#123 William Irvine: How To Live a Stoic Life
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Self-discipline. A lot of people undervalue self-discipline. 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 of 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 accessed before anyone else, transcripts, and other member-only content, you could join at fs.blog.com. 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 going to 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.

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How did you come to write about Stoicism and the Good Life? Ah, 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 to Stoicism through Zen Buddhism, which sounds like a 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, and 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 one, and I started looking into them. I had actually encountered the Stoics

But doing logic back in college, 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 ideas.

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 that's not what the Stoics were about. But if you want, you can study their logic. And they were in the 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 and your cell phone

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 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 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, it could go either way. The Stoics said, well, we've got some basic psychological strategies you can put to 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 research project. I went in thinking I was going to come out as Zen Buddhist and came out as 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, 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 changed on that, 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 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 tried a few schools on his own, and then he thought, you know, I think I can get this interesting hybrid that'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 I can have my own school. So he started a school. This was in Greece, and

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. 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? 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 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, right?

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 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 a 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, 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 preppers, you know, these are the people 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 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 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. 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 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? To begin with, 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 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 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 some of the greatest emotions 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.

It's a beautiful shade of blue that will change from hour to hour within a day and will change from day to day. 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. You can experience awe

usually requires a little bit of effort on your part. 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, I 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 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. 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 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 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 who 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 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 lion ate him. I don't know if that's how he perished. And when mealtime came, he didn't have 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 present, but

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 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 backpacks and everything else. I don't think they did that they could carry. And 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 and

But we're wired. Once we get something, 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 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. 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 the beginning of the 19th century, and then suddenly they drop off. So when I published A Guide to the Good Life, I had very, very low expectations. And these were reality-based expectations. I looked on Amazon, and

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 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 Stoicon Convention. There are now enough of us that we can have global conventions. And I did some research there.

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 to

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 works. And then I guess the word spreads, but it shows signs of picking up speed, if anything. And it's undergone in the last 20 years this 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 it's okay, let's take two minutes to go through an 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 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 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 this.

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 going to 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 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 feel sorry for me. Look how terrible it is. It's a mind game. It's a psychological technique.

So 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're on that hedonic 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 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 middle category. So I'm putting a spin on Epictetus here. So what are the things that you can't control? Well, you know, if an asteroid hits the Earth tomorrow, hey, 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 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'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. 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 have noticed this in my own life. There are things I will toss and turn at night as a stoic.

Everybody does. 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 mind. And then the question is, what do you do about it? And 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 a 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 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.

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 building.

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 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 to exist in, except your actual human situation is even worse than that.

Because there, you knew that COVID 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 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 something happened to lessen their social status.

they survived and reproduced those who just took it in stride 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 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 the anger bursts into a flame, it's going to 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.

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 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 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? 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 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 your setbacks. The setbacks themselves can be tiny little things like somebody making an offhanded remark about your appearance or about something you did. That's the setback. And then what does the harm is you dwelling on that, you tossing and turning on that.

That's an important insight 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 an author and you put out work publicly. 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

that 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 and Zoom interviews and so on. And what I found is you can do it in such a way that people can chat while 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 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 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...

You know, trying to respond, trying to work around it. Praise, I tend to shrug off. I'm pretty good about shrugging off praise. If I get a positive email, I will thank the person who sent it. But a stoic is going to be very picky about 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 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. Right.

But praise from a variety of people, I don't know. What are their values? In fact, I have 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've got to correct that.

Now with social media, and I have as little social media in my life 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 day to day. And the thing is that you don't know who these people are. And yet, 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 there are people who can do that. I've certainly seen people who don't even look at their Twitter feeds. 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. Well, 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, as a kind of a guiding technique, sometimes when I'm really stymied, I will ask myself, what would Seneca do under these circumstances? If I'm lying in bed, I ask myself, what would Marcus Aurelius do, right? And he famously said, you know, is it my purpose here to

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 row competitively. I skull more precisely. That's with two oars rather than one oar.

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 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 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.

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. 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 you harm, and you are consciously going out of your way to expose yourself, well, then it's on you. Now, in other cases, you have relatives, you have coworkers and so on. You can't quite do that. But yeah, so this notion of people who just have different values or are having a different game for them to approve of you is a bad sign. The

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 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, mimeographed

papers and put it in people's mailboxes. And people very quickly would have found out who it was. And 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 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 say 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 was involved in failing, for somebody to fail is

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 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. 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. Well, 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. 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, right?

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. There are people who came in ahead of you. 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 voices in my head. And

and to do the training, the physical training necessary to be out there.

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 something to be proud of. When you were saying that, it brought to mind, I often go for this 10-mile run where

where I go out five and I come back, but there's a point at about three and a half where I can take this shortcut and I can get home at about nine instead of 10. 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 instead

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. 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. Yeah.

Yep. Giving in to those voices encourages them hugely. You know, they live in the back closet of your mind and they're always trying. But you give them one big success, you know, where you actually do quit and

And it's like giving them superpowers. It's like you injected them with adrenaline or whatever, because after that, they're going to own you. So there are times when I do quit. There are times when I'm not proud of it when it happens. But 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. 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 realize that somebody has the ability to get under your skin, and 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 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 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 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 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 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 final solution there, but it really is 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 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 we go as parents about teaching our kids to be more stoic? I used to think that stoicism was a philosophy for older people.

in particular, really old people, people facing near death. I thought that that's the primary target for them. But then at age 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

are just a prime time for you to develop stoicism. Because that's when you really have 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 I haven't given it a whole lot of thought. I'm aware that there are some people who have, but just the whole notion that kids are a prime candidate for

You know, and other things like being grateful. And you have to be careful. You'd have to package it with kids in mind. But here would 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.

In other words, turn it around. So if somebody insults you, so here's one turnaround. 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 having whatever conversation you were 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 A Guide to the Good Life and 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.

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 be to slip into a coma. 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.

You know what? You can say what you want. And it's just words. It is simply words. Go ahead. Now, the thing is, you are wired to care very much about insults because, again, on the savannas 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 life. You felt 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 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 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 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 bone marrow.

some one germ lurking 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.

That's not literally a pound of literally dirt, 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 easygoing, 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. 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 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 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. Number one is you map out your options. So I'm actually at work on a project right now where I go into that in greater detail. You know, mapping out your options is

There will usually be the obvious thing to do, which might not be the optimal thing to do. And so one thing 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 is

And spend active thought laying out the options because there can be multiple options. So my wife and I, when we're trying to decide 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, 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 was open-minded but not skeptical. Before you knew it, their mind would be full of conspiracy theories and all sorts of strange stuff because there'd be all sorts of ideas flowing in without filter. Now imagine the opposite of that, somebody who was skeptical, highly skeptical about

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 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 one crystal of sugar into a super-saturated sugar solution, and that one tiny little crystal will grow into a massive,

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 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. 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 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 philosophies of life? Well, there is one, the skeptics. There's the Epicureans. There are numerous schools. These were schools in ancient Greece. So they had

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 kind of had to come up with a, you capture one corner of the market by coming up with one particular way 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 learned speaking skills. Might be the law. So 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. That's just the way it is. But then you realize, gosh, what would it be like if I had to have a product that

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 in it for a career. And there are people who are interested in law or politics who actually take philosophy. So it's curious we still have that aspect going.

So I regard myself primarily as a teacher. Professionally, I'm a teacher. And I regard my teaching as having two forms of outreach. I teach in the classroom.

And I teach through publications. 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 teaching. I reach a whole lot more people than I do in the classroom. And I get 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 that I'm reaching an audience, that's wonderful. How do you want to be remembered? Father, husband, and teacher. That would do it. So on my tombstone, if I have one, I would actually like to describe this somewhere. Um,

compost it down, spread in a tomato garden and be served as a tomato salad on some fine summer day. But if I did have a tombstone, 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. The Knowledge Project is produced by the team at Farnham 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 slash podcast. To get a transcript of this episode, go to fs.blog slash tribe or check out the show notes. Can you do me a small favor? Go online right now and share this episode with one friend who you think would love it. Thanks for listening and learning with us. Till next time.