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Michael Gibson on Philosophy Outside of the Academy and Stoicism in Silicon Valley (Episode 66)
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Want to become more Stoic? Join us and other Stoics this October: Stoicism Applied by Caleb Ontiveros and Michael Tremblay on Maven
In this conversation, Caleb speaks with the investor, author, and philosopher Michael Gibson.
You’ll hear why Michael thinks novelists are the successors of Plato, what some of the key entrepreneurial virtues he looks for are, how a philosopher like him ended up managing a sizable venture capitalist fund, and what his criticisms are of Stoicism in Silicon Valley.
So I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did and do check out his most recent book: Paper Belt on Fire – as it has a number of gems we don’t even begin to touch on.
(09:29) Redesigning Academic Philosophy
(19:34) The Meaning of Polytropon
(23:18) Do Founders Need a Life Philosophy?
(26:38) Does Virtue Pay?
(31:54) Virtue Ethics in Entrepreneurship
(33:55) Stoicism and Silicon Valley
(50:22) A Role Model
***
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Thanks to Michael Levy for graciously letting us use his music in the conversations: https://ancientlyre.com/
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Transcript
Epictetus and the Power of the Soul
00:00:00
Speaker
I think there is something so beautiful and noble about someone like Epictetus who was a slave. Someone who
00:00:08
Speaker
really had a lot taken away from them and could not be touched, that there was something within them that was so strong that it could not be influenced or swayed by even physical force. I think that is so beautiful and powerful view of the soul or whatever it is you want to call it within us. The spark of Zeus. I think that's right.
Introducing 'Stowe Conversations'
00:00:35
Speaker
Welcome to Stowe Conversations. In this podcast, Michael Trombley and I discuss the theory and practice of stoicism. Each week, we'll share two conversations. One between the two of us, and another will be an in-depth conversation with an expert. In this conversation, I speak with the investor, author, and philosopher Michael Gibson.
Michael Gibson's Career and Philosophical Insights
00:00:59
Speaker
You'll hear why Michael thinks novelists are the successors of Plato, what some of the key entrepreneurial virtues he looks for are, how a philosopher like him ended up managing a sizable venture capitalist fund, and what his criticisms of stoicism in Silicon Valley are.
00:01:21
Speaker
The best writers and philosophers often have a hand in the concrete world, and Michael's a good example of that. He's taken a winding path through academic philosophy, writing, and venture capital that can only enrich his thinking. So, I hope you all enjoy this conversation as much as I did, and do check out his most recent book, Paper Belt on Fire. It's an excellent read and has a number of gems we didn't even begin to touch on.
00:01:51
Speaker
Here is our conversation.
1517 Venture Capital and Inspiration from Thiel
00:01:54
Speaker
Today, I have the fortune of speaking with the investor and author Michael Gibson. Michael co-founded the venture capital firm 1517 and wrote the excellent Paper Belt on Fire. Thanks for joining. Thanks for having me on, Caleb. So let's start with a broad question. What's your story?
00:02:15
Speaker
Oh man, okay. Where do you start with these things? Maybe the more interesting place to start is where I start in that book. I wanted to tell the story of what we do as a fund. We're called 1517. We back people primarily who don't have college degrees.
00:02:32
Speaker
So we see ourselves as this alternative education system in a sense, homeschooling, startup founders, CEOs. Why we do that is something that grew out of Peter Thiel's fellowship. My co-founder, Danielle Strachman, and I helped Peter start his fellowship back in 2010. And that was a grant-making program to support people who did not have college degrees. We saw a lot of incredible things come out of that. The most famous probably is Vitalik Buterin.
00:03:01
Speaker
We helped him launch Ethereum in 2013, but there are other people too. Dylan Fields, we helped him start Figma in 2012. That made news last year because they were acquired by Adobe for 20 billion. So by 2015, we had seen a number of cool things come out of it. They weren't quite that extraordinarily successful, but still there was a lot of promise. And so we decided that there would be a lot of upside if we had a fund devoted to this mission.
00:03:28
Speaker
meaning we could help more people, we could raise money from other investors and so on. And so we did that in 2015. So now eight years later, we're doing pretty well
Journey from Philosophy to Venture Capital
00:03:38
Speaker
as a fund. We've had one company go public, Luminar Technologies. We've got some others coming down the pipeline.
00:03:43
Speaker
So I wanted to tell the story of like, okay, how did two people with no background in finance somehow come into Peter Thiel's orbit, run this strange fellowship and launch a fund based on this mission that the college degree has lost its signal as a signal of value. It's not the guarantee of success that a lot of people think it is.
00:04:04
Speaker
So that's sort of my professional background, even deeper than that. And, you know, partially why I'm on the show perhaps is I thought I was going to be a professor of philosophy. I dropped out of Oxford universities. They call it something different, be filthy, feel track, but the, but I thought I was going to be a professor. And then I was a journalist for a short time. And so I've written on different philosophical subjects over the year. I still am interested in the, in the field.
00:04:33
Speaker
I just think it's lost its course in the academy. When you went to Oxford, did you have in mind the goal of becoming a professor or was there some other purpose behind continuing
A Passion for Writing and Learning
00:04:45
Speaker
to study philosophy? My secret desire was always to become a writer. There's this idea that we imitate people quite a bit and that René Girard
00:04:54
Speaker
The French literary theorist described so well. When I was 18 or 19, I saw the poet T.S. Eliot, you open up the back dust jacket and see his little biography. And I noticed that he had a PhD in philosophy from Harvard.
00:05:10
Speaker
Another writer I admire, Tom Wolfe, journalist, novelist. I saw he had a PhD in American studies from Yale. And so I was so innocent and naive when I was 18, 19. I thought I needed these things too. I just thought I needed a wide breadth of learning. And I loved the classics. I learned Latin and ancient Greek. Greek was more my thing because it was tied to philosophy and drama and poetry.
00:05:38
Speaker
And so yeah, I just thought, okay, this, I need more time. I also felt like a late bloomer. So I, you know, that was the secret desires. Like, okay, I get these years. I can read more. I can explore these really profound topics. And then ultimately I'll, I'll become a writer.
From Journalism to Finance
00:05:54
Speaker
When I dropped out, I mean that I was reading a wolf.
00:05:57
Speaker
He has a collection called The New Journalism in which he describes this change in journalism in the 1960s where you had these rebel writers using all the tools and techniques of fiction to tell true stories. So scene by scene construction, something like a plot, character development. So you could get to the emotional truth things, not just tell a story like you see in the newspaper where it's like, oh, the Yankees won six to five and so on and so on.
00:06:22
Speaker
So I'm reading one of these Wolf's collection in the basement and it suddenly hit me. I'm like, geez, I don't, this is nuts. I don't need a PhD. I just got to get out there and start writing. So yeah, I was, my yearning and longing was always to sort of be this poet philosopher. And I thought the Academy would be a good day job. But the realizations that
00:06:45
Speaker
Being a professor is a job. It takes a lot of work. Even if I was in a great program as far as that goes, but it would still be hard to establish and sustain a career because the number of job openings are so small. You're adding a decimal point to someone's already existing view. It's hard to break new ground. And probably most damningly of all to me was I didn't enjoy teaching.
00:07:10
Speaker
So you should really love teaching if you're going to be a professor. A lot of people are drawn to it for the research side and that can be quite fun, but you should really love teaching and I didn't. So yeah, I dropped out. I had a little bit of a background in journalism, meaning internships and small jobs.
00:07:27
Speaker
I was able to land a job at a technology review, this magazine that MIT owns. And I told you I have a background in philosophy and ancient languages. I don't have a background in science, but it was a baptism by fire because I'd get assigned stories and I'd have to get up to speed on things and learn about quantum mechanics or a better way to brew beer. There are some weird stories thrown my way.
00:07:51
Speaker
But my plan at that time was, okay, I'm going to work the fat off my pros over the next three, four years. At the end of that, I'll be ready for the main event, which will be the novel or not actually. And it was only after a couple of years that I came into Peter Thiel's orbit.
Thiel's Diverse Team
00:08:06
Speaker
There was this opportunity to work with him. I never thought I'd work in finance, Silicon Valley. And I talk about this in my book a little bit, this unlikely interview and Peter hired me. But, you know, I think that's interesting. It's like I showed up to work. I thought I was unique. I'm like, oh yeah, what the hell am I doing here? I was hired as an analyst at this hedge fund.
00:08:26
Speaker
I assumed showing up that, you know, 99% of the people there on the trading floor had a background in finance. Maybe they were skilled, but they learned it on their own, I discovered. So it was everyone else who worked for Peter where they had similar stories. They had attained some level of achievement in some field and then decided to leave. So Peter hired nuclear engineers, statisticians, literature scholars, like no one on this hedge fund had a degree, had an MBA or
00:08:54
Speaker
a degree in finance. So yeah, that was part of the story I wanted to tell in the book as well was that, wow, you know, Peter, I mean, everyone knows him as a great investor, but what's behind as he's very creative when it comes to spotting talent. And, you know, one of the themes of the book is, is that creativity is a real mystery when it comes from strange places. And I think it's to Peter's credit that, you know, on the types of people he funds, whether it's Zuckerberg or Musk,
00:09:22
Speaker
Or, you know, even just the hires he makes, he has a very unusual framework he uses for thinking that through. So going back to a philosophy, if you had to redesign a philosophy PhD program, not maybe not from scratch, but sort of elements, which you include, if you think, you know, these are the sorts of changes we'd want to make to that advanced training.
Critique of Modern Philosophy
00:09:46
Speaker
Yeah. I think there's a spurt.
00:09:49
Speaker
I think we've had a hundred years or so of specialization, and now I think pseudo specialization, and also the professionalization of it all. So what do I mean by that? It's like, okay, philosophy could be broken down into metaphysics, epistemology, moral philosophy.
00:10:08
Speaker
And then even within each of those subfields, there are further subfields. So it could be within moral philosophy that you deal with normative ethics, which is what we should do in certain situations. Or maybe you're interested in the nature of ethical truth, right? And then in these tiny little crevices,
00:10:27
Speaker
These professors are writing these really jargon-filled, boring, dry as dust, academic papers in a way that I think only appeals to the small number of people operating in their field. So I think that is to the detriment of the subject. The philosopher Christine Korsgaard, she had a long career, ended it at the long time, though, I think 20 years or so at Harvard. She's a specialist in Immanuel Kant.
00:10:55
Speaker
And she gave a speech on her retirement and one of the things that stood out, she was criticizing the writing and she said something that academic philosophers suffer from is this dream of writing the unassailable sentence. And that phrase stuck out to me, unassailable sentence. Cause what does that mean? It means, okay, we have 15 qualifications before the main subject for her. As soon as the claim comes, it's like already diminished so much that you're bored by whatever someone's saying.
00:11:23
Speaker
So I think that has been a detriment to it. But maybe even more broadly and deeply, I think that philosophy should come back to its roots in the love of wisdom. And I think it should seek to make our attempts to answer the fundamental questions of life to help us understand what is important.
00:11:47
Speaker
how to cope with life's central problems. What is the deepest story we can tell about the significance of things? I think these really foundational questions have been lost, and I wish we had creative, imaginative minds attacking them, whether they're novelists or poets or philosophers.
00:12:06
Speaker
So in my, it's strange to say, but I think we've got to go back to the future or not. Well, it's like we're back to the past to see the future.
Plato's Dialogues and Historical Context
00:12:16
Speaker
It's like I've been coming back to Plato more and more and you hear these, you know, these things attributed to Plato. One of them could be that, oh, Plato banished the poets or the next thing could be that Socrates hated writing or, you know, on and on.
00:12:31
Speaker
But this doesn't bear scrutiny when you really understand what Plato presented as his philosophy.
00:12:39
Speaker
And so what do I mean by that? OK, well, yeah, people read dialogues, and they get a sense that there are these, like, not a single view is being stated and accepted. Oftentimes, they end in having the question unanswered, especially those earlier, shorter dialogues about certain concepts like courage or even inspiration and poetry. They end with no one having a good idea what a definition of these things is.
00:13:06
Speaker
What I think Plato was doing, so the number one thing that I think people overlook is Socratic failure. And these aren't just dialogues. They're also historical documents. And all the people, the characters in these dialogues were actual people tied to the decline and fall of Athens in the Peloponnesian War and the convulsions of the destruction of democracy, the rise of oligarchy, and its aftermath. And so you read something like the Republic,
00:13:35
Speaker
And Glaucon, one of the main characters talking to Socrates, that's Plato's brother. And what's more is this person was one of the 30 tyrants who failed to save Athens. And so it says something that Socrates, who was officially these people's teacher, Plato is surely saying something to us that he failed in his philosophical duty in educating these people.
00:13:57
Speaker
That raises all these sorts of questions that tie back to what philosophy should be doing because I think what Plato is saying is it seems to be inert in some respect. Just reading and speaking isn't enough. And so I don't think we can say Plato banished the poets because there's so much love of poetry in his writing. There are all these things beyond philosophy that are called upon to try to awake us from our slumbers.
00:14:21
Speaker
So I think that's a lesson for the Academy today, is that these dry as dust, like fake legal arguments, supporting one view or another, I mean, maybe they're good for clarifying concepts, but they're not good for getting us closer to greater wisdom.
00:14:42
Speaker
There is a value in clarity and rigor, but sometimes one gets the sense that the questions might be chiseled down too much, such that there's not much to chew on at the end for many philosophical, academic philosophical issues. That's certainly true.
00:14:58
Speaker
It's surprising that we have not had philosophical dialogues that are as impactful or captivating as Plato's or perhaps even Xenophon's if you are a fan of the memorabilia or something of that sort. But do you think that's right or what do you think about that general issue?
Philosophy's Evolving Medium
00:15:21
Speaker
Well, I think that a lot of the traditional questions of philosophy that could be addressed through those forms have been pushed to things like movies and plays and novels. A good example of that, although not very recent, would be someone like Dostoyevsky, who I think
00:15:40
Speaker
was a profound thinker who attacked life's deepest questions, but in the form of polyphonic novels where these characters would represent certain belief systems taken to their extreme. I think those are wonderful philosophical books. But when it comes to the Academy, I think there was a lot of success. I also want to say it's
00:16:02
Speaker
There was a very creative collaborative circle, mainly philosophy bifurcates around the First World War. You have the analytical tradition in the UK and then in the United States. And then on the European continent, you have a different style of philosophy. So I'm really talking about that analytical philosophy that came out of Oxford and spread elsewhere that was really obsessed with those things, those conceptual clarification and logic chopping.
00:16:30
Speaker
And I think they made a lot of good contributions in the early days in the 1950s, people like J.L. Austin, and then even, I guess you could even count someone like Wittgenstein. But I think we've exhausted that approach.
00:16:46
Speaker
And I think because it's the dominant form in the universities, I think that's sad. But on the other hand, I just what that means to me is we just need more people. I mean, like yourself, it's like, OK, we have a podcast and there are lots of people discussing philosophy and podcasts. Here we are. So maybe these are the new exciting mediums and or media and they don't they don't have the prestige yet of the academic paper.
Intersection of Philosophy, Science, and Art
00:17:08
Speaker
But but I think there's a lot going on that's great in these things.
00:17:13
Speaker
Right, right, absolutely. Yeah, I should say on the logic shopping side, I do think there's a lot of value in, you know, you have Kripke or Parfit. I think both those philosophers do excellent novel work, but there are Kripke clones or Parfit type clones. That's when the one worries about what's going on. Yeah, I think that's well said.
00:17:34
Speaker
Yep. I think there's also, I initially came into philosophy as with a somewhat wiggish approach of all this history. Why are we asking all these old questions? You know, when you've had all these novel advances, but I've come around to the view that there's a serious value in having people around to preserve the great works, continue to study them. Yeah. Philosophy has this interesting role. I do think it plays an important role there.
00:17:59
Speaker
Yeah, that's fair as the custodian and maintainer of the canon. I think their philosophy sits in a strange hinge, somewhat tied to science, somewhat tied to the arts. What I mean by that is in science, we don't necessarily read the paper that announced the first discovery of something. Now you read a summary about that in a better presentation in a textbook, and you're none the worse for it.
00:18:30
Speaker
I know there are some people object to that because they think, oh, to truly understand Einstein, you should probably read his papers. But by and large, we accept that the summary and the paraphrase and people can refine these explanations and the knowledge is transmitted. That's not true of the humanities when it comes to works of philosophy or poetry. In those instances, the experience of reading them
00:18:54
Speaker
is something above and beyond the paraphrase or the summary. Reading Anna Karenina by Tolstoy is the experience of living with and responding to Tolstoy's wisdom. And the same could be said of philosophy, I think. It's like it not only did, let's say, a thinker, even Kripke, attack a problem, but he does it in a certain style that is his own. And I think something of that humanistic
00:19:23
Speaker
Halo is part of that, even in these rigorous papers. So philosophy is strange like that. I agree with you. I think that the history is also part of it. So tell us about Polytropon and how that fits into your thinking.
The Entrepreneurial Spirit of 'Polytropon'
00:19:39
Speaker
Okay. Well, it's tattooed on me. So I mentioned, yeah, I studied the classics. I love The Odyssey. It's such a wonderful work. And in the course of working in Silicon Valley and with Peter Thiel, every investor is going to develop some
00:20:00
Speaker
list of characteristics that they think a great founding team should have. You just have to because when you're making early investments, you can study the business model or you can look at the product, but by far the most important thing is the team and the quality of the people. So every investor has to come up with some theory about what makes a great founder for a startup.
00:20:22
Speaker
And in my own experience, what I realized was maybe this is the benefits of a classical education, was that a lot of this arch characteristic of the right stuff I had seen a little bit in Odysseus, the character, he does
00:20:41
Speaker
fit the trickster archetype as it's been manifested throughout history. And in the first line of the poem, we're introduced to this character. And polytropon is an interesting word. It's the first adjective to describe Odysseus. The literal translation from the Greek is like many, many turns, many wade. Poly, we all know from polygon or polytheist.
00:21:08
Speaker
And then tropon, we also know from trope, it's where we get that phrase, that word that means a turn, a way of doing things. But there aren't many satisfying translations of this word. It is very unique in the history of Greek and then in attempts to translate it.
00:21:24
Speaker
It does carry with it a connotation of cunning, of trickery. Sometimes it's looked down upon and other times it's sorely needed. So it always stood out to me that Odysseus was this wily, cunning character. And I saw that the great founders that I interacted with and learned from, that they possessed a little bit of this in themselves.
00:21:47
Speaker
You know, some great scientists have it too. One thing I heard recently that was just really cool was Richard Feynman gave a talk on his time at Los Alamos.
00:21:58
Speaker
You can find this on YouTube. I think it's called Los Alamos from the bottom up. And it is hilarious. Feynman is breaking into safes, finding ways of breaking into Los Alamos through a hole in the fence. His wife is sick with tuberculosis in Albuquerque, and so he has to communicate with her via letters.
00:22:18
Speaker
But he starts doing it in code, and then the sensors are upset with him. And so it's like all this trickery. You see this in great scientists as well. Something about hacking through a system, sometimes just for fun. So it was all that. Or I wanted to convey, there isn't a good English word for it. I think trickster doesn't quite catch it.
00:22:38
Speaker
So, and I thought Polytropon was, you know, the best sort of, if we're going to talk about the right stuff when it comes to creativity, I think Polytropon is up there as one of the contenders. Yeah. Yeah. I enjoyed that quite a lot. Nietzsche has a description of Socrates where he says he has a kind of embodies a roguish wisdom, which although not the exact same thing, I think gets that.
00:23:04
Speaker
Yeah, that's good. He'd lure you in. Someone would make a claim and then he'd lure you down a path. And finally, you would find that you're holding two ideas that contradict each other. Yeah, that's right.
Life Philosophy for Founders
00:23:20
Speaker
How important is it for
00:23:23
Speaker
founders for their Success for their in their enterprise to have a life philosophy, you know some account of what it is to live a good life or do you think of that as orthogonal to the project of founding a company I Certainly think at a practical level it's required. I think there's a lot of toxic productivity out there meaning
00:23:50
Speaker
just, oh, you got to grind away 20 hour days. And if you can't do that, you're not going to make it. That just doesn't work from a practical perspective. So I think the best founders I've worked with do, in fact, find a way to balance everything going on in their life. There are going to be times that require extreme commitment, in particular in the early days. But I do think health, eating, getting sleep, all of that stuff that a lot of people
00:24:19
Speaker
You know, fitness gurus talk about and no, I think it's good for people to stay up on that because it's important because you're running a marathon. It's going to be grind. It's going to be hard. They're going to be ups and downs. The emotional volatility is going to be strong. So to the extent that you can cope with these things, I think it's important to be of sound mind and body. So that side of things from the practical perspective, yes.
00:24:42
Speaker
I think increasingly it is important for people to understand why they're doing what they're doing. Is what you're inventing good for the world? So how are you going to make judgments about that? I think it's worth mulling over these questions. I'm not saying you have to take a course in philosophy, much less read a book, but I do think people have to start thinking about
00:25:02
Speaker
what the future is, not just in terms of this thing I want to create, but what is its influence on the wider world? I think a lot of great founders are constantly asking that question. But that is to say, I'm not going to tell them, okay, go read Plato and here you're going to find the answers you need. I don't think that's necessarily true. So I think they have to be philosophical about what they're doing.
00:25:27
Speaker
but not necessarily well versed in strictly speaking in philosophy.
00:25:33
Speaker
I think everyone more and more, I mean, just take AI right now, the hot trend. I think anyone working in that space is going to have to contend with questions about the future of super intelligence. Is this a threat? How can we best use this tool to help humanity? These are questions grounded in philosophy, and there's even a small tradition going back a few years now.
00:25:58
Speaker
discussing these issues. So I think more and more people are going to have to get up to speed on this stuff. It will be required, if only for public relations.
Virtue in Silicon Valley
00:26:08
Speaker
Even if you were just trying to make money by building a bot, which I don't recommend, I don't think fame or fortune are good motivators in the long run.
00:26:18
Speaker
But if you were, I just think that everything people are building these days touches on so much of life that someone should have a background, moral philosophy, whatever that is. Maybe they can't articulate precisely the foundations of their morality, but they should be able to state why things are going to be good or better.
00:26:38
Speaker
One argument for being virtuous is just that it'll work out better for you in the long run. To what extent do you think you've seen that be true or not in your interactions and Silicon Valley investing? I think it's true by and large on average. I guess it's the outliers who stand out. Someone like Steve Jobs is a good example.
00:27:06
Speaker
I guess he could be one of the top three American CEOs in all of history, if you think about him taking control of Apple back in the late 90s and now setting it on a course to be one of the biggest companies in all of history. So from the perspective of product design and management,
00:27:27
Speaker
Jobs is an ace, but if you read anything about his private life, it was a disaster. His daughter published a memoir, can't remember the name of it, but it was really sad just because, and if you've seen the movie, I mean, it's been dramatized some, but he refused to acknowledge this poor girl as his daughter for many years, even though he named the lease a computer after.
00:27:51
Speaker
It's so bizarre. As a father, he was not virtuous, but he was very good at being a CEO. There are examples like that where it's like someone... Look, there are sociopaths out there. There are narcissists and they can be successful at things.
00:28:11
Speaker
Do they have a rich life? Probably not. Do they have a lot of broken relationships and traumas? Probably. But, you know, okay, they're millionaires. They're out there. So, and I guess you see this in sports and entertainment. God, it's like there are so many great basketball players who, or, you know, or Ty Cobb and baseball, who are just like out and out bad people.
00:28:34
Speaker
but they were really good at their craft or their sport. So it's like I said, by and large on average, I do think, you know, for the vast majority of people, I do think we should strive for excellence, especially in those major virtue categories.
00:28:49
Speaker
But it is true that I think people can find success in different arenas, even if they are vicious in certain respects as well. So it's hard. Yeah, it's a tough question.
Creativity from Unconventional Places
00:29:02
Speaker
I think there's a tradition in philosophy, though, that wants to ground just that you will have a more valuable life if you live a virtuous life. And I live by that. And I think it's
00:29:13
Speaker
It's something I wish upon everyone, but there are these examples out there where these complex lives that are just like these immoral artists who create great works of art. It's hard to know what to do with these people.
00:29:27
Speaker
Right, the art question is always interesting. If you look at traditionally stoicism, you have an account of the good as being knowledge and exercising that knowledge across the four different virtues, which doesn't leave that much room for
00:29:46
Speaker
deep sort of psychological insight, at least not on the surface, from really flawed people making excellent works. You know, the Stoics rule out things like Acresia, so that's not something that's going to be represented in the works. That's something I've thought about, how does that one make sense of this in the traditional Stoic view, when you can have something, you know, Wagner or something like this.
00:30:10
Speaker
beautiful music on a stoic account. Maybe he's capturing the order of nature in some sense. But I think often there are other works, maybe works where some writers, where their personality is imbued in the work, even though aspects of that personality may be vicious. Right. And that in itself could be an interesting document about humanity.
00:30:34
Speaker
that Bill Cosby could be so funny, or Michael Jackson could write these incredible tunes that we all love to dance and sing to. What does that say about us? Is it interesting in and of itself? Yeah, strange. To be fair, I don't know a lot about stoic aesthetics in particular, but yeah, interesting question. I do think, though, that it goes back to this question of creativity, which is such a mystery.
00:31:03
Speaker
And yeah, this René Girard had this idea that
00:31:07
Speaker
He spent a lot of time studying the madness of crowds, witch hunts, and scapegoating. And then he canvassed mythology and collected all these different stories about scapegoats. And there are some interesting patterns that the people who are chosen as scapegoats are oftentimes heroes or villains. They have extreme characteristics. They tend to be these boundary characters who are both insiders and outsiders.
00:31:35
Speaker
in a society. So, you know, maybe this is like just a different turn on the old sort of madness genius concept that, you know, the sources of our creativity are oftentimes correlated with other things that may be outside the bounds of normalcy. Yeah, it reminds me to some extent of what you talk about edge control, where if you think about
00:32:00
Speaker
I think there are many domains in life where doing the right thing, there are always different accounts of this, but it can be a bit of a tight roping challenge where fearing too far into maybe ruthless ambition is going to cause an awful lot of suffering, but there's some amount of ambition that's necessary to accomplish great things and so on.
00:32:22
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. And so my, in my version of the right stuff I present in the book, meaning like, what is the virtue theory that I think underpins great entrepreneurship? I am using a virtue theory, meaning there is a golden mean and there is, you could go too far to the left or too far to the right on that.
00:32:42
Speaker
You know, the traditional one is courage, which would, okay, if you hit the mark, beautiful. But if you fall short, then maybe you're experiencing cowardice. But if you're too bold, then you're reckless and rash. So how do we find this golden mean? And then I mentioned this term edge control because I noticed there are a lot of people who are used to pressing their ambition into chaos, into ignorance, into new ideas.
00:33:11
Speaker
There are certainly people who are too bold and too rash about that. They go too far. And then there are other people who just are complacent. And there is this very difficult edge work that everyone does that is out there on the edge of something exciting and risky, especially in entrepreneurship. So yeah, it is a blend of courage. It's a blend of commitment.
00:33:34
Speaker
I guess it's risk-taking in a sense, although I don't always like it portrayed that way because it makes it sound like some kind of extreme sport, like parachute jumping or parasailing or gliding or whatever. What makes it different is this day in, day out commitment. It's not just one time, it's like year after year. You have to be up for doing this. All right, right. What's your impression of Stoicism's influence in Silicon Valley?
Stoicism's Appeal in Silicon Valley
00:34:02
Speaker
Okay, yeah.
00:34:04
Speaker
I can't remember the exact time of these things, but sometime in the last 10 years, it started to become more and more in vogue. People like Tim Ferriss and Ryan Holiday, and then spreading outward. I mean, people like William Irving.
00:34:21
Speaker
Can't remember some of the other paglucci. There are some big books out there. There you go. Sorry for them mispronouncing his name. I mean, really great books on stoicism. I don't, you know, what's the reasoning for this? I think people are hungry for meaning and for understanding some of these topics we've touched on, these big questions about what's the meaning of life and how should I live. And stoicism, I think, stands out because
00:34:51
Speaker
A lot of people have either grew up in a secular non-religious environment or maybe the church didn't speak to them or the temple. And so these ancient philosophies stand out as a framework for thinking about these things without appealing to the baggage of some of these other traditions and institutions. And I think in Silicon Valley, a lot of people, yeah, it was as though they were in the desert and they needed water and Stoicism offers it.
00:35:20
Speaker
But from my own point of view, since I do have a little bit of a background in philosophy, one of the things I noticed in a lot of the writing was not understanding or at least appreciating the context of Stoicism in the history of the marketplace of philosophy.
00:35:40
Speaker
So what do I mean by that? What I mean by that is like there was an actual marketplace, the Agora, where Stoics would hang out, but there were also the descendants of Aristotle, the descendants of Plato, you had the Epicureans, you had the cynics. There were competing schools of philosophy, and there are great works, you know, Cicero has one, where you get a sense that these schools did disagree with each other.
00:36:06
Speaker
there were things about, you know, whether it was, you know, different principles to live by or different assumptions about the way the world works. And so what I noticed is, and as Stoicism started to gain its ascendancy as this appealing philosophy, it didn't take into account some of these other views, you know, like Aristotle's
00:36:27
Speaker
Martha Nussbaum is a great philosopher. She was a professor of mine at the University of Chicago. She has a great book called The Fragility of Goodness, which is a good summary of some of these differences. And a lot of it has to do with our vulnerability in the world.
00:36:42
Speaker
Stoicism is very much about trying to protect ourselves from attachment to things that may not be worth it. So I think in that sense, it can be quite valuable, especially in a world full of ambition, startup, people are chasing money, they're chasing valuations, they're chasing fame, and the emotional roller coaster of running a company.
00:37:08
Speaker
my God, there are so many dark nights of the soul. So I can see how a philosophy that is all about trying to find the right level of judgment about what these external objects mean to us could be so appealing. I do see that.
00:37:24
Speaker
But yeah, so I started thinking about that in my book. I include at the very, very end some thoughts on this. What it comes down to for me is, I mean, there's a reason that the word, if we describe someone in common American English as stoic, it tends to mean that they are not expressing their emotions or they're keeping their emotions under a lid. And that is a caricature of the stoic position, to be sure. But I think it's a natural outgrowth of some of their philosophy.
Debating Stoic Emotional Detachment
00:37:53
Speaker
And so I think, you know, for me, I think as, as beliefs are to facts, emotions are to value. And emotional experiences tend to have a three part structure. There tends to be a belief, there tends to be an evaluation, and there's a proportional response of the emotion to the evaluation and the belief. So what do I mean by that? Say I believe my dog died.
00:38:19
Speaker
That's the belief. Let's say it's true, okay? The evaluation is negative. That is a bad experience for me and everyone else who loved the dog. And then the feeling should be in proportion to the belief in evaluation. So if my dog is dead and I express as much grief as I would over the death of my child, that would seem like it was disproportionate in its response.
00:38:45
Speaker
Or we could imagine the opposite. Someone's don't cry over spilled milk. OK, this is a bad event. But if you're acting, crying as much as you would over the deaths as if someone had died over spilled milk, that would show that the proportion is out of alignment.
00:39:01
Speaker
So, you know, an emotion should be fitting to the situation and the thing and whatever is being evaluated. And that can be tricky because it's hard to know, you know, if our beliefs are true or, you know, is this evaluation correct? Should it be in a positive or negative direction? And then what is the extent of that proportional response? I think can be tricky for people.
00:39:27
Speaker
What I find, and I guess where I push back against the Stoics is to say, is that last part is like, or maybe it's part two and three, meaning, okay, we're not going to argue over the belief, is it true or false? But what's the evaluation over what we're discussing, positive or negative? And then what is the proportion of the response? And I do think Stoics want to certainly shrink the
00:39:55
Speaker
the response, you know, maybe not according things, the value that we think they have and maybe, you know, not giving a positive evaluation or negative evaluation at all towards something. And I don't think that's, you know, and I think it's arguable and worth debating and happy to get into it. But, you know, my think, you know, in my sense of a well-lived life, I think you want to do your best to hit those three parts of that emotional experience so that it fits.
00:40:22
Speaker
And you might not live a fully responsive life to the world if you cut yourself off. Yeah, I suppose the concern is the stoic account of proper emotions cuts one off from being vulnerable to the world in a way that if you think about relationships of
00:40:43
Speaker
love if I love another person in some sense I should be entering you know not really a contract is too much but in a sense if they are not doing well I should my well-being should be tied up with theirs likewise if you know my dog my dog dies or something bad happens in the world
00:41:02
Speaker
there if I cared about that to begin with, there's some sense in which I should feel worse and some sense in which I should be harmed, unlike what the Stoic view is, which was that harms can only come from your own judgments or beliefs. In that case, if you were harmed, it would be a mistaken belief. So that's your reticence about the Stoic view then.
00:41:28
Speaker
I know in more sophisticated versions of Stoicism, they have these different categories. Sometimes the ancients would call it preferred indifference, meaning like your dog or maybe your partner, these people. They are accorded some value that's more than, let's say, the vase or the glass, but on the other hand, they still do not go all the way and say that they're necessary for happiness.
00:41:57
Speaker
They cut short of that, and so they use this term preferred and different, which sounds pretty bad in translation. But still, yeah, I think you said it well. I think the best lives we can live entail some amount of vulnerability, and none of us are going to come out of this completely unscathed.
00:42:16
Speaker
on, you know, sometimes those moments, you know, they etch us, they deepen us in some ways. I mean, there are philosophers who just wholeheartedly accept the darkness as necessary for the grandeur and majesty of the heights. People like Nietzsche and Rilke talk about this.
00:42:36
Speaker
And I think they were, or at least in Nietzsche's case, he was drawing on the ancient Greek tradition in the theater, especially with tragedy, you know, these great, you know, we suffer, we have the calamities, catastrophes, and in our response to them is like the greatest thing we can do. You know, this whole open-hearted, sorrowful, you know, just
00:43:04
Speaker
blobbering, crying is like the most appropriate thing we can do to it because that's how we show our greatest strength in humanity. It is a very different approach and I can't quite accept all the darkness in the universe as being worth it, but I do get a sense of where they're coming from.
00:43:23
Speaker
Right, right. Two quick things by way of defense of the Stoics. Unfortunately, you won't be able to get into all of it, but curious to get your reaction on at least these two lines of thought.
Odysseus' Choice in the Odyssey
00:43:35
Speaker
So one is just the idea that so much of how we react to events has to do with our social roles and acting inappropriately.
00:43:45
Speaker
and our relationships might not look like acting like a lowercase stoic quite often. So Epictetus has a famous line where he advises people to grieve with others so long as they don't grieve inwardly. The thought is that it's important to show others you care and what showing amounts to is probably going to be socially contingent. You know, some cultures might be more expressive than others.
00:44:08
Speaker
But certainly being a lower case stoic at a funeral in many cultures would just not be an appropriate action. So I think that's one line many stoics might take. And then the second line that I'd be curious to get your take on is,
00:44:28
Speaker
One great advantage of Stoicism is that it's very egalitarian. Anyone can live the good life no matter what they've been handed by the external world because the good life is up to their decisions and judgments. And that does have the consequence that we're discussing that
00:44:48
Speaker
you can somewhat, you just are divorced from what happens outside of you in some sense, so long as you make the right decisions with respect to whatever arises. So that's, I think, one of the main motivations of stoicism. Okay, those are two great points. On the first one,
00:45:09
Speaker
I want to say that I guess that you're right. Maybe there was two parts to that. One is like you're in a certain role and there are certain things required of you in that role, whether because you're part of a family or maybe even an organization or something. And so you have to react in a certain way.
00:45:32
Speaker
That seems very pragmatic, but it's that last piece of, but don't let it really touch you deep down, something like that. Or I think you used the term on the inside. And so it almost comes across as a little insincere. But maybe to plumb even deeper, I would say that what happens in the world, or let's say the people we relate to, the events that occur in our life,
00:46:00
Speaker
I think they can be valuable or meaningful or significant. Well, I don't know the right evaluative term, but whatever it is, it has a structure. And one of the unique things I think about our emotional life is that it's not digital, it's analog. That's that little bee dance proportionality piece of the emotion.
00:46:20
Speaker
where I think our insides are reconstituted almost in a representative in exemplifying form of whatever it is we're responding to. So if the tragedy is catastrophic, our emotional state is in a sense mirroring that when it is fully authentic.
00:46:40
Speaker
So I think to say, to sort of wear a mask that might appear to be sad just because it signals that you're part of something, that you're sharing something with others isn't enough, I think, to fully participate in reality. There's this, like by constituting yourself in some analog representation of whatever it is you value, that that in itself is as meaningful in life. The second question
00:47:08
Speaker
I yeah, I guess it's all about I think there is something so beautiful and noble about someone like Epictetus who was a slave. I am someone who
00:47:20
Speaker
really had a lot taken away from them and could not be touched, that there was something within them that was so strong that it could not be influenced or swayed by even physical force. I think that is so beautiful and powerful view of the soul or whatever it is you want to call it within us, the spark of Zeus.
00:47:45
Speaker
I think that's right. But on the other hand, there is something where I don't think it's interesting. If you tell me about Jesus, Buddha, Epictetus, Socrates, they didn't have much room in their life for loved ones. And we don't see their lives diminished because of that. It's hard to imagine some of those people having romantic partnerships.
00:48:13
Speaker
But nevertheless, I think there's something in our lives where it feels like it wouldn't be fully lived unless we had that full commitment emotionally to these things. So it depends what those external goods are. You're right, it's very democratic, egalitarian in the sense of if a slave can find some level of nobility
00:48:37
Speaker
in the citadel of his soul, I think that's powerful. But when it comes to the well-lived life, I do think there are these external things that could be loved one. But I also think it could be experiences, just experiencing nature and all of its extraordinary qualities or understanding the universe or that entail putting our neck out there a little bit.
00:49:00
Speaker
And it may cost us a lot if we lose them. So that's a good question. Maybe it's like there is this absolute ground level that could be that like, okay, even a dictator cannot take away your dignity. That's left for your judgment. Now that's powerful.
00:49:18
Speaker
But then from there, it could be the case. I don't know how we build from that on the stoic view, but it could be the case that, okay, if that's the baseline, then there are, if you are lucky enough to live in a time and place where it's possible where, you know, other things, you know, other valuable and meaningful things are possible.
00:49:35
Speaker
Right, right. Yeah, I think the main focus is on your social role and playing that well and what that looks like is going to, of course, depend on whether you are a slave or someone in the 21st century. And I think there's certainly some questions about, okay, to what extent are you exposed to the well?
00:49:57
Speaker
well-being of others, how closely should you bind yourself to others? What does that look like? That, you know, maybe we should chat about some more, but I agree that. Yeah. That's what I just said now, it's not a... Hopefully, when the internet... When the internet comes back? Yeah. Well, if you have time, I'll ask you one more question, unless you need... Okay, yeah, one more question. Let's do it.
00:50:22
Speaker
All right, one more question. What's a fictional role model or maybe perhaps a real role model that you'd like to share with Stoics, either someone they can emulate or perhaps at least, if not emulate, get its important wisdom from? Geez, trying to think through recent books I've read or memoirs. That's specifically for Stoics. Yeah, I'm trying to think of...
00:50:50
Speaker
Well, certainly the Odyssey, I think, is an interesting point. It would be interesting to see how the Stoics react to the Odyssey. But I think that the foundational choice of the Odyssey could be an interesting one from a Stoic point of view. In the Iliad, the central question is
00:51:11
Speaker
whether Achilles should go home and die an old man, you know, maybe with a comfortable house and family, good life as a farmer, but with no renown, no glory, or should he accept his fate.
00:51:28
Speaker
Even though he'll become the best of the Achaeans and the greatest warrior, he'll die a young death. What's interesting is the Odyssey is the opposite choice. Odysseus is given the choice between, on the one hand, immortality and great sex with a goddess.
00:51:46
Speaker
Or to accept his fate as immortal and return home to his wife whom he hasn't seen in years. And so it's interesting that he makes that choice. And I think that would be worth mulling over whether you're a stoic or, or anyone. Very good. Absolutely. Perfect. Well, thanks so much for coming on. Cool. Thanks for having me on, Caleb.
00:52:08
Speaker
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Conclusion and Subscription Call
00:52:16
Speaker
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00:52:38
Speaker
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00:53:01
Speaker
And finally, please get in touch with us. Send a message to stoa at stoameditation.com if you ever have any feedback, questions, or recommendations. Until next time.