin on it So the people you normally think of as
stoics are Roman stoics most famously top for Seneca who's currently my favorite but ask me next week and I might have a different favorite Seneca Marcus Aurelius Epictetus and Musonius Rufus and the interesting thing is if you say well, what is the stoic say?
Well, I've just named four of them and they actually can have interestingly different spins on the questions you ask So it's a diverse kind of philosophy with common themes running through it Where do those four tend to diverge?
The greatest divergence is between Musonius Rufus and either Seneca or Marcus Aurelius.
So Marcus Aurelius would have been He was the Emperor he would have been that vastly wealthy vastly powerful Seneca Was counselor to an emperor, but he was also the greatest playwright of his time He was also the first century AD equivalent of a billionaire And he was a stoic at the other end of the spectrum.
We find Musonius Rufus who basically said you know what if you can give me a case to live in that'll work that'll do it for me, so he was a minimalist kind of stoic and you can have the whole gap in between I guess one thing about the stoics is And stoic will tell you You know, what do you need to drink
a stoic will say well water is fine It satisfies the need but if you handed a stoic a glass of really fine wine, he would probably say oh, sure I'll drink that and then if you said okay, no more wine He said okay jab some water because I'm thirsty right now So it's that notion that you enjoy what life has to
offer But without becoming addicted to it without clinging to what life has to offer You're always prepared for things to take a turn for the worse So, you know the the people the the preppers, you know, these are the people who who stockpile food and everything else in case Things take a turn for the worse.
They always have their day You know like at the start of Covid where everybody else was scrambling for toilet paper and they said here's my supply of four Years of toilet paper and they look really good and the rest of the time we all we all just say oh these people They're so foolish but the stoics
can be regarded as emotional preppers So what were they doing?
They were preparing for things to become dramatically worse They were preparing to lose the things they value in life and that can sound like a really negative approach to things Except that they had the insight that if you do that Then you'll be profoundly grateful for whatever it is You do have in life
because otherwise you're just gonna take everything in your life for granted But if you appreciate what you have you can savor it You can embrace it and that raises the possibility of you experiencing joy in your life these people sound almost superhuman right like the ability to just Go with the flow
always and always be prepared and always be ready and no matter what happens You just have this sort of we would call it a stoic sort of way about you for many of us you have more Difficulty dealing with that.
It sounds like oh, I could never do that Did they always practice what they preached?
Is this like a binary thing or is it a gradient to begin with?
You know, we what we normally call stoics.
These are people who don't experience Emotions and when life does something brutal to them They just suck it up and stand there and and take it I call those the lowercase s stoics That's the common conception of the stoics themselves were remarkably well adjusted people They were known to those who who they
lived with as cheerful individuals because they weren't anti emotion What they were out to do is minimize negative emotions and they weren't out to stifle negative emotions They were out to prevent them from happening in the first place and to nip them in the bud When they did start to arise Positive
emotions they were connoisseurs of positive emotions And you know some of the greatest emotions you you can have That can be everyday experiences But you kind of got to open your mind to them one is feelings of delight You walk outside There's the sky.
It's blue and it's a beautiful shade of blue that will change From hour to hour within a day and will change from day to day and it didn't have to be that way You can either just say yeah, it's a sky or you can say no look see what there is.
It's a sky Same thing with feelings of awe so you can be experienced awe Usually requires a little bit of effort on your part You know I've described this in one place where I can be walking along and pick up a rock in fact right here where I live Found a rock and I was freaking out because the rock
was actually a fossil that was 400 million years old because the place where I now have my home used to be under an ancient sea That was the source of this fossil so you know the people who are watching me freak out were thinking well He's got a rock.
Well. You know it can be a rock, but it can be Impressively greater just a wonderful thing compared to that and also the things that you are part of your everyday life You know if you look at your life from the point of view of your ancestors.
You're living in heaven You're living in a dream world.
Well. What do I mean by that?
Do you have running water?
Do you have a toilet you have toilet paper?
You know from their point of view you've got in your pocket a little device That you can order pizza in Hong Kong if you wanted to and and what do we do?
Oh, you know what I don't have the latest model of that phone man If only I had the latest model I would be a happy person, but I don't and pity me everybody Look at what I lack one of the Stoke insights is that much of our unhappiness is self -inflicted It's a question of your state of mind It's a question of you
framing the things that happen to you in a way that makes them not just more Tolerable, but where you can actually extract delight from them Let's take a little sidetrack here on that sort of hedonic treadmill that you brought up.
What why is it that we think?
That something is gonna make us happy and then when we get it we just immediately almost take it for granted We're on to the next thing.
We're always chasing something else.
We're wired to be that way.
So by wired. I don't mean wires I mean neurons, but we evolved on the savannahs of Africa, you know 200 ,000 to 70 ,000 years ago rough rough numbers and the ancestors were alive back then who were easily satisfied dropped out of the gene pool Imagine that you had an ancestor and While everybody else
was walking around worried about lions and worried about where the next meal was coming from He was there on the savannahs of Africa looking at the blue sky thinking isn't it all just grand?
I'm gonna stay in the moment.
Well, he stayed in the moment for a moment and then a lion ate him I don't know if that's how he he perished and when meal time came He didn't have food prepared He didn't have food of some sorts of food So people who were easily satisfied dropped out of the gene pool Now the people who were constantly
thinking not about the the present The people who weren't in the moment But the people who were constantly thinking about the past about things that had happened so they could learn from them and the future So that they could control that future in a way that would benefit them those people who were not Satisfied
who always wanted more were much more likely to survive and reproduce and therefore much more likely To be somewhere in your family tree so to be dissatisfied was Had survival advantage, but we live in a dramatically different world than those ancestors did and We have food food is not the problem.
The problem is overeating We have the opposite problem Material possessions think of it their possessions were limited to what they could carry And they didn't even have like big cooler chests, you know and and and backpacks and everything else I don't think they did that they could carry in so it's
basically what you could carry kind of on your person and in your Hands and that was the limit and we have now just you know places where you can stuff them With material things, but we're wired once we get something we we just raise our standard we say, okay Okay I've got all that and that's nice But
you know if I only had and then you fill in the blank however you want then at last I would live happily ever after so we're like we're like thirsty people chasing mirages in a desert we work so hard to get to that seeming pond off in the distance only to realize it's a mirage and Then we go to the next
seeming pond off in the distance.
Why do you think there's a stoic Renaissance now?
I don't know and like I said, so this would be in the 1970s I was exposed I was a philosophy major, but the only place I encountered stoicism was in a logic class Philosophers lost interest.
I mean there were classical philosophers who didn't but most of philosophers would have said that's just not an appropriate thing for us to be thinking about there are more important things to be thinking about and so it's a curious thing but it had survived you can find examples of philosophers starting
in 300 BC all the way up to What the beginning of the 19th century and then suddenly they they drop off So when I published a guide to the good life, I had very very low expectations Because and these were reality -based expectations I I looked on Amazon and I could find a handful I could find books
written by the ancient Stoics translations of those books I could find scholarly books written about the ancient Stoics But there were only a handful of books that were written about stoicism for general audiences And I think it's because people just didn't know these the Stoics were out there Most
college professors wouldn't stoop to writing a book that would reach a general audience So there were a handful of books when I published it.
It got off to a very slow start but started picking up speed and Last year I gave a talk at the stoic on convention.
There are now enough of us that we can have global Conventions and I did some research and at present there are books on stoicism Written for general audiences coming out at the rate of more than one per day So it's just this incredible transformation I can give you the reason why Stoicism is popular
and that is because it's very hackable and I hate the word hackable, but it's hackable.
It gives you Specific psychological techniques That you can use to change the way you're living your life There's a handful of these techniques and these aren't obscure things.
They're easy to learn easy to try So it's got a very low price of admission compared for instance to Zen Buddhism so people try it and they find it it works and then I guess the word spreads But it's it shows signs Picking up speed if anything and it's it's Undergone in the last 20 years is huge change
in popularity. Well, let's talk about some of those Specific techniques how do we train ourselves to be more stoic?
My favorite beginning technique on stoicism is what's called negative visualization and If you if if it's okay, let's take two minutes to go through Actual exercise, this is two minutes that could change your life or maybe not but we'll see So negative visualization step one is you think about things
in your life that you rely on think of about the things that you Experience daily and this can be the people in your life.
This can be your job.
This can be your health And these are all just things that are there and they've been there for a long time And so you being a human you you just start taking them for granted Okay, so negative visualization says once you found your thing to think about now, I want you to imagine That you don't have the thing
that you take for granted So for instance, you can imagine it can be a child in your life.
It can be a spouse or partner in your life It can be your job.
So I want you to imagine Just give yourself a flickering moment to fill in the details That that person or that job or that thing is suddenly gone.
Here's something you take for advantage This is if you're a sighted individual and that is your eyesight.
So here's a concrete way to put this Okay, so close your eyes And I want you to imagine that that's all you would ever see That's it Now here's a twist that I put into this exercise so you don't dwell on these negative things because that would be a recipe for a disastrously suicidal life But now in a second
here, I'm gonna ask you to open your eyes But I want you to imagine that when you attempt to open them That they're somehow glued shut So go ahead but they're glued shut and you realize you can never open them again Now give yourself a second to let that soak in now open those eyes and Take a look Isn't
that? Absolutely incredible and yet two minutes ago It was something you took utterly for granted and your life is full of things that are like that your sense of balance your ability to walk Your ability to breathe without needing some kind without needing an oxygen tank.
You can go through things You're one of the luckiest Individuals ever to inhabit the universe and yet if you have the wrong frame of mind, you know Poor poor pitiful me somebody feels sorry for me.
Look how terrible it is It's a it's a mind game.
It's a Psychological technique So it's it's a flickering thought that you have and you can fill in some detail on that flickering thought So imagine that you've lost your job then You allow yourself to kind of think about that for a second fill in some of the details and then snap out of it and go on with life
I do this on a routine basis about any number of things common things and My wife knows I've been doing it because she'll hear me yell out from the back bedroom Thanks for existing and she'll know That I imagined her suddenly being absent from my life and then it all rushes in.
Oh, wow That would be a huge loss.
What does that mean?
That means I've got something really wonderful.
And what am I doing?
Well, I'm a human being I'm taking it utterly for granted or you know in a worst case I'm just sort of saying yeah Yeah, this is fine for now But you know if only I had and then you you're on that hadonic treadmill if only I had Something better than that.
I would finally that would do it for me, but we're human beings.
That's just part of the experience So negative visualization is one technique.
Are there other? Popular or effective ones that are equally valuable.
Yeah. Another one is the dichotomy of control So epic Tetus is normally identified as the source of this psychological insight The dichotomy of control which I have transformed into the trichotomy of control So it says look there are things you can control and things you can't control and I've actually
put it into three different Categories there are things you can control meaning you have almost complete control over things you can't control meaning you have no control at all over and Things you have some but not complete control over so that'd be that middle category So I'm putting a spin on epic
Tetus here. So what are the things that you can't control?
Well, you know if an asteroid hits the earth tomorrow, hey, that's you can't you can't prevent that you can't stop that What are things you can control you can control the values you pick for yourself You can control the goals you pick for yourself You can with a little bit of effort control how you
respond to the challenges life presents you So I've used the example of a tennis match.
So suppose you're Scheduled to play a tennis match.
So a stoic would say, okay So what you want to do is you want to think about the three elements of control here You can't control how hard your opponent trains You can't control how what strategy your opponent uses you can't control how hard your opponent plays But what can you control?
Well, you can control how hard you practice You can control the strategy you use going into the game You can work on your conditioning You need to focus your attention on the things you can control and sometimes there there's very great degree of control and sometimes there's moderate degree of control,
but that's what you should be thinking about because The things you can't control you're just wasting your time because you can't control them.
You can't affect them You can't change them.
So to spend your time and energy Worrying about them is a waste of your time and energy and it's a profound insight You know, some people are anxious some people are not but the people who are anxious often it's because they're concerning themselves with things they can't control and So an important
insight so focus your attention on things You can control and I mentioned that among the things you can control are your values So what is it I want in life?
What do I value the most you can pick that you can set that and then Develop a strategy that'll get you to the things that you value the most I remember having a conversation with one of my friends a few weeks ago and they were focusing on something they couldn't control and even Though they recognized
that they were focusing on it They couldn't really stop focusing on it.
Is there a way to get that out?
I've have noticed this in my own life.
There are things I will toss and turn at night as a stoic Everybody does you know, you'll have some Intrusive thought that you're trying to fall asleep you wake up in the middle of the night the intrusive thought says oh, he's awake Okay, here we go.
We're gonna party in his in his mind.
And then the question is What do you do about it?
And it's it's really interesting when you become a practicing stoic Then you get upset at a whole other level.
I call it meta anger So you're angry about something but as a stoic you're angry that you're angry at it because you realize that as a stoic You've let it get to you.
It's under your skin and it really is an interesting and challenging thing I've decided that there are people to whom I'm simply allergic It's this kind of a psychological allergy.
They know how to get under my skin I can have any number of techniques, you know standard technique is that's just Bob of being Bob That's just what Bob does and I'm working with that Check with me again in a few years and I'll tell you about that particular experiment You know and because of covid
people were locked into small spaces with people perhaps not of their choosing so Imagine that you're locked into an apartment With two roommates one of whom has anger issues one of whom is an emotional basket case And so the one who has anger issues keeps coming in and nudging you You know that guy
who said that thing about you the other day You should be really angry about that if I were you I would be so angry about that And then the emotional a roommate will come in just as you're trying to fall asleep and say, you know Yeah, I'm worried about such and such and I think it can affect you.
So you should be worried about that, too that would be a terrible situation to exist in except your actual Human situation is even worse than that Because there you knew the kovat was gonna come to an end and you'd get out of this apartment and so on but you are locked inside your skull with these two
roommates for the rest of your life, so you have Systems within your brain that respond with anger to whatever to bad things that happen How come because your ancestors who were very angry for instance when when something happened to lessen their social status?
They survived and reproduced those who just took it in stride.
Oops same thing with the emotional aspect of it you're wired to have those feelings So the next step strategy for dealing with them is number one to realize that's what the game is You're locked into the skull with them So in my most recent book the stoic challenge I describe what I call the five -second
rule So within my my mind I'll notice that something has happened and I'll notice the earliest signs of anger just little smolderings of anger and then My theory is I've got five seconds to reframe that Because otherwise once once that the anger burst into a flame it's gonna be there and you know It's
a strange thing, but you can talk to people.
Oh who have lost most of their memory older people, you know demented You know, they don't know what day it is They don't know what season it is But they can tell you in graphic detail about something that happened to them for 40 years ago.
That was upsetting So anger has that power over us So what you do is you try to take incidents that could make you angry and you frame them as a kind of a test That it's a test of seeing hey, can I work around this?
Can I repackage this in some way where it's not gonna trigger those feelings that are gonna wake me up?
In the middle of the night and there's this whole notion and in the book stoic challenge the title says it all So we treat these episodes as challenges and we deal with them as such we say, oh, it's a test It's a test.
What do I have to do to pass this test two things?
Number one is I have to find a successful work around to the setbacks I experience I have to get out on the other side and number two and even more important I have to not let myself get out of control and angry and upset While I work around to the other side because if you think about the things the setbacks
you experience in life Usually the setback is going to harm you but usually what harms you the most is your response to the setback So I use the analogy of a broken water pipe, right?
That's a setback if you discover that you have a broken water pipe in your house That's a setback, but that can be cured quite easily You have a plumber come out and for a few hundred bucks, it's all fixed.
What causes the harm is not the pipe itself But the flooding water Admitted by the pipe which can cause all sorts of damage.
It can cause ceilings to collapse it can flood basements It can do any number of things Same with you and and your setbacks the setbacks themselves can be tiny little things like somebody making an off -handed remark about your appearance or about something you did That's the setback and then what what does
the harm is you dwelling on that you tossing and turning on that?
And that's an important insight that that it's self -inflicted harm when setbacks hurt us Most of the harm is self -inflicted and it's us letting that flood of negative emotions Take us over.
I don't know if you're like me at all But you're you're an author and you put it work publicly and so people comment on that forever You might get a thousand positive comments, but they don't stick in your mind at all.
It's that one negative comment That stays seems to stay with you.
Yes You're absolutely right.
Let me tell you something else that's happened I've done a bunch of these zoom speeches in zoom interviews and so on and What I found is you can do it in such a way that you can people can chat while you're you're giving your talk and Then you have the option you can see the chat or you can not see
the chat and at first I thought oh the chat is a really good thing because you've got instant feedback and you know that the weird thing about giving up Like a zoom talk is you'll tell what you think is a really really great joke And there's no audience response because you can't hear Their end and then
and then you're thinking was it a bad joke?
Did they just not get the joke the little chat stuff that went by I finally decided number one It's distracting and number two.
I would see one negative chat and Then spend the next seven minutes of my speech Yeah, you know try to respond trying to work around it a praise I tend to to shrug off I'm pretty good about shrugging off praise I will if I get a positive email I will thank the person who sent it But stoic is going to
be very picky about a praise if I designate somebody a mentor and they praise me That's cause for celebration because the mentor is the person that you've said you've decided This is a person who really understands something.
So when they're talking, I'm just gonna shut up and take notes I'm not gonna try to correct them.
I'm gonna ask lots of questions, but I'm gonna take notes And if that person says, you know, you did X and that's a good thing Wow, right?
That's great But praise from a variety of people.
I don't know. What are their values?
in fact, I have this this concept of an anti mentor and that is there are people who if they praise you It's a sign that you're doing something very wrong because they have such different values than you do That if they think you're doing the right thing, whoa, hold on, you know You've got to correct
that You know now with social media and I have all I have as little social media in my life as I as I can But you see the effects of that and that is people can now React to praise from complete strangers thumbs up or becoming a follower And it's a metric and you can check how it changes from from day
to day And and the thing is that you don't know who these people are and yet in in many cases It's possible for a person's life to be taken over by the praise or criticism of complete strangers whose values you don't Understand and might not even agree with So it's really risky and you know, there are people
who can do that, you know I've certainly seen people who don't even look at their Twitter feeds, you know, they just dump stuff because there's going to be so much Stuff and that's maybe the healthy way to proceed But I know I would read them and I know I would react to them So I don't want to expose
myself to that risk I like how you shape sort of the environment to meet your needs and understanding yourself in that context I'm wondering if you can go a little bit deeper on the concept of an anti -mentor Anti -mentor and again a mentor and you can have I guess you could have a life mentor I don't
think I have I think if Seneca had been around.
Yeah, he would be a life mentor in fact in the day is a kind of a Guiding technique sometimes when I'm really stymied I will ask myself.
What would what would Seneca do under these circumstances?
If I'm lying in bed, I ask myself what would Marcus Aurelius do right?
And and he famously said, you know, is it my purpose here to lie and keep warm under these blankets?
No, you know, I have a social duty to go do things So there are people that I would give blanket mentor status, too Normally though it's a limited status.
So I'm a I row competitively I skull more precisely that's with two oars rather than one or and There have been people I have chosen as rowing mentors And so what they tell me about rowing I take very seriously and if they criticize me I take that very seriously I don't get hurt feelings, but I know
oh great Here's something to work on So that would be a limited mentor and I have multiple limited mentors in my life And you know the the danger is that you think you don't need mentors because that means you think you know everything And that's a really bad state to be in so an anti mentor is somebody
that I've had a chance to observe to get to know and Have drawn the conclusion that they're playing a radically different game than I am So there's one game the social status game There are people who live to create a certain social impression.
So they buy a car they dress they buy a house They do all of that.
That's not the game.
I'm playing. I'm playing a radically different game and so when they Look down on me, you know, I think oh, oh, that's a good sign because they're playing a different game and for them to win What I'm doing would be craziness, you know, it'd be like bringing a hockey stick to a baseball game You know
just that wouldn't be absolutely crazy So if they criticize me I perk up a bit.
Oh good. I'm not playing their game I don't want to be playing their game.
I think their game is kind of foolish.
Not that I'm gonna tell them that Guess what?
That's how they feel about the game.
I'm playing. So that would be an anti mentor One thing you can control is your exposure to various people and if there's a person who's Not doing you any good and doing your harm and you are consciously going out of your way to expose yourself Well, then then it's on you now in other cases, you know,
you have relatives you have co -workers and so on You can't quite do that But yeah So this notion of people who are just have different values or are having a different game for them to approve of you is a bad The only thing I might add to that is people who aren't in the arena or haven't done what you're
trying to do So it's easy to be a critic these days You can sort of sit in the stands and watch anybody try to do what they're trying to do and you know Lob these grenades at them But if you're the way that I think of it is if you're not in the arena With me or trying to do what I've done or have done
what I'm trying to do then those comments are generally speaking Misplaced and don't add a lot of value to the the conversation.
What's your response to that?
Well to criticize other people is now Frighteningly easy because social media has made it possible to anonymously criticize other people There was a time when I was a kid when you had your neighborhood, you know And if you wanted to spread a bad word about somebody you would have to do it either verbally
to somebody's face Or to people who knew them or I don't know mimeograph Papers and put it in people's mailboxes and people very quickly would have found out who it was And you know, the interesting thing is whoever you were attacking would be very angry at you But the people who saw you attacking him
would be thinking, you know what?
He might be doing that to me when I'm not around So there was a price to be paid for being negative in that way but now you can do it anonymously and there are people who that's how that their meaning of life is I'm gonna be outraged and when Somebody's attacked.
I'm gonna pile on and you know that for me is a good day So, let's see.
I piled on to 18 different people today.
Yeah, I've earned my beer Here's another wrinkle on that and that is the notion of failure.
I happen to be a big fan of failure Don't get me wrong.
I don't like failing.
I don't go out of my way To fail but I know that a capacity to fail in some sense of the word and the stoics had their own kind of conception of what it was involved in failing for somebody to fail is Actually an interesting sign and for somebody to fail in public is an interesting sign because what is it
an indication of? One of the things is that they're trying trying to do things that for them are hard It's an admirable trait that some human being is trying to do things that are hard to do And if they really are hard you're gonna fail you're gonna fail At some times you might fail a lot and if you
never fail You might say I've never failed and then the stoic response is well do something hard then, you know Well, the things are easy for me will then switch to something that will be hard for you to do So I told you I'm a competitive rower So I oftentimes do not place well and you know, the interesting
thing is when I don't Then the question is so did I fail?
Well, actually not because one of the reasons I row is it's part of my stoic training So a training involves doing something that's very hard to do running the risk of failure Doing something that's going to activate.
Remember we talked about the roommates that you're trapped with if you're rowing a race those roommates When you're two -thirds of the way through the race, they come out and they haunt you and they say Bill wouldn't it be nice to slow down at this point, you know, why not quit altogether?
So you get to grapple with those voices and you get to tell them to shut up and you get to push on To the end and I think you're a better person for having done that But when I come in last So from that metric, yeah failure, you know, there are people who came in ahead of you, but no no I was playing
a different game. Yeah, I know I was playing the rowing game To go out there to grapple with these of these voices in my head And to do the training the physical training necessary to be out there And there's a background kind of thought of yeah, you know what?
I may have come in last place in that race But I beat the approximately seven point five billion people who didn't even show up at the starting line Which is which is something to be to be proud of When you were saying that it brought to mind I often go for this, uh 10 mile run Where I go out five and I
come back But there's a there's a point at about three and a half where I can take this shortcut and I can get home in about nine instead of ten And I found through trial and error that it's much better for me If i'm going to give up to actually walk the full ten Then it would be to take the shortcut
because I took the shortcut once and i've only done this once ever But it took me three months Yep, because every time I passed it on the way back it became harder and harder Not to take the shortcut after having done it once.
Oh, yeah So it's better to just sort of like stop and walk the rest of the way if you don't want to run But don't take the shortcut.
Yep, uh giving into those voices Encourages them hugely, you know They live in the in the back closet of your mind and and they're they're always trying but you give them one big success You know where you actually do quit and it's like giving them superpowers, you know It's like you injected them with uh
with adrenaline or whatever because after that they're gonna they're gonna own you So there are times when I do quit there are times when I and i'm not i'm not proud of it when it happens But uh to wrestle with them to wrestle with them you're going to build up your sense of I can control aspects of my
life Self -discipline right self -discipline a lot of people undervalue self -discipline, uh, you know, you're so Straight and always doing what you want to do.
But when you think about it in a different sense Self -discipline means what it means you are controlling the one life that you have to live And then the follow -up question is uh, so uh, if you're not controlling that life who or what is And why would you allow something else to control the one life
you have to live? What a waste that's a really good way to put it.
I want to come back to the people that you're allergic to What's the thought process that you go through before you remove them from your life?
Well once you once you realize that somebody has the ability to get under your skin And you know, I I don't even think that they think of it in those terms And so the best way to think of it is that's just them Doing what they do I think there are people who are allergic to me So that's that's kind
of how it goes. And so what is it that they're allergic to?
Well, it's something about my personality It's something that grates against their personality or their values, you know relatives You don't get to choose and uh, if you have relatives, it's wonderful if you can get along with them You can work at getting along with them But sometimes the best solution for for all
parties involved is you just keep your distance and if they come up and Start doing their normal act then you just remind yourself.
That's just what he does And this sounds, uh cruel, but he can't control himself That's just who he is.
It isn't cruel though because that's how you are There's just things that you do because they just feel like the right thing to do.
And so that's how That's how you behave.
So I'm not there yet.
I'm working on it again.
Get back to me sometime in the next decade and I might have the The the final solution there, but but it really is uh tricky.
So we human beings We're social animals We need other human beings around us.
I call it vitamin p People we need that contact and you're going to be very unhealthy if you don't give that Get that contact.
The problem is People are just so difficult, right?
They can't see things your way.
They can't bend over backwards for you the way you're sure you're bending over backwards for them So can't live with them can't live without them.
But hey, welcome to the human experience How do how do we go as parents about teaching our kids?
to be more stoic I used to think that stoicism was a philosophy for older people And in particular really old people people Facing near death.
I thought that though that's the primary Target for them but then at at age of 40, you know our age 50 I discovered it myself or Stumbled across to myself and realized no.
No, it's not for old people And I have had numerous people write to me and say What about kids?
And the more I think about that the more I realize for instance your teen years Are just a prime time for you to develop stoicism Because that's when you really have to to deal with your fellow human beings up close You can't get away with them.
You're stuck with them.
You encounter them every day and then you can have stoic coping strategies That you can use so, uh, I haven't given it a whole lot of thought I'm aware that there are some people who who have but just the whole notion that kids are a prime candidate Uh, you know and other things like being grateful,
uh, and you have to be careful You would have to package it with uh with kids in mind, but here here'd be a great example And that is kids can be very insulting Number one strategy how to respond to an insult Make a joke out of it And in other words turn it around.
Uh, so if somebody Uh insults you, uh, so here's one turn around You know if that's the worst thing that you have to say about me You really don't know me well enough to be insulting me.
You should really Put your attention somewhere else But that requires a little bit of thought and a little bit of presence in the uh aftermath of being insulted A better way to respond to an insult is with no Response at all So somebody says they're insulting remark and you just carry on Having whatever
conversation you were having and the interesting thing is and you can watch this happen Um, so I wrote a book on insults called the slap in the face So this was a follow -on book to a guide to the good life and um to say nothing at all So you watch what they do?
And it's really kind of fun because at first They'll be kind of wondering did he hear me?
I just insulted him.
Did he hear me and you let them stew like that and then with luck they'll say They'll repeat the insult at which point you say yeah I heard you the first time and then you just go on with your conversation once again Uh, it requires very little effort on your part and yet it's a knockdown punch Because
here they are hitting you with their best shot and you aren't even hearing it So a better way still would would be to slip into a coma, you know I mean if you went up and were insulting a person who was comatose, man You're an idiot that you would be doing such a thing But what you do it's the ultimate
put down of you know What you can say what you want and uh, it's just words.
It is simply words Go ahead now, uh, the thing is you are wired to care very much about insults because again on the savannahs of africa If you allowed yourself to be insulted you lost social status meaning you were less likely to eat Uh, you were less likely to mate so it's wired into you Uh, and I
remember being a teenager what a troubling time of of life, you know, you felt, uh, everything deeply So there should be a stoic answer to that, but I haven't experimented deeply with that talk to me about the psychological immune system psychological immune system the uh biological immune system Of
course in order to be healthy your biological immune system.
You have to expose yourself to germs I'm going to use germs in the broad sense, but you have to expose yourself to germs and foreign bodies for your biological immune system to be healthy and active So there are these cases like the case of the bubble boy who uh doctors early in his life figured out
that he was He had no immune system.
He grew up in a bubble Literally a plastic bubble with filtered air meaning no human contact meaning none of this Uh was doing okay And then when he was 10 or 12, he got a bone marrow transplant from his sister thinking this will cure it Unfortunately, she had someone germ lurking In whatever in the bone
marrow and it killed him it killed the guy um, so I have a relative who's actually a pediatrician and I asked him about the immune system and How how you should respond to that with respect to kids and he said that the official medical advice Is a kid should eat a pound of dirt And that's not literally
a pound of literally dirt but but to be exposed to germs growing up is a very healthy thing because you'll have a healthy immune system and a kid left to his own devices will do strange things Will suck on the remote control for the tv will taste the dog, you know, if you have a dog will do these things
A psychological immune system is a similar thing if you lived in a psychological bubble That is in an environment in which you never had Challenges in which people never insulted you in which it was just always Smooth and easy going when someone else took care of whatever bothered you, uh, you would be
like the bubble boy And as a result as soon as you were exposed to psychological Challenges you would crumble they would seem like major major incidents I worry we live in a time when a lot of people are in to some extent one of these psychological bubbles and we're protecting them from being exposed
to These irritants and we want to help them.
We're trying to protect them but It could be I think if you brought the traveled the Stoics forward in time to today.
They would say, you know what they need is just a Kind of a more challenging environment and then they will be able to cope with the challenges they experience What's the stoic advice on decision making?
stoic advice on decision making is you Fragment it into the part you can control and the thing you the part you can't control And you focused your attention on the part you can control and of course they were also logicians So, you know, there's a very rational way you can go about making decisions
Number one is you map out your options?
So i'm actually at work on a project right now where I uh go into that in greater detail, you know mapping out your options There will usually be the obvious thing to do which might not be the optimal thing to do And so one thing I I tell my students when I teach critical thinking Is it's very important?
That you invest quality time into thinking about what your options are and that can involve a degree of brainstorming There's no guarantee you're going to pick the optimal option.
You can put all the thought you want But one thing's for sure and that is that if you don't even consider the optimal option There's no way you can pick it.
So that notion of okay control things that you can Have control over or worry about things that you can have control over and spend active thought Laying out the options because there can be multiple options Uh, so my wife and I when we're trying to decide, uh whether to go somewhere what to do when we
get there I'll say okay.
Well, here's a bunch of different options.
We have available to us And so for me that's just second nature you actively Think about options and some of them can be way out there options because you never know And then you choose among those in a rational way Can we talk a little bit about the tension between being skeptical and being open -minded?
Right now, uh the project i'm working on is about being simultaneously skeptical In open -minded and I think that's the key if you want to be a person Whose mind is full primarily of true and useful beliefs?
So imagine somebody who is open -minded, but not skeptical.
Uh before you knew it their their mind would be full of uh, Conspiracy theories and all sorts of strange stuff because there be all sorts of ideas flowing in Without filter, okay Now imagine the opposite of that somebody who was skeptical highly skeptical But not open -minded so that person would end
up Basically with true and useful beliefs because that skeptical guard would only let those in But there'd be all sorts of other beliefs that are both true and useful That he simply wouldn't open Uh himself too and we have this psychological phenomenon called confirmation bias which Unfortunately left
to run will make us more and more closed -minded Confirmation bias is when you believe something You start looking for evidence that what you believe is true and you start ignoring evidence that what you believe is false So you can imagine it like dropping a little little one crystal of sugar into a super
saturated sugar solution And that one tiny little crystal will grow into a massive Uh crystal that's how it is with your beliefs So a little tiny belief can get into your mind and once it's there It can grow until it becomes a major major obsession so, uh, the trick if you want to have a healthy mind
is your Simultaneously not only letting new ideas in but exploring new ideas One of the new ideas is that many of your old ideas are mistaken.
That's a sign of open -mindedness You know if you sort of acknowledge yeah A bunch of what I believe right now Those beliefs are mistaken.
Uh things I was told when I was a kid wasn't true things my tribe believes believes They aren't true And so one thing you will do is you will reach out to intelligent articulate people on the other side of the debate And you'll listen very carefully to what they have to say you'll talk to them not trying
to refute them Not trying to disprove them not trying to show your mastery but to learn from them and and then the follow -up thing a lot of people say at that point is Well in this particular debate there are no intelligent articulate people on the other side Which I should add is a sign of closed -mindedness
on your part So then you're precisely the person who needs to seek out those people because almost invariably they're out there Almost invariably you can gain something from talking to them.
We talked a lot about stoicism What are the other competing sort of philosophies of life?
Uh, well, there is one, uh, The skeptics there's the epicureans.
Uh, there are Numerous schools.
These were schools in ancient greece.
So they had Uh, it was like schools of martial arts, right?
So if you wanted to start a school of philosophy What did you have to do you had to have a formula and then you had to gain students but there was an ongoing business of creating philosophy schools and you You kind of had to come up with a you capture one corner of the market by coming up with one particular
way of uh of thinking Uh the people who went there some of them came for self -improvement But parents would have sent their kids there so they could gain skills that the kids could use In their adult careers, so there might be politics.
So you learned logic you learned speaking skills might be the law So you you uh, you did that so it was very much unlike Um in modern times academic schools of philosophy and these would be departments of philosophy and universities I don't have to attract students.
They have to take me Uh, that's just the the way it is.
But then you realize gosh What would it be like if I had to have a product?
That students and their parents said, okay, you've got to do this You've got to take this guy because he's going to give you some very important insights about something And in fact most of my students if they weren't forced to take my classes Would not take my classes because they're they're in it
for a career and uh, There are people who who are interested in law or politics who actually take philosophy.
So it's a curious We still have have that aspect going so I regard myself primarily as a teacher Professionally i'm a teacher and I regard my teaching as having uh, two forms of outreach.
I teach in the classroom And I teach through publications Uh, and i'm one of the luckiest people alive In that I get paid for thinking about things I want to learn about And then sharing what i've learned with a broader audience and I regard it as a wonderful form of uh Of teaching I reach a whole lot more
people than I do in the classroom and I I get, uh emails from people It's wonderful to be changing people's lives and if i'm changing them for the better that's better still right?
But uh that i'm reaching an audience.
That's wonderful How do you want to be remembered father?
Uh husband and teacher that would do it.
So on my tombstone if if I have one, I would actually like to be Uh describe this somewhere Um Compost it down Spread in a tomato a garden and be served as a tomato salad on some fine summer day But if I did have a tombstone, uh, uh husband father teacher would be the three Thank you so much belt this has been
a really great conversation.
Oh, thank you i've had fun Thank you The knowledge project is produced by the team at fernum street I'd love to get your advice on how to make this the most valuable podcast you listen to email me at shane at fs .blog You can learn more about the show and find past episodes at fs .blog Podcast to get
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