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 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 [Music] bill welcome to the show oh hey it's a pleasure to be here how did you come to write about stoicism and the good life ah long story but here's the short version of it apparently uh 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 i got to 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 mid-life crisis but at the same time i could get a a publication out of it you know and 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 uh well stoics
offered a one and i started looking into them uh 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 professors 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 2 000 years and you know what we're so close to the final breakthrough when we finally figure this out so um so that's not what the stoics were about but if you want you can study their logic and they were uh in first century a.d they were the prime logicians of their time and they
were very good at propositional logic which is what makes modern computers and your cell phone work so it dawned on me once i found out more about stoicism that i actually uh first surprised was they are headed at approximately the same grand goal in living and that is a life that's full of uh to the extent possible of positive emotions like delight and even joy and relatively uh without negative emotions like anger and anxiety and regret
and uh 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 and as a result and and i i believe this is true as a result of that you can you can reduce the number of negative emotions you experience um 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 uh whereas um 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 of 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 uh to zen buddhism it's a strange word you know research project i went in
thinking i was gonna come out as zen buddhist and came out as stoic instead then really 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 uh we're in the midst of a stoic renaissance and i i caught it uh in the early stages so uh
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 we dive into some of the nuances and details here it's probably wise to start
with what is stoicism okay stoicism is uh philosophy ancient philosophers uh first stoic was a guy named zeno of sitium who lived in 300 bc he wanted to become a philosopher and back then there was no such thing as academic philosopher philosophy
so what you would do is you would create a philosophical school and then you would have students in that school and presumably uh you know it was like a school of martial arts you know uh 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 sidium did basically that he found a few schools 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 i
got um this whole notion of being able to communicate well got some science in it this whole batch uh 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 four seneca who's currently my favorite but
ask me next week and i might have a different favorite i'm very fickle about that seneca marcus aurelius epictetus and musonius rufus and the interesting thing is if you say well what did the stoics 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 well you can find the the greatest divergence is between um 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 uh was counselor to an emperor but he was also the greatest playwright of his time he was also the first century a.d equivalent of a billionaire and he was a stoic at the other end of the spectrum we found musonius rufus who basically uh
said uh you know what if if you can give me a cave 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 um if you um
a stoic will tell you uh you know what 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 that's he would say okay do you have 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 people the the preppers you know these are the people who who stockpile food and everything else in case uh
things take a turn for the worse um and uh they always have their day you know like at the start of covid where everybody else was scrambling for toilet paper and they said uh here's my supply of four years of toilet paper and they
look really good 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 um 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 going to 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 i want to come back to this idea of emotional preparedness at some point but i think these people sound almost super human 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 and for many of us that who suffer from variations and emotions maybe or not suffer that's part of the spice of life but 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 okay
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
lower case s stoics that's the common conception 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 uh they were connoisseurs of positive emotions and you know some of the greatest emotions you you can have um that can be everyday experiences but you kind of gotta open your mind to them uh one is feelings of delight um you walk outside
there's the sky it's blue it didn't have to be blue but 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 so 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 experience awe usually requires a little bit of effort on your part but uh um
you know i've described this in in one place where uh uh you know i can be walking along and pick up a rock and then realize you know what this rock in fact right here where i live uh found a rock and um i was 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 were 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 so um and also the things that 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 do 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 uh yeah you do 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 and uh boohoo pity me everybody look at what i lack so the stoic insight one of the stoic 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 the light from them let's take a little sidetrack here on that sort of hedonic treadmill that you
brought up why is it that we think that something is going to 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 uh we're
wired to be that way so by wired i don't mean wires i mean neurons but we evolved on the savannas 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 of course he wouldn't have been an ancestor but imagine somebody back then was was the ultimate cool dude and while everybody else was walking around
worried about lions and worried about where the next meal was coming from he was there in the savannas of africa looking at the blue sky thinking isn't it all just grand i'm going to stay in the moment well he stayed in the moment for a moment and then a a lion ate him i don't know if that's how he he perished and when mealtime came he didn't have uh food prepared he didn't have food of some source of food so people who were easily satisfied
dropped out of the gene pool now the people who were constantly thinking not about 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 an um 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 they would their possessions were limited to what they could carry and they didn't even have like big cooler chests you know 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 uh the limit and we have now uh just you know places where you
can stuff them with material things and um 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 if i only had such and such 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 why do you think there's a stoic renaissance now i don't know so 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 uh and uh so 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 um 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 um so when i published a guide to the good life so um i i told you the that the um i had very very low expectations uh of how a guide to the good life would do 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 and i think that um 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 uh and uh last year i gave a talk at the stoicon 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 uh 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 and so people try it and they find it it works and um and then i guess the word spreads but it's it shows signs of picking up speed if anything and it's it's uh undergone in the last 20 years this huge uh change in popularity well let's talk about some
of those specific techniques how do we train ourselves to be more stoic okay my favorite uh beginning uh technique on stoicism is uh what's called negative visualization and uh if you if if it's okay let's take two minutes to go through an actual exercise this is two minutes that could change your life or or maybe not but we'll see so negative visualization step one is you um think about things in your life that you rely on think of about the
things that you uh experience uh daily and this can be the people in your life this can be your job this can be your health uh 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've found your thing to think about now i want you to imagine that you don't have the thing that you take for a 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 a more concrete way 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 uh so so just think of what that would be like and i want you to imagine that uh that's all you would ever see that's it uh now here's a twist that i put into this exercise um so you don't dwell on these negative things because that would be a recipe for a disastrously suicidal life but now uh 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 um 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 um so 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 it's a mind game it's a psychological technique and uh now again i don't encourage people to dwell on losing things so it's it's a flickering thought that you have and you can fill in some detail
on that flickering thought uh so imagine that you've lost your job uh then uh you allow yourself to kind of think about that for a sec fill in some of the details and then snap out of it and go on with life so um i do this on a
routine basis about any number of things common things and so 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 you know 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
worse 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 hedonic treadmill if only i had uh something better than that i would finally that would do it for me uh
and uh but we're human beings that's just part of the experience so negative visualization is one technique uh are there other popular or effective ones that are equally valuable yeah another one is the dichotomy of control so epictetus
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 would be that uh middle category so i'm putting a spin on epictetus here so what are the things that you uh can't control uh well you know if an asteroid hits the earth
tomorrow hey that's uh 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 um i've used the example of a tennis match so suppose you're scheduled to play a tennis match and so a stoic would say okay so what you want to do is you want to think
about the three elements of control here uh 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 practice uh you can work on your conditioning so what do you need to do 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 um 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 yeah you know so uh uh you know i'm a practicing stoic have been for uh 20 uh years and uh you know you're always um practicing
practicing in two senses you know that that is you're making it a part of your ordinary life and you're working to get better the way you would practice uh you know playing a flute or oboe or something if you were a kid in school
and so um i have noticed this in my own life there are things i will toss and turn at night uh as a stoic everybody does you know you'll have some intrusive thought that you're trying to fall asleep or 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 uh then the question is uh 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 it's a stoic you've let it get to you it's under your skin and um
and it really is an interesting and challenging thing uh i've decided that there are people to whom i'm simply allergic uh it's a kind of a psychological allergy and that um they know how to get under my skin uh 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 uh and i'm working with that uh check with me again in a few years and i'll tell you about that particular experiment the thing is
um you know and because of covid people were locked into small spaces with people perhaps not of their choosing so uh you had roommates and you know they said okay you you really can't go out except for groceries so you're stuck
with these roommates imagine that you're locked into an apartment with two roommates one of whom has anger issues one of them uh one of whom is an emotional basket case uh and so the one who has anger issues keeps um keeps uh
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 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 uh to exist in except your actual human
situation is even worse than that because there you knew the covet was going to 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 um systems within your brain that respond with anger to whatever uh 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 uh aspect of it and you're wired to have those feelings so uh the next step strategy for dealing with them is number one to 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 the anger bursts into a flame it's gonna be there
and you know it's a strange thing but you can talk to people who have lost most of their memory older people you know demented and 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 going to trigger those feelings that are going to 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 workaround 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 and 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 ah
what causes the harm is not the pipe itself but the flooding water emitted 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 uh and your setbacks the setbacks themselves can be tiny little things like somebody making an off-handed remark about uh your appearance or uh about something you did um and then uh so that's the setback and
then what what does the harm is you dwelling on that you tossing and turning on that uh while trying to sleep that's the real damage 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 uh like me at all but you're you're an author and you put it work publicly and so people comment on that and 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 so
i've done a bunch of these zoom speeches and zoom interviews and so on and uh 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 the weird thing about giving a 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 uh their end and then and then you're thinking was it a bad joke did they just not get the joke um but the the the little uh 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 the next seven minutes of my speech yeah you know trying to respond trying to work around it uh a praise i tend to
uh to shrug off i'm pretty good about shrugging off uh praise i will if i get a positive email i will thank the person who sent it um but but uh stoic is going to be very picky about uh praise because there's uh some people
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 going to shut up and take notes i'm not going to try to correct them i'm going to ask lots of questions but i'm going to 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 uh in fact i have this uh 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 uh uh hold on you know you've uh you've got to correct that um so uh 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 um can now react to praise from complete strangers thumbs up or or becoming a follower and it's a metric and you can check how
it uh changes from from day to day and uh and the thing is that you don't know who these people are and yet in in many cases uh 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 uh you know i've certainly seen people uh who don't even look at their twitter feeds you know they just dump stuff because there's gonna 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 i don't want to expose myself to that risk
well i like how you shape sort of the environment to to meet your needs and understanding yourself and that context i'm wondering if you can go a little bit deeper on the concept of an anti-mentor anti-mentor uh and again a mentor
and you can have i guess you could have a life mentor uh i don't think i have i think if seneca had been around uh yep he's uh he would be a life mentor in fact in the day as a kind of a uh a guiding technique uh sometimes when
i'm really stymied i will ask myself what would what would seneca do under these circumstances uh if i'm lying in bed i asked myself what would musonia what would marcus aurelius do right and uh 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 to normally though it's a limited status so i'm i i row
competitively i skull more precisely that's with two wars rather than one ore and there have been people i have chosen as 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 if they praise me that's great so that would be a limited mentor and i have multiple limited mentors in my life and you know 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 i have drawn the conclusion that
they're playing a radically different game than i am so there's one game the social status game uh 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 uh
that's not the game i'm playing i'm playing a radically different game and so uh when they uh look down on me you know i think oh oh that's a good sign because they're playing a different game and uh and for them to win their game
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 would be absolutely crazy um 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 going to tell them that guess what that's how they feel about the game i'm playing so that would be an anti-mentor there
are also uh people that i've decided i'm simply allergic to uh and so then you know uh one thing you can control is your exposure uh to various people and if there's a person who's not doing you any good and doing you harm and you are consciously uh
going out of your way to expose yourself well then then it's on you now in other cases you know you have relatives uh you have co-workers and so on you can't quite do that um but uh 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 sign the only thing i might add to that is uh 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 yeah the whole notion of failure well uh to criticize other people is now uh 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
yeah people very quickly would have found out who who it was and you know the interesting thing is whoever you were attacking would be uh 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 uh that's how their meaning of life is
um i'm going to be outraged and when somebody is attacked i'm going to 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 tonight you know i've i've
earned my uh keep here 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 uh 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 um 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 uh one of the things is that they're trying to 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 going to fail you're going to fail um sometimes 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 yeah well the things are easy
for me we'll then switch to something that will be hard for you to do um and uh so i told you i'm a competitive rower uh so i often times do not place well and you know the interesting thing is when i don't then uh the question is so did i fail uh
well actually not because one of the reasons i wrote is it's part of my stoic training uh stoic 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 all together so you get to grapple you know mano armano 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 and so if i come in last place in a race which has happened you know the interesting joke uh in rowing is uh you know if somebody tells you that they uh took first place in a in the race they were in and then
if you want to be snarky the follow-up question is uh oh did you have any competitors because it can often happen you know that you're the only boat if you're in an age category group of a certain weight class and so on um but when i come in last so from that metric yeah failure you know there are people who came in ahead of you but uh but no no no i was playing a different game yeah i know i was playing the rowing game but i was
playing a different game and the game is number one not to be afraid of failure 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
doing that 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 7.5 billion people who didn't even show up at the starting line which is uh 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've found through trial and error that it's much better for me if i'm going to give up to actually walk the full 10 than 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 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 so it's better oh yeah 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 giving in to 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 super powers 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 um 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 uh i'm uh i'm a human being but uh to wrestle with them you know to wrestle with them you're gonna build up your sense of
i can control aspects of my life self-discipline right 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 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've once you've realized that somebody has the ability to get under your skin and you know 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 allergic there are people who are allergic to me i don't know who they are maybe they're uh they're they're dodging 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 and uh so uh 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 uh and if they come up and uh 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 but that whole notion of he's just him being him you know he that's that's what he does um so i'm not there yet i'm working on it again get back to me
um sometime in the next decade and i might have the uh the the final solution there but uh 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 uh 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 we go as parents about teaching our kids to be more stoic uh i used to think that stoicism was a
philosophy for older people uh and particularly really old people people uh facing uh near death i thought that though that's the primary uh target for them but then at at age of 40 you know our age 50 i discovered it myself or stumbled across it 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 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 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 and you have to be careful you would have to package it with with kids in mind but here be a great example and that is kids can be very insulting stoic 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 aftermath of being insulted a better way to respond to an insult is with no response at all so somebody says their insulting remark and you just carry on uh having whatever conversation you are having and the interesting thing is and you can watch this happen so i wrote a book on insults called the
slap in the face so this was a follow-on book to um a guide to the good life and uh 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 knock down 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 uh and uh uh go ahead uh now 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 you were less likely to mate so it's wired into you 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 a 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 doctors early in his life figured out that he was he had no immune system he grew up in a bubble uh 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 i forget the exact time but he got a bone marrow transplant from his sister thinking this will cure it unfortunately she had some one germ lurking
in whatever in the bone marrow and it killed him it killed the guy so i have a relative who's actually a pediatrician and i asked him about the immune system and 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 um 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 we'll do these things biological uh immune system is a similar kind of thing and that is that if you lived in a uh sorry 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 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 so i worry that 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 travel the stoics forward in time to today they would say you know what what they need is just a 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 focus 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 uh 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 because it would be 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 you know whether to go
somewhere what to do when we get there i mean she knows um maybe maybe this is a source of irritation i don't know but where i will lay out 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 use 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 i like expanding the options for sure
can we talk a little bit about the tension between being skeptical and being open-minded yeah so right now the project i'm working on is about being simultaneously skeptical and 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'd 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 be all sorts of other beliefs that are both true and useful that he simply wouldn't open uh himself to and we have this psychological phenomenon called confirmation bias which unfortunately left to run will make us more and more close-minded uh 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 you're
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 beliefs they aren't true and so one thing you'll do is you'll 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 uh the epicureans uh there are uh numerous schools these were schools in uh you know 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 and so it's interesting 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 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 learn speaking skills might be the law so you you you did that so it was very much unlike 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 and and you know that's just 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 you know for a career and uh there are people who who
are interested in law or politics who actually take philosophy so it's curious we still have have that aspect going um so the books i write so i regard myself primarily as a teacher so uh well actually a three uh word description of
me i'm a husband father and 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 of teaching i reach a whole lot more people than i do in the classroom and i get uh emails from people so it's it's it's very it's wonderful uh 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 uh 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 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 a husband father teacher would be the three thank you so much bill this has been a really great conversation oh thank you i've had fun you