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Tanner Campbell on Practical Stoicism (Episode 38)
795 Plays1 year ago
Want to become more Stoic? Join us and other Stoics this October: Stoicism Applied by Caleb Ontiveros and Michael Tremblay on Maven
This conversation is with Tanner Campbell., the founder of Practical Philosophy and host of the Practical Stoicism Podcast.
Tanner specializes in bringing Stoicism to a broad audience in a way that is practical and accessible. In this episode, he and Michael Tremblay how to navigate our roles and responsibilities as Stoics, Tanner's journey from being skeptical of Stoicism to a Stoic advocate, and Tanner's relationship with the Stoic God as the former host of an atheism podcast.
(01:16) Introduction
(10:40) Podcast as Practice
(22:55) The Difference That Stoicism Makes
(36:10) Virtue Signaling
(38:37) How Do You Know What Your Roles Are?
(48:14) Common Pitfalls
(50:29) Popularizing Stoicism
(01:01:39) Traditional Stoicism
***
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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
Introduction to Stoicism and Hosts
00:00:00
Speaker
the most powerful aspect of framing stoicism as a way of answering the question or plotting a course for developing a good character. I think the benefit is that everything else falls into its little bucket and you know what to do with it. Welcome to Stoa Conversations. In this podcast, Caleb Ontiveros and I discuss the theory and practice of stoicism. Each week we'll share two conversations.
00:00:28
Speaker
one between the two of us, and the other will be an in-depth conversation with an expert. This conversation is with Tanner Campbell.
Tanner Campbell's Journey into Stoicism
00:00:36
Speaker
Tanner is the founder of Practical Philosophy and the host of the Practical Stoicism Podcast, where each day Tanner reads and discusses a short passage of stoic philosophy. Tanner specializes in bringing stoicism to a broad audience in a way that is practical and accessible.
00:00:52
Speaker
In this episode, we discuss practical advice for how to navigate our roles and responsibilities as Stoics, Tanner's journey from being skeptical of Stoicism's values to a Stoic advocate, and Tanner's relationship with the Stoic God as the former host of an atheism podcast. Tanner, how are you doing? Welcome to the show. You're doing great, and thank you for having me, Michael. I'm really happy to be here.
00:01:16
Speaker
Yeah, awesome. Well, I was really excited to talk to you a couple of reasons, you know, you're the host of the Practical Stoicism podcast and that's something that I've, I've been a fan of. And I think you're, you're one of the leaders in kind of spreading stoicism to a wider audience, but also with a focus on accurate representations of stoicism. You know, a lot of your work goes into talking about the stoic texts, interpreting those, breaking those down, but doing that in a way, again, that's accurate, but communicable to people. So I wanted to have this chat and, you know, chat about.
00:01:46
Speaker
some of your perspectives, get some of your insights on maybe the value of stoicism and ways to practice and develop in your stoic journey. So to start us off, I was wondering if you could just kind of give that broad overview. How did you get into stoicism? How did you end up where you are today? What did that journey look like in your stoic path?
00:02:09
Speaker
Well, I think it's interesting. I'll let your audience decide whether or not it actually is. But I was a rather large-sized podcaster in the atheism and theism space. Back in 2012, 2013, I had a podcast called The No Godcast.
00:02:25
Speaker
And we talked a lot about the nature of belief or the lack thereof. And it was a long-form content show. I think before long-term was really like kind of the standard. Long-term got a lot more popular over the years since then. But we were talking to people like Ray Comfort, who were on the theistic side, of course. And we were talking to people like Sean Carroll, who were
From Atheism to Stoic Advocacy
00:02:44
Speaker
very much not on the theistic side. And we were talking to all manner of people in between.
00:02:48
Speaker
And I really loved those conversations, but I found that the atheism community right at about that time, and this has been corrected since I just had a great conversation with Hemet Mehta, who was a colleague at the time, and he's told me that that atheism community has settled down a bit, and that it's not quite as aggressive as it used to be, but it wasn't like peak cantankerousness at the time. And I found that my listeners more and more wanted me to be angry and be aggressive towards people who believed, and I really
00:03:18
Speaker
I didn't like that too much because I think my disposition is just that I'm not that guy. I like to be people's friends. I like to not be too, you know, if I disagree with you, I'm going to let you know, but I'm not going to do it in a way that insinuates that I think you're stupid. And it felt like that's what that community wanted more and more at the time.
00:03:37
Speaker
And so I got kind of burned out. There were other reasons I got burned out, but I walked away from it. And at the time I knew someone who was the head of Center for Inquiry, DJ Grothe, and he was interested in stoicism. And so he was my first introduction to the word stoicism, and this is like 2013-ish. And from there I, because I was in a position of kind of reflection and having just walked away from this rather large project of mine,
00:04:01
Speaker
I went and I started a podcast called Epictetus is My Therapist, which if you search it where you actually can still find and while the episodes thankfully are not still available online, if you use the internet way back machine, you can see like the website and some of the old blog posts and it's like reading an old journal. It's really like, oh man, this is what I thought stoicism was in 2013.
00:04:23
Speaker
And I have initially walked away from it a bit because you run into, especially with Epictetus being the starting point, which is probably not the best starting point. He talks a lot about a personal God in a sense, and I'm just walking away from the atheism community and I'm thinking,
00:04:39
Speaker
Okay, well, I don't think I'm quite ready to be talking about God in the sense that I think he's talking about something that's like an Abrahamic God at that time, which of course he isn't. And so I shy away a little bit and then in 2015 or so, I come across Sharon Labelle's book, The Art of Living. And I thought that book was so exquisitely well done and also extremely brief. I think it might've been 120 pages or so where it felt short at the time.
00:05:04
Speaker
And at the end of that book, Sharon did such a great job of condensing those ideas into language that was, I guess, more approachable for me that I thought, okay, well, I can continue to be bothered by these words like God and faith and Zeus. I can continue to be bothered by those things or I can just grow up.
00:05:26
Speaker
and actually consume these texts in full and try to get more out of it. Because it seems like I'm really short sheeting myself, so to speak, by walking away just because somebody mentions
The Role of Podcasting in Stoic Practice
00:05:36
Speaker
Providence. So at that point, I reread Epictetus, I read Marcus Aurelius, I read some of Seneca's letters, and I realized that there's a lot more to this philosophy. It goes a lot deeper. It's a lot more nuanced than I was giving it credit for at the outset.
00:05:51
Speaker
And then we had a kind of a personal family tragedy on my partner's side of the family. And that kind of threw our lives into a little bit of disarray. We moved around a lot and fast forward to 2020. We had just moved from Maine. I had closed a recording studio, moved from Maine to Colorado and was really just doing audio book work and, you know, consulting work. I used to be in the audio space.
00:06:15
Speaker
And I was more stressed out and just overwhelmed than I had ever been in my entire life. And upon reflecting on that and trying to figure out what I could do maybe to get back to where I had been, because the pandemic I think was the same for everybody. It kind of sucked. And especially for me, I lost a business, which some other people did as well. And I thought, well, you know, I haven't really thought seriously about stoicism in a number of years. I've been too busy, right? That's what it felt like.
00:06:46
Speaker
And I'd like to get back to it, but I don't know, I've read the texts and I don't know if that's really going to bring me fully back to it. And so since I was in podcasting and audio, I thought, well, what if I just start a weekly podcast? And so I began every Saturday morning, waking up, reading one of Marcus Aurelius's meditations, because that was easy. One of the reasons I started with Marcus was because
00:07:12
Speaker
I knew I knew enough about meditations to not too badly muck up meditations in interpreting it, right? I might get some strong nuance wrong, but I wasn't going to get it so wrong that I wasn't going to be leading people down an incorrect path or something. And so I just started doing that and people responded well to it, which I never intended. I didn't market the show. I did nothing to seriously try to let people know I was doing it.
00:07:37
Speaker
kind of in the vein of that Epictetus is My Therapist podcast where I was doing it for me. And if it helped other people, well, that's great. And it did. It attracted a very large Generation Z and Gen Alpha audience. And before the summer, I had 100,000 listens a month.
00:07:54
Speaker
And that's not enough to really quit your day job or anything, but it was enough to say, oh, I've really got something here and I should keep doing it because now it's not just about me. Now it's about helping other people. People are obviously getting something out of it. And then came late summer, early fall, and I was up to around 300,000 listens a month. And I thought, okay, well, this is something you could quit your day job for. It wouldn't be a lot of money.
00:08:19
Speaker
I could pay my rent with it. And it just so happened that at the same time I was approached by Glassbox, which is the media network I'm part of. And they said, we'll pay you to make this podcast. Come on board with our network and we'll make it your job. And so I've been doing that since October. Something interesting happened then. And then I got this very big
00:08:37
Speaker
I felt like an imposter in some ways, because people refer to me as a philosopher of stoicism, but I don't have a PhD. And I always try to be very clear with everybody about that. Like, look, I'm not an academic. I've just started really seriously studying these things since last fall, less than a year ago. And I realized that at the time, and I thought, I have to do something about this. And a listener reached out to me and said, Tanner, I really like your show.
00:09:04
Speaker
but I think you could learn a little more. Let me pay some money so that you can be tutored by Kai Wedden." And I didn't even really know who Kai was. So I was like, okay, yeah, sure. I was really open to that because I saw myself as
00:09:20
Speaker
at this point, like right now, we have more reviews on Spotify and Apple Podcasts in total than Ryan Holiday has on his show. That means technically we're, we might not be more listened to, but we're more reviewed than he is. And as I started to realize that, I thought, I have a responsibility now. Like this isn't just
00:09:39
Speaker
This isn't just for me and it's not just me doing my best. Now I'm getting paid for it. Now it's my job. I have to really... I've got out my game. And so it was kind of serendipitous that that offer was made to me. I was tutored by Kai for...
00:09:52
Speaker
a number of sessions and then it became apparent during the sessions that Kai and I just got on very well. And we became friends and that kind of worked into us writing a couple of books together and me really delving into I think what the broader Stoicism community refers to as traditional Stoicism. Whereas before that, because of my atheistic background, I was more like in the modern Stoicism camp because I was still hung up on that
00:10:19
Speaker
well, for a time anyway, I was hung up on that, the god aspect, the stoic god, and cosmology, nature is god and all that stuff. And Kai helped me work through that nuance to understand that it really wasn't anything like what I thought it was, and has put me pretty firmly in the quote unquote traditional astosism camp since then.
00:10:38
Speaker
long answer to a short question. Sorry. Yeah, no, great. Good answer. So there's, there's a, there's a couple of different ways we could take that or a couple of different ways I want to take that. I think to start off, what struck me as most interesting about that story was this idea that your podcast at the beginning was almost a form of practice, if you will.
00:10:59
Speaker
Like this way of holding yourself accountable. I mean, like I'm going to sit, you know, I'm going to read a chapter or a portion of Marcus Aurelius every day. I'm going to think deeply about it and I'm going to share those thoughts. And, you know, it makes me think of Seneca's letters, right? Where he's, you know, maybe he's quoting a passage of, you know, Epicurus or something like this and he's reflecting on it. And so it has this benefit. We're reading those letters, but there's this benefit also of this practice of putting it together.
00:11:29
Speaker
And one thing that I'm thinking, so now this is going to be a long question. So this thing that I think very deeply about, I think very deeply about this question of.
00:11:36
Speaker
how depending on your level of progress or your level of experience, what appeals to you about stoicism is going to look different and the way you should be presented stoicism is going to be different. If you present someone who knows nothing about stoicism, an entirely accurate picture of stoicism, it is not only going to be confusing or challenging, it's going to be ultimately ineffective because it's not going to resonate or connect and people aren't going to practice with it. So some
Stoicism and Political Engagement
00:12:02
Speaker
thoughts I have is,
00:12:05
Speaker
I wonder if your show almost benefited from you being in kind of a progressing position because you'd be almost wrestling with the same kind of topics or the same intuitions or the same things that seem unintuitive about stoicism to someone who is new to stoicism. You'd still be wrestling with those or still empathize with those very much, as opposed to someone who takes those for granted. I was having a conversation on Twitter the other day
00:12:32
Speaker
where someone was saying, you know, virtue was such an off-putting word. And I think I've been reading stoicism for so long now that virtue doesn't seem weird to me. I've lost that empathy with someone where they, if they read virtue, they might think, you know, that has these Christian connotations or these religious connotations. So I guess.
00:12:48
Speaker
I guess there's, there's two parts to that question. One is, you know, do you think the work has benefited from this kind of active progression that you've been taking and maybe the humility that comes with that instead of being, well, I am an academic, I already know all of this, let me tell you. And I guess the second, the second part is how has that informed or changed the work you've done on your podcast, that, that active progression and practice.
00:13:16
Speaker
I think I've absolutely benefited from that. I mean, when I look back and I try to analyze why the podcast is successful, there is no X factor that I can identify other than that. You have podcasts like Chris Fisher's podcast, Stoicism on Fire, which is so good. But if you're somebody who's new, it might be a little intimidating because of... I mean, Chris is amazing. He's so thorough and he knows so much. He hates to be called a scholar.
00:13:43
Speaker
But he is, I'm calling you a scholar, Chris. He knows a lot. He knows a lot. And I think that if you're, I feel pretty strongly about this. I think if you're an older millennial or if you're a Gen Z'er or a Gen Alpha, this new generation that's coming out, I think that you have really heightened BS detectors.
00:14:06
Speaker
And I think what you just said about virtue being kind of a strange word, an off-putting word, I think that's definitely on that radar that they have. They think, oh, okay, virtue. So we're talking about, like you said, Christianity. We're talking about Christianity, and so Christianity means that you're gonna judge me for not doing the things that get me into heaven, and I'm just completely, virtue ethics are, I don't even see them anywhere. I used to see them in school all the time when I was young, I don't see them anywhere now. Or if they're taught, they're so obfuscated that you can't even tell what you're talking about anymore.
00:14:35
Speaker
So I think that I spoke to people who were looking for some sort of trustworthy
00:14:47
Speaker
source of information of how to put their lives together and have some kind of meaning in it. Because I think these younger kids, they care a lot. They just, they want to care. They know that the world has a lot of problems. They want to be part of fixing those problems. And I think that is why they're so easily hijacked by various activist groups or by various, I mean, I'm not calling Andrew Tate an activist, but he has an approach to
00:15:16
Speaker
life frameworks that when you have no direction and you think everything sucks, then that might be attractive to you because it's an answer of some kind. But then there are also, on the other side of the Andrew Tate spectrum, there are people who are polar opposites of Tate, but they're moving in a direction that I also don't think is particularly good.
00:15:34
Speaker
Like kids are throwing paint or trying to throw paint on famous pictures because they think somehow that's the answer too. And it's because they're passionate either way and they need some direction. And I think rather quickly, as soon as the show started to get popular, what I realized was that I had a way to interrupt those two pathways by saying, hey, here's a middle way and maybe this could be of use to you. Maybe you could find some purpose in your life with this. And I think I'm drifting a little bit from your initial question, but
00:16:02
Speaker
I think because it was necessary for me to approach teaching stoicism from a position of, look, I know I'm not an expert, that I had to be open with that, and I had to wrestle with it the way that you said, that I think it was easy for me to appear trustworthy to those people. Because they said, okay, Tanner's not telling us this is what stoicism is, or this is the only way to do it, which is something I get pretty passionate about. People say that there's only one way to practice stoicism or you're wrong.
00:16:31
Speaker
And I think in that they thought, okay, I can listen to this guy. And I cannot account for the podcast growth outside of that. It has to be that I wasn't the expert and that I was struggling through it with them. And that audience has begun to trust me because something really interesting happens when a new listener comes to the show.
00:16:50
Speaker
they listen to the entire back catalog because of the nature of the progression through the meditations they have to. So every new listener takes that journey with me. So by the time they catch up to recent episodes, they're like, oh, well, this is the guy who just started out a year ago or, you know, whenever it happens to be when they listen and he, I can hear him learning and I'm learning along with him. And I think that that matters a lot.
00:17:14
Speaker
Yeah, it's pretty cool. It's pretty inspiring when you put it that way. I think that's like, it's pretty motivating too because in a lot of what we talk about in stoicism is also role models. Again, your, your answers are, there's a lot of different directions to take these answers. So one thing that I want to get back to is this idea of the political extremism and looking for kind of a middle way or a sense of meaning because you care and you want to direct that somewhere. I want to, I'm going to come back to that.
00:17:35
Speaker
But I also think there's this idea of kind of role models and stoicism is something that we push. We talk a lot about contemplation of the sage, but contemplation of the sage is really intense. Really what it is kind of emulation, you know, cause there's not a lot of sages, but really it is emulation of people or behavior you want to see him. So maybe this behavior of, you know, this kind of humility, this behavior of, of.
00:17:59
Speaker
iterating and growing and learning. So this person gets put on this path when they start your podcast, but then they're following your path and you're a couple of steps ahead. And that can be very motivating for a lot of people. I think that's a reason why a lot of people like Marcus Aurelius, for example, because he's somebody that has doubts and is wrestling.
00:18:18
Speaker
He talked about, you know, it's either Providence or it's Adams. And, you know, Stos is very clear that it's not Adams, it's not randomness, but he's still wrestling with that. But that gives you, I guess, permission to be in that space as well, that space of wrestling with those ideas. One thing, so following up on that, I guess, to go in that political direction.
00:18:41
Speaker
There's a couple things, I think it's connected also to that idea of atheism you were talking about before, because one of the things I see, when people ask me, why is stoicism becoming popular? The answer I give is typically, I think people are becoming less religious, but there's also this need for kind of meaning and sense making. And I don't use the idea of bullshit detector, but I think there's this idea where people like something that they're allowed to wrestle with.
00:19:04
Speaker
And what I like about ancient Greek philosophy is you're allowed to question it. You're allowed to argue against it. That's encouraged. That's why I loved when I took philosophy as a major. I thought I was in another class. And if you say that seems kind of stupid to me, the professor would be like, stop talking. You're in second year. You don't get to call it stupid. But if you're in a philosophy class and you say that sounds stupid to me, the professor goes, why? Like, let's talk about it. You know, there's this kind of confidence to wrestle with it. So that's something that I really love about philosophy.
00:19:35
Speaker
What I wanted to go there is stoicism, people they need meaning, they're looking for a sense of meaning because they care. That can draw them into these kind of extremists in either direction. So there's this way of taking this middle ground. But another thing that I've read that you've written about is you've claimed that stoicism is necessarily political or stoicism is something that is political.
00:19:58
Speaker
And so one way of reading a middle ground is kind of this enlightened centrism, a political stance. Like I'm in the middle because I don't, I'm not either left or right, or don't identify with any of this. And I think you've, you've, you know, you've written against that. So I'm interested in kind of your views about why you think stoicism needs to be political and how that makes sense in the framework that you've just provided.
00:20:22
Speaker
Sure. I think that's fair. So I first want to clarify that when I say stoicism is political, I mean stoicism calls us to participate in politics. That's what I mean by that. Just in case anybody thinks that I mean, I think stoicism should be politicized. That is not what I mean.
00:20:38
Speaker
And the reason I feel that is, as you know, and probably all your listeners know, stoicism is role ethics heavy. And so we draw our actions of what is appropriate based on what our roles are. And I think being apolitical is something a person could be, but I believe that in order for that person to be that,
00:20:58
Speaker
that person would be probably rarer than even the sage would be because it would require that their roles ask nothing of them in the participation of the things which affected their the cosmopolis whether it's their local micro cosmopolis or the cosmopolis as a whole and so I feel like as a citizen of let's and we'll throw out the word cosmopolis and we'll just use a citizen of our city or our country there are things that I think if we asked ourselves by not participating in
00:21:28
Speaker
some sort of addressing of this.
00:21:32
Speaker
does that speak positively of my character or does it speak negatively of my character? Now, I think that it is definitely possible that there are people who would say, it does not speak negatively of my character or it speaks neutrally of my character. But I think that those people, those would be very rare. And I think a lot of apoliticism, if that's the right word, politicalness, I think some of that is rooted in a kind of cynicism and helplessness.
00:21:59
Speaker
And I don't feel great about that because I, and full disclosure, I feel like that. There are elections here locally that I have not participated in because I've looked at the left option or the right, all of the options. It doesn't really matter. And I've thought, man, there are so many negatives that are going along with the few positives of these particular candidates.
00:22:20
Speaker
that I think it would speak negatively of my character to choose one of them in a choose lesser of two evils kind of way. And I've had a conversation with Chris Fisher about this on my podcast, and with Kai Whiting, that
00:22:32
Speaker
I think not participating can be a form of participating, so long as it is strategically thought out, and it's not just, well, I feel hopeless, so I'm not going to participate. Because not participating is one part of, I guess, apoliticism, but it's got to be to some effect, right? Otherwise, you're just checking out. That's my feeling anyway.
00:22:55
Speaker
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. I mean, I find that pretty compelling. This idea that you need to participate and what that form, that participation looks like is going to change, but to cynically check out of the process, if you took a step back, probably doesn't reflect well on your character or probably not the best way your character could
The Pursuit of Virtue in Stoicism
00:23:13
Speaker
be. Probably your character would be better if you were able to kind of check in and take a.
00:23:18
Speaker
take a position that, you know, at the very least resonates with your values, but I guess more robustly is the right one to take if you can, if you can get there and get that far.
00:23:28
Speaker
One thing looking at this view of you progressing over time as you've got more into stoicism, what has been some of the practical changes in your life, either in the way you live, the way you feel about things, kind of what you value, what aspects of self-transformation have you felt as you've done this deep dive?
00:23:49
Speaker
I mean, for me, it's easy. It's this full embodiment, full incorporation of the idea that the thing that really matters is the achievement of a good character. I have said this so many times recently when people ask me questions not too dissimilar from this, that I so badly wish that I'd figure this out sooner because of how important I've come to understand it to be. Like it really is about being a good person. We're striving to become the best person that you can become.
00:24:18
Speaker
And I think some people would roll their eyes, non Stoics would roll their eyes and say, well, obviously the goal is to become a good person. But the thing is that good person until I came to Stoicism was never, good was not defined in a useful way to me. It was just this kind of like, okay, well, what the hell does good mean? What does it mean to be a good person? Your parents were like, be good. Okay, well, give me some instruction. And I feel like Stoicism does that because it says, look,
00:24:44
Speaker
good means acting virtuously, means making appropriate decisions. It means trying your best to make the morally correct decision at all times. Not speaking out of turn, for example, if you don't know how to do something, don't say you know how to do it. If you're in a conversation and you don't have anything of value to add, maybe you shouldn't be attempting to add value because that might make things worse by doing that in some ego-based decision to
00:25:12
Speaker
just to have to be heard because you want to seem smart or something, things like that.
00:25:16
Speaker
And since realizing that, my life has become a lot simpler to navigate. And my life didn't feel at all simple to navigate when I had lost my business, lost my home, had my car repossessed, moved across the country. Like my life felt very, not in my control, which of course, if we're going to use the word control, a lot of stuff isn't. Not within my purview of decision making, right? And I couldn't decide, I think is the way I like to say that more than control. But, you know, I felt,
00:25:47
Speaker
I felt like I had no path in front of me that was clearly marked with any kind of trail indicators. And as soon as, and I really credit Kai with this, so I could say that Stoicism did this for me, but if I hadn't met Kai, I don't know if I would have figured it out, gave me this definition of what it meant to be good and allowed me to lay out in front of me exactly what I needed to do to work towards that. And to accept that.
00:26:17
Speaker
The point wasn't becoming completely good. The point was to make progress towards becoming completely good, which gives you something to always be doing because we're never there. I wrote this recently in a Substack article that I wrote where I reflected on Marcus Aurelius and the value of journaling because we have a journaling program. They said that the sage was as rare as the phoenix.
00:26:44
Speaker
But they knew the Phoenix to be mythical. And I think a lot of academics would not agree with what to say, but they knew the Phoenix was a mythical character. So were they saying that the sage was actually not attainable? Kai doesn't like when I say that because he thinks, well, if we think it's not attainable, then we have nothing to work towards, which I totally get. But it's interesting that even the ancients understood that, you know, becoming the sage was kind of the point, but not the practical point that you should have in mind. It should be about progress.
00:27:12
Speaker
not about, oh, if I don't get there before I die, I'm a complete failure. And I think they understood that. You know, what's that epic to this as a line, you know, we can't all be Socrates, but we can all, you know, you know, aim to be or aspire to and try our best, which I think I think is, I think is, is the important one. It's, it's really one, one thing I've never thought about before that you put really well is this idea that we always have something to be doing because if we're not perfect, there is always
00:27:43
Speaker
There is always progress to be made. There is always, I guess, I don't know, an action to be participated in. I mean, one thing that I'm sure you're aware of is the way the Stoics would frame virtue as this really unattainable thing, right? Like this idea that virtue, we're all equally vicious. So there's the virtuous people and there's the vicious people and there's no degree of viciousness. We're all equally vicious or equally virtuous. And they would use these metaphors of
00:28:10
Speaker
You know, a straight line is straight and a crooked line is crooked. There's not, this line isn't more crooked or less crooked or the other one they would use is the word of drowning. You know, if my head is a foot below water, I'm still drowning. I'm not going to say this, well, I'm drowning less than you. Like, look how great I am. You're still drowning.
00:28:26
Speaker
And maybe there's something to that, I think, I'm just thinking about this for the first time, maybe there's almost this like pedagogical or motivational aspect to that of saying like, hey, don't rest on your laurels, right? Like you're all, you're just as vicious as that other person in the sense that you're just as not virtuous. So there's always something to be doing. There's always movement to the water until you reach that phase. That's what that made me think of.
00:28:52
Speaker
And in terms of this progress, in terms of this doing, what are some practical ways that that's affected your life? So you've, you've, you've refocused your view to the development of your character and, and how does that manifest either in how you're feeling or things that you're doing or your robustness? What is that? What are some of the rewards or some of, I guess, the rewards, but maybe the benefits of that practice. That you realize how.
00:29:17
Speaker
You know, one of the things that Stoics really get hammered for is this idea of the indifferent, and I feel like your audience doesn't need me to say this, but the pluralized form of indifferent is indifference, and it really sucks that that word sounds like indifference, like it's such a pain. And so what I'm going to say might lead into that. But it really does, it has shifted for me anyway, the way I look at everything which is external to me.
00:29:44
Speaker
I look at what's going on in XYZ country. I don't want to bring up anything that's a political hot topic at the moment, but I can ask myself some reasonable questions. I can say, okay, well, how should I behave in response to this? And what does that say of my character? Can I respond to it? Do I have any way to be useful?
00:30:02
Speaker
Is there anything within my roles that calls me to participate in this in whatever way? Maybe it's giving money, maybe it's getting physically involved in activism, where is my place in this? And then I just have an answer of what to do.
00:30:17
Speaker
Whereas before I'd be like, oh no, there's a war over here and there's tax code problems over here and like this president's a lunatic and what do I do about that? But stoicism has helped me to understand that, look, there are things that my role might call me to do something about and then I can do them. And then that's my responsibility because that's in alignment with developing a better character. I think that's the most powerful aspect of
00:30:40
Speaker
framing stoicism as a way of answering the question or plotting a course for developing a good character. I think the benefit is that everything else falls into its little bucket and you know what to do with it. And if it's not in a bucket, it's not because you don't care about it. It's because either your role doesn't call you to be involved in it or you don't physically have the ability to do anything about it.
00:31:07
Speaker
And why would you fret about something? Not to say it doesn't matter, but why would you judge yourself negatively for not being involved in something that you couldn't be efficacious in combating or benefiting or working to make better in some way? So I think that's been the biggest help for me is I know that I can reason through what my roles are.
00:31:29
Speaker
And I can determine what to do when anybody brings anything to me. Hey, there's a family next door to you that's having a really difficult time with, they've got a food shortage or something. Well, hey, I can do something about that. Let me look at my bank account and see what I can do, or let me look at local initiatives and see what I can do. Okay, I can do something, so let me do that. And then I'm like, okay, well, I've done that thing. I've participated in the way that's appropriate for me and that actually mattered.
00:31:54
Speaker
And that was my job. But if they say, there's a war in XYZ country, well, what can I do? Do they need money? No, it seems like they've got that. They've got the funding they need to carry out with the war. I think everybody knows what I'm talking about here. So what can I do? Well, maybe I could write a soldier a letter. Is there a program for something like that? No. Okay. Well, I guess I really can't do much. So I can put that in this bucket over here where I don't have a particular action to take and I can move on. Not that I don't care.
00:32:24
Speaker
but that I know, at least for the time being, there's nothing I specifically can do about that. And so it's okay for me to move on from it. And to do so in a guilt-free way, I feel like one of the things that really overwhelms millennials, Gen Z and Gen Alpha is they're like, Jesus, everything's wrong.
00:32:40
Speaker
Everything is going terribly. I have no idea what to do and I don't even know, I mean, which things should I pick to participate in? It must all be the same. But when you bring in role ethics and you start asking questions about like, okay, what do my roles say about what I should do? What can I physically actually do? And it's okay for me to stop there because first of all, I can't solve every problem on earth. And second of all, I can't be efficacious in solving every problem on earth.
00:33:09
Speaker
where I think we've got a lot of this virtue signaling going on. I think people paint virtue signaling as this thing that idiots do, but I don't think that's what it is. I think it's what people are virtue signaling because they feel like I have to be involved. I have to do the thing because it's the only thing I can do and I feel so helpless, hopeless, and lost. For me, that's the biggest takeaway for stoicism, for improving my own life anyway.
00:33:31
Speaker
Yeah, that's great. I think that, I think there's this interesting way of looking at virtue signaling that you just brought up as like this. I mean, so this is what part of what socialism says is that you will experience a passion if you think something bad is happening. So there almost becomes this like moral aspect outrage, right? Whereas like, if you are not outraged, you do not care. And if you do not care, there is something morally wrong with you. But then you end up in this position where
00:33:58
Speaker
You literally cannot, I mean, you could for a very short period of time, maybe, but you can't open yourself up. I mean, the stoic argument aside about whether or not these are the right things to be upset about, you can't open yourself up to really.
00:34:14
Speaker
really feel all the suffering across the entire world in any sort of way that lends you any sort of, as you said, efficacy in actually helping any of those problems. It would just be this kind of overwhelming, I think this kind of overwhelming suffering if you were to engage in those. So there's these kind of two issues at play. There's this kind of equanimity, there's this
00:34:36
Speaker
Look, if I just focus on my roles, I feel better. And that's not to say I never feel deeply. Like, you know, if you have a family tragedy, that will be a time that you will feel deeply that will have to do with your roles and to have to do with indifference in the stoic sense. But then there's also this, as you said, this kind of practical aspect or this effectiveness aspect. And it seems like the stoic solution here might be that I can both be
00:35:03
Speaker
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00:35:33
Speaker
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00:36:00
Speaker
My next question to you, which is a genuine question, something I wrestle with, how do you figure out, how do you figure out your roles? How do you pick which ones that you're going to stick to and which ones you're not? Yeah, that's a great question. Before I answer it, I want to just say that if you were talking, we were talking about virtue signaling, I think that.
00:36:18
Speaker
If anybody was just listening to what we both just said, and we're thinking, well, no, you have to be involved in any way you can be involved, and maybe they agree with that virtue signaling side of the house. Probably not true of your listeners, but if there's somebody out there or somebody who has somebody in the family who thinks like that, I think a good question for somebody like that to ask themselves is, if I can't be efficacious
00:36:41
Speaker
Why am I doing this? And I think that the answer that has to come back, no matter how much cognitive dissonance there is, is I'm doing it because I don't want to be seen negatively by other people. And then the next question is, why is that important to me? Why is the way that I'm viewed by others more important to me than the ability to be efficacious in whatever action, whatever moral action I think I'm taking?
00:37:06
Speaker
And because I'm ADHD, I'm going to ask you to re-ask that question so that I make sure that I don't glaze over in any way. Well, now I'm going to do a follow-up. We're going to come back to it. I'm going to do the follow-up before you just say it. I'm going to push you a bit on that. I think there's another one. So I think you can do it for social reasons. I think you can also do it because you don't have great control over your attention yet or your focus yet.
00:37:29
Speaker
I think there's one view of like, I'm upset about this because I want to be seen as a person that cares about this. But I think there's also, I'm upset about this because that's currently what I'm thinking about. And then the question is, well, why is that the thing you're choosing to think about? Are there better things you could be choosing to think about in terms of your efficiency?
00:37:51
Speaker
I see that especially, you know, working with like teenagers or something like this, like that. You're upset about this because you're thinking about this deeply, but it's like, why is this the topic you're thinking about deeply? Is it something that, because it's not the only bad thing going on, right? So is it something that you're particularly suited to handle? Is it something that is particularly relevant to you in some way? Is something that you're intentionally choosing to be the thing that's taking up your attention or is it just the thing you're kind of, you know, you're seeing on the news or something like that?
00:38:16
Speaker
I think that's a more nuanced way of looking at it. I appreciate, and I think I agree on it. Sure. There is at least a third way. Absolutely. Great. That's very productive. Yeah, yeah. Good. Great. So the question was, which again, as a genuine question, not as like a quiz of Epictetus's theory, because it's something I wrestle with in my practice. How do you pick your roles? How do you... So you say, well,
00:38:41
Speaker
Look, what helps me is I know what my roles are or I decide what my roles are. And that helps me direct my focus in a way that's effective. But then, you know, the kind of kicks the can one level further, which is, you know, what is my role? Is my role to be very involved in political matters? Is my role to be just focused on my family or just at a city level? What's kind of, how do you, how do you do that personally? Not for other people, but how do you do it?
00:39:05
Speaker
Yeah. So I start with what I view my personal roles to be. I'm a partner. I'm a dog dad to two little baby doggos. And so some of what my responsibilities are relate to those roles as a dog partner. So that will help me to sort things out like.
00:39:20
Speaker
how should I prioritize things like anniversary dinners? Or how should I prioritize things like dog park walks during the day and walks for the dog and potty breaks and such while I'm engaged in, you know, I mentioned earlier joking, but quite seriously that I am ADHD. And so it can be difficult to navigate breaks in the workday. And so I have to phrase the responsibility to take a break to take the dogs out or on a walk or whatever it is as a role.
00:39:48
Speaker
And so that's very small scale, self-related, relationship related. Making sure that I've taken off the right days of the week for the anniversary dinners and the date nights and such, that relates to the role of being a partner. And then larger than that, let's say I'm also a renter in a home in Denver and I have neighbors.
00:40:08
Speaker
So I have to look at my responsibilities of my role to be a good neighbor. What does that mean? So I gave the example earlier that if my neighbor was suffering from a food shortage or something that I might, I would be in a position to get involved in that. Kai asks a great question. If I don't do it, who does? And if the answer is no one else can do it.
00:40:26
Speaker
You should probably be doing it if you can, but also things like I have upstairs neighbors. And so that means that I should be considering how loud my television is at a certain time of the evening, right? Because being a good neighbor might relate to allowing my neighbors to go to bed early if they go to bed a little earlier than I tend to and watching the volume of music or television or, you know, whatever I've got going on in the house, planning a house party, something like that.
00:40:52
Speaker
And then we can extrapolate it out further to my street. What's my role for the small street that I'm on? This like little thousand foot stretch of street and all these neighbors I have. Well, maybe when I'm walking, I have a responsibility to pick up trash when I see it in someone's yard or on the sidewalk or somebody who.
00:41:09
Speaker
hasn't picked up their dog poop, which happens far too frequently, Denver, get with it. Maybe if I don't pick it up, clearly the person who left it there is not going to pick it up. So maybe I should do that. And beyond my street, we have local businesses. What's my responsibility to those local businesses? Well, it's not necessarily my role to ensure that businesses survive.
00:41:32
Speaker
If I don't ensure businesses survive in my local, you know, one mile, two mile radius, who does? So maybe I have a responsibility to, when I think about getting a coffee, maybe it's appropriate for me
Application of Stoic Roles in Daily Life
00:41:44
Speaker
to go to Copper Door next to the Botanical Gardens on Monday. And then when I get a coffee the next morning, go to Downpours, which is right at the end of my street. Then the next day go to, you know, Hookdown Colfax, which is another coffee shop.
00:41:55
Speaker
And maybe if I go to Starbucks, I limit that support because Starbucks needs it less than these little mob and pop shops. So I can view the responsibility of maintaining the local business economy.
00:42:06
Speaker
if I decide that that's a role of mine, if I'm in a position to pay $5 for coffee instead of $1, which I could do at the gas station or by making it at home. But there are other considerations there because the coffee bean industry has some slavery aspects to it. So is the coffee fair trade? Because I can control whether or not I buy non-fair trade coffee or fair trade coffee. And I think that my desire to build a good moral character
00:42:33
Speaker
has to ask those questions. So that's part of figuring out my rules as well. And then extrapolate into local politics. Well, there are some ordinances that are up for voting. Like, for example, I just learned the other day that this bougie neighborhood next to our neighborhood, which is kind of like part of our neighborhood, but it's the bougie part.
00:42:50
Speaker
which I don't live in, that they got really upset because pickleball players were using their tennis courts to play pickleball instead of tennis. And I guess pickleball is too loud for those people. So they're like trying to put up an ordinance where you can't play pickleball in the tennis ball courts. And so I have to decide what is my role in getting involved in that? Do I have one as a citizen of Denver and of this particular small neighborhood, Congress Park?
00:43:16
Speaker
And whatever that answer is that I move forward with that in that particular case, because I don't live near there. I'm not affected by it. And I'm not a pickleball player. I probably don't have a role.
00:43:26
Speaker
But when voting on things like drug addiction issues and homelessness issues, of which we have a lot here in Denver, and social concern issues, I think that I, as someone who's affected by them, as someone whose neighbors are affected by them, I think that, well, here I am, a citizen, a neighbor of these people, someone who sees these things on a daily basis. Do I have a responsibility to be involved in them? I think so.
00:43:51
Speaker
How can I be involved? Well, maybe that's donating or maybe that's voting on an ordinance or a bill that's up to be passed. And is it a protest? I mean, I don't feel like my disposition makes me a very good protester. I don't do chants. I don't own a bullhorn. I'm not inclined towards that, but I am inclined towards giving money and voting. And so it helps me figure out what I should do in those situations as well.
00:44:17
Speaker
I can go further than that, but I think maybe that's enough for the, for the sake of your question. Yeah. I mean, those are good examples. Yeah. Those are great. And gives people kind of a, I don't know, a practical example of what an application of world ethic looked like that isn't, you know, Epictetus using these examples of, you know, you're a philosopher, so don't cut your beard. And they end up with these kind of dated examples sometimes.
00:44:38
Speaker
Well, so let me add to that because another responsibility that people, I think maybe role that people wrestle with is their jobs. I know a lot of people don't like their jobs, and so they choose to not do a great job at their job because they're mad that that's the crappy job they have. First of all, I have to say that I'm fairly lucky that my job is content creation and podcasting and talking about philosophy, stoicism in particular. I love my job, but there are definitely days
00:45:05
Speaker
where I wake up and I'm like, Jesus, I've, you know, we do seven episodes a week and there are some Wednesdays or Thursdays and I'm like, do I really, do I really have to do a one and a half hour mailbag episode for my listeners? And sometimes the answer is yes, you have to, this is the role you accept and these are your responsibilities to fill. And sometimes that outweighs the, well, you also have a role to
00:45:29
Speaker
take care of your own mental health, and sometimes it's okay to need a break. And so which of those two responsibilities wins out? And sometimes it's, you suck it up buddy, you promised you would do this, you got to do a mailbag. And sometimes it's, I'm feeling pretty burned out and I don't think the mailbag would be particularly good. So maybe I shouldn't do it just yet.
00:45:52
Speaker
I think that raises an interesting point, which is this idea that our roles are not, I don't know, I would want to use this term intersectionality, right? Like they intersect in ways that are interesting.
00:46:01
Speaker
And that's when things get complicated, right? Because, you know, you booked an anniversary dinner on the same time when there's, I don't know, there's a vote. I don't know the example, but these things can conflict, right? And what you're bringing up as an example of, you know, it's all fine and good when it's like, should I, I'm on a walk. Should I pick up my dog poop? Cause it's like nice to my neighbors or not. It's like, yeah, you should probably do that. And you're probably a worse person if you don't, but it gets kind of messy when it's like, you know.
00:46:24
Speaker
I should do a good job at this work because it's important to do a good job at the job you've committed to but you know I have I have burnout or mental health considerations or self-care considerations or you know how do I choose between this something at work and something in a relationship and these kind of balancing these kind of factors is a complicated part.
Understanding Stoicism's Contextual Nature
00:46:42
Speaker
My general impression is that the Stoics would okay be okay with it being complicated and my general impression is that people kind of have a tendency to
00:46:49
Speaker
There's this real appeal to something like utilitarianism where it's like, well, just pull out your calculator, you know, and do some quick math. And if one number is higher, do that one. And there's, there's just something messy about this and there's something messy about this. I think the stoic answer too would be that the messiness.
00:47:07
Speaker
is more messy as you're progressing as well. There becomes less messy situations as you become more confident in your stoic practice, more clear in your stoic value. But at the start, there'll be a lot of that messiness. And I think that's just okay. I'm all right with that.
00:47:23
Speaker
Although I think it can be off putting for some people who, you know, maybe going back to Christianity, I don't know, I don't know a lot about Christianity, but maybe much more comfortable with some kind of like, you know, set down to find rules. One thing I was, I was thinking about off that conversation is I often think about how stoicism has this missing middle. So there's a lot of great things that stoicism has to say if you're
00:47:44
Speaker
You know, really upset, really suffering, really, really down on your luck, really frustrated. Then there's this, you know, this picture of the perfect person. And then there's this kind of complicated, well, what do I do to get there? How do I do, how do I navigate that middle part, that progression part? I think you've, you've just laid down really succinctly and well what that might look like, or at least part of what that looks like. But.
00:48:05
Speaker
I want to frame this the other way, which is what mistakes have you seen either in your own practice or with your listeners or people you've engaged with in the community? What common pitfalls or mistakes do you think people fall into when they're navigating this middle part or they're taking their stoic journey? Oh, that's a good one. I'm thinking
00:48:27
Speaker
probably that they approach it without understanding that stoicism is highly contextual. So you just gave the example of what if there's a vote, but it's on the same day as anniversary night, right?
00:48:40
Speaker
So I think that, and then you mentioned that people want these absolute answers and approaches to things in this very utilitarian view. And I agree with that. I think people do want that. And I think that's part of why stoicism seems attractive at the outset to a lot of people is that it can give off, that it is that. But in the event of a date night and voting being on the same day, well, that's not happening within a vacuum, right? You can ask yourself,
00:49:06
Speaker
Well, if I don't vote, who's going to? And the answer is a lot of people. And then the next question you can ask is, well, if I don't take my girlfriend out for our anniversary or whoever your partner is, who's going to do that? Well, hopefully not my neighbor.
00:49:18
Speaker
But also, you can go to your partner and say, hey, I know we scheduled this. I'm feeling like I should maybe vote and that would mean we'd have to push our dinner off till tomorrow. Are you okay with that? And then depending on what your partner thinks about that, you can make a decision. So I think that one of the things that people approach stoicism with, I don't want to call it wrong, but I would say can be more well informed as they get deeper into it.
00:49:46
Speaker
is that it's highly contextual. I don't think the Stoic path is the same for any single person because no single person has the same roles, no single person has the same capacities, at least not in totality. And so the answer to your country going to war, let's say the US, goodness forbid, went to war or Canada went to war, that people are like, well, then our duty is to become soldiers. Now, wait a minute.
00:50:11
Speaker
I mean, that's great. You think that's cool. But maybe if you're a teacher who's never fired a gun in their life, are you going to make a very good soldier? Or do you have a better impact by saying, okay, I'm a teacher, so maybe I need to not be a soldier. I need to try to continue to educate people because that's also important.
00:50:36
Speaker
that there's only one way to be a stoic is I think the idea that people approach stoicism with. And I think some of these traditional stoicism groups can seem at the entry point, right? It can seem like they're kind of saying that because they put a lot of really heavy, deep stuff up in the front. James Daltry and I have recently become like, we're not enemies in any way. In fact, we've come to find out that we're kind of more similar than we are different through our conversations.
00:51:04
Speaker
So just to interrupt, for those that don't know James Daltrey, I don't know if he, I don't think he has a website or she does anything. He's brilliant. He should. He knows, he knows so much about stoicism and he posts incredibly regularly, but only on Facebook I've seen, but he, he's incredibly knowledgeable. So that's, that's James. If you're on the Facebook stoicism scene, you've maybe seen him, but he's got a lot of great stuff to say, but sorry, that's some context.
00:51:29
Speaker
So, he recently joined, we had a bit of a fracas in his Facebook group, and then I invited him to join our Discord community, and he has, and we have a theory channel, and James has become like the king of the theory channel, because that's the stuff he knows really well. But I think that when you first come to Stoicism, if you hit traditional Stoicism first, and you're not versed in philosophy just in general, you don't really know what Stoicism is, what you
00:51:54
Speaker
wind up with is like, oh man, okay, there's a very specific correct way to be a stoic. That's not what somebody like James would say, but it's what somebody like James would say that it would seem like what they were saying. And I think that
00:52:09
Speaker
That is part, so one of the reasons that Kai and I are writing Stoicism but brief is because we thought, okay, what we need is Ryan Holiday is like this life hack kind of character, right? And Kai says this to me all the time that his book obstacle is the way it doesn't use the virtue, it doesn't use the word virtue a single time, which is, which seems like a travesty that you could be the best selling book, quote unquote, on Stoicism and not talk about virtue at all in the pages of that book.
00:52:37
Speaker
So, what we're thinking is that we need somebody who, James Joltry is like king of nuance and detail, right? That's what I feel like. And then we have somebody like Ryan Holiday, who's like king of marketing and top of the funnel, but tends to lead people away from traditional stoicism, which is where I think most of the benefit is and like steers them off into, I don't know, life hacky stoicism.
00:52:58
Speaker
we're writing this book because we think what we need is what the world, what the cosmopolis would benefit from is a top of the funnel, so to speak, that was accurate but also accessible and written in plain language. Because if you compare the way that I write to the way that James Dultry writes to the way that Chris Fisher writes, vastly different. But I feel like
00:53:20
Speaker
If you're someone who has no experience with stoicism, you're more likely to continue down the educational funnel and get to people like James and Chris. If I'm the first guy you meet, or Kai is the first guy, or that kind of accessible language is the first language you come across.
00:53:35
Speaker
Yeah, totally. So, you know, for those that might not be as involved in the kind of the, I guess I would say, I don't know, the stoicism kind of ecosystem of kind of who's, who's sitting where or who's kind of, I guess, appealing to which audiences there's, there's a fear with Ryan Hall. And Ryan holiday, I think is somebody who is, I would say he's a popularizer. So he's somebody who provides a lot of people their first introduction of stoicism. As you said, there was this kind of risk.
00:53:59
Speaker
that you can get the wrong picture of it, or you can think, okay, it's about, I think of it as like these kind of tools in my tool belt, but I haven't changed at all. I've just learned that when something bad happens to me, I can think of obstacles the way. And I always use this example, Kant has this really good example of like, unless you're doing it for the right reasons, none of these things are good. Like you don't want a very courageous thief or a very courageous serial killer. That courage isn't beneficial, you know? Your capacity to turn obstacles into benefits is not great if it's an obstacle to your robbing a bank.
00:54:29
Speaker
You know, this is not so you need to be careful without these sitting into a larger system. But at the same time, if you approach the larger system.
00:54:37
Speaker
at the very start, it can be boring. It can be alienating. It can seem exclusionary. There's a lot of, there's a lot of kind of impediments. So what I'm hearing you to say is like, look, you need this introductory tech. You need this kind of the start of your journey, but you want it to lead you, you know, lead you in the right direction so that there's not this kind of gap or these misconceptions when you decide to go deeper, or if you decide to go deeper, you know, you have that strong foundation.
00:55:03
Speaker
Well, I also think that it's the reason why you'll get people who came into stoicism vis-a-vis Ryan Holiday. And I hate to paint him as a bad character here. I've never met Ryan. I'm sure he's a very nice man. He may even be more, quote unquote, devout in his personal stoic practice than he seems to be in his writing. And he definitely is the front of any funnel that leads to stoicism. I mean, to say that he's popular is to understate how popular he really is.
00:55:32
Speaker
But I think that the reasons that things like dollar sign S, Silicon Valley type stoicism and brosism exist is because there's this disconnect between what Ryan Holiday says.
00:55:42
Speaker
what stoicism actually is, such to the extent that when people start to get into traditional stoicism and they hear things like God and virtue, and they hear about the world city, they might think, oh, that's the new world order, right? Like this. When they hear about Zeno's Republic, they think, oh, this is just anarchy. This is socialism. They would be like, where are these things coming from?
00:56:05
Speaker
These people don't know anything about Stoicism.
Reconciling Stoicism with Atheism
00:56:08
Speaker
It's Ryan Holiday that's really got it figured out, which is completely the opposite of what you care about is like a full picture of what Stoicism as a philosophy is. You have to talk about virtue. You have to talk about virtue ethics, role ethics, and it gets really deep.
00:56:23
Speaker
So I worry that with Ryan being the, and again, not to paint him as a bad character, but I don't think we'd have as much division if Ryan wasn't as popular as he is, because he led the charge, didn't he? I don't know when he wrote that book, but I think it was even before Stoic Week was a thing, because I remember Ryan Holiday being a name in the early 2010s when Massimo was just starting with Stoic Week, which is how I first came into contact with Massimo.
00:56:52
Speaker
Yeah, it really is. In my mind, it's really like stoicism. You know, when you tell that timeline of stoicism, you're like, there was ancient Greece, there was Rome, then there was nothing, then there was the Renaissance. So people got into it again a bit there.
00:57:06
Speaker
Then there was like Sharon LaBelle and Bill Irvin with the guy did the good life. And then there was another little gap. And then, and then, you know, yeah, then Ryan Holliday and then the modern stoicism community. And so that kind of, that kind of second echo after that. Yeah, no, I mean, I agree with you. I agree with you. And there's this kind of weird calculus on the benefit of, of.
00:57:25
Speaker
Well, again, not to like, and the last thing I want to do as somebody, cause one thing I really admire talking to Tanner is this kind of humility. And it's, you said, you know, you're not a kind of, you're not an argumentative guy. You're not a person who likes to say, you know, this is how things need to be. And that's the thing that I wrestle with in my own practice because.
00:57:40
Speaker
I feel like sometimes it can be taken to be like ignorance or like, wow, this person isn't certain so they don't know, or this person isn't certain so that they, they know less than the person who is certain. So I'm going to go talk to, I'm going to go listen to that person instead. But, but it's something that I admire in the way that you talk about stoicism and the way that you write about stoicism. It resonates with me because.
00:57:58
Speaker
As you said, the start of that kind of bullshit detector, I get very cautious about people who seem really, really solidified and don't seem like they're, they're questioning. So, I guess where I was going with that is that because we're still learning, I don't want to be like judgmental or exclusionary of people who, you know, either were exposed to Ryan holiday at the start or really love Ryan holiday still. That's not, that's not really the intention here to be like up on this, like elitist cloud or anything like that. I think as you said, though, there, there is, because there is value to kind of deep.
00:58:28
Speaker
this deep, robust stoicism, because there is value, there is going to be a harm if people are getting funneled away from that in any sense. And that's just the way it is. It doesn't have to be any more or less elitist than that, right? Well, and it's a little bit of...
00:58:44
Speaker
when somebody becomes a vegan, or when somebody starts CrossFit, or when somebody finds God, or when somebody figures out what stoicism really is in its totality, there's kind of an excitement around it and the desire to want to get other people to see the benefit of those things. And so it can seem arrogant, right? People might think, who the hell does Tanner think he is taking a shot at Ryan Holiday? You know, like, who's Tanner? He barely, he doesn't even have a book yet, he just got a stupid podcast. Like, and I understand that, so I'm not,
00:59:13
Speaker
But I'm excited about what...
00:59:17
Speaker
transitioning from this very, I wouldn't say broic, but I guess to some extent, broic view of stoicism from the very early days of me running into it to being what I am now, I'm like, oh, I was really missing so much and I would really like it if, and I think other people would benefit if they could shortcut that little journey and get right into this. And I hope that it doesn't come off as arrogant or as me thinking I know more than Ryan Holiday.
00:59:47
Speaker
At the same time, I don't think Ryan Holiday has studied stoicism in the same way that I have. And I don't think that his aims are the same. And I think that it's important to point out that there are multiple ways to approach stoicism and to implement it. And I'm very nervous about that because
01:00:08
Speaker
Anybody listening is going to be familiar with fallacies because we're all philosophy-minded people. The No True Scotsman fallacy is something I'm very wary of because it's an elitist position that there's only one way to be a stoic. And I think the No True Scotsman is, true Scotsman don't put sugar in their porridge, I think is the original story. Well, I put sugar in my porridge and I was born in Scotland. Well, no, you're not a real Scotland.
01:00:32
Speaker
And I think that that just leads to this in-group, out-group stuff that we do kind of have within the Stoicism community that I wish we did not. But when people get excited or passionate about the thing that's changed their life or that they view to be able to change their life, I mean, maybe that's not avoidable. It just kind of happens. But just for clarification, there's many ways to be a Stoic. There are many paths within Stoicism, many ways to walk that path.
01:01:02
Speaker
but it is important that we recognize that there are paths which are not stoicism. So there are multiple stoicism paths, quote unquote, but there are also many other paths that are not the stoicism at all, even if on that path you do something like negative visualization. Okay, that's stoicism inspired and that's fine, but that's not stoicism because stoicism is this thing over here and within that thing are many, many subcategories of being and acting and practicing.
01:01:32
Speaker
but it's within this sphere. And if you're not within this sphere, then that's non-stoicism, that's something else and that's okay.
01:01:39
Speaker
Yeah, that's well put. It's okay. There's just, there needs to be kind of a clarity to that as well. And so let's, let's, so I'm interested in your journey in that stoicism sphere. So, okay. So there's that stuff over there. That's not stoicism. Maybe stoicism inspired, but we have some of the tips, the tricks, the life hacks. Then there's stoicism. One thing we hit on the start, but really interested in this kind of this reconciliation, I guess, with traditional stoicism or this movement from host of atheism podcast.
01:02:07
Speaker
rejecting providence or stoic god to maybe viewing those differently. Well, it may be accepting them. I mean, I'm interested in your view, maybe accepting them, maybe accepting them with caveats. How have you, do you consider yourself a traditional stoic as in someone who embraces the theology and the physics of it? Or if not, why not? I guess, yeah, tell me more about that.
01:02:30
Speaker
I think I'm on the way, is the answer to that question. If I had to identify, I would say I'm more of a traditional Stoic than I am a modern Stoic, but with all things being, if there's zero, one, I'm in the process of becoming a one instead of a zero. Zero in binary sense, I'm calling modern Stoics zeros, just to be clear.
01:02:51
Speaker
I think my hang up now is that I believe because the conceptualization of the stoic god as I view it is that the universe is its own species or phylum of animal or organism. And I think that that might be a little metaphoric, but maybe also it's not metaphoric. I think looking at a universe as a sort of functioning organism or system
01:03:16
Speaker
is a reasonable thing to do. It would not be like any other organism or system that existed like a zebra or human being or a giraffe or something. However, I can see how some people would be uncomfortable with that. Ultimately, the way I see the Stoic God being explained, at least at this far into my study, is that
01:03:36
Speaker
If a system is to function and survive, that system must be designed in a way that it can function and survive, which would have some ramifications that would seem like they were divinely ordered or they were logically ordered. So if we look at the cells inside a human body or just all human processes within our bodies,
01:04:02
Speaker
It seems rheological, right? But I think that might be a human thing that we're doing to the system we're looking at. But one thing that does seem to be the case is that if a system is going to survive, it has to be able to function, which means it is ordered in a particular way that helps it function and survive. And so in a way, and I have a hard time thinking through this, maybe even articulating it if you can't tell, but I think it's reasonable to say that the system we live in, the organism of the universe is
01:04:32
Speaker
structured in a way that enables it to live. And so I think as human beings who kind of anthropomorphize things that we can say, okay, that we can call that logically ordered, even if that's borderline metaphorical. And so I don't think the stoic concept of God violates my position as an atheist.
01:04:52
Speaker
because I think it might have a little metaphor in it and people might take it a little too literally, but I don't think even if it was taken incredibly literally that it violates atheism because atheism is I don't believe in supernatural gods who ask for money and demand my prayers or I'm going to hell or I'm going to go to heaven if I'm good. I think what atheists are more against is the ravages of organized religion.
01:05:18
Speaker
and usually related to Abrahamic religions because no atheist feels very strongly about Sunyunas from, you know, like Irish mythology. Nobody's like really pissed off that anybody ever believed in that. It's always Islam or Christianity or Catholicism or something. And I just don't feel like the Stoic God is
01:05:38
Speaker
I don't feel like the Stoic God vibe. It's an atheistic viewpoint. If I understand atheism to be as I understand it, which is disbelief in supernatural gods. I don't even look at the Stoic God as being, I mean, if you're saying it's the universe and its nature, then we're not even saying it's supernatural. We're just saying it's the space we live in and the fabric that we're pressed up out of. I mean, it's such a different concept of God that
01:06:04
Speaker
Again, I just, I feel like you can be an atheist and believe in the stoic God as absurd as that sounds because the word God is in the sentence, but there it is. Yeah, I'm really a big fan of etymology, you know, just big fan of language. It's, you know, when you say supernatural.
01:06:19
Speaker
Right. Like that's that's that means separate to or above the natural. Right. Like, I mean, you pointed that out, but it's like, yeah, if you if you disagree with a supernatural God, there's no issue with stoicism because there won't be any claim to something kind of abstract to nature outside of nature. Right. There's this the God God is nature.
01:06:39
Speaker
And then there's this other point here about, I say, you might know more about this, or you certainly do, but like there's this anthropomorphized gods that are typically associated with Abrahamic religions that the issue with those things of, you know, this person's looking down and they're angry or I need to kind of appease them or these kinds of positions. And then as you said, I think very insightfully, something I hadn't thought of before is that it might not just be a philosophical claim, but there's kind of a sociological claim about
01:07:05
Speaker
When people tend to believe in these kinds of gods, they tend to organize themselves politically or socially in ways that at the very least, you know, you want to say for better, for worse, at the very least would be different than what it would look like if people socially organized themselves around a stoic God, right? Because there would be no kind of, I don't know, some differences. There would be no, I intuit their will or I'm speaking with them, or I know what this God wants that you don't have access to or some of some of those implications.
01:07:33
Speaker
And I don't know that I speak for all atheists when I say this, but I would imagine that I would speak for a lot of them, that I think the fundamental core point of friction between theism and atheism is the idea that the definition of what a good person is, if you believe in the Christian God, for example,
01:07:53
Speaker
is if Jesus would do it, or if God, the supernatural being, would do it, then it is good. Or if they'd approve of it, then it is good. So then it becomes, well, does God think this war is good? Yes. Okay, then it's a good war. Does God think this genocide is good? Well, our interpreters seem to say so, so then it is good. So it's interesting to me that Theists have this idea that
01:08:19
Speaker
good or virtue, we'll just say good in the Christian sense, is objective morality, because it's not.
Stoic Ethics and Modern Appeal
01:08:28
Speaker
It's subjective morality and the subjective individual is God, right? So it's not objective. It's all up to this guy.
01:08:35
Speaker
If that's what you believe, it's all to this guy's opinion. And then if you agree with the opinion of God, which is subjective, although they would argue that, of course, then you're good. That's the definition of if you're doing what God tells you. I think that is the thing that bothers most atheists is that, well, there's more nuance than that. And I think Stoicism respects it because, again,
01:08:56
Speaker
the contextual and nuanced nature of Stoicism is, who are you? Where are you in the world? What are your roles and responsibilities defined by those roles? And do these decisions with all those things considered, are those moral decisions? It's extremely flexible. It doesn't have any edicts. It doesn't have any decrees read by an angel with a trumpet. And so I think that if you really pressed an atheist
01:09:23
Speaker
in the cosmology of Stoicism. They might have some scientific arguments, but I think they'd be limited. And I don't think that they would really have a lot of theological sticking points because they'd be like, okay, well, I didn't really understand that that's what the Stoic God was, and I would
01:09:39
Speaker
I'm as uncomfortable with that, I think an atheist would say they're as uncomfortable with that part of stoicism as they would be with something like pantheism, or like believing that in, what are they called? Dyrads or something like tree spirits? I think it's something more like believing nature is holy, and I think stoics have a way, I think atheists have way less issues with thinking like that, although it still may be to them off-putting. It's not off-putting in the same way as
01:10:08
Speaker
You know, thinking there's a guy on a cloud that exists outside of the galaxy and the universe that is telling us, you know, who we're allowed to have sex with, for example. Yeah. Yeah, no, great. Are you familiar with the, with the youth of throw the platonic dialogue?
01:10:23
Speaker
I am not. No, I've not. So this one is like Plato's. Basically the story is Socrates goes to, goes to the courthouse. He bumps into a guy and Socrates does going around bugging people bumps into a guy says, Hey, what are you doing? He's like, Oh, I'm here to like testify against my father. And Socrates is like, whoa, you're testifying against your father. And he's like, yeah, cause my father did something unjust. And he's like, you must, you must know what justice is. If you're willing to put your father in jail, you must really understand what justice is.
01:10:49
Speaker
Tell me about it. I'm Socrates. I know nothing. I want to know what justice is. And here you are, you know, condemning your father. So you must be the you must be the guy to talk to. This is you.
01:10:58
Speaker
I really love that Socrates always in the back of his head must have honestly been like this idiot. Yeah, there's some irony. There's definitely Socratic irony as a theme in these dialogues. But basically, the question is, and he says, well, you know, the gods, well, I can't even remember what the father did, but what my father did, the gods said it's wrong. And these are the ancient Greek gods, right? So, you know, Zeus and
01:11:22
Speaker
these anthropomorphized, multiple gods. And Socrates, basically what Socrates pushes him to is this question of, is
01:11:31
Speaker
You know, is it wrong because the gods said it was wrong or was it wrong and the gods knew, the gods perceived that it was wrong and then told you? So basically our gods, are they value discoverers? Are they the people that perceive the value that it already exists without them and then tell you? Or are they value creators? Is it right or wrong? Because, and he pushes the example, right? Like in these examples of, you know,
01:11:57
Speaker
If God said, yeah, that war was good, or that sexual assault was good, does it become good? Or is there this point where you could disagree with God because goodness and wrongness exist outside of, as you put it, the subjective will, right? Because it is incredibly subjective in ancient Greece. It's like there's no ambiguity there when it is Zeus or Athena. These are kind of characters, right? They have personalities or interests.
01:12:25
Speaker
So it really made me think of that, this question of God as a value creator or God as a value discoverer. And the implications of God being a value creator, as you said, are quite substantial with something like a holy justified war, no matter what happens or things like this, right? And I think that falls into the category of, you know, I feel like people who feel and believe that way, that they
01:12:51
Speaker
don't run into these. It's a question like, well, if God created the universe, who created God?
01:12:58
Speaker
it's a question like, well, if God said it was good, doesn't make it not objective morality, but subjective morality, like they don't take it that extra step. And I think that, again, I just think that those are the things that really take atheists off is a lack of logic in their eyes. And I don't feel like the stoic God or stoic logic for that matter, which I would love to dive into if I were smarter, but I'm not. That I think that that is why
01:13:29
Speaker
Stoicism became popular within the atheist community, which you would almost think wasn't possible when it did in the early 2010s with Stoic Greek and such. In retrospect now, it's so interesting to me that so many atheists were like, oh, Stoicism, terrific. And then birthed from the, oh, there's divinity and there's God in this. Oh, no, we got the modern Stoic movement that was like, okay, well, let's just cut that part off.
01:13:58
Speaker
which is like fair, you can do whatever you want. I'm not judging you. Ultimately, I think the important claim in stoicism is virtue is the only good. And I think that even though traditional stoics would disagree, and A. A. Long said that ethics were parasitical upon the physics and the cosmology, and while I believe that that is true,
01:14:18
Speaker
I'm not going to stop modern stoics from, if you move on from virtue as the only good and you behave in that capacity, I still think you're going to wind up being a terrific person. And I think that's good for the planet and for the human race and for everybody else for that matter.
01:14:33
Speaker
But that argument between, do you need to believe in the stoic in order to be quote unquote a stoic? I think the answer is like, if you're defining stoic full bore all three legs of stoicism, then I think the answer is yes. But I don't know that it's a useful argument to be having. If our goal is for people to just
01:14:53
Speaker
become virtuous and good people, let's not debate this highly academic issue down here, or at least let's give them a few years to ramp up before they have to dive into the deep end and have that argument with themselves. Yeah, that's something that Caleb pointed out in a podcast that we were doing, which I think is helpful, which he has this kind of general heuristic of
01:15:13
Speaker
You know, if, if this thing we're arguing about, would it, would it cause me to act differently? It would have caused me to feel differently. It would cause me to live my life differently. And if the answer to those are no, then we should probably not worry about it too much. At least as you said, at least not in the short term.
01:15:29
Speaker
And if you have people kind of acting as if virtue is the only good, you know, maybe there's a question to dive into there later. Maybe that's something that you can turn to deeper in your stoic practice, these questions of theology and God, at least the stoic God. But, you know, in the interim, if this is providing, you know, coming back to this idea of practical stoicism in the interim, if this is helping you feel better and do better by other people.
01:15:52
Speaker
That's something that I think is kind of mission accomplished. So I
Tanner's Podcast and Upcoming Book
01:15:57
Speaker
want to end off with one last question, which is basically, for those listening, they hopefully got a lot of value out of our talk. They're like, I want to hear more about what Tanner has to say. What do you have going on? You got your podcast, your upcoming book. Maybe if you could talk a bit about those, let people know where they can find out more about you.
01:16:16
Speaker
Sure, absolutely. And thank you for asking this kind of you. So Practical Stoicism is the podcast. You can find it on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and probably anywhere that you listen to podcasts, although we're a little behind on uploading to YouTube. We're not a video-centric podcast, so we're kind of lax on that. But all the audio-only spaces you can find us pretty easily just search for Practical Stoicism.
01:16:36
Speaker
We're also, Kai Whiting and I are co-authoring a book called Stoicism, but brief, which I mentioned briefly, ironically, but it's meant to be this entry-level point that dives into Stoic logic, physics, and ethics, and the cosmology with physics, but does so in plain language because we don't really talk about this much, but
01:16:58
Speaker
I was a high school dropout, I was a college dropout, I was homeless for a time. I know what it's like to approach a text that is written above my head and how that can be really off-putting. And so Kai and I were really sensitive to the idea that this be written in accessible language that didn't make people feel dumb because it's easy to do, which I don't think academics do intentionally. They're just smart as hell.
01:17:23
Speaker
And they've got these great words to describe things that they understand, which goes into something you were saying earlier about, like when I hear virtue, it's not a weird word to me, but it might be weird to other people. Although we do use the word virtue quite briefly.
01:17:35
Speaker
So it's meant as a, we think it's a great entry level to stoicism and we think it's more, we think of it as a accurate, accessible, and well, I guess those two things, brief, also brief, entry. So that somebody can pick it up and read it in an hour or two, if they're a faster slow reader and they can, they can answer the question.
01:17:56
Speaker
is stoicism for me and do I want to learn more or is this enough to let me know that this isn't really my thing and I'm going to go look somewhere else? Because answering that question yes or no, I think is valid. If it seems interesting to you, we want you to be part of this stoicism club if we're calling it that. And if you think it's silly and stupid, well, at least you figured it out in a couple of hours instead of spending months or years on it and we think there's a bite.
01:18:21
Speaker
And then we have a Discord community and a sub-stack, our Discord community is at stoicismpod.com forward slash discord. It's got nearly 700 people in it now. It's a great space. We've got people like James Dultry who I talked about, but we've also got people like Judy Stove and Donald Robertson are in there and just tons of people who are at all varying levels of their education in stoicism. And so it's a fun place to hang out and talk to others and
01:18:48
Speaker
I love it. I think it's grown so fast, and I would love for you to join it if you're interested. And our substack is at stoicismpod.substack.com. We also just launched that about a month ago, and that's free as well. So please, articles written there by myself and Kai Whiting, and we're bringing on
01:19:04
Speaker
William Stevens to do some stuff on Stoicism and pop culture, for example, Stoicism and Dungeons and Dragons, which I think is going to be like a really interesting exploration of fate because what is Dungeons and Dragons, if not somewhat the fate of a roll of dice. So I think that'll be really interesting. So stoicismpod.com has links to all those things and follow us wherever you'd like to, and I'd love to get to know you and have you be part of our community.
01:19:30
Speaker
Awesome. Tons of great stuff going on. That's exciting. And yeah, thanks again for being a part of the show. It was great talking to you. You too, man. I hope I can come back one day. Awesome. We can make that happen. Great. Thanks Tanner. Thanks for listening to Story Conversations. If you found this conversation useful, please give us a rating on Apple, Spotify, or whatever podcast platform you use, and share it with a friend. We are just starting this podcast, so every bit of help goes a long way.
01:19:58
Speaker
And I'd like to thank Michael Levy for graciously letting us use his music. Do check out his work at ancientliar.com and please get in touch with us at stoameditation.com if you ever have any feedback or questions. Until next time.