Speaker 1: Would you like to hear your voice on an episode
Speaker 1: of The One You Feed? We sure would. Our five
Speaker 1: hundredth episode is coming up in May, and to celebrate,
Speaker 1: we'd like to feature listeners of the show during the episode.
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Speaker 1: one and leave us a voicemail. We're excited to celebrate
Speaker 1: this milestone with you, our dear listeners. Gosh, a newer
Speaker 1: model iPhone just came out, and if only I had
Speaker 1: extra money, I could get that. It's a recipe for
Speaker 1: a dissatisfied life. What's tragic is there's another way you
Speaker 1: can go where you're going to have maybe not more things,
Speaker 1: but more satisfaction, and that just seems like the obvious
Speaker 1: path to take. Welcome to the One You Feed. Throughout time,
Speaker 1: great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we
Speaker 1: have quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are
Speaker 1: what you think ring true, and yet for many of us,
Speaker 1: our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity,
Speaker 1: self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't
Speaker 1: have instead of what we do. We think things that
Speaker 1: hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not
Speaker 1: just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent,
Speaker 1: and creative effort to make a life worth living. This
Speaker 1: podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in
Speaker 1: the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks
Speaker 1: for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Professor
Speaker 1: William b Irvin from Right State University. He not only
Speaker 1: teaches things and writes about philosophy, but has adopted a
Speaker 1: philosophy for living, namely in the ancient philosophy known as Stoicism.
Speaker 1: William is the author of many books and publications, including
Speaker 1: the one discussed here, The Stoic Challenge, a philosopher's guide
Speaker 1: to becoming tougher, calmer, and more resilient. Hi, Bill, welcome
Speaker 1: to the show. Oh it's a pleasure to be here.
Speaker 1: Thank you for inviting me. I am really happy to
Speaker 1: have you on. We're going to be discussing your book
Speaker 1: The stoic challenge of Philosopher's guide to becoming tougher, calmer,
Speaker 1: and more resilient. And I've seen your name around for years.
Speaker 1: Whenever I'm looking at like what does it mean to
Speaker 1: live a good life? Like you pop up a lot.
Speaker 1: So I'm happy we're finally getting to have this conversation.
Speaker 1: And let's start like we always do with the wolf parable.
Speaker 1: In the parable, there is a grandparent who's talking with
Speaker 1: their grandchild and they say, in life, there are two
Speaker 1: wolves inside of us that are always a battle. One
Speaker 1: is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and
Speaker 1: bravery and love, and the others a bad wolf, which
Speaker 1: represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the
Speaker 1: grandchild stops and thinks about it for a second and
Speaker 1: looks up at their grandparents says, well, which one wins?
Speaker 1: And the grandparents says, the one you feed. So I'd
Speaker 1: like to start off by asking you what that parable
Speaker 1: means to you in your life and in the work
Speaker 1: that you do. Yeah, it's a great parable, And of
Speaker 1: course I'm going to side with you, know the things
Speaker 1: you do. What's the best way to be loved is
Speaker 1: to love? What's the best way to feel a sense
Speaker 1: of self worth. Be a kind person, be an understanding person.
Speaker 1: I have conversations in which you actually listen to what
Speaker 1: other people say. You don't simply wait until they're done talking,
Speaker 1: so you can reveal the truth to them. And you know,
Speaker 1: you describe the two wolves, and a lot of my
Speaker 1: research I've actually done a kind of a variation of that.
Speaker 1: So instead I described three different sources from which your
Speaker 1: desires can arise, and so you can put it into
Speaker 1: by a logical terms. You've got what has been called
Speaker 1: a triune brain, a brain with three parts. There's the
Speaker 1: reptile part that's responsible for reflexive actions, there's the mammalian
Speaker 1: part that's responsible for emotions, and there's a the human
Speaker 1: part that's responsible for the higher rational process. Now, I've
Speaker 1: been told by people who know their brain physiology better
Speaker 1: than I do that that's a a sort of a
Speaker 1: crude way to put it, but it makes this important point.
Speaker 1: And the important point is we're wired biologically to have
Speaker 1: these components in us. They've been there for literally millions
Speaker 1: of years, and it's a fact about us, you know,
Speaker 1: like our need for oxygen, and we also the next
Speaker 1: thing is we humans being so proud of ourselves, we think, well,
Speaker 1: you know, our rational component is in charge of these
Speaker 1: other components, except that guess what its simply isn't. Normally,
Speaker 1: it can have a certain degree of control over them,
Speaker 1: but it spends so much of its time making up
Speaker 1: clever reasons why you're got should be able to do
Speaker 1: what your gut wants to do, and that is get
Speaker 1: angry and clouder this guy right now. And it can say, oh, yes,
Speaker 1: you know, that's a sensible thing to do, or you know,
Speaker 1: for the emotional things too, it can come up with justifications,
Speaker 1: so it could be reasoning its way through the world,
Speaker 1: but it spends a lot of its time as a lackey,
Speaker 1: and it rationalizes its way through the world, and that's
Speaker 1: the cause of a lot of human misery. Yeah, there's
Speaker 1: a lot in what you said there, and trying to
Speaker 1: think of which direction I want to go first with that.
Speaker 1: One of the things that I was struck by in
Speaker 1: your work that came up a couple different times was
Speaker 1: this idea of you first reference it that I noticed
Speaker 1: in terms of anger, and you said, you know, the
Speaker 1: typical storyline is your anger. You have two choices. You
Speaker 1: can suppress your anger, or you can express your anger, right,
Speaker 1: but you pause it a third way, which is not
Speaker 1: to get angry in the first place. And I'd love
Speaker 1: to dive in there because, while I think makes a
Speaker 1: ton of sense, how do we start to head off
Speaker 1: an emotion before it even starts? Because that process is
Speaker 1: kind of like that. Yeah, it's quick, you know when anger,
Speaker 1: when you feel it in you, you know, you know,
Speaker 1: you can feel it starting to boil, and then it
Speaker 1: erupts within a matter of seconds. So you you got
Speaker 1: to act quickly. So in the book The Stoic Challenge,
Speaker 1: what I do is I describe these deeper emotions, these
Speaker 1: very destructive and negative emotions that lurk within you, and
Speaker 1: I described techniques developed by the ancient Stoic philosophers for
Speaker 1: not only kind of containing them, but for harnessing them
Speaker 1: and using them for good purposes, which is a real twist.
Speaker 1: The analogy here of psychologists named Jonathan Height last name
Speaker 1: spelled H. A I. D. T. Has this story about
Speaker 1: the mahout that's the man who sits behind the head
Speaker 1: of the elephant and by tapping the elephant can get
Speaker 1: the elephant to move tree. You know, things it's heavy
Speaker 1: construction equipment in some parts of the world. But of
Speaker 1: course the elephant could simply knock him off and trample
Speaker 1: him at will. But the mahout can actually control, can
Speaker 1: sort of say, okay, elephant, you've got all this power. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you can use it to trample those villagers, but hey,
Speaker 1: here's a log that needs to be moved, so let's
Speaker 1: do that instead. So the stoics came up with the idea,
Speaker 1: you can do that with those angry impulses, but you've
Speaker 1: got to act quickly because once the full anger is stirred,
Speaker 1: a game over. You know your your anger is gonna win,
Speaker 1: and your brain is, like I say, it's going to rationalize.
Speaker 1: It's not going to try to reason. You can't reason
Speaker 1: with the anger. You can't reason with your gut because
Speaker 1: your gut is irrational. It would be like trying to
Speaker 1: reason with a tree. You can't do it. So what
Speaker 1: can you do? Maybe divert it for better purposes. You know,
Speaker 1: in the analogy you just used of the elephant and
Speaker 1: the rider, that take that I got from that is
Speaker 1: very similar to yours, is that you know you've got
Speaker 1: the rider up there and he's trying to steer the elephant,
Speaker 1: and they say that the writer the analogy makes it
Speaker 1: sort of like your conscious brain. It's your conscious brain,
Speaker 1: and it it says, let's go this way, let's go
Speaker 1: that way. But if the elephant really wants to go
Speaker 1: a certain direction, the elephant is going to go that direction.
Speaker 1: And so the key is to train the elephant to
Speaker 1: go in the direction that you want it to go.
Speaker 1: And you know, this shows up a lot in stoic
Speaker 1: talk also about desire, which we're going to get to
Speaker 1: in a minute. It's about, you know, learning to desire
Speaker 1: quote unquote the right things. However, there's a lot of
Speaker 1: people who say that these lower if we want to
Speaker 1: call them lower mammalian reptile, these these other parts of
Speaker 1: our brain do have valuable information to give us, and
Speaker 1: then emotions often are valuable information. So how do you
Speaker 1: see the role of of rationality interplaying with the other
Speaker 1: parts of the brain in a way that is, I guess,
Speaker 1: for lack of a better word, harmonious. Yeah, that's a
Speaker 1: great question. So the whole question of the role emotion
Speaker 1: should play in your life. I think what would be
Speaker 1: really nightmarish is to be in a body that lacked
Speaker 1: an emotional sense, because that's the human experience. What does
Speaker 1: that mean? That means you could never fall in love? Well,
Speaker 1: you know, falling in love is one of the great
Speaker 1: human experiences. Being loved is wonderful, and it's what we're
Speaker 1: always looking for, is somebody who's going to love us.
Speaker 1: But the capacity to love is itself a wonderful power.
Speaker 1: It helps you get outside yourself. The ability to empathize
Speaker 1: with other people is a wonderful thing as well, And
Speaker 1: I wouldn't want to lose that one thing I've been
Speaker 1: paying attention to because I've reached a stage of life
Speaker 1: where I can be watching something, watching a movie, you know,
Speaker 1: and and they kind of string you along and then
Speaker 1: the emotional thing is delivered, and then the question is
Speaker 1: what do you do. Well, I don't want to choke up.
Speaker 1: I don't want to shed any tears. This is the
Speaker 1: what I was trained to do as a as a
Speaker 1: functional male, you know. Um. But now the interesting thing
Speaker 1: is it's a delightful moment, you know, where you're connecting
Speaker 1: with your humanity. I wouldn't want that to go away.
Speaker 1: So lately I've been watching and so if you watch
Speaker 1: enough documentaries and so on, you can see people being
Speaker 1: interviewed that break into that emotional state. You can see
Speaker 1: before your very eyes that the emotional state has been triggered.
Speaker 1: And what's interesting to me is they always apologize to
Speaker 1: the interviewer. You know, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Let's let
Speaker 1: me No, they shouldn't be sorry. They just had one
Speaker 1: of the key human experiences and you basically have to
Speaker 1: embrace it. So that whole notion of your emotions, you
Speaker 1: know what, You can use them to enrich your life,
Speaker 1: but of course they can also trample your life because
Speaker 1: some of the emotions are these terrible emotions like envy.
Speaker 1: You can be gripped with envy. It can distort you
Speaker 1: and it can transmogrify you into this monster. But it
Speaker 1: can also enrich your life. And you have some control
Speaker 1: over which of those directions. Like you say, you know
Speaker 1: which wolf are you gonna feed? You have some control.
Speaker 1: And the thing is you aren't taught by anybody in
Speaker 1: the normal course of life how to control it. But
Speaker 1: there have been some very wise individuals who have come
Speaker 1: up with suggestions on how to do that. And the
Speaker 1: Stoics were not alone in doing that, but I would
Speaker 1: say they are among those who did that. Yeah, my
Speaker 1: primary philosophical background, if you would call it such. I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm not trained in any real way, but has been
Speaker 1: a student of Buddhism for a lot of years. And
Speaker 1: you can't you can't read about Stoicism and no Buddhism
Speaker 1: and not see a lot of overlap. There are some differences, obviously,
Speaker 1: but but some of the core ideas are are very similar.
Speaker 1: There is an idea, you know, in Buddhism of wholesome
Speaker 1: and unwholesome emotion. What I've found interesting is as I
Speaker 1: look at Buddhism, as I look at psychology, as I
Speaker 1: read about Stoicism, one of the tensions that I talked
Speaker 1: about on this show a lot is kind of what
Speaker 1: we're talking about now. It's this tension of on one hand,
Speaker 1: you want to allow and feel the natural human emotions
Speaker 1: that come up, and you don't want to shut them off.
Speaker 1: You don't want to shame yourself, you don't want to
Speaker 1: drive them away, you want to allow them to be there.
Speaker 1: And there's a very clear sense in which they're like
Speaker 1: you said, we don't want to be slave to our emotions, right.
Speaker 1: There is a very clear sense in stoicism and Buddhism
Speaker 1: and cognitive behavioral therapy where we work with our thoughts
Speaker 1: and emotions in a skillful way. And I'm always kind
Speaker 1: of thinking about which tool to use at what time. Right,
Speaker 1: there's a time to let the human emotion come out
Speaker 1: and let it be there. There's time to go Wait,
Speaker 1: hang on, I'm perceiving this incorrectly. You know we're gonna
Speaker 1: get to your stoic test challenge here in a minute.
Speaker 1: But we use tools like framing and anchoring to to
Speaker 1: change the way we're seeing things. What's the right tool
Speaker 1: to use in what circumstances. And this may lead us
Speaker 1: into some of your work, your you and on decision making,
Speaker 1: or this may not even go there in that direction
Speaker 1: at all. But I'm kind of curious what you think
Speaker 1: about my very long question. Yeah, I'm going to break
Speaker 1: apart some of the parts of your question, and if
Speaker 1: they're any important ones, I leave out the connection between
Speaker 1: Buddhism and stoicism. I got into stoicism by way of Buddhism,
Speaker 1: which your sounds like, no, you couldn't possibly do that,
Speaker 1: But I got it in my mind that I was
Speaker 1: going to become as en Buddhist, and then it dawned
Speaker 1: on me that I could improve my academic standing by
Speaker 1: writing a book on that. And then to do that,
Speaker 1: I had to investigate Stoicism. And the shocker for me
Speaker 1: was they both were aimed at the same goal. They said,
Speaker 1: the goal of your life, the long term goal should
Speaker 1: be a life living a life of equanimity, of tranquility.
Speaker 1: But the word tranquility is dangerous word to use. So
Speaker 1: they had the same goal, but they had radically different
Speaker 1: strategies for attaining that goal. So if you want to
Speaker 1: be as in Buddhist, you're gonna do lots and lots
Speaker 1: of meditations. You're gonna actus solving Cohan's although if you
Speaker 1: have Zen Buddhists in your audience, they're gonna say he
Speaker 1: doesn't know what he's talking about. But you're going to
Speaker 1: take that route. And I think that is a route
Speaker 1: that can successfully be used. So I'm not putting downs
Speaker 1: in Buddhism. But then it came across the Stoics, who
Speaker 1: happened to have been the pre eminent psychologists of their
Speaker 1: time this would be the first century a d. And
Speaker 1: they came up with psychological strategies for reaching the same goal.
Speaker 1: Now one difference between the two, and the two are
Speaker 1: also compatible. I've gotten to know a Zen master in
Speaker 1: the United States named Henry Shookman s h u k
Speaker 1: m A Henry Uh. I asked him flat out it said,
Speaker 1: are these two compatible? And he kind of rolled his
Speaker 1: eyes back and said, well, of course, right. So, But
Speaker 1: the interesting thing is, if you're gonna give Zen Buddhism
Speaker 1: a fair try, it's a big undertaking. I'm a Zen practitioner,
Speaker 1: so I'm I know the drill. I've done hundreds of coons.
Speaker 1: It is an undertaking and and a worthwhile undertaking. What
Speaker 1: a long term undertaking? Stoicism My my sales pitch is
Speaker 1: on a three day weekend. You can learn enough about
Speaker 1: it and its strategies for you to be able to decide, hey,
Speaker 1: this is working for me, or hey this isn't working
Speaker 1: for me. I would call it as a lower price
Speaker 1: of admission. You can very quickly test drive it and
Speaker 1: find out whether it's going to work for you or not.
Speaker 1: But it's interesting that two so different approaches would be
Speaker 1: two different solutions to the same problem. And when I
Speaker 1: encounter stoics, I recommend that they try meditation simply because
Speaker 1: meditation is one way for you to get a front
Speaker 1: row seat to the operations of these deeper forces that
Speaker 1: we're talking about. And you know, typical first meditation as
Speaker 1: you try to empty your mind of all thoughts, well,
Speaker 1: you know, and I assign that to my students, and
Speaker 1: next time we meet, you know, I say, okay, did
Speaker 1: you try the experiment? You know? And they all say yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: And I'll call on one of them, how did it go?
Speaker 1: And he said, oh, it's easy. I emptied my mind
Speaker 1: of all thoughts. And I did that for five minutes.
Speaker 1: And I know then that he didn't do it because
Speaker 1: if you if you try it, you know, you think,
Speaker 1: first five seconds, for seven seconds, this is easy, and
Speaker 1: then you realize, oh, I'm thinking about what I'm going
Speaker 1: to have for dinner tonight, right, and uh, and they
Speaker 1: just keep flooding in and so you realize how your
Speaker 1: consciousness is a stage on which these different desires will
Speaker 1: trot out, or these different emotions, or these different resentments
Speaker 1: will trot out, and then you've got a choice of
Speaker 1: what do you do with them? Now? Do you act
Speaker 1: on them? And a lot of desires people act on
Speaker 1: them because they say well, it was in my mind,
Speaker 1: so it must be what I want. The answer is no.
Speaker 1: So well, one component of your brain that's very ancient
Speaker 1: has decided that you want and you know better than
Speaker 1: that you shouldn't want that. So many things in there
Speaker 1: that we could hit on. But to what I and
Speaker 1: to hit on is the practice of stoicism, because you
Speaker 1: do make a good point that Zen Buddhism is a practice.
Speaker 1: As an ongoing thing, we keep doing it, and some
Speaker 1: of the goals, particularly in Zen, are aiming even somewhere
Speaker 1: different than just tranquility or equanimity. But setting that aside,
Speaker 1: you know, you say that for a weekend, you can
Speaker 1: kind of, you know, go get the stoic thing in
Speaker 1: a weekend, right and agree totally, like you can get
Speaker 1: the basics of the philosophy very quickly. The place that
Speaker 1: I'd like to ask you about is it's one thing
Speaker 1: to have a philosophy that you read about and you
Speaker 1: shake your head in agreement with and you go, yeah,
Speaker 1: that makes sense. That's where I should live that way,
Speaker 1: that's the way I should think. It's an entirely different
Speaker 1: animal to actually bring that to mind in the moments
Speaker 1: of your life. And so I'd love to hear a
Speaker 1: little bit about you use this phrase a couple of
Speaker 1: times and books the practice of stoicism. So can we
Speaker 1: talk a little bit about what some of the practices
Speaker 1: are and how do people as they're on this path
Speaker 1: remember to actually practice in the moments that it matters most. Right.
Speaker 1: I consider myself a practicing stoic. I'm a twenty one
Speaker 1: century practicing stoic. So what does that mean? And I
Speaker 1: also have I get emails from people and they say,
Speaker 1: how do I know when I'm a stoic? And um,
Speaker 1: my reply is, well, are you practicing stoicism? Because that's
Speaker 1: as good as it gets. H. I know a woman
Speaker 1: who's a very skilled oboist, and at first I was
Speaker 1: puzzled because she had to practice for like an hour
Speaker 1: or two a day or maybe more than that. And
Speaker 1: I would kid her and I'd say, well, when are
Speaker 1: you going to learn it? And you know, she made
Speaker 1: it clear what you can kind of never do you
Speaker 1: practice it? And that's true of stoicism. So you're practicing,
Speaker 1: it means what you're using certain psychological strategy. And it's
Speaker 1: important that your listeners realize that this is not a religion.
Speaker 1: It's psychology in the sense that I'm interested in it.
Speaker 1: It's psychology. So there are practices like negative visualization where
Speaker 1: some odd moment in your day you don't have to
Speaker 1: sit down in a darkened room. You can do it
Speaker 1: in the middle of a crowd. It's perfectly worth doing there,
Speaker 1: and you take a moment to think about the things
Speaker 1: in your life that you value, and you allow yourself
Speaker 1: to have a flickering thought about if they suddenly ceased
Speaker 1: to be part of your life. You don't dwell on that.
Speaker 1: That would be a really good way to get deeply depressed,
Speaker 1: but you allow yourself to have a flickering thought about.
Speaker 1: How about losing your job, how about being told by
Speaker 1: your doctor that you have some kind of cancer. How
Speaker 1: about getting a phone call, Hey, your child has been
Speaker 1: involved in an accident. Right, figure out what is important
Speaker 1: to you, what you value. Now let yourself have that
Speaker 1: second or two where you really sort of let that
Speaker 1: sink in and now go about your business. And it
Speaker 1: can be a really transforming thing because the next time
Speaker 1: you encounter the child, instead of just sort of ignoring
Speaker 1: it so you can check your email, you might you know,
Speaker 1: pick the kid up and say thank you for being
Speaker 1: part of my life. This is this is wonderful. So
Speaker 1: it's easy to do, and the interesting thing is you
Speaker 1: can reapply as needed. I will go through that exercise
Speaker 1: maybe five times in the course of the day. Because
Speaker 1: the way we humans are wired, whatever we have, we
Speaker 1: start taking for granted. So we're always dissatisfied because as
Speaker 1: soon as our life kind of flattens out and we've
Speaker 1: got stuff, and then we say, well, this is good,
Speaker 1: but there's something that would be even better, and and
Speaker 1: then we we embark on that. So we spend lives
Speaker 1: of dissatisfaction when satisfaction is within our grasp. If only
Speaker 1: we would learn to appreciate the things we already have,
Speaker 1: and negative visualization is one way to do that. You
Speaker 1: have a line that I absolutely love about this. You say,
Speaker 1: one key to happiness then is to forestall the adaptation process.
Speaker 1: And the adaptation process that you're talking about is the
Speaker 1: exactly what you said. It's often referred to in psychology
Speaker 1: as hedonic adaptation. Basically means once I get something, I
Speaker 1: take it for granted. I mean there's a positive side
Speaker 1: to our adaptability also, which means we can adapt to
Speaker 1: very difficult things and we just Okay, now it's normal.
Speaker 1: But the downside is hedonic adaptation. We get something and
Speaker 1: we suddenly take it for granted. And I just love
Speaker 1: that line. Forestall the adaptation process. So negative visualization is
Speaker 1: one way to do that. Are there other stoic practices
Speaker 1: that help forestall the adaptation process? Yeah, let me tell
Speaker 1: you some others. But before do that, here's a personal
Speaker 1: revelation for you. Okay, okay, the guy who wrote the
Speaker 1: book on this, I've been a practicing Stoic for like
Speaker 1: nearly twenty years. Okay, So this was a few weeks ago.
Speaker 1: I was on a podcast that drove the sales of
Speaker 1: the Stoic Challenge book. And you know, on Amazon you
Speaker 1: can look up the ranking of a book. The lower
Speaker 1: the better. I mean, they have what ten million books,
Speaker 1: you know, so uh, to to get even to a
Speaker 1: thousand number of thousand, that's a major accomplishment. But I
Speaker 1: did a podcast and just idly checked and realized that
Speaker 1: the sales were improving dramatically. And so I watched the sales.
Speaker 1: Oh look at that, I'm number two hundred and sixteen.
Speaker 1: I watched you know, oh look I'm a hundred and thirty.
Speaker 1: I watched I was at a hundred, the hundred best
Speaker 1: selling book on Amazon, and this was far better by
Speaker 1: hundreds than I had ever been before. And then the
Speaker 1: next time I checked it was like at a hundred
Speaker 1: and seven, and I was thinking, oh, man, I wish
Speaker 1: I had hit double digits. In other words, I had
Speaker 1: that hundred, and what did I do? For a minute,
Speaker 1: there was the biggest thrill? And then what was the
Speaker 1: next thought that came into my mind? Ah, if only
Speaker 1: I had done one better than that, And that's crazy,
Speaker 1: I've got Oh I know it is. Yeah, yeah, so
Speaker 1: that's human. It's totally human. So then how does a
Speaker 1: stoic recognizing that, like recognizing what you just did? What's
Speaker 1: the practice then to sort of try and forced all
Speaker 1: that adaptation or reverse it in that case, because you
Speaker 1: kind of didn't even forestall it, right, it sort of happened,
Speaker 1: so now we're in reverse. Negative visualization is one such technique,
Speaker 1: because what you're doing is you're imagining the loss of
Speaker 1: things you value. So suppose you know, so you can
Speaker 1: you can go through all of these mind experiments. Suppose
Speaker 1: I hadn't been able to find a publisher for the book.
Speaker 1: Another way to think about it, is realized that for
Speaker 1: everything you do in life, there will be a last
Speaker 1: time you do it. There have been last times you've
Speaker 1: dialed a telephone, remember the good old days when we
Speaker 1: had dials, last time you played hop scotch, But there
Speaker 1: will be a last time you lay your head on
Speaker 1: the pillow, a last time you bring Now it's like
Speaker 1: negative visualization. You know somebody who will come to this
Speaker 1: and say, well, that's a recipe for depression. You're just
Speaker 1: having all of these negative thoughts. Shouldn't you try to
Speaker 1: keep out the negative thoughts? Isn't that the trick to
Speaker 1: being a happy person? And the stoics said, no, they
Speaker 1: should play a role in your life, but just a
Speaker 1: kind of a peripheral role where you consider them, because
Speaker 1: what it'll do is it'll make you more satisfied with
Speaker 1: the life that you're living. So, in this particular one,
Speaker 1: doing this exercise and thinking, you know, right now you
Speaker 1: and I are doing a podcast, and uh, you've done
Speaker 1: tons of them. I've seen and I've done a fair
Speaker 1: number as well. And so you can go through the
Speaker 1: podcast and you can think and doing another podcast, or
Speaker 1: you can go through it and realizing there will be
Speaker 1: a last podcast you do, there will be a last
Speaker 1: podcast you do. It has to be the case, because
Speaker 1: unfortunately we're we're mortal, and there will be a last
Speaker 1: podcast I do. And if you go into a podcast
Speaker 1: thinking those terms, it puts an entirely different spin on it.
Speaker 1: Another related exercise is there will be some time in
Speaker 1: your life should you live long enough, and I sincerely
Speaker 1: hope you do, where you'll look back on these as
Speaker 1: the as the good old days. Right, things happen, and
Speaker 1: right now you are living what some day to you
Speaker 1: will be the good old days. So am I suggesting
Speaker 1: that you fixate on death? No, not doing that. So
Speaker 1: so what's the point here? The point is to realize
Speaker 1: that life is a precious commodity simply because it has
Speaker 1: an end point. Right, there will be a last time.
Speaker 1: So think about the way a twenty year old approaches
Speaker 1: life compared to the way an eighty year old approaches life.
Speaker 1: So to a twenty year old, what's the value of today?
Speaker 1: You know, he can do the math on this and
Speaker 1: he can say, wow, let's say I've got thirty thousand
Speaker 1: days to live, probably, so this is one thirty thousands
Speaker 1: of my life. So this day means nothing. So what
Speaker 1: am I gonna do. I'm gonna play video games all
Speaker 1: day long. Take the eighty year old, you know, uh,
Speaker 1: And he says, Oh, I've got X number of days,
Speaker 1: and that number isn't so big, so this day is
Speaker 1: a good portion of those. So I'm gonna be thoughtful
Speaker 1: on how I spend this day. I'm not going to
Speaker 1: squander it. This day is going to be full of
Speaker 1: time well spent. I'm getting on in years myself. I
Speaker 1: recently had a seventieth birthday, and the striking thing is
Speaker 1: I noticed myself becoming less tolerant. You know, if you
Speaker 1: if you go to somebody to do something simple and
Speaker 1: they can't do it. And I realized part of that
Speaker 1: is I realized time is valuable in a way that
Speaker 1: it didn't used to be as a kid. So those
Speaker 1: seem like negative thoughts, but they can make you appreciate
Speaker 1: the moments in the abilities you have right now. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Buddhism has similar concepts. You know you're gonna die and
Speaker 1: you don't know when, So what do you do with that?
Speaker 1: You know, because the twenty year old might have thirty
Speaker 1: thousand more days, he might have three hours. He doesn't know,
Speaker 1: right we don't know, you know, so I may do
Speaker 1: five hundred more podcasts or this could be my last podcast.
Speaker 1: To your point, like very literally, it could be. Life
Speaker 1: is uncertain in that way. Here's an analogy for you.
Speaker 1: So suppose I gave you a vessel, a big jug
Speaker 1: and you wanted to be full. For it to be full,
Speaker 1: it has to have a maximum capacity, otherwise it can
Speaker 1: never be full. And you could say the same of
Speaker 1: a life. For a life to be full, it has
Speaker 1: to have a capacity. That is, there has to be
Speaker 1: a value of x to the number of days you've
Speaker 1: got left. I did a sort of philosophy of religion.
Speaker 1: Course we're talking about heaven. And the thing about heaven
Speaker 1: is it seems wonderful because how many days? What's the
Speaker 1: value of x? Infinite? So what are you gonna do?
Speaker 1: You're gonna waste every single day? How come? Because you
Speaker 1: got infinitely many of them? And to care that sounds
Speaker 1: like a recipe for a miserable existence because you had
Speaker 1: waste every day and on earth. If you're kind of
Speaker 1: a mindful and individual, you're not gonna waste it. You're
Speaker 1: gonna have time well spent, a life full of time
Speaker 1: well spent. Will be a life well spent. And when
Speaker 1: you are on your last days, you don't want to
Speaker 1: look back and say I had a chance at life
Speaker 1: and I wasted it. Do you want to say, no,
Speaker 1: I did good things, I did meaningful things. Let's use
Speaker 1: that as a place to pivot to desire what it
Speaker 1: is that we want because our actions tend to be
Speaker 1: geared at getting what we want, right, That is sort
Speaker 1: of the way that we go about things. You say
Speaker 1: that the easiest way for us to gain happiness is
Speaker 1: to learn how to want the things we already have.
Speaker 1: It feels to me like very much a Buddhist idea.
Speaker 1: There's this sense of yeah, be happy with what you have,
Speaker 1: and another tension that I often feel. I felt that
Speaker 1: in Buddhism is that sense of like, be happy with
Speaker 1: what you've got. You know, it's wanting things that you
Speaker 1: don't have that causes you to be unhappy. That strikes
Speaker 1: me as unalterably, fairly true thing to say, And it
Speaker 1: does also strike me that there seems to be a
Speaker 1: human desire for moving forward. Some of it is the
Speaker 1: adaptation we talked about, but some of it feels natural
Speaker 1: and healthy. Right, So, how do you think about the
Speaker 1: question of wanting what you have and balancing that, you know,
Speaker 1: being happy right where you are, with the desire for more, different, better,
Speaker 1: you know, in whatever way you want to phrase those up. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you're wired to want more because us. And this is
Speaker 1: evolutionary psychology. On the savannahs of Africa, a hundred thousand
Speaker 1: years ago, humans who were easily satisfied died. You know,
Speaker 1: if let's just imagine one of them was kind of
Speaker 1: blissed out and he said, Ah, the savannahs of Africa.
Speaker 1: I think I'm gonna sit here on this rock today
Speaker 1: and just take it all in and enjoy it. Oops,
Speaker 1: he became some lions lunch right, And the same thing
Speaker 1: back then that the struggle would have been what am
Speaker 1: I going to have for my next meal? Will there
Speaker 1: be a next meal? And so we're wired to always
Speaker 1: want more, to always try to improve our circumstances. Except
Speaker 1: where in a radically different environment. Now, you know, it
Speaker 1: isn't where's my next meal going to come from? It's
Speaker 1: whether I'm going to over eat once again? Can I
Speaker 1: hold off to my next meal before I have eat twinkies? Yeah? Yeah,
Speaker 1: So we're in a wildly different environment. Use the word happiness,
Speaker 1: and I've used it too, but I've become more careful
Speaker 1: about my use of happiness because I'm not quite sure
Speaker 1: anymore of what it means. I think it's something that
Speaker 1: is a byproduct of other things in your life. So
Speaker 1: to say you know that my goal is to become happy,
Speaker 1: I'm not sure that's a fully coherent notion. But one
Speaker 1: thing a word I'm I'm more comfortable using is satisfied
Speaker 1: being pleased. Okay, so that notion of being pleased with
Speaker 1: what you've already got that level of satisfaction. Uh. Now
Speaker 1: there are people who say you shouldn't settle for that,
Speaker 1: and to me, that's crazy talk because those people are
Speaker 1: saying you should go through life dissatisfied. And why because
Speaker 1: you have these desires within you and you should act
Speaker 1: on them. And then the thing is, well, that's just
Speaker 1: an accident. We're wired crazy because we were wired on
Speaker 1: the savannahs of Africa, and we now have rational component
Speaker 1: to our brain, and we should attempt to outthink those
Speaker 1: impulses that we have. We should put that brain to
Speaker 1: good work and try to get around them. You have
Speaker 1: an analogy I think is so good. You say, suppose
Speaker 1: you woke up. When we're in Discover, you were the
Speaker 1: last person on the earth, right, and in that situation,
Speaker 1: you could satisfy as many material desires as you want.
Speaker 1: You could drive any car you want, you could live
Speaker 1: in any house you want, You could have everything, and
Speaker 1: then would you still want it? So I love that
Speaker 1: analogy talk about how we go about getting clearer on wanting.
Speaker 1: And I'm putting this word in in quotation marks the
Speaker 1: right things, the things that do lead to satisfaction. What
Speaker 1: are those things? And then what's the retraining process look like? Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, because culturally we're just conditioned, to your point,
Speaker 1: more and more and more better, better, bigger, bigger, bigger, bigger, right,
Speaker 1: So there has to be some process that retrains that,
Speaker 1: it seems. So this would be in the book on
Speaker 1: Desire where I made the point we all want to
Speaker 1: be rich and famous. By rich, that means more affluent
Speaker 1: than the people around us, and by famous I mean,
Speaker 1: I guess I mean social status. And again there's an
Speaker 1: evolutionary reason for that. Our ancestors who are wired that
Speaker 1: way were more likely to survive and reproduce than those
Speaker 1: who weren't. So it's wired into us and it feels
Speaker 1: good when other people look up to us, when other
Speaker 1: people admire us. Oh, and you know what really feels
Speaker 1: good is when they envy us, which is terrible. Envy
Speaker 1: is one of the worst emotions there is. But we
Speaker 1: now have, as we said a minute ago, we're in
Speaker 1: a different environment than our ancestors were, and in the
Speaker 1: last twenty years were in a radically different environment because
Speaker 1: social media have come along. So there are now people
Speaker 1: who are living their lives to do what to get
Speaker 1: likes on Facebook, on Instagram, to get followers, and who
Speaker 1: are the people who are awarding them, uh, complete strangers
Speaker 1: who might have radically different values than they do, who
Speaker 1: might themselves to be living miserable lives. A few years back,
Speaker 1: my wife and I were in Paris. We went to
Speaker 1: see the Mona Lisa and it was just the most
Speaker 1: striking thing because people weren't looking at the Mona Lisa.
Speaker 1: What people were doing is doing selfies with the Mona
Speaker 1: Lisa in the background. And so what were they doing.
Speaker 1: They were spending this time in this museum posting stuff
Speaker 1: so they could create an impression, so other people could
Speaker 1: admire them. And that's craziness because you don't know these people,
Speaker 1: and and why should they play this role in your life.
Speaker 1: You're spending the one life you have to live trying
Speaker 1: to impress complete strangers. That's crazy, That's crazy. But here
Speaker 1: we are. And uh, I'm the outlier in talking this way,
Speaker 1: and I know that there are some people I want
Speaker 1: very very much to please. There are other people who
Speaker 1: if they like what I'm doing, I will rethink whatever
Speaker 1: it is I'm doing and think I've got such different
Speaker 1: values that I do that if they like what I'm doing,
Speaker 1: I'm doing something really raw. Right. I gotta gotta think
Speaker 1: this through again. Also, the desire for affluence. It's easy
Speaker 1: to go overboard on this. We're living in the dream
Speaker 1: world of our ancestors. You own right now, I will
Speaker 1: predict you own something that the richest man on the
Speaker 1: planet Earth could not have owned half a century ago.
Speaker 1: A good chance it's in your pocket. You call it
Speaker 1: your cell phone. You've got one, right, And the richest
Speaker 1: person on the planet, you know, a mountain of gold,
Speaker 1: could not have bought it him, that that device, and
Speaker 1: you've got it. And yet so how are you responding? Gosh,
Speaker 1: a newer model iPhone just came out, and if only
Speaker 1: I had extra money, I could get that. It's a
Speaker 1: recipe for a dissatisfied life. What's tragic is there's another
Speaker 1: way you can go where you're going to have maybe
Speaker 1: not more things, but more satisfaction. That just seems like
Speaker 1: the obvious path to take. So how do we change
Speaker 1: what we want? Because, like you say, I mean, I
Speaker 1: can hear, and I'm sure a lot of people listening
Speaker 1: can hear everything you're saying and go, I totally that
Speaker 1: makes complete sense to me, and yet I still find
Speaker 1: that I'm wanting. It's there, and I might think virtue
Speaker 1: is the way to be. I should want virtue. I
Speaker 1: read about it. It makes sense to me, and yet
Speaker 1: emotionally I'm still wired over here. So what's the process
Speaker 1: of unwinding the desire to the things that are crazy right,
Speaker 1: that don't lead to happiness, that don't lead or whatever
Speaker 1: word we want to use in its place, that don't
Speaker 1: lead to a good life, and beginning to want the
Speaker 1: things that do lead to a good life. One thing
Speaker 1: is you should be suspicious of the desires you find
Speaker 1: lurking in you. And one question. When you find a desire,
Speaker 1: because they float into your mind, it's they're like they're
Speaker 1: like viruses. They float in try to plant themselves in
Speaker 1: your mind and grow into full fledged desires. And so
Speaker 1: one of the things you've got to do is when
Speaker 1: you detect a desire, do a little bit of detective
Speaker 1: work where did this come from? So if you find
Speaker 1: yourself reading the car ads in the newspaper, you know
Speaker 1: you should stop and say, why am I doing this?
Speaker 1: I didn't choose to do this. I noticed that I'm
Speaker 1: doing this. I noticed that I have this desire for
Speaker 1: a new car. Do I really want to do this?
Speaker 1: And if I'm not the author of this desire, then
Speaker 1: why would I let some sales agencies somewhere take control
Speaker 1: of me and plant this in and shame on me
Speaker 1: for letting it grow. Now, As a Buddhist, one part
Speaker 1: of meditation is to recognize a thought within you, and
Speaker 1: you acknowledge it and you dismiss it, and you know,
Speaker 1: another rational strategy is to say, oh, you know, it's
Speaker 1: like I caught a cold, And in this case, I
Speaker 1: guess you can't just make the cold go away, but
Speaker 1: just recognize it for what it is. Another thing about
Speaker 1: desires is there are things that you might not of
Speaker 1: it in your control self control. It's a difficult thing
Speaker 1: to accomplish. And one thing, though, is you do have
Speaker 1: it in your power not to put the objects of
Speaker 1: your desire right in front of you. So, for instance,
Speaker 1: if you tell me that you're trying to lose weight,
Speaker 1: that that's your goal, but you're going off for a
Speaker 1: cup of coffee, then one thing you have complete control
Speaker 1: over is whether you get the cup of coffee at
Speaker 1: a donut shop or at someplace else, Because if you
Speaker 1: go to the donut shop, then those desires are going
Speaker 1: to become incredibly powerful and you're probably going to act
Speaker 1: on them. And so is the heart of this really
Speaker 1: recognizing that some desires lead to happiness and others don't,
Speaker 1: so being able to rationally see that and then, like
Speaker 1: you said, try and watch for the ones that we
Speaker 1: know don't lead to happiness and try to redirect ourselves
Speaker 1: to the ones that do. Yeah, Stoics and other ancient
Speaker 1: philosophers as well said, you should have a philosophy of life.
Speaker 1: You should have this grand goal that are aiming at.
Speaker 1: And because once you've got that, then you can fill
Speaker 1: in the lesser goals. And if you detect a goal
Speaker 1: in yourself, you can ask yourself. Is that more likely
Speaker 1: to lead me toward the grand goal or away from
Speaker 1: the grand goal? And if the grand goal is this
Speaker 1: equanimity or this tranquility, or this absence of negative emotions
Speaker 1: from you, then you look at the desire that's popped
Speaker 1: in and say, okay, if I act on this desire,
Speaker 1: will that take me toward that ultimate goal or away
Speaker 1: from it? Problem is, most people don't have a grand goal.
Speaker 1: What they do is they just wing it. Day to day.
Speaker 1: They make up stuff, and so tomorrow they undo what
Speaker 1: they accomplished today because the goal changed, because the goal
Speaker 1: changes from day to day. So to have a kind
Speaker 1: of a coherent hierarchy with at the top the grand
Speaker 1: goal and then below that the goals that are going
Speaker 1: to get you to that grand goal. And what would
Speaker 1: stoicism say the grand goal is or would it say?
Speaker 1: It would depend on who you are, They would say
Speaker 1: tranquility or equanimity. What's the successful life? It's a life
Speaker 1: that was full of positive emotions, like feelings of delight,
Speaker 1: like feelings of joy, like that rush of a sense
Speaker 1: of awe about the universe that we're in, and the
Speaker 1: avoidance of negative emotions like anger, like jealousy, like envy,
Speaker 1: like anxiety. So you just kind of do a weighing act. Okay,
Speaker 1: so I've got these negative emotions, I got the positive emotions.
Speaker 1: The positive are okay. In fact, I should try to
Speaker 1: fill my life with those, and then there's going to
Speaker 1: be certain actions you can do to increase the chance,
Speaker 1: you know, like loving, like being full of sympathy for
Speaker 1: the people around you. And then how do you avoid
Speaker 1: the negative emotions? Well, you know, just by trying to
Speaker 1: put yourself in somebody else's life, it becomes a lot
Speaker 1: harder to hate them. You know, you don't have to
Speaker 1: experience those emotions. So the stoics were rational. You know.
Speaker 1: Occasionally I get contacted by people who tell me they
Speaker 1: have these intense anxieties, and my reply is, stoics can't
Speaker 1: help you because they have rational strategies, and uh, an
Speaker 1: intense anxiety can be a biological phenomenon. If you're an addict, sorry,
Speaker 1: stoicism can't help you because it requires the very rational
Speaker 1: kind of strategy. Doesn't mean you have to have an
Speaker 1: i Q of two hundred, just means you have to
Speaker 1: be willing to get your head in the game. That's
Speaker 1: a really fascinating thing that you just said there that
Speaker 1: I'd like to explore a little bit more, which is, yeah,
Speaker 1: where does something like stoicism help? And this gets a
Speaker 1: little bit to what we hit on a little bit earlier,
Speaker 1: and we kind of moved out of it because there
Speaker 1: are a lot of interesting places to go, which was
Speaker 1: sort of how we work with emotion and thought and
Speaker 1: what we do because, as you're saying, stoicism is a
Speaker 1: rational thing, and oftentimes our emotions overtake our ability to
Speaker 1: be rational. You know, does stoicism have anything to say
Speaker 1: about how you work with a highly activated state of
Speaker 1: emotion like an anxiety, how you work with a very
Speaker 1: highly emotional state. So the book The Stoic Challenge is
Speaker 1: applied stoicism and it says life is challenging. In the
Speaker 1: course of our daily life, we encounter setbacks. Some of
Speaker 1: them are tiny, like we realize we run out of sugar, right.
Speaker 1: Some of them are big we get a diagnosis, you
Speaker 1: know that one of our kidneys is in trouble. So
Speaker 1: the setbacks and they are the leading cause of negative
Speaker 1: emotions that we experience. And that's sad because you know,
Speaker 1: when you experience the setback, your emotional response to the
Speaker 1: setback is likely to do you far more harm than
Speaker 1: the setback itself was. So you're you're driving to work
Speaker 1: and somebody cuts you off in traffic and you find
Speaker 1: yourself yelling at the other person angrily. Well, he can't
Speaker 1: hear you, he doesn't even know you're yelling. So who
Speaker 1: are you hurting? You're hurting yourself. And if that gets
Speaker 1: your day off to a bad start, you can spend
Speaker 1: the rest of the day in a bad mood. And
Speaker 1: if you let that happen, shame on you, because it's
Speaker 1: self inflicted misery. So what do you do? You instead
Speaker 1: treat it, So this is what I'm describing. You can
Speaker 1: reframe it. You can laugh it off. You know, you
Speaker 1: can treat it as a kind of a test where
Speaker 1: to pass the test, what you have to do is
Speaker 1: you have to come up with a workaround to the test,
Speaker 1: a successful workaround, and keep your cool as you do. So, Now,
Speaker 1: if you laugh something off, it actually is interesting because
Speaker 1: it turns what could be a negative experience into a
Speaker 1: positive experience. Somebody insults you, A great defense is to
Speaker 1: make a joke in response, because it will devastate the
Speaker 1: insult or they want to ruin your day, and you've
Speaker 1: just laughed at their at their expense, and you've protected
Speaker 1: yourself against the negative kind of emotions that the insult
Speaker 1: could trigger. I want to go into the Stoic test
Speaker 1: challenge a little bit more in a minute, because I
Speaker 1: think there's a lot of great stuff in there. I
Speaker 1: want to give you an example from my life over
Speaker 1: the last couple of days and just kind of hear
Speaker 1: your reaction to it. So, for whatever reason, I don't
Speaker 1: quite know what it is. I am a person who
Speaker 1: has dealt with depression over the years, but for whatever reason,
Speaker 1: the last several days I have just been more irritable
Speaker 1: than normal. And so I've had a couple of experiences
Speaker 1: where normally I would just do any of the number
Speaker 1: of things you just described, right, I'd be like, this
Speaker 1: is no big deal, Eric, let it go, and I
Speaker 1: would just let it go, or you've handled this before,
Speaker 1: don't worry about it, or laugh a little bit. But
Speaker 1: I found myself unable almost to do those things. Those
Speaker 1: things weren't working because I felt like there was some
Speaker 1: emotional energy that was stronger or darker or heavier than
Speaker 1: normal that made the strategies that work for me, when
Speaker 1: I'm in a okay place, harder to implement or actually ineffective. Yeah,
Speaker 1: once the reptilian feelings come into play, it's game off.
Speaker 1: You know, they're they're gonna take the high road. So
Speaker 1: a parallel thing in my life, I've gotten a lot
Speaker 1: better at sleeping than I used to. But I I
Speaker 1: now when I exercise, I need an APP. And I
Speaker 1: explained to my wife that when I wake up from
Speaker 1: an APP, I'm going to be quite crabby. That I
Speaker 1: need about twenty minutes and then I'll be my old,
Speaker 1: lovable self. But that first twenty minutes I'm going to
Speaker 1: be crabby. I will tell her I've just woken up
Speaker 1: from an APP and she should tread very lightly. I
Speaker 1: would appreciate it. And the interesting thing is I know
Speaker 1: that when I'm in that state, I can work. It's
Speaker 1: just really hard to keep your cool in that state.
Speaker 1: And that's a case where you aren't thinking clear, you
Speaker 1: know it's just not quite right. But anger is the
Speaker 1: more dramatic example, where you find yourself shouting and then
Speaker 1: you know you want to say, well, why am I
Speaker 1: doing this? And of course you shout even louder than
Speaker 1: So there are these inner forces that can break through,
Speaker 1: at which case your mind just says, okay, well I'm
Speaker 1: out of here. I'm gonna go into the back bedroom
Speaker 1: for a while. And when you calm down. So we
Speaker 1: are biological creatures. We have hormones. I mean another thing
Speaker 1: is just the hormone level. Once the hormones are there,
Speaker 1: you know where this that of neurons, right, And that
Speaker 1: would be weird enough, except that we're bathed in hormones,
Speaker 1: and you change the hormones and it affects what we think,
Speaker 1: it affects how we think. That's the heart of the
Speaker 1: question really that I'm wandering around and not articulating, great
Speaker 1: is that very thing? It's like, I feel the ability
Speaker 1: to be We all do this. Like there are times
Speaker 1: where it's like, yes, I can have some degree of equanimity,
Speaker 1: even in difficult circumstances, you know, like I'm just like, Wow,
Speaker 1: I'm I've got it going on, right, you know, And
Speaker 1: then another day, identical situation and I'm like, I'm not
Speaker 1: handling this well. I just often think like we're a
Speaker 1: bag of chemicals and we're trying to apply strategies to
Speaker 1: work with that bag of chemicals the best we can
Speaker 1: and I see this in Buddhism a lot. We talk
Speaker 1: about equanimity as the ultimate virtue, and then when people
Speaker 1: find that they're unable to have as much equanimity, they
Speaker 1: feel bad about themselves, when in reality they may actually
Speaker 1: be better at practicing equanimity than the person next to
Speaker 1: them who looks more equanimious, because they've got a harder
Speaker 1: internal battle to fight to get to that place. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and people who are anxiety written like for me to say, Okay,
Speaker 1: my goal for you, I'm gonna be the guru and
Speaker 1: and you're going to to be my follower. And our
Speaker 1: goal is to overcome our desire to breathe, you know,
Speaker 1: And you say, yes, Master, So how do I do it?
Speaker 1: And I said, We'll just stop breathing here. We're gonna
Speaker 1: put this bag over your head and then and then
Speaker 1: you just work with that. Biology does not allow that
Speaker 1: to happen. It's a simple matter of biology. You have
Speaker 1: this precious, powerful reasoning brain awash in this chemical fluid
Speaker 1: that can change from minute to minute. And if you
Speaker 1: want to see what happens, if you want to unleash,
Speaker 1: if you want to get your rational mind out of
Speaker 1: the picture and just see what your emotions and your
Speaker 1: heart and gut can do. Get drunk, the higher brain
Speaker 1: checks out and what's left and some people start crying
Speaker 1: when they get drunk. Some people start fighting when they
Speaker 1: get drunk because the head is out of the game.
Speaker 1: They make a cell phone. We talked about cell phones
Speaker 1: a minute ago. So cell phone is is ultimately rational calculator, right,
Speaker 1: and they're very careful all the circuitry to encase it,
Speaker 1: to isolate it from the outside world. So it's literally
Speaker 1: true that you can take a modern cell phone you
Speaker 1: couldn't do the US five years ago. You can take
Speaker 1: it and drop it in a picture of beer and
Speaker 1: pull it out and it will function just as well.
Speaker 1: That didn't used to be the case. I know that
Speaker 1: because my son, when he was a teenager, dropped his
Speaker 1: cell phone in a couple of lemonade. We tried dramatic measures,
Speaker 1: but we could not bring it back to life. So
Speaker 1: they know, you know, the environment. So here you've got
Speaker 1: this human brain in this pool of changeable chemicals that
Speaker 1: will affect how it works. But that's evolution, you know,
Speaker 1: That's how it works. And so we do the best
Speaker 1: we can with the tools we have. Essentially, yes, I
Speaker 1: can't let you go without talking about another of my
Speaker 1: favorite topics that you've written about to a certain extent,
Speaker 1: And I've often said that I think the Serenity Prayer
Speaker 1: is one of the wisest things ever written. Right, we
Speaker 1: accept the things we cannot change, we change the things
Speaker 1: we can. We try and have the wisdom to know
Speaker 1: the difference. Stoics talk about this also, They talk about
Speaker 1: a dichotomy of control. Things we can control, things we
Speaker 1: can't control. You, in what seems to me to be
Speaker 1: a very wise thing, created the trichotomy of control. Can
Speaker 1: you talk a little bit about that. Yeah, First, the
Speaker 1: Serenity prayer is mid twentieth century Reinhold Neiber, I think
Speaker 1: is the person who came up with it. It's a
Speaker 1: total rip off of the Stoics, in particular the one
Speaker 1: called Epictetus who came up with it. But it's a
Speaker 1: good rip off because it's gotten a lot of my
Speaker 1: leg and spread the word. It's helped. So Epictetus said
Speaker 1: there are things you can control and things you can't control,
Speaker 1: and that's called the dichotomy of control, and I I thought, well,
Speaker 1: you know, that can be a bit misleading, because then
Speaker 1: people will say, Okay, if I can't control something, Epictetus says,
Speaker 1: just don't worry about it. Well, I can't control whether
Speaker 1: I keep my job, so I just won't worry about it.
Speaker 1: I'll just do whatever I want. So I suggested that
Speaker 1: you should think of life in terms of there's things
Speaker 1: you have absolute control over, like your values, you get
Speaker 1: to choose them. Okay, like your character you get to
Speaker 1: choose that. There are things you have absolutely no control over,
Speaker 1: like whether it's going to rain tomorrow you just can't control.
Speaker 1: But then there's this beautiful, sweet middle section of things
Speaker 1: you have some but not complete control over. So I
Speaker 1: describe it in terms of a tennis match. So suppose
Speaker 1: your scheduled to play a tennis match against your arch
Speaker 1: rival in a week. So what can you control. Well,
Speaker 1: you can control how hard you train, you can control
Speaker 1: how you train, you can control the strategy you go
Speaker 1: into the game with. You can control what you eat
Speaker 1: the day before the game, So that's what you should
Speaker 1: focus your attention on. What you don't have control over
Speaker 1: is how the other person trains the strategy they have,
Speaker 1: So you shouldn't be thinking so much about those. But
Speaker 1: it's the middle ground where you have some but not
Speaker 1: complete control, like during the game, how hard you play,
Speaker 1: like during the game, whether you change your strategies. So
Speaker 1: you should certainly devote attention to things you have complete
Speaker 1: control all over. You should also devote attention to things
Speaker 1: you have some control over but not complete. But this
Speaker 1: last thing, you know what, if you took advantage, if
Speaker 1: you did everything you had some control over as well
Speaker 1: as you could, and you lost the game anyway, probably
Speaker 1: the other person was better than you and a story,
Speaker 1: So should you feel that you failed? Well, in one sense,
Speaker 1: obviously you lost the game, but in another sense, you
Speaker 1: did the best you could. And there's a saying for that.
Speaker 1: You did what you could with what you had where
Speaker 1: you were, and that's all you can ever do in life.
Speaker 1: And if you do that, you walk away. You should
Speaker 1: be proud. You should be proud. I took what I
Speaker 1: had and I did the best I could with it,
Speaker 1: and it didn't pan out this time. But if I
Speaker 1: go through my life with that in mind, with that
Speaker 1: saying in mind, do what you can with what you've
Speaker 1: got where you are, in the long run, my life
Speaker 1: is probably going to be much better spent than if
Speaker 1: I didn't follow that advice if whenever something bad happened,
Speaker 1: if I simply played the role of victim and wallowed
Speaker 1: and said, everybody pity me, No, do your best. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I've always loved that phrase. I think I've heard it
Speaker 1: attributed or something like it to Arthur Ash. But yeah,
Speaker 1: I think that's so true. And I love that you
Speaker 1: talk about that third category because the serenity prayer, I've
Speaker 1: often said, is very wise, but when people talk about it,
Speaker 1: they set it up in these really sort of silly ways,
Speaker 1: like well, I can't control the weather, but I can
Speaker 1: control what sweater I wear today, as if it's easy
Speaker 1: to figure out. And it's that last line for me,
Speaker 1: that's the payoff, the wisdom to know the difference, and
Speaker 1: that seems to be the part that's a little bit trickier.
Speaker 1: And that's why I love how you introduce this sense
Speaker 1: of like that, Yeah, there's areas we have influence. You know,
Speaker 1: I cannot control my partner. I cannot control what what
Speaker 1: she's going to do. I do have influence on our relationship,
Speaker 1: you know, to say that I don't would be silly.
Speaker 1: You know, the the way I behave does influence the
Speaker 1: way our relationship goes so I love that trichotomy of control.
Speaker 1: You and I are going to talk a little bit
Speaker 1: more in the post show conversation, more about the Stoic
Speaker 1: test strategy and decision making. So listeners, if you'd like
Speaker 1: to get access to lots of great post show conversations,
Speaker 1: add free episodes, a special episode I do each week
Speaker 1: called Teaching Song and a Poem where I share a
Speaker 1: song I love, a poem I love, and I try
Speaker 1: and dispense some bit of wisdom. You can get all
Speaker 1: that and other benefits it when you feed dot net
Speaker 1: slash join Bill. Thank you so much. I've really enjoyed this.
Speaker 1: Lots of great stuff. Oh you're very welcome. I've had
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