The Exchanges

Q I have so many questions to follow up on, but I, I think before we, we dive into some of the nuances and details here, it's probably wise to start with, what is Stoicism?

A Stoicism is, um, uh, philosophy, ancient philosophers. Uh, 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, 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, uh, did what, uh, modern martial arts schools do, and that is, uh, you can have a pure style of, uh, martial arts, but you can mix together different schools and come up with your own version. Um, so, uh, Zeno of Sidium 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, 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, uh, the Romans took it on and put their own spin on it, So the people you normally think of as Stoics are Roman Stoics, uh, most famously, top four, uh, Seneca, who's currently my fav…

AI assessment note: “Stoicism is, um, uh, philosophy, ancient philosophers. Uh, first Stoic was a guy named Zeno”

Q Well, let's talk about some of those specific techniques. How do we train ourselves to be more stoic?

A Uh, 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 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, uh, 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, uh, and they've been there for a long time, and so you being a human, you, you just start taking them for granted. Ok, 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 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, ah, your job. Ah, 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. Ok, so close your eyes. And I want you to imagine that that's all you would ever see. That's it. Uh, now, uh, …

AI assessment note: “my favorite, uh, beginning, uh, technique on stoicism is, uh, what's called negative visualization.”

Q So negative visualization is one technique. Uh, are there other popular or effective ones that are equally valuable?

A Yeah, another one is the dichotomy of control. Uh, so Epictetus, uh, is normally identified as the source of this, uh, psychological insight. Uh, 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, ah, middle category. So I'm putting a spin on Epictetus here. So what are the things, ah, that you, ah, can't control? Ah, well, you know, if an asteroid hits the Earth tomorrow, hey, that's, ah, 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, uh, 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, uh, what strategy your opponen…

AI assessment note: “Yeah, another one is the dichotomy of control.”

Q Well, 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 going to make us happy? And then when we get it, we just immediately almost take it for granted. We're onto the next thing. We're always chasing something else.

A We're wired to be that way. So by wired, uh, I don't mean wires, I mean neurons, but we evolved on the savannas of Africa, you know, 200,000 to, uh, 70,000 years ago, rough, rough numbers, and the ancestors who were alive back then, who were easily satisfied, dropped out of the gene pool. Uh, imagine that you had, uh, an ancestor, and, uh, 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? Uh, I'm gonna stay in the moment. Uh, 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, um, and, uh, when meal time came, he didn't have, uh, food prepared. He didn't have food, 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, 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 dissati…

AI assessment note: “ancestors who were alive back then, who were easily satisfied, dropped out of the gene pool”

Q We talked a lot about stoicism. What are the other competing sort of philosophies of life?

A Uh, well, there is one, uh, uh, the skeptics. There's, uh, the Epicureans. Uh, there are, uh, 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 career. 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.

AI assessment note: “well, there is one, uh, uh, the skeptics. There's, uh, the Epicureans.”

Q Can we talk a little bit about the tension between being skeptical and being open-minded?

A Right now, uh, 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 is 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 himself to. And we have, uh, this psychological phenomenon called confirmation bias, which unfortunately left to run will make us more and more closed-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 th…

AI assessment note: “the project I'm working on is about being simultaneously skeptical and open-minded”

Q 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?

A Well, uh, to criticize other people is now frighteningly easy, because social media has made it possible to anonymously criticize other people. Uh, there was a time when I was a kid, when you had your neighborhood, uh, 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, who it was, and you know, the interesting thing is, whoever you were attacking would be, ah, 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, ah, that's how their meaning of life is 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. 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 …

AI assessment note: “to criticize other people is now frighteningly easy, because social media has made it possible”

Q 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?

A Well, once you've, 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. Um, 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. So I, 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.…

AI assessment note: “sometimes the best solution for, for all parties involved is you just keep your distance”

Q 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 who 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?

A To begin with, you know, we, what we normally call Stoics, these are people who don't experience emotions, uh, and, uh, 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. The Stoics themselves were remarkably well-adjusted people. They were known to those who, who, uh, 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 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, experience awe usually requires a little bit of effort on your part. You know, I've described this in one place where I can b…

AI assessment note: “what we normally call Stoics, these are people who don't experience emotions”

Q Why do you think there's a stoic renaissance now?

A I don't know. And like I said, so this would be in the 19 seventies. 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, um, So it's a curious thing, but it had survived. You can find examples of, uh, philosophers starting in 300 B.C. 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, I had very, very low expectations because, uh, and these were reality-based expectations. I, I looked on Amazon and 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, uh, a general audience. Um, so there were a handful of books, uh, when I published it, it got off to a very slow start, but started picking up speed. Uh, and, uh, last year I …

AI assessment note: “I can give you the reason why stoicism is popular, and”

Q How do, how do we go as parents about teaching our kids, um, to be more stoic?

A Uh, I used to think that Stoicism was a philosophy for older people, in particular, really old people, people, uh, facing, uh, near death. I thought that though, that's the primary, uh, uh, target for them. But then at, at age of, uh, 40, you know, or 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 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, 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.

AI assessment note: “So, uh, I haven't given it a whole lot of thought.”

Q 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?

A 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. You wake up in the middle of the night. The intrusive thought says, oh, he's awake. Okay, here we go. We're going to party in his, in his mind. And 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, uh, you get upset at a whole other level. Uh, I call it, um, meta-anger. Uh, 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. Uh, I've decided that there are people to whom I'm simply allergic. Uh, it's a, kind of a psychological allergy.

AI assessment note: “And then the question is, uh, what do you do about it?”