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Mahmoud Rasmi on Philosophy for Business Leaders (Episode 102)
585 Plays1 year ago
In this episode, Caleb speaks with Mahmoud Rasmi, a former philosophy professor from Lebanon, on philosophy, business, and the importance of asking questions well.
Philosophy for Business Leaders: https://amzn.to/3NeQ7gi
https://twitter.com/Decafquest
(03:04) Getting Into Philosophy
(12:26) Losing Your Business
(14:11) Philosophy vs Critical Thinking
(25:23) Are Philosophers The Best Thinkers?
(32:09) Getting Down to Business
(38:46) Asking Questions
(48:49) Leaving Academic Philosophy
(54:44) Shifting Perspective
(58:22) Stoa
***
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Transcript
Introduction to Living a Good Life and Philosophy
00:00:00
Speaker
If ultimately it's about living a good life, that's your, you are asking yourself the question, how should I live a good life and what is a good life, et cetera. At some point we, we get drowned by all these, by, by life in general. And then like in my case, right, particularly comes to philosophy as at first, as a response to existential questions I had versus philosophy as this abstract academic thing I did as a job.
00:00:29
Speaker
Yeah, it's at some point I had to ask myself, what am I doing? Is this how I want to continue?
Introduction to Mahmoud Marashmi and His Academic Journey
00:00:37
Speaker
Welcome to Stoa Conversations. Today I am speaking with Mahmoud Marashmi, a former philosophy professor in Lebanon, researcher and consultant focusing on philosophy and cultural policy. He recently wrote the book.
00:00:55
Speaker
philosophy for business leaders, which I believe will, as of the release of this podcast, just have been released. Well, thanks for joining. Glad to meet you. Thank you for the invitation. I'm super excited about our conversation today.
00:01:12
Speaker
Cool, cool. Well, let's start with this broad question. What's your story? Interesting question. So when I went into undergrad studies, I really didn't know what I wanted to study. I mean, I didn't know what to major in.
00:01:29
Speaker
And I just took several courses, as I mentioned, organic chemistry, biology, math, and then I took a couple of English and cultural studies courses. And then for some reason I thought to myself, well, I really want to understand what a stock is.
00:01:49
Speaker
So I thought maybe finance is the way to go. So I decided, okay, maybe I'm going to major in finance. So it was a business administration, banking and finance. I signed up for a managerial finance course and then other business courses. And I thought to myself, I really like this subject, so I might as well major in it.
00:02:07
Speaker
Then fast forward a couple of years, I graduated with finance and a minor in philosophy. I thought to myself, I don't really understand finance as well as I thought I did. And I had so many questions and I thought that philosophy would give me the answers. So I decided to do a master's and a PhD in philosophy. I eventually became a philosophy professor, went back to Lebanon where I am from. I did my PhD and master's in Spain.
00:02:38
Speaker
And I taught philosophy for seven years.
00:02:42
Speaker
And then I noticed that academia was not my thing. So I decided to quit and I started doing my own thing. So currently for the past three years, I've been teaching philosophy for philosophy enthusiasts online synchronously. And I've been doing, as you mentioned, some consulting work in cultural policy and the cultural sector
Exploring Existentialism and the Role of Philosophy
00:03:04
Speaker
in general. What were some of the philosophers that first engaged you or sort of first captured you or drove that interest in philosophy?
00:03:13
Speaker
So the first ever philosophy course I took at university was intro to philosophy. And I don't really remember much about that course except for Kafka, because we read the metamorphosis and it stuck with me. And I had before that, when I was 15 or something read Sophie's world.
00:03:35
Speaker
And this is the most cliché kind of story ever. And then for some reason I thought to myself, I really like philosophy. I never thought I would study it, but I enjoyed the subject.
00:03:48
Speaker
the first not philosopher but philosophical school of thought that actually resonated with me was existentialism and it was when i took the second philosophy course in college which was existentialism and literature that was when i got exposed to it
00:04:07
Speaker
Sartre Heidegger and all the other literary existentialists, we even read Bulgakov, so more than a philosopher it was this school of thought, like existentialism struck a chord with me.
00:04:22
Speaker
Yeah, that makes sense to me. If I think about how I got interested in philosophy, it was those questions that concern the philosophy of life. How do you live? What are the purpose of life? So for me, it was, I was also interested in the existentialists. I loved Camus early on, but also this question of, does God exist? And that question mattered because if God exists, that would
00:04:45
Speaker
change how one ought to live was at least one of my key assumptions, right? So diving into debates on that front, especially with this eye of overarching purpose. How should one live? How should I spend my time? Was it your major concern? So was it the main reason why you did philosophy in your case? Because I know you studied philosophy as well.
00:05:13
Speaker
That was one of the key questions, yeah, especially early on. I think I discovered through looking into debates about God's existence, a whole other world of philosophy, because of course you have classic philosophers takes different arguments from philosophers like
00:05:33
Speaker
Aquinas, you've got David Hume. But of course, these philosophers have thoughts on so many other matters other than the religious ones that are also very interesting. So I think it's through that question that I found, oh, there's a much larger field in philosophy of questions on epistemology, questions about ethics and politics.
00:05:53
Speaker
precisely. So like you got into philosophy because it was driven more by an existential kind of quest of some sort instead of the abstract fear of argumentation within the philosophical world. Based on my kind of observations, there are
00:06:15
Speaker
And I'm simplifying here, two kinds of people who study philosophy when they're in college or who take philosophy courses, also I've taught for seven years, you have the people who love the debate and they want to argue about everything.
Philosophy's Influence on Critical Thinking and Mindset
00:06:29
Speaker
And so for that, just mastering the logical aspect of the argumentation and then nitpicking on your argument.
00:06:36
Speaker
is the reason why they go into philosophy in the first place and then you have the other side and they don't have to be mutually exclusive but it's the other side is more concerned with as you said questions about like what does it all mean how should I be living my life is there something out there
00:06:57
Speaker
that is greater than us? Is there a God? Is it something else? What is it? And they're really concerned with these questions. And so it's more existential for them. And some people are concerned about death and they have all these questions.
00:07:15
Speaker
they're just by anxiety and, and stress of some sort. And so, yeah, it's, it's just interesting to see these two different sides of the same coin or less. Yeah. It sounds like you're maybe also more on the existential side, at least initially that that would have drove your interest. And I even wrote an article about it back in the day, like in 2019, I think it was titled war and the awareness of death.
00:07:44
Speaker
absent, kind of relevant even today. But then in my case, this is also one of the reasons why I signed up for a philosophy course, particularly existentialism. Something about it just sounded irrelevant to me, but yeah, I had lived through the 06 war and, you know,
00:08:08
Speaker
bombs and destruction everywhere and you see and you hear and that's just a terrifying experience and you think to yourself, everything is just fragile, right? So you start asking yourself questions. It doesn't have to be war, it doesn't have to be finance, whatever it is, but then yeah, driven by more concrete existential questions and concerns. Right, right.
00:08:38
Speaker
To what extent do you think philosophy is served as a practical solution to some of these problems or questions that emerge or becomes a pursuit that's done more for its own sake, right? It almost becomes, once you start, it takes on its own momentum. How do you think about that? Yeah, interesting question.
00:09:06
Speaker
And I also mentioned that in the book, after seven years of teaching philosophy in an academic setting, I noticed that
00:09:18
Speaker
I philosophy became more of an object of study for me. So it was, I was doing philosophy for philosophy's sake, not because it solved any kind of problem I had. And I had forgotten about a philosophical mindset or what had, why I had gotten into philosophy in the first place.
00:09:38
Speaker
So I noticed that with time, things were becoming more abstract for me. And without noticing it, I became ever more stressed and frustrated and bored and all the qualifiers you could think of. So I think the reason
00:10:02
Speaker
Like it depends because I also don't want to generalize, right? If you get into philosophy because you love all that abstract kind of way of doing things, great for you. If you're into academia, for me personally, I noticed that philosophy was something else. It wasn't just about studying who said what it was about how this it's to me and how I can use it and implement it in my life in order to live some sort of a better life or a more meaningful life.
00:10:33
Speaker
Once I noticed that, I started reframing how I approached philosophy. So why am I reading philosophy? Is it because I wanted to publish more articles, academic articles, maybe no one will read and I don't even enjoy writing them? Or is it because I want to read philosophy for, for my own sake for, to see how this can help me?
00:10:53
Speaker
And so in so far as practicality goes, philosophy can be practical and useful in helping us navigate problems we have in our life. But it doesn't translate directly into your everyday life. It's just a mindset that you cultivate with mental models and concepts and tools and examples and ways
00:11:21
Speaker
that other philosophers thought about things that would give you a different perspective, that would help you navigate the problems that you're facing in life. So it's more of a, I don't see it as a formulaic kind of study. It's more of a, okay, let me see what this person said and how it's relevant to me. You develop and cultivate this mindset and then indirectly it becomes translate, it translates into your life.
00:11:50
Speaker
More of a, I give the example of, as though you go to the gym, the left muscles, right? The gym is not useful as such, but it just helps you build your strength in order to become, uh, you know, more agile and more fit so that you can carry out a healthy, uh, life. Right. Right. Yeah. Build some of those general capabilities or capacities as opposed to be not.
00:12:17
Speaker
or at least plausibly being a solution to a specific, specific problem like whatever it is.
00:12:26
Speaker
Uh, yeah, so I see it more of a, yeah, basically it's just a mindset and I'm speaking generally here because then we can get into, uh, particularities, but it doesn't matter which, for example, if, um, I give the example of, uh, Zeno, right. Uh, Zeno of CTM, he was the founder of, uh, stoicism. He allegedly had a shipwreck, lost his business. Right. And so he was facing a problem. He had lost everything.
00:12:58
Speaker
And by chance he happened, so he asked people around. He wanted to know what he can do. He wanted to study something else, do something else. They told him to follow a particular philosopher. He got into philosophy. He started studying all the different schools of thought back in the day, but nothing really spoke to him. The guy had lost his business and he had a shipwreck.
00:13:24
Speaker
and all the other schools of thought were discussing a subject that was irrelevant to him. And so he thought to himself, okay, let me see what these people have to say, and then went on and founded his own school of thought in order to respond to the problem that he was facing.
00:13:44
Speaker
So if you're experiencing a business problem, maybe Zeno would be more relevant to you and say Descartes, right? So philosophy is like a broad kind of topic and it can be useful. And so far as you match your problem with maybe a particular school of thought or a particular philosopher or a particular mental model or idea, that's how at least I view it.
00:14:11
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. Well, how do you think about contrasting the philosophical mindset with improving critical thinking generally?
Philosophy's Application in Business and Problem-Solving
00:14:17
Speaker
Because of course, different people are thinking about how to think better at a level that is similar to philosophy. You might identify a particular cognitive biases or think about what kinds of habits would be epistemically virtuous, where that's improving your ability to pursue knowledge. To what extent does
00:14:40
Speaker
philosophy contrasts with improving critical thinking generally. How do you think about that? Or I should say the philosophical mindset to be more precise. Does it contrast? Well, it may not.
00:14:54
Speaker
Yeah, it just adds to it. So certain ways of doing philosophy, for example, if you look at Plato's dialogues, if you look at a few things that, in this case, Descartes or Hume wrote, we can get into the details. So there's a
00:15:16
Speaker
a way of doing philosophy that also helps you improve your critical thinking. Like for example, asking questions, learning how to ask the right questions, more or less trying to, as you said, understand where your biases are coming from, confirmation biases, so philosophy teaches you to
00:15:39
Speaker
scrutinize your beliefs and assumptions, look at a particular issue that you're thinking about from different perspectives, engaging in a dialogue with others, and of course, the different forms of and modes of argumentation.
00:15:55
Speaker
This is a huge kind of topic, but it does help you improve your critical thinking by doing all these things. And so for example, if you want to look at how to ask questions and how to improve or your, your perspective taking when it comes to a particular subject, I would direct you to a particular dialogue by Plato to see how it is done.
00:16:21
Speaker
And, or different modes of thinking, like where you can take the cart for, for example, or human, they discuss deductive versus inductive reasoning and the problems of each, et cetera, et cetera. So, so yeah, it's, it's the, in this case, we would be looking at, at the form of doing philosophy more so than the content. So you look at, this is how it improves your critical thinking. So what did Socrates do? What did Plato do? What did the cart do? What did?
00:16:47
Speaker
Cume do what did the Stoics do etc etc and you see how they did things and approached these problems and by examining their writings and how they did things it Indirectly kind of improves your critical thinking like you're learning different methods and ways of arguing having conversations, etc. I Don't know if this answers your your question, but what do you think?
00:17:16
Speaker
Well, I think maybe philosophy is almost broader if I think about improving critical thinking. Usually that's in the context of solving particular problems that are going to be more applied. So when you might hear this in a course context, it's going to be related to business.
00:17:45
Speaker
issues, how do I figure out what's really going on here? How do I figure out what's the most profitable move, most strategic move at this point using these tools from critical thinking? If you apply it to politics, how do I think about ensuring that my political prejudices are blinding me? What are the best sources? How do I think about questions at that level? And perhaps philosophy is even stepping back.
00:18:10
Speaker
one of course it's a part critical thinking is a part of philosophy of course but thinking about you know fundamentally how do things hang together and philosophy of course so many different questions but if i think about in the platonic dialogues we have the euphifera and questions about
00:18:32
Speaker
what is good is something good because the gods say it is so, or do the gods merely recognize it as good is one way to formulate the main sort of discussion of that dialogue. And that's sort of at a level of even higher abstraction than what many people are thinking about when it comes to sort of thinking about critical thinking, applying it to a specific
00:18:55
Speaker
problem. And that, I suppose, helps you approach this broad issue of coming back to this existential theme using philosophy
00:19:06
Speaker
at least how I think about it as a way of life, thinking about philosophy as a way of life. What is a good life? How do you achieve it? And then filling out some of the details as you make things more concrete. Perhaps that initial difference is more abstract, more fundamental.
00:19:30
Speaker
So basically you see critical thinking as more applied than abstract. So it's critical thinking in this case is how you solve particular problems versus philosophical mindset would be a level higher that I understand that correctly.
00:19:52
Speaker
I think so. Yeah, that's I think that's how I would see it. See, this is the thing. This is why I was saying so to maybe clarify this point. And in this case, a philosophical mindset basically broadens your, your view. And so it does improve your critical thinking because you, you look at
00:20:11
Speaker
bigger picture than you originally would and so you ask questions that at first you might not or you may not have considered at first or you may not even think about etc etc so it's yeah it's it does give you I mean because you're exposed to different ways of approaching a particular problem
00:20:34
Speaker
Even if the problem is related to a big question like how to live a good life, it's just looking at many people attempting to answer this question and to work it out and to try to figure out how to live a better life or how to apply philosophy as a way of life.
00:20:56
Speaker
or it kind of helps you widen your perspective, even without intentionally trying to do so. By just getting exposed to, let's say, stoicism, Epicureanism, skepticism, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, it's just where we mentioned like five, six at different schools of thought here, and they are enough for you
00:21:26
Speaker
just change the way you look at problems in general. So it does not necessarily improve your critical thinking by telling you or by making you a more concrete kind of problem solver. It just helps you approach these problems in a different way.
00:21:48
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's a good point because it gives you these different models. Like you're not always just going immediately to some abstract issue, but you're thinking about, how would Epictetus approach this question, given what we know about him? How would Socrates approach this issue, given what we can see in the dialogues? And in that way, philosophy takes on almost a more concrete character where it's often done in dialogue, you have
00:22:16
Speaker
These examples, of course, of philosophers thinking through problems influenced by their personality, their historical period, what have you, and that way it provides models living concrete lives, I suppose, that we can learn from.
00:22:37
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. I do like the the symposium Plato symposium comes to mind because it's it's quite interesting how at least in what Plato does he's trying to get people to not adopt the view of the problems or the issues they're thinking about so this dialogue the symposium you have a group of people who
00:23:04
Speaker
are invited
00:23:20
Speaker
a speech about what love is and so here you have the doctor trying to define love as you know the physical manifestation of loves and in modern day terms you would be talking about all sorts of hormones and neurotransmitters and whatever and the lawyer would try to define love in modern day terms you know uh manage or
00:23:44
Speaker
being having a boyfriend, girlfriend, whatever it is. And then you have the tragedian defining love by using a tragedy, the comedian by giving a comic or a comedic account, et cetera, et cetera. And we tend to do that in our lives. As you said, you're influenced by the context, by your background, by your specialty, et cetera. So if you're a doctor, you would look at a particular problem
00:24:10
Speaker
through your medical lens, if you're a lawyer through the lens of the law, etc. And here comes Plato writing a dialogue telling us that's 2500 years ago.
00:24:25
Speaker
Maybe you have a narrow perspective in this case. Maybe it's more than that. Have you ever attempted to think about a particular issue by shifting your perspective, by looking at things, by asking different questions, by seeing what other people think about it and how they define it?
00:24:47
Speaker
In that sense, I see it as something that improves critical thinking, not as you said directly, but it just goes one step further, as you said, because in this case, if you now want to solve a problem, you're not only thinking from the narrow perspective of your specialty, let's say you're a coder, and I want to ask you about this, let your studies philosophy and you code, et cetera.
00:25:13
Speaker
but you have a wider perspective, so you may be more equipped with different models to solve the problems that you face. Would that suggest that if you're thinking about
00:25:28
Speaker
what communities include the most skilled thinkers or intellectuals that you would expect those communities to be full of philosophers. So if we look around today, we should expect to see people who are philosophers with some of the best opinions in the sense that they most capture reality about
00:25:53
Speaker
maybe whether it's investing or political matters or of course other matters that are related to the things we care about like ethics and our social norms and so on. Do you think that's right or what do you think about that?
00:26:13
Speaker
The assumption here is that someone who not necessarily studied philosophy in college, but someone who has a philosophy background would make or would be
00:26:32
Speaker
not necessarily more successful, but at least help their community be more successful. Is that the assumption? Yeah. Well, I suppose, so both of us are saying, look, because it's tricky, like I'm, this is the thing is like, what is it, is it, what are we trying to qualify them with? Are they more successful or did they just improve their community or they, they add a different flavor?
00:26:57
Speaker
Yeah. Well, I suppose if we think the philosophical mindset is broader than critical thinking, should we expect philosophers to in some sense be more skilled thinkers, communities of people who are full of philosophers to be more skilled? Perhaps as people who have this philosophical mindset, maybe they didn't study philosophy.
00:27:22
Speaker
uh strictly speaking not necessarily more skilled but then like we have examples right uh peter teal for example study philosophy and uh stuart butterfield if i'm not mistaken the is his name the slack guy and there are yeah there are many examples of founders vcs and politicians and people from all walks of life who as it turns out
00:27:51
Speaker
had a philosophy background. Now it doesn't necessarily have to be philosophy because there's this book I read then by Hartley, Scott Hartley, if I'm mistaken as well. It's called The Techie and the Fuzzy.
00:28:08
Speaker
And he talks about, he gives examples, a wide range of examples from people, not necessarily philosophers, but people who have a liberal arts background. And the entire argument is that the argument is not saying that the techies are bad. It's just that if you're a techie and you have a liberal arts background, you would be more skilled than if you just have a techie background.
00:28:36
Speaker
And I would say the same thing about, uh, the fuzzies, like those who come from a liberal arts background. This is, I think how one could be more skilled or have the potential to be more skilled. It's like you simply have to be willing to entertain.
00:28:56
Speaker
different perspectives and to learn things beyond what you just specialize in. So this is what philosophy helps you do. Not always. Some people study philosophy and they become so specialized, they lose sense of reality. This is not the kind of stuff that we're talking about. It's just that if you use philosophy as a tool to just
00:29:20
Speaker
Like you said, widen your perspective, then of course you would be more equipped to improve your skills in any other undertaking. Yeah, it gives you the opportunity to become more skilled, which you can seize.
00:29:36
Speaker
or not. Exactly. There's an economist, sort of generalist type, Robin Hanson, and he has this line in one of his blog posts, the effect that he thinks all good thinkers have some background in philosophy, but the best usually don't study too much philosophy, which I think sort of gets to this point that there is something you can sort of narrow your
00:30:02
Speaker
view on the world if you spend too much time thinking about, you know, what does Kant say about this? Hegel or not, you know, if you're an academic philosophy, academic philosophers think in a particular way that economists don't, that physicists don't share, and of course people outside of the academy don't share. So if you're purely studying philosophy, you're going to be somewhat narrow likely. I do think there's something to that thought that
00:30:30
Speaker
you want the recitalian mean when it comes to certainly what we formally call philosophy. Yeah, I agree. But I mean, see, we also, I usually am careful here because the attack having been an academia, like this is no attack on academics who enjoy doing that, where we're not talking about academics who specialize, like some physicists do as well, right?
00:30:57
Speaker
They have a narrow perspective, but there's an argument there to also be put out about how this hurts research in general. We need interdisciplinarity, but this is an argument we can have separately.
00:31:13
Speaker
But you're right. When it comes to philosophy or anything for that matter, it's like doing it in excess is going to backfire eventually. So it applies to philosophy and it applies to absolutely any other endeavor or pursuit. Because as you said, you could fall into the trap of just not being able to think for yourself. And it's like an analysis paralysis kind of thing.
00:31:43
Speaker
If you don't know what Kant would have said about it, it's as though you cannot do anything. And it's problematic. So it's trying to find some sort of balance. Reading philosophy, learning about the context, knowing the history sometimes is helpful, but then too much
00:32:05
Speaker
uh of it would also be problematic yeah it's a it's a good it's a good line so how do you see in your interactions with others philosophy making that concrete difference either to their business with sorry others how do you see when you're teaching other people how do you see philosophy making that comfort concrete difference either to their their business lives especially when it comes to this idea of
00:32:32
Speaker
thinking well, helping people improve how they think about whether it's a personal project or a business matter. How's that showed up in people's lives?
00:32:44
Speaker
Yeah, teaching philosophy in an undergrad setting was completely different than teaching philosophy for professionals and people who are business leaders and who've been working for at least five, say, who have actual work experience. And so I'll focus on the latter, because when it comes to undergrad students, it's a completely different mindset. And I see how philosophy could be relevant to them, but I have come to
00:33:13
Speaker
this realization that, I don't know, we need to rethink how philosophy is taught and I don't know, we can discuss this, but when it comes to the professionals, yeah, I still haven't figured it out, right? Because I enjoy teaching philosophy to professionals.
00:33:30
Speaker
And this is where the book came from. So I've been teaching philosophy, as I said, in a non-academic setting. I've been doing it on my own for the past three and a half years. And it's been a learning curve for me. I had a particular idea of how to teach philosophy and how to approach philosophy, of course, because I was transitioning from university.
00:33:53
Speaker
And bit by bit, I started asking professionals and business leaders and people from all walks of life and different backgrounds, et cetera, how philosophy could help them. Because I was not, I didn't really know why they signed up for my courses, right? At first it was the pandemic because I started right around the time we were all in lockdown. And I thought it was a strike of luck, maybe. But then people kept coming.
00:34:23
Speaker
and they would sign up for different courses and then some courses would be more popular than others. So for example, analytic philosophy, only six people would sign up, but then I would offer an existentialism or I titled navigating uncertainty or the quest for meaning and then 20 people would sign up. And so clearly I was having signals there and
00:34:52
Speaker
Over these three years, I noticed that at least when it comes to people, the professionals and business owners and business leaders, there are particular topics that they
00:35:06
Speaker
reflect on or problems that they experience, that philosophy can offer some sort of practicality or actionable tips and help them navigate. And this is why I wrote this book. So these broad kind of topics are one, questioning our assumptions and asking better questions and shifting perspectives. And we can apply them to businesses shortly.
The Importance of Questioning Assumptions
00:35:34
Speaker
And then the second part is navigating uncertainty, handling stress, and the quest for meaning, whether in your work or in your life, and ethics. So these were broad themes or topics that almost all professionals and business leaders related to or resonated with or were interested in. And then I started. So for the past these three years, I've been talking with them
00:36:04
Speaker
I mean, when it comes to questioning assumptions and asking questions and to identifying problems, it's like when you're, when you're in a business setting or when you're running a business and you have a problem and you want to solve it.
00:36:21
Speaker
It's interesting to see how many people either don't question their assumptions or take their assumptions for granted or fight over things with others, like you're in a business meeting and everyone is fighting. And once they learn a few things about the importance of asking the right questions and questioning their assumptions and beliefs, et cetera, and they see that it could be done in a
00:36:53
Speaker
safe space kind of, like no one is going to cancel you if we share different ideas and perspectives, then they start relating to it in a different way. So they think to themselves, okay, there's something there, there's something to it. Similarly for uncertainty and for ethics as well. So it's just interesting that in my case, it's not what I think philosophy could offer, it's
00:37:19
Speaker
what I saw philosophy could offer based on the problems that they were having. The first point brings to mind is many of the people we mentioned who have that philosophical background and some amount of material success in investing or business or what have you.
00:37:44
Speaker
Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, many of the tech people especially have this approach where it's almost like first principles type thinking or strip away a lot of the assumptions how people commonly think about. I think the Stuart Butterfield case is he is now the CEO of Slack, but originally he was building a video game company, noticed that their chat
00:38:06
Speaker
client was actually really good and had the flexibility to realize this thing we built on the side is actually much better than what I thought the purpose of this company was, which is to make games.
00:38:23
Speaker
And probably many companies, you know, you just get, you get habituated very easily with the people around us, particular way of speaking, particular way of thought. So I think that is a nice example of something that, you know, of course, it's easy to say, of course you should question your assumptions, but actually taking the time to do it is another matter.
00:38:46
Speaker
Yeah, definitely. And doing it in a way that doesn't kind of anger anyone or lead any roles or feuds or discussions between people. But it's really quite interesting because
00:39:09
Speaker
I'm fascinated with the topic of asking questions for some reason because I've given this workshop twice now and you see people wanting to learn how to ask questions or to ask questions, for example. But then somehow they either prefer not to or are discouraged to, or they couldn't be bothered to. And so instead of maybe
00:39:39
Speaker
asking questions about how to solve a particular problem. They would just, they couldn't care less. Like in the case of Stuart Butterfield, he asked himself, okay, is there something else I could do here in order to pivot and create something else? Well, you need to ask yourself these questions and you need to be able to take a step back and question your initial assumptions. If he had doubled down on his project, or there are many other examples that we could give it's
00:40:10
Speaker
you would end up with a probably failed business because you did not ask yourself a question or questioned your assumptions, tried to find a different way of doing things. And it happened with me, right? If I had stuck with the way, like the first course I ever gave, as I said, existentialism and literature, if I had never online, if I had never questioned my assumption about the way I approached philosophy,
00:40:40
Speaker
I probably would have gone out of business because no, this is how philosophy should be done. You know, if I hadn't adapted and asked those who signed up questions about what worked, what didn't, et cetera, seeking feedback and the likes, I wouldn't have grown personally. I wouldn't have been exposed to new ways of doing things. I wouldn't have had different perspectives. I've been learning from all the people who've been signing up for my classes.
00:41:05
Speaker
And I like almost much more than we, than I would cover in a class, right? So, because I have like 15 people in class, each with a different story and each with a different experience. So, I have 15 people sharing their experiences with me and I'm just sharing the experience of Zeno, let's say, or the car, you know? So, it's just interesting. So, yeah, asking questions is
00:41:32
Speaker
my god and and and yeah navigating uncertainty and handling all these issues yeah yeah well i wonder if some of the hesitancy around asking questions is just that it so often does create that uncertainty that can result in either conflict with others or exactly yeah yourself you know making a large change to your own life perhaps and there is some
00:41:57
Speaker
Yeah. So I'm at a risk. This is spot on exactly. And this is, this is precisely why I started with, with this first part, because it's, you need to be willing to jump out of your comfort zone in order to ask questions. Cause when you're asking questions, you're learning new things. One.
00:42:19
Speaker
Before you're even learning new things, when you're asking questions, it can either imply that you are trying to solve a problem that you have and you're trying to figure out how, or you lack knowledge.
00:42:33
Speaker
And both of these things can be problematic nowadays because everyone is an expert now. And you see it in an example as simple as being in a classroom, right? And a student asks you a question, and as a philosophy professor who's an expert in philosophy,
00:42:52
Speaker
Some people shy away from saying, I don't know, or let me figure the answer out and I'll get back to you. So apply this to a more serious context and a company where supposedly they hired you because you're an expert, et cetera. So asking questions to clarify a particular thing or to try to gain knowledge, it's as though you're admitting to yourself that you don't know enough.
00:43:18
Speaker
And of course, this has all sorts of ramifications. You need to improve your skills. You need to read. You need to just hone your skills and knowledge in general. And then all this leads to risk taking as well and uncertainty, as you mentioned. And so also how can we deal with that?
00:43:39
Speaker
Yeah, well, so I do think if we sort of put this and think about this through the lens of stoicism, what the stoics are ultimately concerned about is pursuing knowledge. And to do that one I think needs to be willing to
00:43:58
Speaker
think curly, ask good questions, not be afraid to look dumb. And there's a real skill to both of those things, both crafting your own questions, knowing when to ask them well, knowing your social roles so that you can skillfully ask them in the right context, especially when you're dealing with others. And personally, being the kind of person who is able to maybe even take some amount of reputational
00:44:26
Speaker
hit or at least overcome the avoidance I think a lot of us have towards, especially people interested in intellectual matters, philosophical matters, towards looking like we don't know something that we should. Which I think we probably often overestimate how much of a reputational hit we'll make. We'll suffer when we do ask the question, but nonetheless, there is that skill.
00:44:51
Speaker
So, I think, you know, if you're thinking about pursuing knowledge, of course, asking good questions is a matter of that. Being the kind of person who can ask a question, you almost put it in an Aristotelian way, you know, the right question at the right time in the right way. It's a tricky art.
00:45:08
Speaker
And definitely something a lot of people struggle with. I can think of myself in particular times where, oh, I should have asked that question earlier, which at least indicates that I had more to learn. Definitely.
00:45:26
Speaker
It's definitely interesting, especially in a context where you're dealing with many people because you did mention asking the right question at the right time. It's an art that one has to learn, but asking not only others, asking oneself as well questions. When do you ask yourself the question?
00:45:46
Speaker
Is it time to move on to something else? It doesn't have to be, you know, big problems and being creative and solving the next big problem. It's just as simple as when do I pivot? If you're building a business and it's not working out and, but you insist you're doubling down and then you have to commit to it because you have different philosophies, right? People who tell you diversify and others who tell you,
00:46:16
Speaker
If you have an idea, you need to put all your bets on it and stick to it and work long enough and hard enough in order to succeed. This is the thing. When do you ask yourself the question, should I sacrifice my idea? Should I do something else? Should I move to a different country? Should I? So it doesn't really have to be that abstract. So just simple questions that we sometimes
00:46:43
Speaker
are afraid to even ask ourselves because we think well we'll figure it out maybe not today we'll figure it out and then five years later you're like oh i should have done this i should have done that etc so it's uh yeah and it applies to jobs life decisions everything yeah yeah i suppose you have that the image of
00:47:05
Speaker
the meme, of course, the dog saying, this is fine.
Philosophy in Personal Growth and Career Decisions
00:47:09
Speaker
And we're refusing to ask a question or look at reality.
00:47:14
Speaker
Yeah, but this is really where it's coming from. It's just also looking at, as you said, reality and trying to figure things out. If ultimately it's about living a good life, you are asking yourself the question, how should I live a good life and what is a good life, et cetera. So at some point, we get drowned by all these, by life in general. And then, like in my case, particularly, it comes to
00:47:44
Speaker
philosophy as at first as a response to existential questions I had versus philosophy as this abstract academic thing I did as a job. Yeah, it's at some point I had to ask myself, what am I doing? Is this how I want to continue? And it does use also all kinds of change and uncertainty with regard to the future, but here we are.
00:48:13
Speaker
Right, right. And of course, there's always the issue, should one stick to action or is more deliberation needed? Should one start the new venture or continue to persist? And the fact of the matter is that
00:48:30
Speaker
You know, there's this rule of advice that for every good piece of advice, someone needs to hear the exact opposite, right? And it's always going to be tricky to figure out, are you the person who should be deliberating more often or not? Are you the person who just needs to stick to it? Or do you need to learn how to, how to quit?
00:48:49
Speaker
Yeah. And sticking to it, you can, you can really stick to something and so far as you're aware of the consequences as well. So this is what's going to happen instead of, Oh, things are all are going to be great eventually. If I stick to it, well, maybe not.
00:49:06
Speaker
Maybe things are not going to go the way you wanted them. Just like in the case of Zeno, but, uh, but yeah, and then, um, I'm curious about your decision to, uh, not only your decision, but also the transition, your transition into the industry, uh, kind of, cause you, you did philosophy, you, you mentioned, and then, uh, you switched.
00:49:33
Speaker
Was it a premed, was it a decision in the sense that you knew before you studied philosophy that this is what you were going to do or was it something that happened afterwards and what got you to pivot and how did you? Yeah, it's something that happened afterwards. I think I essentially learned that I didn't need to become a philosopher. I went to graduate school with a view that I was someone who couldn't see myself doing anything else, but
00:50:03
Speaker
practicing philosophy and being a professor of philosophers seemed like the best way to do that at the time, if not the only way. And then going to graduate school, I think was, in many respects, a wonderful experience, but also learning that I can actually do, there's a whole other world of different forms of inquiry, different kinds of living that I would benefit from exploring more.
00:50:30
Speaker
And then also realizing that in some ways I overrated what the academic life would be like.
00:50:39
Speaker
And I think those two features, that willingness to see the possibilities as a fact larger than they were and then realizing that becoming an academic philosopher in some ways, an excellent role, but in other ways, I might not be best suited for the next three years of writing a dissertation.
00:51:01
Speaker
going through the gauntlet of trying to find an academic position in some different place when I could be, you know, I can be building new products, reading philosophy on my own time, discussing philosophy with people in the world outside of academia. And there's, there's a lot of people who want to do that. Yeah. Yeah. And it's, it's funny. You mentioned reading philosophy.
00:51:29
Speaker
First, I presume reading philosophy you're interested in at your own pace and time. In my case, for example, over the past two years,
00:51:42
Speaker
I have not read philosophy. And even though I spent my time on Twitter telling people to read philosophy, but the reason why I was not reading philosophy was because I had read so much philosophy that I was not reading anything else since between 2010 and 2021.
00:52:08
Speaker
Seriously, that's all I read. The philosophy books and philosophy articles and German idealism and Schelling and all these people, right?
00:52:19
Speaker
And over the past two years, I got exposed to a different kind of genre in general, or different books. So I've been reading all sorts of stuff about topics I did not know I was interested in, or I rediscovered my interest in all these topics.
00:52:42
Speaker
And basically that's what I've been doing. This is what helped me also write the book because it took me some time to get out of the academic mindset and the academic way of writing and develop a different voice, a new voice that was more real.
00:53:00
Speaker
that was clearer and more relatable to people. So I've been reading economics, psychology, business, and even what would be considered as self-help books. I've been reading all sorts of stuff. If the book kept me interested, I would listen to it. I wasn't even reading more, listening to odd books.
00:53:21
Speaker
So it's been an interesting journey and one of the books that stuck with me was this Scott Hartley's The Techie and Fuzzy and then books like A New Way to Think by Roger L. Martin and then books like The Book of Beautiful Questions and The More Beautiful Question by Warren Berger and all these people. So it's
00:53:42
Speaker
It's been an interesting journey for me to not be reading your typical philosophy stuff and be reading stuff that was easier to understand and more relatable. If you read the card, it is relatable. I'm not talking about the classics. I'm talking more about the hardcore academic stuff.
00:54:09
Speaker
that you have to read when you're in academia, my God, and the conferences you attend and stuff like that. It's not my thing. Whoever is interested, great for you. I'm happy for you. It wasn't my thing, and it was making me miserable as well. I thought I hated writing.
00:54:29
Speaker
Right. But then I noticed that I did not hate writing. I love writing. It's just, I love writing about things I'm interested in and in a way completely different than how you should present it in academia.
The Role of Stoicism and Perspective Shifting
00:54:44
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. That's a, I think that's such a crucial insight that.
00:54:48
Speaker
People will say similar things about math, you know, they hated math and they learned it in school and they thought they'd never be good at math. And then for whatever reason, stumble upon a teacher or a book later in life and realize, oh, this is what math is and I actually like it. And I'm actually not that bad at it. And there is something to that.
00:55:07
Speaker
idea coming back to shifting different perspectives, trying things in new ways that you can learn something that you thought was so familiar or so obvious. Seriously, and you start believing these things, it becomes a belief. You incorporate it into your daily life and worldview. Then you're like, no, writing sucks. No, it's not the writing. It's how you're doing it. It's what you're doing, the topics you're writing about, etc.
00:55:35
Speaker
So yeah, whatever it is you're doing, anyone who's listening to this, try to shift your perspective and ask yourself, is it the topic? Is it the form? Is it the way I'm doing it? Whatever it is, this is, I think this is, this is also stoic to tie it with.
00:55:53
Speaker
with the podcast itself. No, it's to what extent is this stoic, I would ask you, you know, more on these. I think that's, that's absolutely right. If you think about, again, this focus on knowledge that the stoics have and being able to
00:56:11
Speaker
overturn some of these common assumptions just as the project of becoming more knowledgeable. And if we look at some of the stoic practices, Marcus Aurelius has some great examples of shifting his perspective about how he views common things, either by breaking them into their parts, seeing the purple robe merely as a sheep's wool dyed in the blood of a shellfish, or zooming out and trying to get a larger perspective from
00:56:40
Speaker
By looking down on things seeing things in their context of much larger space of time and history So I think I think that's that is a very stoic very stoic approach As well as a useful you get this useful thoughts I think from other Hellenistic philosophies to like that the skeptics of course their ability to generate skepticism by having
00:57:05
Speaker
believing, finding the best arguments for some proposition, the best arguments against where I'm not a skeptic by any means, but I think that exercise is so neat. And it can be a really productive and generative one for thinking about overturning assumptions or even if not overturning assumptions, thinking of new things, new things to try.
00:57:28
Speaker
Yeah. And so far as one maintains the balance as well, right? Because we've talked about not taking things to extremes because some people take the skeptics way of looking at the world, examining the argument and the counter argument can keep searching, et cetera, and then they apply it to absolutely everything.
00:57:53
Speaker
deciding whether they have a pizza or a burger. No. One has to also learn where to apply it, how to apply it, as you mentioned with regard to questions as well, knowing when to ask the question at the right time, et cetera.
Integrating Stoicism with Modern Tools and Education
00:58:09
Speaker
And my question to you is, because you mentioned that you're developing this application to help people.
00:58:17
Speaker
also practice stoicism, if I got that correctly. And so how do you incorporate stoic teachings into that? What's the app like?
00:58:31
Speaker
Yeah, the app's called StoA. We've got an approach that combines mindfulness meditation, StoA philosophy, and thought-front cognitive behavioral therapy, where people are taught the basics of the philosophy through reading texts, listening, and then performing these exercises.
00:58:56
Speaker
Initially to sort of address some problem they have, a concrete problem, whether it's anxiety, meaninglessness, procrastination, and thinking through some of the best thought from the Stoics to help approach these questions, and then enriching those with some of the modern work that has been inspired by the Stoics.
00:59:18
Speaker
as well. So that's the approach that the app takes. Some people like to take it just sort of at the practical level, take what they like from Stoicism, directly apply it to their life. Other people will like to dive in even deeper and spend time reading the texts, even perhaps even becoming in some sense, a Stoic and taking that on as a full life philosophy. And we want people to be able to do both of those things with
00:59:44
Speaker
our app, have it be a useful tool for people to, whether it's cultivate resilience, use services to approach some of these modern problems of life, or even more broadly, be a philosophy that is a philosophy of life, a source, and a source of meaning that they can learn about, engage in, and practice. Yeah, interesting stuff. And this is the tricky thing about philosophy, right? Because as we mentioned at the beginning,
01:00:14
Speaker
philosophy is a very broad field and you have people interested in the form of doing philosophy as we said the arguments etc you have people who are interested in studying the texts closely reading the texts and analyzing them interpreting them etc and then you have people who study philosophy or are interested in philosophy because they want to use it to apply it in their lives and
01:00:45
Speaker
That's one of the issues I've been facing. This is why my courses are always synchronous, because it relies heavily on conversation, discussions with people.
01:01:01
Speaker
a commenting quote, but then explaining it and then see what everyone has to say. And then from this discussion, just like Plato's symposium, people would learn a thing or two, and then it's helpful to each and everyone who's there, but because they apply these lessons to themselves, like they tailor them to what they're experiencing.
01:01:26
Speaker
If I do asynchronous courses, I always feel like something is missing. So this is why I'm asking you when it comes to an app, right? Because it's difficult, I think, to translate the practicality, but also the academic aspect of it into something that works for people.
01:01:48
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's a balance. I think many people, they're not looking for that academic approach or they're not even looking for something that's theoretical. They just have anxiety. They've heard that stoicism is a useful solution to that. And that's how they went to interact with the app. So I think we went to ensure that people have the approach to do that and sort
01:02:15
Speaker
they're not scared by too much philosophical language or not bothered by all these theoretical questions, what have you. But also show that we have the depth, we have the philosophical grounding or we thought about what the content is enough that people who come with that more philosophical approach or people who develop that over time continue to be able to learn from us. And we just started doing synchronous courses as well.
01:02:45
Speaker
nice yeah i saw you it was on maven right yeah that's right you launched it on maven yeah yeah and uh but i know you might now want to leave soon but uh what got you into stoicism um
01:03:02
Speaker
The main thing that got me into stoicism just is Nassim Taleb's book, Anti-Fragile. He talks about Seneca, Seneca having this approach to managing uncertainty that is something that thrives in the face of fortune as opposed to merely withstanding it or being resilient against it.
Conclusion and Reflections on the Discussion
01:03:26
Speaker
That model is very striking to me. I went back to read Seneca and then read Marcus Aurelius. And Marcus Aurelius, I thought, was very powerful. There's something about his approach to life, thinking about things with a focus on acting virtuously, seeing things as they are.
01:03:49
Speaker
not being harmed by things themselves but our opinion of them. There's ideas and then Marcus Aurelius also has a almost, well he does have a spiritual side to his writing. He's talking about nature, the way things flow together, compose the whole that I thought was evocative and really rather beautiful. So through from that I
01:04:16
Speaker
got more of a stronger interest in the philosophy. So I would be useful as a philosophy, philosophy of life. So that's a quick story there. Yeah. Nice. Nice. Interesting. I think we have a similar story there. Yeah. Yeah. Well, do you have anything else you want to add? No, I really enjoyed the conversation and this was fun. So thank you again for the invitation.
01:04:44
Speaker
Thanks again for listening to Stoa Conversations. If you found this conversation useful, please give us a rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify and share it with a friend. And if you'd like to practice stoicism with Michael and I as well as others walking the stoic path, we are running our three-week course on stoicism applied. It'll be live with
01:05:10
Speaker
a forum interactive calls that I think will be an excellent way for a group of people to become a more stoic together. So do check that out at stomeditation.com slash course. And if that's not to your fancy, you can find links to the Stoa app as well as the Stoa letter, our newsletter on stoic theory and practice at stomeditation.com. Thanks for listening. Until next time.