Camp Gagnon - Stoic Expert Explains Self Mastery Secrets | Massimo Pigliucci

Episode Date: June 18, 2024

Sign up for free and exclusive updates: https://camp.beehiiv.com/subscribeMassimo Pigliucci is a world-renowned Stoic philosopher. He teaches how to gain control of your life and on how to become a principled, good person. He’s in the tent today to explain the reasoning that leads to happiness and good decisions. WELCOME. TO. CAMP. 🏕️Thank you to our sponsors:Marek Health, Bespoke, Bluechew, Morgan & MorganThanks to Bespoke Post for sponsoring this video! New subscribers get 1...

People on social media get angry far more than they would be under normal circumstances. One of the turning points was when Facebook engineers invented the angry button. This was not by chance. This was because research showed that if people have an anger button, they will hit that 10 times more than any other kind of post. Is the outcome ever a justification for a man's rage? You just made the argument that Aristotle makes. Hopefully you're going to help me not be such a mess.

Raising the stakes right from the beginning. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a heavy lift, okay, but I think we can do it together. We'll try. What is stoicism and what are some basic rules that I can apply to my life to become a better human and have more self-mastery? I'm curious, can you explain to me what is stoicism and what are some basic rules that I can apply to my life

to become a better human and have more self-mastery? So stoicism is an ancient Greek and Roman philosophy that falls into a broad category called virtual ethics. virtual ethics is the idea that the most important thing in life is to actually develop a good character that the best way to spend your time is to become a better person is to improve your character and that is done through mindfulness and through habit you basically pick certain behaviors that you think are appropriate or good are the kinds of things you want to do and then you stick with it it's a little bit like going to the gym you say

I think it's a good idea for me to build muscles and aerobic capacity. So you made that decision. Then you start going to the gym and you use the tools over and over and over until things improve. And you don't stop. This is kind of a lifelong commitment. So the major reason to embrace Stoicism is if you want to be a better person, and I assume most people do, then that is to be. certainly one way to go. That's one path.

It's not the only path. The ancient Stoics thought that that was the only way to go. I think there are others. You can be Buddhist. You can embrace a number of other philosophies or religions that in fact have a significant number of similarities

with Stoises, Buddhism in particular. But the basic idea is, I want to become a better human being. How do I do it? And once I start, it's a commitment. Now you said in terms of rules, Well, Epictetus, who was a prominent stoic philosopher, the early part of the second century, was a really interesting guy. He studied life as a slave in a place called Hierapolis, which is in modern Western Turkey.

He was then brought to Rome, and he was still as a slave at the court of the Emperor of Nero. But he was a bright guy. Eventually, he was given first the ability to study, in particular study philosophy, and then he was given his freedom. and he studied teaching philosophy, particularly stoicism. So it was a really interesting guy. He went from the lowest rung of society to eventually being considered one of the most important influential teachers of the second century.

He told these students that there is one fundamental rule in life. You have to know the difference between what is up to you and what is not up to you. You need to focus exclusively on what is up to you, and you have to develop an answer. attitude of acceptance and equanimity toward the things that are not up to you. Now, the trick there, of course, is to figure out what is exactly up to you and what is not up to you. We can talk about it in a minute.

But that concept may sound familiar to some of your listeners, for instance, because it has been taken up by a number of other traditions, including Christianity. If you go to a 12-step organization meeting like Alcoholic Anonymous, they often, we'll start the meeting with what they call the serenity prayer. The serenity prayer was written by a Christian theologian in the 1930s, but it's inspired directly from Epictetus's manual. And the prayer goes something like this. You know, you ask God the wisdom to tell the difference between what you can't change when you cannot change, their courage to change what you can,

and the serenity to accept what you cannot. That's pretty much the idea that Epictetus was putting forth. So the devil there, however, is in the details. What exactly is up to us and what is not up to us? Hey, what's up, guys? Sorry to interrupt this amazing program, but I need a little bit of help. If you're watching this on YouTube, you can probably see our subscriber number right down here. And if you're able to, it would mean the world if you could subscribe.

That is the best way to support this show. Because when you subscribe, I'm able to show it to potential guests or to different brands and stuff like that. And it really, really helps grow the show, get us cooler guests, have cooler conversations. And it helps everything so, so much. So if you don't mind, thank you so much. Let's get back to it. Now, different traditions differ about this. But Epictetus is very clear.

He says there's only three things that are up to you. Your judgments about situations, your decisions to act or not to act on those judgments, and the values that you endorse or reject explicitly as a conscious decision. And that's it. Everything else is not up to you because it depends on external factors. that you do not control. So, for instance, this morning I came here and to have a conversation with you. And one of my intentions, what was up to me, was to come in on time at the time we agreed on.

That's my intention, and it is up to me. Actually showing up on time, it's not up to me because it depends on the subway. It depends on, you know, other things that might get in the way, me actually get in there on time. So intentions are up to you. Outcomes are not. You can, of course, influence the, there's a connection. You can influence the outcome, right?

The reason I got, in fact, in the end on time is because I figure out what I needed to do at what time I needed to get out, et cetera, et cetera. So I acted on my judgments, and that turned out to be correct. But in fact, it could have easily, despite my best intentions, it could have easily not come out right because I don't control other things.

Now, the idea is therefore, that if you focus on what is up to you, you're essentially paying attention to the kinds of things that you really are under your control. Your agency is, in fact, used to the best possible way, because all you're paying attention is, okay, what here in this particular situation is up to me. The second part, the developing an attitude of equanimity toward the things that are not up to you, it's difficult. But it is essentially, you know, suppose that at some point instead this morning, you know, the G train broke down and I couldn't come here on time. Well, then I should have had, I should have accepted that as a fact of life, not get upset, not get, you know, pissed off, not starting swearing, not, you know, nothing. I was just like, okay, I guess this is it.

I brought a book with me, so I'm going to read, and I'm going to send a text message saying that I'm late, and that's about the extent of what I can do. So that's the basic idea. Now, the example of showing up on time for a conversation is a minor one, but the fundamental, what Epicitos calls the fundamental rule of life really applies to everything, from the minor issues to really major ones, such as one of your loved ones dying, for instance, or major. turmoil or setbacks in life. Now, stoicism is about a lot more than the fundamental rule,

but if there is one thing they say that you want to try, that would be the one. That's very interesting. Yeah, I think the judgment thing is a little bit easier, like you just mentioned, than accepting the things that are out of your control. I can accept these things are in my control, and I can do things about those,

and that actually brings me a lot of comfort because I enjoy the agency of trying to improve my life. And you give the example of being late, which I think is very astute. and appropriate, but I'm curious about extrapolating that to the fuller degree. So obviously, if you're late for this show, fortunately for you, I'm an extremely generous and kind person. I would say, you know what, no problem, okay?

And then I would just silently, you know, judge you. But let's say you were a young professor and you're going to, you know, some type of interview for a promotion at your dream university. And if you're late, that's going to reflect really poorly on your, you know, chances or your prospects of getting in. How do you control that emotional feeling of sitting on the train? and seeing the time tick by and you're running late, even though you left early and you had the intention of running on time,

and you had the judgment that being on time was a virtuous thing to do. But still, despite all these things outside of your control, there's a delay on the train and there's traffic everywhere, and you're sitting there watching this opportunity slowly fall out of your grasp. How do you deal with that emotional feeling? So that is a question, that's why this is an issue of practice, right? So if I just tell you, as I just told you, If I say, hey, this is the rule, apply.

That's it. Done. It's not going to work. Yeah, you know the rule at a sort of an intellectual level, but at an emotional level, that's not going to make it the next time you run into a situation or challenge or a setback. What it is going to do it is if you do this over and over and you keep practicing mentally. Look, a modern version of this is something called cognitive behavioral therapy, which is one of the best evidence-based. type of psychotherapy. It's very popular. It's very effective. It started out in the 1950s. And the people that got it started in the first place were actually inspired by Epicetus

and Marcus Aurelius, so some of the stoics. And CBT, cognitive behavioral therapy, essentially uses the same idea. It says the first step, if you want to change the way you feel about things, is cognitive. That is, you are telling yourself explicitly, okay, here is, I'm I want to behave. Again, remember the example of the alcoholic an animus, right? The first thing you say is I'm an alcoholic. So the first step is cognitive. But just saying that isn't going to solve the problem, obviously. It exists here, but it's not here. Exactly. So the first step is cognitive. The second one is behavioral. That is you implement your cognitive assessment of a situation behaviorally. And initially, this is going to be difficult. Just ask any alcoholic. So for instance, in the case of being, you know, late, you know, I travel a lot and for both leisure and especially for work. So I run often into, you know, canceled planes or delayed flights by hours at a time, you know, things like that. And years ago, I used to get pretty damn upset about these kind of things because it would

get in the way on my plans. Sometimes I would have to, I knew that I was going to miss the second flight or sometimes I would even get there late for a conference or something like that, right? So it's normal to get upset. But I started with the cognitive step. It's like, okay, it makes no sense for you to get upset here because what are you going to do?

Is getting upset actually helping? No, it's only making the situation worse, in fact. I add insult to injury to myself. There's something already I can't do anything about that creates a real problem on top of which now I'm getting upset. So I'm creating additional problems. It's like hurting your hand and in rage you punch a wall to make a feel of that. Exactly right.

Exactly right. You just injure yourself twice. Right. It's a good analogy. You know, what is the point? Now, the behavioral step may be, initially may be something very simple. Like, as I said, I always try with a book, actually with an e-book reader. And so I forced myself to open the book, read, and start taking notes.

Initially, the first times that I started doing this kind of thing, it was difficult. Because my mind was still going after. the, I'm late, I lost my plane, you know, the thing, what's going to happen, etc. And then you will gently nudge your mind back toward focusing on the reading, especially if you do something physical, like taking notes, that actually helps,

because reading by itself can be passive. And if you engage in a passive activity, then your mind starts wandering again into the direction that you don't want to. But if you're engaged into something, especially that has a physical thing, that's why a lot of people that get upset, to get over there upset

because of the gym. Right. Because it's a physical activity. So you do that and you keep nudging yourself back and you will calm down. I mean, you know, rage when it's not fueled will in fact dissipate.

Now the first time I did that was difficult and kind of, eh, sort of word, but not really. And the second time, and then third time and the fourth time, again, it's just like going to the gym, right? I mean, I remember years ago making that decision for myself,

okay, I need to take care of my health long-term health. So even though I dislike going to the gym, let me do it. And I remember that one of the first times, you go to the gym and there's this nice person on the other side of the entrance and says, have a nice workout or enjoy your workout.

That's it. Enjoy your workout. And I looked at her and I said, what? This is not something I enjoy. I'm doing it as a duty to myself. This is not an enjoyment. But I wanted to change that attitude,

that mental attitude. And the only way to do it was to, first the cognitive step. You remind yourself, why am I doing this exactly? Oh, right, because this is important. This is something I decided to do. Then it's the behavioral step. You do it and you keep doing it.

The third step, the emotional one, does come, but it comes later as a consequence of the fact that you keep going back and forth between the cognitive and the behavioral. That's the way Stoicism works. That's also the way cognitive behavioral therapy works. takes time. Now let me give you an example of when I figure out that this was actually working. So after a while, years ago, after a while that I was practicing this kind of sort of mindfulness,

behavioral, let's call it behavioral mindfulness, even though that's not actually a term. But sure, why not? It works. So I was in Rome. You know, I grew up in Rome in Italy, and I was visiting my family, and I got on the subway because I had an appointment with one of my brothers and his wife who going out for the movies and dinner and all that sort of stuff. Great. So I got into the subway. It wasn't particularly crowded. And I got this guy in front of me that really pushes back hard on me as if the subway were completely full of people. And I thought, the hell is this guy doing? And then I realized it. He had a friend just behind me that picked my pocket and jumped out of the subway before I could do

anything about it. Now, normally, I would be really pissed off because, first of all, what pickpocketed in my own town where I grew up where I've been on the sub before. You're supposed to do this to English people. Yeah, exactly. Not me. Not me.

So first of all, that was that. And then second of course, now there are an immediate number of practical problems. Lost all my credit cards, my driver license, all that sort of stuff. Cash, you know, etc.

And then I was going to meet my brother. So that was going to be ruining the end of the evening. And the insult to your ego. And the insult to me. What kind of a man are you? Exactly. They think that they can just take something from you and nothing will happen.

Precisely. And yet, I realized that that was, by that time, this kind of sort of, let's call it, stoic mindfulness, really started working on me. Because instead of all of that kind of reaction that I was expecting, that would have been normal for me earlier on, the only thing that happened is I got upset. I realized the thing. It was just like a second of shock. It was like, oh, crap. and I sat down I took out my

cell phone luckily Rome's subways have connection all throughout you don't have to wait for the next station and they stole that too

and then ran out they were already out and there was nothing I could do about it right I could not go run after them that was it so my mind immediately

thought okay that's done it's gone don't think about it because you're not going to get it back what can you do that actually

is helpful. Take the phone out. First thing, call the credit card companies, stop the credit cards, which I did in a matter of seconds. Then I thought, oh, let me see what I can do about my driver license. This was my American driver license, by the way. So I went on the website of the DMV, and it turns out there is a place there where you can actually say, I lost my, you know, was stolen, my license was stolen. They gave you a PDF as a temporary license that you can use immediately. And then they send you a new one in the mail, which in fact, by the time I got back to New York was already there. So I thought, oh God, that's nice. By the time I got and met to the station, three stations later, I met my brother. I told him what happened. And he looked

at me, I said, well, you don't seem very upset. I said, well, that wouldn't help. I've done what I could. I solved the major problems. Now you just have to loan me some cash for dinner. You actually made money on this. That's right. I actually made. made money. Wow. So that was the time they realized that, okay, this thing is actually working at an emotional level, not just at the cognitive behavioral level. But by that time, I had been practicing close to a year, I guess. And so, and it gets better and better. Now has been several years and, you know, all sorts of other things have happened, of course, because life

does happen. And typically that's my, I notice that this is my first response. The first thing that my mind goes to, place that it goes to, is, okay, what here and now is up to me and what is not. Wow. I really like that as just a life philosophy, focusing on what you can control and what you cannot control. But the thing that I, even in this story that I'm thinking about for myself, because I tend to gravitate this way personally, I enjoy stoicism because I think just kind of the way

I was raised and sort of the environment I was in, it was always to control your emotions and to be sort of emotionally neutral. So when things are amazing, just kind of be happy, but be chill, and when things are bad, be a little bit low, but be chill. Everything was just kind of in the middle. So I like this. But the thing that I get insecure about personally

is that the ego component, if someone robs me, or if someone breaks into my home and takes my things, I don't know how I would get over the emotional component of what do these people think of me that they think they can just take my shit and I'm not going to do anything about it. Right. Or if someone pushes me on the subway or some guy yells at me, it would enrage me that he looks at me as someone that is able to be pushed around and that life in the world will exert its will upon me and I will do nothing in the way of that. So that component specifically,

what would be your answer to that? I can give you Epictetus's answer because he has a story in the discourses. I wish we could get epititis. I know, right? I mean, be following. So there is two books that are attributed to Epicetus. The handbook sometimes referred to as the Enchiridian, which is the Greek for handbook. And it's a very, very short book. And then the discourses, which is a book in four large chapters.

And I have to caution, by the way, your listeners, if they're interested in this thing, do not start with the handbook. Because the handbook, you know, a lot of people say, oh, this is short. I can do it. Yeah, handbook seems very easy. Right, yeah.

Except that that is meant for advanced, So if you jump straight into the handbook, you will not understand what's going on. They got a brand that better. Sorry, exactly, they do. Now, in the discourses, and he didn't write these books, it was one of his students, Aaron of Nicomedia who wrote these things. But in the discourses, Epictoros has actually a situation very similar to the one you're talking about, about your ego and what does it depend on, somebody doing something to you, and what are you responding to?

So he tells his students this story. He says, you know, the other night I was in my home and I heard a noise in the other room. And I got up and I looked at the window and I saw that my really nice lamp, oil lamp, was gone. It was made of bronze or some kind of nice lamp and nice material. And it was gone. So somebody stole epitosis lamp. And he said, I was about to get upset. and then I thought, hold on a second here.

What have I lost? My lamp. Well, great. I can replace a lamp easily. In fact, tomorrow I'm going to go to the market. I'm going to get a cheap lamp so that the next time it's not going to be worth the effort to actually steal it. Now, what did the teeth lose is integrity. In order to get a lamp, he is now a teeth.

He's now somebody with a bad conscience. He's now somebody that does that kind of thing. Now that's who he is. I'm not. I didn't really lose anything. So anything of value. I lost the lamp, but I didn't lose anything on failure. So the issue that you're talking about,

it's a major component, major aspect of what Stoicism is all about, redefining who you are and what counts as your ego, yourself. Unlike the Buddhists who maybe don't think that there is such a thing is a self, maybe not. It depends. You know, they have a doctrine that is called no self, but it's actually open to interpretation. It's not

clear, to me at least, whether they really mean that there is no self. For the Stoics, there is a self, but yourself is very limited. Your self is something that a pituit is called your pro-hiresis. Your pro-high recess literally translates

to your volition, your ability to make decisions. In modern terms, a modern kind of scientist will tell you that that is an area of your brain where your executive function lies. There is a part of your brain that is in charge of making decisions.

Of acquiring information, processing that information, and then making explicit decisions, the kind of conscious, deliberate decisions. Not a decision that is automatic, you know, like, I don't know, somebody throws you a ball and then you catch it. That's not what, that doesn't involve your priorities. That's an instinctive reaction.

Your prohyrisis works whenever you actually stop and think about stuff and say, okay, do I really want to do this or do I not? For Epictetus, that and only that is who you are. Anything else is not really yours and it doesn't define you. And that applies not just to this external stuff, like a lamp, for instance, or, you know, your wallet or whatever. It even applies to your body. Epictetus says your body is not your own.

You can take and you should take care of your body as much as possible. But, you know, then a stupid little virus comes in and kills you. Or maybe you cross the street, you make a bad movement, you fall down and you break a leg. And he knew because at some point, one of the stories that are told about Epicetus is that when he was still a slave, his master, who was a guy named Epaphroditus, who was Nero's personal secretary, who normally was a nice guy. You treat him Epitetus well enough, but apparently one day he got upset

and he took it out on Epictetus. And so he started twisting Epictetus' leg. And Epitius looked at the leg and looked at Apaphrodite and said, you know, if you keep doing that, it's going to break. And Parthodotias kept twisting it and, sure enough, the leg broke. And Epitius looked at it and said,

I told you, if we're going to break. He was lame for the rest of his life as a result of that episode. But his take on it was that's not my leg. It's mine only in the sense that it's part of my body I needed to walk around and all that sort of stuff. But I don't have control over it. I can take care of it. I can do things that I can't do.

They're up to me. But at the end of the day, all it takes is some guy getting pissed off in me for no particular reason. He twists my leg and the leg is gone. It's broken. Now I can't use it anymore. So it's not me. It's not who I am. Who I am is only and exclusively the decisions that I make.

And that's it. Now, if you start in that, this is a concept that it's difficult initially even to accept, let alone to internalize. Of course, the first step is always to accept things and then you internalize them, right? But once you start actually working on internalizing this thing and repeating yourself, like, okay, I am only my pro-hiresis. For a while, I went around with a bracelet that had prohyrisis on, written on it, just to remind myself that, oh, okay, this is what I am, this is who I am. Then at that point, when you say things like, oh, somebody comes in and does something to me, what they think, what must they think of me, epictitious response would be, why the hell do you care?

That's up to them. What they think of you is up to them. What you think of you is up to you. Now, did you do the right thing? Did you act virtually? Did you not do anything like stealing at the lamp, anything that you should be regretting? Well, if that's the case, then you have absolutely nothing to worry about what other people think.

So including fame, reputation, things like that. I mean, as you know, we live in, especially in the 21st century, in a place where the number of likes define, you know, most people's ego and self-worth. But that's silly. it's like what is that really worth it in terms of, does that make you a better person? Now, those kind of things, externals, stoics call them externals. So your reputation, certainly the things you own, even the job you have and all that sort of stuff. Those are externals.

And externals do have value. It's not like the stoics think that all of that doesn't matter. Of course it matters. You do want a job. You won't pay your bill. and reputation is important because you can influence other people for the better through your good reputation and if you have a bad reputation then you can't do that sort of so all those things do matter they have value but they don't define you the only thing that defines you is how you use

those things in our words your character i said at the beginning that stoicism is a type of virtuetics and virtuetics is about character epictetus uses a nice nice metaphor to to make the point. He says, you should go through life in the way in which Socrates played ball. Now, we don't actually know whether Socrates really played ball. But what he means metaphorically is like when you play ball, let's say soccer. We're talking about soccer right before what Americans call soccer and the rest of the world called football. Right.

Now, when you play, the important thing isn't the ball itself. It's how you handle it. messy doesn't care what the color of the ball is or what the exact pattern or it doesn't matter it's a ball what matters is what you do with it now of course it also matters whether you score or not right but here's an interesting example it matters when if you score virtuously but if you don't score virtually then it's a problem remember the hand of god of course right Diego meredano yes Diego Maradona in the, what was it, the 1986 World Cup, I think, something like that. In the semifinals, Argentina beat England and two do nothing.

The second goal was spectacular and absolutely well deserved. The first goal was not, because it was Maradona, instead of hitting the ball by the hand, by the head. It hit it by the hand. And later when he was asked, you know, hey, what the heck was that? He said, oh, that was the hand of God. It wasn't my hand. It was the hand of God. Now, yes, Argentina did win the game.

They did go to the finals. They did win the World Cup. But Maradona's reputation has been tarnished ever since. Like, this is a guy who cheats. Yes, he wins, but he cheats. And that is an indelible mark on Maradona's. You know, you will always be remembered. As soon as I mentioned, you immediately said, oh, yeah, of course.

And yeah, that happened 86, so we're talking about a good number of decades ago, right? and he's deadened up by this point. So, on the other hand, somebody like Messi does not have that sort of stigma. If he wins, he wins, fair and square. And so when people say the important thing is winning, well, no, the important thing is playing well. Because winning is not up to you, Epictetus will remind us.

Playing well is up to you, right? That's your intention. Winning is not because, you know, it depends on the other side as well. You're not the only one to play, especially with a game like football or soccer that is a team play. So it depends on your own teammates. You could be the best player in the world,

but if your teammates don't play along, you're not going to win. And, of course, it depends on who you're facing on the other side. So the actual outcome of the game is not up to you, and therefore your self-esteem should not depend, depending on whether you win or not. But it should be dependent on whether you win. playing well or not.

That's interesting. You bring up Diego Maradona's reputation and that his reputation has been tarnished, which I, for one, to be completely frank, and maybe I'm an outlier. I've always grown up as a soccer fan knowing about the Hand of God incident, and it never actually affected my opinion of him

as a person of low character. I assume he's low character because he's Argentinian, but I don't... No, joking. Ooh, you're right. He lost millions of people. I'm just mad they beat us in the World Cup. Okay. Yes. But I never actually looked at him as someone of low virtue, which is interesting. Obviously, cheating, I think, is a non-virtuous thing to do, but I don't look at him in that way. And I'm curious if most soccer fans or most people see him in that regard. But with that being said, his reputation is outside of him. So he can't control that. So why is it important that we are considering his reputation when it comes to his virtue? It isn't. The important thing is how he considers his reputation. So remember the case of the teeth who steals the lamp, right?

Epitito says, now he is the kind of person that has a bad conscience. So it's not about how I think of Maradona or the thief or something like that. It's about are you individually, you Maradona or you the teeth. How are you thinking of yourself? Now you think of yourself at the kind of person who cheats. Now you think of yourself as the kind of person who steals. And you may be telling yourself stories like the hand of God. It's a really cute story. It's like, you know, oh, isn't that nice? But you're actually fooling yourself. And so Epitir says, you know, this is your problem. This is your true problem. That is either you will think of yourself as somebody who is not a virtuous person, and that is an issue. Or you don't even realize that you don't even realize that, you are a person of, you know, no virtue, in which case, I just have to pity you because it's like, not only you're not doing the right thing, you don't even realize that you're

not doing the right thing. And that's your problem. It's not mine. My concern is only with my own virtue. Right. Not with yours. My suspicion is that Maradonna doesn't consider himself a person lacking, you know, ethics or virtue. I bet you he considers himself someone that is a winner that wins World Cups, that is one of the greatest footballers of all time. And, and, So in that regard, I feel like the world is predisposed to benefiting those that are able to rationalize their lack of moral character. Sure. And yet, Maradona had a lot of trouble after he retired. Sure.

And he died really young. And it clearly was a troubled person. So I think we could surmise, you know, Nidovanovas, of course, knew him and, you know, who knows. It's hard to tell what other people think and how they react. But even from the outside, this was not a person without trouble, without problems, right? But at the end of the day, what you say is like the world sees it in a certain way. First of all, different people see it differently. Like right here, we have an example, right?

You did not think of him as a troubled person because of the hand of God. I do. Now, who knows how many people think like you or think like me. But at the end of the day, for the stoic, that's not the problem because what other people think is up to them. But if my project is to become the best person that I can't, you know, we've been talking, we've been using the word virtue already quite a bit. And virtue is kind of a funny word because these days it's associated with one of two things, I think. either with a sort of conservative, politically conservative outlooks,

like people talk about virtue or on the right side of, I don't know why I'm going left with my hand on the right side. It's right for the audience. You're always a performer. Either that, or with the Christian version of, you know, oh, by virtue,

you mean sort of things like chastity and purity and things like that. But in fact, the word virtue in virtual ethics and as I said, stoicism is a type of virtual ethics comes from the Greek, arete and arrete means excellence so something that has arrete or someone that has arrethe is somebody or something that is excellent at what they do and it doesn't apply just to human beings for instance you know some time ago when my wife we realized that our bread knife was not working very well and i'm italian i eat bread

i want good bread and so i need a good knife right so we went out and we looked for an arreete knife meaning an excellent knife, a knife that does its job, its function, performs its function, in the best way possible. The idea is that that's what we want as human beings.

But that raises the question of what is the function of a human being? So we can understand what's the function of a bread knife. It's to cut bread without slicing my fingers. But what is the function of a human being? And the Stoics thought

that when you ask that question, you had to ask yourself, what is a human being? What kind of animal is a human being? And what is it that makes a human being thrive and flourish? And what kinds of things get in the way of a human being thriving and flourishing? So let's, to make the point, let's come up with this with an analogy. Let's say that you invite me to your apartment and for dinner and I come in with, you know, the customary bottle of wine. But I also bring you a plant, a cactus, just because I like cactus. Now you're responsible for the cactus.

Now, how do you take care of the cactus? You have to know something about the nature of cacti. Not just that they're plants, but that they're desert plants. Because that means that they need a lot of light and little water. If you make the mistake of saying, oh, this is a plant, I'm just going to give you a lot of water. You're going to kill the cactus very, very quickly. So in other words, in order for the cactus that it's now in your... your care to thrive, you have to know something about the nature of that particular living

organism. The Stoics thought that it's the same with human beings. Now, there are certain things that we all agree human beings need just like any other animal. We need food. We need water. We need shelter. We need to be safe from violence, you know, that sort of stuff.

But those things we share with a lot of other animals. So they're not specific to human beings. we need to take care of them. Those are the kind of externals that the Stoics thought have value, but it doesn't define you. They suggested that the true thing that really distinguish human beings

from anything else on Earth are the fact that we are highly social animals and we are animals capable of reason. Now, there are other social animals out there. There are social insects like bees and termites, things like that. There are social primates like chimpanzees, bonobos and stuff like that.

But nothing on earth even approaches remotely the kind of complex social structures that human beings have. So we're social and we're capable of reason. Now, other animals may or may not be reasoning. By reasoning here, I mean explicitly thinking through your problems, not just intelligence. A lot of other animals are intelligent

and a lot of other animals can solve problems. But the kind of animal that actually sits down and says, okay, let me sit, plan about this thing, right? There is a possibility that we are the only ones doing that. But even if we're not, we certainly do it to a much higher degree than anything else. I cannot imagine two bonobos sitting down here and having a conversation like we're having. Who am I?

How did I get here? Yeah, right. And what do I want to do with my life? That sort of stuff. It's like, it's hard to imagine. It must be nice. Right? Yes.

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then the Stoics thought that human arrethe, human excellence, means being prosocial and rational. So if you go through life, if you try to go through life, using reason instead of force, let's say, to solve problems, and you go through life by acting pro-sociality, that is just being nice to other people,

cooperating with other people, doing things together with other people, then you're acting in an arreter fashion that's what virtue really means so you are the human equivalent of the brand knife that cuts really nicely that's interesting so it's basically parsing the things that make us human and that make us animal because as homo sapiens we are sort of both we're able to reason but we're also you know violent right we're able to be pro-social and create social structures but we're also you know hypersexual and just want to be you know primally spreading our seed around the world. So we're simultaneously both. And to live a virtuous life, we need to be maximizing those

things in which make us human. Correct. That's a fair way to phrase that? I think that's very, that's very fair way to phrase. And what do we do with the animal nature of us, with the, with the primal nature, the instinctual things that are imbued into us as as primates? So that's, that's an interesting question. There are things that are natural and they're not good for us. I hopefully will agree on this. Like, for instance, there are. are things, you know, one example of thing that is natural, it's, I don't know, poisonous mushrooms, those are natural, but they're not good for us, right? You don't, you don't want to eat them. Uranium ore. Yeah, something like that. It's lots of stuff that it's natural,

and earthquakes are natural, but you don't want to be in the middle of one, right? Right. So when people say, sometimes you hear today, you know, there's a whole industry, as you know, about doing things naturally, you know, as if natural were sort of equivalent to good, but it's Clearly not. We can have a conversation to the end of the day on the number of things that are natural and that they're not good. So I think that that means that the Stoics were onto something when they thought, okay, not everything that is natural is good for you. So for instance, you've mentioned aggression and the ability to inflict violence, you know, to act violently in other people. Rage is another one of those things that comes natural to human beings in certain conditions.

But the Stoics thought, yes, those things are natural, but they undermine your excellence. That is, they actually are opposite to the kinds of things that are best about human beings. And again, those things are just too, pro-sociality, prosociality, prosocial behavior, and reason. For instance, rage, you know, getting angry about things. the stoic Seneca who lived at about the same time as Epicetus

in the first century of the current era he said that that getting upset that that rage is a temporary madness and he said

just look at the face of somebody who is angry right their features are distorted they look like you know wild animals they're bowed to pounce on you

it's like is that what you want to look like on a normal base no You don't want to do that. Rage or anger are natural, and yet they're not, they're unhealthy. The Stoics divided the emotions into two major groups, healthy and unhealthy. And they actually had a very precise way to establish whether an emotion was healthy or unhealthy.

It wasn't just a random thing. Everything that is aligned with reason is healthy. everything that overrides or is opposite to reason is unhealthy. So, for instance, love for your partner or your children, or in fact, I would say for anybody, for anybody that is a member of the human species, it's aligned with reason. These are the kinds of things that make your life better. You know, taking care of other people, other people taking care of you. That is the kind of things that make your life better.

being in a rage and therefore yelling at people or possibly attacking them violently, it's against reason because in the long term it's going to undermine who you are. You don't want to be an angry person. It's natural to be angry in specific circumstances, right? It's a natural reaction. But again, we just said a minute ago that not everything that is naturally is necessarily good. And so if you indulge in your anger, if you let yourself, becoming angry under certain conditions,

then it's more likely that you'll do that in the future. You kind of get used to it. And you become the kind of person that often or easily gets angry. That's not the kind of person you want to be, according to the Stoics, because that gets in the way of your reasoning and it gets in the way of your social interactions

with other constructive social interactions with others. That's why anger is just a no-no for the Stoics. It's a rejection. Now, they also think that some emotions that they consider unhealthy, for us, would be problematic. For instance, grief. They think that grief is unhealthy. And most psychologists today would agree that anger is unhealthy, but they wouldn't say that grief, unless it becomes pathological. I mean, there are situations where grief does become pathological.

It goes on for years. It becomes a clinical depression. Yeah, exactly. It becomes depression. and it becomes something that defines you as a person. Then even a modern psychologist would say, yeah, that's not a good thing. But the ancient stories would say, no, grief, it's not rational. Because after all, what is it that you're grieving about?

So you lost somebody, right? Like in my case, for instance, I just lost somebody, you know, my stepfather just a few weeks ago. And I grew up with him. Part of my childhood was with him. So we had a very good close relationship. He died age 79 cancer. Now, the studies say, okay, so look at that situation. What exactly happened there?

You lost somebody. Well, death is natural. This is not the kind of thing. This is part of the order of things. You cannot avoid. Nobody can skip on that one. You knew it was going to happen. You know, this person was sick.

It was old, and you knew what was going to happen. and yeah you're going to miss him so it's fine to miss that person but you know if you're missing somebody goes into the level of grief in other words kind of you you feel desperate about it well that's that's really more about you than them isn't it it's more kind of a selfish sort of thing oh i don't have his company anymore i don't have you know the privilege of seeing him and all that it's not about him anymore because he's gone it doesn't exist anymore he's been reabsorbed in the cosmic cycle, as the Stoics would put it. Now, that for us is a little difficult to accept, of course.

But the Stoics had reached that conclusion because they believed that the universe itself is actually a living organism endowed with reason. And therefore, that everything that happens is providential in the sense that it is for the good of the cosmos. If you accept that kind of metaphysics, I wish I could, then I can see why grief would actually not be a thing. Because somebody dies and you think to yourself, oh, this is for the good of the universe. This is what actually, it's part of the general plan of how things unfold.

So I'm going to, I derive a lot of consolation from that sort of thing. Unfortunately, as a modern stoic, I don't believe in that the universe is a living organism. therefore I don't believe in Providence. And so I feel okay, feeling grief for my lost stepfather. But again, only within a certain amount, only within reason. If it starts getting to the point where I cannot function anymore because of grief, if it starts getting to the point where I feel depressed and all that sort of stuff, then I think there is a problem.

And at that point, I wouldn't need to seek counsel. What about joy or happiness? Same thing. So the Stoics would say that joy or joy. happiness are appropriate. You know, they are in agreement with reason, as they would put it, in certain circumstances

and not in others, right? So, if you feel joy at the fact that your daughter has gotten a good job and, you know, her life is off to a great start, that's appropriate. If you feel joy at torturing a kitten, that's problematic. That tells

you that there is something really wrong with the way you look at things. So, so some of these emotions are not necessarily intrinsically good or bad or healthy or unhealthy. It depends on the circumstances. It depends on what the emotion is about. So some of them, so I guess the general picture therefore is that some emotions are always unhealthy, according to the stoics. Rage is the best example. Some emotions are always positive, like joy at your own ability. ability to act virtuously.

That is definitely a positive thing. There's no counter to that. And then there are some in the middle that become healthy or unhealthy, depending on what the object of those emotions is in the specific. That's interesting. Now, is there ever a use for rage? What if we look at the outcome of immense rage

and we see all of the positives from it, right? So we could come up with 100 hypotheticals, but let's say there's a Jewish prisoner in a concentration can. and him and his whole family is being tortured by the Nazis, and he gets angry, and that rage fills him after seeing hundreds of his countrymen and brethren and family getting killed, and in a rage-filled state, he grabs a gun from the Nazi

and kills all the Nazi leaders in the concentration camp and liberates all the Jews from this camp. That's a place where I would look at the rage, and I would look at the outcome, and I would say, oh, the outcome justified the rage. Now, I don't know if you want to use this exact example, because it might be controversial. It's a tough one, right?

But in that case, I'm just using the most extreme version. I'm wondering, is the outcome of a justification for men's rage? Yeah. You just made the argument that Aristotle makes about the use of anger. So Aristotle said, yeah, sure, excessive anger is a bad thing because it leads you to do things that are unreasonable, irrational, and you're eventually going to regret it. But a little bit of anger under the right circumstance.

It's actually a motivation. It's actually a good thing. And Seneca, the Stoic, actually wrote a whole book called On Anger, in which he responds to Aristotle and uses some of the examples that you just similar to what you just proposed. So, for instance, Aristotle says, you know, it's a good thing for soldiers before going to battle to be a little bit angry because they're more willing to fight, if that's the case.

and Seneca's rather sarcastic response is, well, by that token, we also know that soldiers will fight more willingly if they're a little bit drunk. That doesn't mean it's a good idea to have a drunken army. So, yes, anger certainly is a motivator, can be a motivator. The problem is it can also get in the way of pursuing the best course of action because it tends to overrefering. right reason. So you tend to act in a way that is not necessarily the most rational. So Seneca says, you know, so should I not defend

my family, you know, from an assault? Of course I should. But why should I be, why do I need anger for that? I just need love for my family. And that's enough. That's more than enough to get me, even to get, to pick up weapons. The stoids,

the stoics were not pacifists. They were not violent. They thought that violence was the last resort in under most circumstances. But nevertheless, they were not pacifists. So, Sonagana says, yeah, of course I'm going to pick up my sword and defend

my wife or my father or something. But I don't need anger for that. I just need to know that that's the right thing to do. I need love, in fact, if anything. Quite the opposite. I can reach the same results even better. Now, there is some empirical evidence here that I think

helps the stoic position. There are studies about the techniques used by boxers and martial artists when they fight. And, you know, there's different personalities, especially among boxers. Martial artists tend to be much more controlled because that's part of the discipline that they learn, right?

It's part of the art. But especially among boxes, there's a lot of variation. So there are people who really get angry. There are people who really get, or really self-control, etc. And the studies show that other things we need, equal, the fighters who are self-controlled win fights far more frequently than the ones that let themselves get into rage.

In fact, one typical technique is to annoy your opponent until he gets angry. Because once you get angry, yeah, you are definitely motivated in punching harder and stuff like that, but you also become sloppy because anger takes over. And you're no longer rational. You're no longer rational. Right. Exactly. You're not longer acting in the most efficient way. You're just going at it, right?

And if your opponent is an expert and it keeps in school, he's going to get you off guard and he's going to punch you really seriously. So there is a discussion there to be had. I mean, I think Aristotle, you know, if somebody will take the Aristotelian position, I would say, sure, go ahead. If it works for you, that's fine. But I think the Stoics have at least a point for us to consider. we do tend to get really easily angry these days.

I mean, there are contemporary studies, very recent studies in sociology, social psychology, that show that people on social media get angry far more than they would be under normal circumstances. One of the turning points was a few years ago when Facebook engineers invented the angry button. So you remember that on Facebook until a few years ago, you could only like things, and that's it. That was it. Then they expanded the range, and they did put things like, you know, hearts and hugs and stuff like that. But they also put in the anger button. This was not by chance.

This was because research showed that if people have an anger button option, they will hit those kinds of posts that generate the anger thing, the angry reaction 10 times more than any other kind of post. People really like to be angry. Self-righteousness, it's a thing. It feels good to be angry about something. And Facebook engineers exploited that. And shortly thereafter, we saw a flood of fake news and alternative facts and all that sort of stuff that is now making social media chess pool, essentially.

So that I think is a warning to the fact that the stoics might have been under something there when they were warning about anger. By the way, on anger by Seneca, which people can still read their excellent translations. One of my favorite translations is by the University of Chicago Press that came out a few years ago. If you check on anger, which is still considered one of the best books ever written on the subject. And then at some point I did this comparison, I went through on anger where Seneca not only does an analysis of anger. So it tells you, here's what anger is, here's how this is different from other reactions, et cetera, et cetera. But he also tells you what to do. So when you feel anger, the first movement of anger, as he calls it, coming up, that rush of adrenaline, basically.

So here's how you do. And he says things like, you need to disengage. So walk, go out for a walk. count until 100, do whatever it is that disengages you from the immediate situation. Let the anger subsize. In other words, don't try to suppress it.

Because suppressing emotions is impossible. You cannot suppress an emotion. It just doesn't work that way. What you can do is to disengage, gain something that modern psychologists called cognitive distancing from the emotion. And then the emotion will subside on its own. Unless emotions are fueled by your own,

thinking, they don't last. You cannot be angry on a sustained fashion unless you keep thinking, I really should be pissed off about this thing. I really should be angry. If you just don't, if you go for a walk, the thing will subside. And then Seneca says at that point, you start reasoning with yourself and ask yourself questions like, why the hell was I getting so angry? And what could it be a better response to that kind of situation, that sort of thing? Now, I made a list of the kinds of things that Seneca says we should do, the kind of advice that it gives us. And then I went to the American, the webpage of the American Psychological Association, they have a section on anger management.

It's almost entirely Seneca. Wow. It's almost all of the things that, now, of course, the APA's advice is based on research. Seneca's was based on intuition, on personal observation of human behavior. The modern version is more accurate, it's more precise, because it's, based on empirical evidence, you know, controlled experiments and all that sort of stuff. But at the end of the day, it turns out that this guy who wrote 2000 years ago pretty much had the right answer. It's like, it's there.

Wow. That's really impressive that he was able to intuit his way into what, you know, we were required to sort of test our way into. Wow, that's very impressive. Now, on the topic of creating character, so we talk about virtue and creating like that internal interpretation of what character should be. How can I go about creating a framework for what my character should be? I grew up Catholic, so I kind of download a lot of Catholic teaching when it comes to what it means to be virtuous. But for a non-religious person or someone that's trying to come up with their own sort of code of ethics, what is a helpful way that I could do that in order to discern and apply these Stoic principles? Yeah, that's an excellent question. I actually grew

up Catholic as well. I grew up in Rome, literally not far from the Vatican, from the Pope. I can imagine. Massimo from Rome. Yeah. So, yeah, I know what you're talking about this. There was a, you know, the Catholic influences, sticks with you. Interestingly, Christianity has actually historically taken over a lot of the teachings of stoicism. It rejected other ancient philosophies, for instance, rejected Epicureanism because of the Epicureans were about, you know, pleasure.

Having a good time. And all that sort of stuff. And, of course, that's a no-no for the Catholic Church. but the Stoics talked a lot about virtue, they talked a lot about duty, and those things actually line up pretty well with sort of the Christian ethos. And in fact, Christians,

ever since at least Thomas Aquinas in the Middle Ages, recognize seven virtues, and four of those are actually straight from the Stoics. The seven virtues, let's see if I remember them. The four cardinal ones are wisdom, courage, justice, and temperance, and I'll go back to those in a minute, those are part of the answer to your question. And then the Catholics added, the Christians added,

well, actually I should say the Catholics. Thomas Aquinas was a Catholic. They added three more, which are hope, faith, and charity. So these are the seven virtues that are recognized by it. And as I was mentioned earlier, the serenity prayer is based on Epictetus. So there is quite a bit of, you know, the manual of Epictetus, the one that I mentioned earlier, people shouldn't read as the first thing that they do. when they approached Stoicism,

it was translated in Latin and it was used throughout the Middle Age, because it was written originally in Greek, and it was used throughout the Middle Ages as a training manual for monks. Epictetus's work. Yeah. Oh, wow.

Except that every time that Epicterus mentions Socrates in the manual, they replace it with Jesus. Hilarious. Out of that, out of that, it's essentially the same book. Okay, so back to your question, sort of what kind of framework? There are a couple of different ways of thinking in terms of stoicism,

thinking about a sort of frame for the kind of character that you want to aim for. And then there are different techniques that will get you there. Let me give you the most intuitive, the most, I think, practically useful, at least in the beginning framework, which is based on the four cardinal virtues that I mentioned a minute ago. So those are, again, wisdom, courage, justice, and temperance. What's up, guys? We're going to take a break really quick because you are. a man who needs a personal shopper. Now here's how you're going to do it. You're going to go check

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So you can kind of use them, think of them as a compass, a mortal compass. And the idea is that one way to practice stoicism is that every time you're about to make an important decision or you're going to interact with somebody or you're facing a setback or a challenge, you ask yourself, okay, what would the four virtues tell me? What would be the kind of behavior that is virtues according to the four? And they're defined in a very specific way within Stoicism. Wisdom, which is actually technically called practical wisdom, there's a separate thing called theoretical wisdom, and we're not going to go there. But wisdom is the knowledge of what is truly good for you and what is truly bad for you.

According to the Stoics, the only thing that is good for you is good judgment, and the only thing that is bad for you is bad judgment. Why? Because everything else depends on it. It's like, remember, Socrates' ball. The only thing that is good for you is to play the ball skillfully. And the only thing that is bad for you is not to play, to play badly. Everything else follows from how you actually play. So everything else follows from what you call.

consider a good, for a good judgment or a bad judgment. So wisdom is what tells you that the only truly good thing for you, it's to develop good judgment about situations. That's number one. Courage is not just a courage to, you know, face danger or, you know, going to battle or stuff like that, because that could be full-hearted, depending on the situation. May or may not be courageous. This is moral courage, the courage to do the right thing. The third, one is justice. Justice is defined by the Stoics as the notion that other people should be treated fairly and we respect dignity, the same way in which you would want presumably to be treated. And then temperance is the notion that you should be doing things in the right measure,

neither too much nor too little. Now, how do you actually use this for cardinal virtues in a practical situation? Let's say that tomorrow morning I go back to campus to my department. And I walk into the office and I see my boss harassing a colleague. He would never do that because he's a really nice guy. But nevertheless, imagine that that is the situation, right? So now I'm faced with a decision to make. Should I intervene or walk away? And if I do decide to intervene, how should I intervene?

So mentally, I consult the four cardinal virtues, wisdom, first of all. Remember, this is the knowledge of what is good and bad for you. Well, it's good judgment, the Stoics think, to be inclined over helping other people. Pro-social. Right, pro-social. It's bad judgment to wanting to run away from situations like that. So, okay, wisdom tells me, yeah, you should intervene. Courage.

Well, it does take courage because it's my boss. And so there could be retaliation, consequences, you know, all sorts of stuff. Who knows? If he's really upset, it could be even physical consequences, right? If he's really... So courage says, yep, you should. This is a... It takes courage.

It's a thing to do. Justice, remember, is about treating other people fairly and with dignity. If I were in the place of my co-worker, would I want somebody to interview? Presumably, yes, right? So that's three yeses already. And then temperance. Now, temperance is not a yes or no thing. It's a question of measure.

How much? right so I could do one of two extremes I could just mumble something under my breath so that nobody actually hears me but technically I intervened be too temperate though yeah that's a little too quiet right it's like okay that's not enough but you also could get out of gun

and shoot him exactly or I could just get into the end and start punching him or something and that's like no that is not the situation that the situation doesn't require that nobody seems to be a threat of violence and there's no you know so temperance tells me you should step in the middle of it and with firm voice trying to calm things down. So I got my answer. And now I walk in and actually do it.

Of course, in practice, the way this works is that, you know, in most places, most times we don't have the luxury to look at a situation and say, okay, wait a minute here. Let me ask the four virtues. But through constant practice, this type of, you know, cognitive exercise can then become second nature. Correct. And that's the idea. Interesting. Right. Can you take me through a couple other example?

I have some of my own that are interesting ethical dilemmas that I'm curious if this framework could solve. Sure. Let's say you have two friends, a guy and a girl, and they're both dating each other. And then you find out that the guy cheated on the girl. You have a relational duty to both of them, but at the same time, it's not really any of your business.

What would the stoic in this case using these four pillars do in that instance? Is there an answer to that? I think there is. But before I give you the answer, what I think is the answer, let me make one thing clear. Unlike other approaches to moral philosophy, for instance, deontology, the ontological systems are based on very rigid rules like the Ten Commandments, for instance. That's the ontological system.

It's like, thou should not kill, period. It doesn't say Tao's not kill except, right? It just says, no killing. end the story. There are no exceptions. In virtual ethics, the answer very often to a particular moral question, moral dilemma, is it depends. Now, it depends on what. It depends on the specific of the situation on exactly what your relationship is with those people, exactly what is going on, exactly what you know about these people, et cetera, et cetera. So I'm about to give you what I think is a reasonable answer, but the implication is not that, oh, well,

Stoicism says. Stoicism says only that you should use your judgment. I see. And your judgment is kind of subjective. Well, I wouldn't go that far because subjective implies often implies that, man, your opinion, my opinion, you know, it's like, you know, it's different things, but whatever, anything goes.

It's not subjective in that sense. It's specific. It's situational. Sometimes people use the word situational ethics. There is an answer. there is an objective answer to the question but that answer

depends on the specific details and so I might you may be for instance in this particular case in a far better situation than I would be answering the question because you know the people

right so you know a lot of the background you know what's going on you know the people themselves etc etc which means also you might know what works best and how the people

might react or not react the one thing the Stoics would not say is, oh, that's none of my business. It is your business, because your business is to improve the human cosmopolis, to make the human family a better place. And if there is somebody who is being hurt

and you can help it, you have a duty to help. The question is how, what is the best way to help? And that does depend on the details. For instance, it's possible that, let's say that, for the sake of argument, that your male friend is doing the cheating and the woman is being cheated on.

Although it could, of course, easily be the other way around. It could be two men. It doesn't matter. But for the specific case, let's just fix our ideas on that situation. Well, you could decide that the first thing to do is to talk to him and not to her because perhaps your assessment of the situation is that he might,

actually respond to your counsel. If you sit him down and have a beer with him and say, you know, I know you're doing this. It's really not cool, man. It's like you're hurting our friend, your partner, my friend. You know, you really should think about this kind of thing. It's possible that just doing that is enough to improve the situation and then therefore you need to do nothing else.

Then it's up to him to handle the situation. it's also possible that perhaps the other person doesn't actually care as much as normally somebody might. You know, who knows? Maybe you find out more about things and it turns out that they actually have an agreement about, you know, so long as the other one doesn't know, it's okay to sort of play around a little bit. Okay, in that case, more information will solve the problem right there. Or is in fact possible that the woman really knows about it, it's really hurt, or would really respond in a way that you think

would be detrimental to herself. Then you had to make your decision, do I actually go on and tell? The specific things you do depends on your judgment and your assessment of the situation. The one thing you don't do is to walk away. You have a duty to help other human beings if you can. So these excuse, I guess,

that we often come up with. That's not really my business. This is the New Yorker's mantra. That's right. Exactly. It's none of my business. I'm going to keep it pushing. Exactly.

And that I think it's a little too self-serving. It's like you're abdicating your responsibility. I mean, do you have responsibilities to these people? They're your friends. Right. So that I think is much more clear. I think I do have responsibility to them. Correct.

Now, can we go one step further? Let's say this happens in New York all the time. You're getting on the train, and let's say you see two teenagers fight in. Yeah. Two young men, they're both 15 years old. They're in high school, and they're punching each other in the face. And their friends are around, and some of them are egging them on.

Some people are filming, and it's become a spectacle. Right. As a stoic, should I intervene and try to stop it? But I also am kind of running late to a thing, and I have a place to be, and I should just get on the train and go. Not to mention that one of the teenagers might have a knife and not appreciate the fact that you get into the middle. Exactly. Who knows?

This happened, as you know, very recently. Something like this happened actually very recently. Somebody who was shot on the subway. Oh, yes, yes, yes, exactly. Because of an altercation. Crazy. Right. So these days it's kind of, ah.

So that leads me to the question, like, did Seneca or Epitios? Did they account for this modern variation? Funny thing is, there is a story in Epictetus that it's, that kind of addresses the problem, the issue. It's not about subways because there were no subways in ancient room. It's about two slaves. I remember Epititos was himself a slave, so you knew what he was. was talking about. And one of his students actually poses that kind of question. He says, look, imagine that there are these two slaves and their masters, their respected masters, asked them to

hold the chamber pot while he's doing his business. Should they do it? Isn't that something that is kind of repugnant and demeaning and all that sort of stuff? Should they do it? And everybody says, well, that's up to the slaves. One slave, if might be making the reasoning, you know, this is actually demeaning. This is a disgusting thing to do. On the other hand, if I don't do it, I'm going to be beat.

And I don't like that. And I don't like skipping dinner. And, you know, it's like, that's enough. I don't go that far. I'm just going to do it. I think it's awful, but I'm going to do it. The other one says, hell with that. I don't care if I get beat.

I don't care if I sleep. If I don't get dinner, this is just not acceptable, even for a slave. and so I'm not going to do it. And every thing is, interestingly, does not criticize one or the other of the slaves. He says they both decided that there was a limit, where was the limit to their dignity? And one happened to set that bar higher than the other. And that's just the way it is.

It's up to them to make that decision. But then he adds, so to his students, to his student, he says, so be careful where you sell at what level, at what price you sell your dignity or your character. Just make sure you don't sell it too cheap. So in other words, don't make excuses for yourself. So in the case of that you're, I think this applies very well to the case you're talking about

under the subway. You know that if you intervene, there may be consequences that could be serious. You could get killed in a situation like this in a subway or at least injured, right? Or at the very least getting into a very unpleasant sort of situation. But at the same time, you also know that, you know, separating two teenagers who are fighting is probably a pro-social act.

It's something that other things being equal you really should do, right? Right. So, Abbotelus would say, that's up to you. You have to make a determination in the moment how far you're going to push your sense of integrity. you probably will feel better if you intervene. You know, you'll imagine that you do intervene and then everything was fine.

You go home and you pat yourself in the back, right? You say, I did a good thing today. If you don't intervene and you're at least a little bit self-aware, you probably will go home and feel bad about it. You say, you know, I probably should have done something there. It's like, you know, I was kind of rationalizing things. Either way, nobody's asking you to do. be a hero.

In fact, nobody can, according to the Stoics, ask you to be a hero. It's about you. It's yourself from inside that says, okay, is this the kind of situation that I feel I have a duty to intervene? Or, no, I'm sorry, this is too dangerous, potentially too dangerous. I'm not going to go there. Either way, the decision is yours. Just don't give yourself excuses.

So, for instance, when you were explaining the situation, you said, You know, maybe I think I'm too busy. I'm in a hurry. That's an excuse. You never do busy to intervene in a situation on that. But if you tell yourself, look, this is a dangerous situation. I could get killed or I can be injured. That's a reasonable excuse.

That's a reasonable way to say, no, I'm not going to intervene. In fact, what I'm going to do is I'm going to get out at the next stop and alert the MTA. I can do something else. You don't necessarily have to intervene directly. So it depends on what reason you're giving yourself for it. If you say to yourself, I'm busy or rather read a book or something. Well, that definitely is an excuse. And that applies to all sorts of situations.

Like, for instance, I think that other things being equal, vegetarians and vegans have the upper moral hand. I actually agree on this point. I've thought about this. But I'm not a vegetarian or a vegan. I am what sometimes people euphemistically refer to as a flexitarian. That is, I tend to eat vet a little meat and I tend to decrease. Over the years, I've tended to decrease the amount of meat that I eat. I almost never eat red meat, for instance.

And when I do eat meat, I try to be careful about looking whether it's sourced from local farmers and stuff like that. But at the end of the day, I agree that the vegans actually have the upper hand. If not vegans, definitely the vegetarians. We could get into why and all that sort of stuff. But if you, even for the sake of argument, let me entertain that thought, then the question is, well, why don't you act? Why don't you just embrace a vegetarian diet? Well, there is a lot sorts of reasons, some which are habit that are difficult to overcome,

some which is, you know, it's been formed in my mind and in my way of responding to things since I was a kid. You know, it took me time to realize that there are moral issues here. And they're not quite clear-cut. Vegetarianism also has its own problems in terms of environment, in terms of all sorts of stuff. So it's not quite that clear-cut, but all things consider I should be doing better.

So basically, I am telling myself, yeah, I'm not doing well enough, so I need to improve. But needing to improve and being conscious of the fact that I need to improve, that I need to do better. Doesn't mean that automatically, just, you know, as a today, that's it, I'm done, right? It's a process. And so long as you see progress being made, one of the, so the stoics refer to themselves as procoptontes, which is a Greek word that means those who make progress.

The problem, the point is not to become a sage, to be enlightened, and, you know, all of a sudden being perfect. That's hard. That's almost impossible, I would say. But the point is, in fact, to make progress. And to make progress, just like to use again the analogy of going to the gym, what do you need to do to make progress at the gym? You need to push yourself. If you only take the weights that you can handle already easily,

you're not doing anything. You're just pretending. You need to do things that are actually pushing you. Okay, so I can lift this much weight easily. therefore I'm going to add five more pounds or 10 more pounds or whatever it is right I can my aerobic capacity is such that I can do easily you know 20 minutes on the treadmill at this particular speed okay let me increase the speed or let me increase the time by five minutes or whatever it is right that is the point of stoicism so in order to answer again more generally

your question the issue isn't perfection if we set perfection as as a bar we're not going to do it. We're just going to say, okay, that's it. I'm not. I'm not at that level. But if we tell yourself, could I push myself a little bit more, then you're more likely to actually do it. Obsession with progress. Focus on progress, more than obsession. Temperance. Temperance. Exactly. Obsession would be intempered. Yeah, I'm not a tempered person. I get obsessed with things. But see, you think of yourself, not as a tempered person. And therefore... It's self-fulfilling. But I do feel that my natural disposition is more obsessive than other people.

Sure. Yeah, and there is such a thing. And that is one of the things that both the Stoics recognize and especially the economy behavioral therapists recognized. That is, we all come with different degrees of abilities to respond to situations and to controllers, to be temperate and so on and so forth. And those abilities vary because of our genetic makeup, which we certainly don't control. It's not up to us.

Our early upbringing, you know, the kind of... of environment, family environment in which you grow up and all that sorts. All of those have effects. But at the end of the day, isn't it part of becoming an adult precisely the fact that you're taking more and more responsibility

about your own behavior, right? So you can say, oh, I behave this way because when I was a kid. But the more you do that, the more that becomes an excuse. Right. Yeah, that makes a lot. Yeah, we're rejecting excuses here.

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Now, on the dichotomy of control, the epititis talks about, or the serenity prayer found in Christianity, I can kind of accept that there are things outside of my control, and I can work and practice the serenity of letting go of those things. Like, you know, if the universe explodes tomorrow, I can't control that, and I find serenity in that. So that's work, but that practice seems very reasonable to me. I can work on my courageousness to try to take up those things that I can control. And whether it's being a better son or a better husband, I can control those things. And I can accept that I should work on that and that I have that within my control. It's the wisdom to understand what is and isn't that to me feels like the greatest task. And I'm curious how I can create a framework to understand what,

is and isn't because there's some things that I feel like are in my control that may not be. So for example, like outcome-oriented thinking. I spoke recently with a retired NBA player. He played many years in the NBA playing basketball. And I asked my question about creating goals and visualizing the future. And he made a comment that was very stoic. That was interesting. He says, I haven't set a goal for myself since I was 16 years old.

And at this point, he was almost 40. and I asked why. He said, because I have no control over those goals. Very nice. He said, I can only control what I do. I can only control how much I practice, how frequently I practice, how well I take care of my body. But I can't control if I win a national championship. So I'm not going to make that a goal.

I thought, oh, that's quite interesting. He's definitely a stoic. Whether he knows it or not. Right. So my question is, how can I divorce myself from the outcome, when the outcome of things feels very much within my control? Well, as your basketball player said, it's actually not under your control. And therefore, it's a question of recognizing.

Remember, we talked about the cognitive and then the behavioral step, right? The continuity step is the first one. One of the major issues with control, with the notion of control, is that a lot of people seem to think that things are under their control, that they're not. And the first realization in Stoicism is that there is very little that you actually control. In fact, there is only one thing that you control at the end of the day. I mentioned three earlier because that's what Epicther does. He mentions three at the beginning of the manual.

He says, these three things are your judgments about situations, your decisions to act or not to act, and the values that you endorse or reject. So values and these values, right? But if you think about it, they all come down to judgments. Judgments, obviously, are judgments by definition. Decisions to act or not to act are judgments. Because if you decide to act, you're provided the judgment that this is a situation where you need to act. This is the practice of judgment.

Right. And then the values and these values are also judgments. If you say to yourself, these are the things that I value and these are the things that I don't value, those are judgments as well. So at the end of the day, the only thing, according to what we did you do, that you control is your judgments. Judgment, judgment and judgment. Right, it's judgment, judge, and judgment. And as the basketball player was saying,

you control your intentions, which is another way to say your judgments. You do not control your outcomes. So if you think of in terms of that dichotomy, sometimes modern stoics refer to that as the dichotomy of control. As in there's two things only and only two things. What people have trouble with, in my experience,

Then they say, well, but it's not a dichotomy, is it? There are a bunch of things that I influence. I do not fully control, but I influence. And the answer there is no, there is no such a thing. Whatever you think of as influencing is still the result of two components, one of which is your intentions and the other one is the outcomes. The example of the basketball player is a perfect one. So as he says, what do I control?

my decisions to practice, my decision to do this or that or the other. What I don't control, the outcome, whether I win a game or I win a championship. Can I influence the chances of winning a game or a championship? Yes, but how does that influence work? That influence is the result of these decisions to act in a certain way, and then what other people and other circumstances do or don't do. So every time we think about influencing something, what you're really saying is there are two components

you're going on. One that is up to me, my intentions. And one is not up to me, all the external factors. To influence simply means to translate your judgments into action. That's what an influence is. A good tennis player, let's say, influences the outcome of the game by deciding to act in certain ways.

That's it. Then the outcome of the game, of course, depends on the combination of what he actually does plus what his opponent does, plus what the referee does, and plus random things like the ball spinning one way or the other. All of those other things are not under his control. He doesn't control his opponent.

It doesn't control the referee. He doesn't control the ball. The only thing that he controls, And therefore, the way influences the game is through this decision to act in a certain way or not, to hit the ball with a certain angle or not, to respond to you, move in a certain direction or not, that sort of stuff. Now, hypothetically, in the tennis example, let's say there's doubles tennis. Now, the proper way to play tennis, like we talk about playing the game masterfully or playing the game skillfully is what you should be striving to do as an athlete or someone playing some type of sport. to play the game masterfully would be to playing it the proper way.

Now, what if there's an improper way that is not explicitly stated? It's not cheating, but targeting the weaker player. Every time the ball comes to you, you're going to hit it to the weaker player. Yeah. I don't know if this would be a beautiful way to play the game. I don't know if this would be a virtuous way to play the game because you're trying to exploit a weakness, but it would increase your chance. of winning.

Yeah. I don't know if that example would apply. I have another example that might be useful. Well, let's take with this one for a second, and then we'll move to the next one. Remember, one of the three things that Epitio says are up to you is your values, right, and these values. So what's your value?

Is your value that winning is important no matter how you win within the rules. If you're cheating, that's it. Of course, it's out of the question. Right. Right. But within the boundaries of not cheating, then it's up to you. You have to make a decision about your values. Is your value that you don't just want to win? You also want to play beautifully? Or is your value that you, you know, whatever it takes within the limits of what is actually allowed, I'm going to do it. I don't think the stories would blame you one way or the other. It's like, okay, those are your values. There are some people who say, no, I don't want to just do just to win. I want to win in style. I want to win in a way that it's beautiful.

I want to have a aesthetic appreciation of the component on my game. I don't want this to be an ugly game. Interesting. Okay, fine, that's your value. Like trash talking, for example. Yeah. So Marco Maserati, 2006 World Cup against France. He's trash talking, Zinnadine Zadon.

Zendon gets angry. He head butts him. He gets injected from the game. It goes to a Poundty shootout. And Zinnadine Zadon can't take a Pound to kick, despite being one of the great. pound-to-kick takers on the team and in the world at the time and as a result France loses the game and you still can't get over it and I can't get over it

Massimo I'm still frustrated I cry I'm just a boy okay but my question is the Italians Maserati in that moment used a tactic that's not illegal it's not it's not it's not against the rules to talk trash obviously within a limit he was I don't think he was being racist or prejudicial in some way so I don't think he broke a rule right and he just pushed the right button he pushed the right button he pushed the right and as a result, he won the game. Right. So from a stoic perspective,

this would just come down to what his value set is. Correct. And I think that from a stoic perspective, I think both of them made a mistake there. So the Italian player

made a mistake of, although he was technically within the rules, it clearly was not a virtuous thing to do. Right. To go to an opponent into losing their temper I mean, according to your virtues.

Well, no, according to remember, the virtues are supposed to be universal. If you buy into the Stoic system, you think that those are universal. And one of the major goals, remember, is to be prosocial. You're not being prosocial if you are going somebody into becoming angry by insulting their girlfriend or sister or whatever it is, right? So one could argue that is not a virtuous behavior. It's technically okay. As you said, he didn't break any rules. But are you actually, you know, think of it this way.

Are you really proud of that? You know, when you go home, you say, hey, I won't because I got the other guy upset. It's like, eh, hmm. On the other hand, the French player also did something that, from a stoic perspective, is question. You got angry. Right. That seems much more clear to me. Yeah.

Right. So he should have just shrugged his shoulders, turn around and kick the penalty and focus on on the game. So they both made engaged in a way that was not exactly the best way. That said, that's what human experience is about, right? And you learn

I'm sure that actually learned that, you know, the next time around, you don't react that way. Right. Yeah. Right? It's like, oh, that's an experience that you don't forget. Losing the World Cup as a result of getting angry. Surely is something

that tells you that getting angry might be problematic. Right. Yeah, that makes sense. I don't know. I guess I get hung up on the value system. Like, it feels subjective to me. Why? I guess insofar as one person's value might be to, you know, like, I don't know, I guess that I would conflict with people and in certain values. So, for example, like, I don't know, I guess you could say like sexual promiscuity. I was raised Catholic. So the idea of being overtly sexual and engaging in casual sex would be something that would violate my moral virtue. But I also recognize that it doesn't really violate everyone's moral virtue.

And I think if you're 20 years old and having consensual sex with people, I don't see that as a, I can see how someone could rationalize that as being something virtuous for them. It's pro-social. Insofar as that it's temperate and you're not a sex addict. But this is my question. Is it though? So I look at these things through a. Judeo-Christian lens obviously because that is the worldview that I was raised with. So I would say,

oh, it would be morally virtuous to abstain from these types of, you know, flippant sexual behaviors because I believe that God instilled sexuality into us and as a moment of bonding that between two people that are in an intimate relationship and that is preserved for this sort of, you know, a very, like, profound connection with another human being and that it shouldn't just be trivial. But if someone sees it that way, I'm not, I don't see how I could infringe on their virtue of saying, no, you don't, you don't infringe. So, so one of the things that the stoics may clear is that you don't go around telling other people bad stoic. That's one of the fundamental rules of Stoic club. You don't go around telling other people, oh, bad stoic. It's about you. So, so the question

is, would you feel virtues or non-virtures engaging in one behavior or another? It's not about other people. Other people, it's their own judgment, and their own judgment is not up to you. But this is the subjectivity I'm talking about. Yeah, that's right, but it's not subjective. So the Sto, in this sense, the Stoic think that these values are universal for humanity. They're not universal in the sort of cosmic sense. If there are Martians out there and their society is structured in a very different way, there are different biological organisms, the four virtues may not apply to Martians. Right.

But they apply to human beings. Right. I recognize animals and humans probably have different rules around consent. Right. For instance. Right.

It doesn't make any sense, for instance, to say, oh, that lion is behaving in an immoral fashion. It's like, that's just not a thing. It doesn't apply to lions. But the Stoics do think that morality is universal

as far as human beings are concerned. And as I said, they derive that from an understanding of human nature. If you agree that there is such a thing is human nature, that is that there are certain things that are characteristics specifically

of our species and that there are some things that are good for us and other things that are not good for us. That's true universally. One of the, it's not subjective. Now, other people may or may not recognize it and it may or may not be your business

to tell them, you know, if they ask me, I'll give them my opinion. But if they don't ask, their behavior is up to them. But it's not subjective in the sense that they're not, different kinds of behavior according to the Stoics are not equally, morally, you know, equivalent

from a moral perspective. Some people will do the wrong thing. They may or may not realize it that they're doing the wrong thing, but they will be doing the wrong thing. One of the analogies, so far I've brought up several times the analogy with athletics, with exercise. But another one of the analogies that the Stoics often make is with health, medicine.

right so as a biological organism there are certain things are good for human beings and other things are bad for human beings right and those are universally so this isn't you know the COVID virus is universally bad it may or may not kill you

it may or may not affect you in one way or the other but it's bad and we if we reason rationally we all agree that it's bad there's no such a thing as you know injecting you with COVID and say, oh, I'm going to get a really good thing here, and I'm going to improve my health.

So there are things that are universally good or bad in terms of health, physical health, because human beings are built in a certain way. So there are certain things that are nutritious. Other things that are crap. There are certain things that are good for you in terms of improving your health and others that don't.

The Stoics think is the same at a moral level. We are not only biological beings, we're also moral beings. and there are certain things that will be good for you as a moral individual and other things that will not be good for you.

You realize it or not? The same goes for the physical health, right? I mean, some people think that eating triple cheeseburgers and French fries is really great, but it's not. It's objectively not. So just because some people do it,

it doesn't mean that it's subjective. So those people are just wrong. on factual grounds. Or they might not care. They might say, okay, yeah, I know that this is going to give me a heart attack by the time I'm 50, but I don't care. It's just too good. I want to eat it. Okay, great.

That's your prerogative. One thing that you cannot, however, argue is that it's objectively good for your health. You can say, I'm going to do it anyway, but it's hard to imagine somebody seriously saying, oh, this is really good for me. No, I didn't. That's interesting. Right. So the Stoics would say the same thing goes for, let's say, the example of anger that we mentioned earlier, right? Anger is, according to them, objectively bad for a number of reasons. They have an argument. They build an argument for that. That said, some people might say, I don't care. It feels good to be angry and that's what I'm going to do. Okay, great. But just because people do different things, it does not imply that those things are equivalent. Hmm. Right? Yeah, I could see that.

And now, on the topic of anger, is there any argument to say that anger is biologically or evolutionarily advantageous? That if it is so natural and it feels so good, is there any room to say that it has persisted in homo sapiens as long as it has because there is an ultimate benefit for our survival? And should we adhere to that or at least listen to it when it comes to making judgment? That is an excellent question. And it brings us to talk a little bit about the stoic psychological theory of emotions, which, as it turns out, it's one of those cases where the stoics seem to have gotten pretty much right in terms of modern science.

Again, as I said before, they had only their intuitions and their observations of human behavior. To go by modern science has a lot more. we have both systematic psychological research and also we have cognitive science looking actually the way the brain works. But as it turns out, the Stoics got most of the picture right. So what evolved and is advantageous

is not anger as a complex cognitive emotion, it's the fight or flight response, what it's called the fight or flight response. So that rush of adrenaline, if you feel like you're in danger, potentially in danger, then you have that rush of adrenaline, your brain floods,

your system with adrenaline, and it puts you in a situation of either flying, meaning running away, or fighting. That is definitely advantageous. It evolved clearly a long time ago, and in fact it predates human beings

for a long time. This is all mammals have the fight and flight response. So this is something that evolved literally hundreds and millions of years ago. And it's certainly advantageous. If you're in a situation all of a sudden where there is a

sudden danger, potential danger, and you have to make a split-second decision, do I run or do I fight, that's going to save your life. That ability to react instinctively is going to save your life. Now, but that isn't anger, even though it's

often confused with anger. But it's not anger. It's the first, what Senegal calls the first movement, the first portion. An emotion becomes a fully formed emotion, this is not just according to the stoics, but also according to modern science, only once you start adding a cognitive component to it, that is you give yourself reasons for doing one thing or another. So we're not talking about a fight or flight response anymore.

Now we're talking about a situation where you are feeding your emotional response by saying, yeah, this is really awful. This is an injustice. I need to be upset about it. I need to be. I to fight back, blah, blah, blah. At this point, you are talking to yourself. There's a reason why CBT is called cognitive behavioral therapy. Right. Emotions are cognitive. Right.

It can be subconscious. Yes, there can be subconscious. But if I ask you, hey, why did you get upset the other day? If you think about it for a second, you probably tell me a story. You say, well, this happened and therefore, blah, blah, blah, right? The fact that you're able to tell me a story means you can give me, there is a cognitive component to your being upset. There are reasons.

You may or may not be aware of those reasons in the moment, but later on, you can think about it. Oh, yeah, that's why I got upset. You can tell yourself a story. If you can tell yourself a story, now you moved from the instinctive reaction, the fight-of-flight response, to the fully formed emotion. Again, this is not just stoicism. This is also modern science. So what the Stoics are saying is, well, you cannot control the fight-or-flight response.

response. That's automatic. That's instinctive. You cannot control blushing, for instance. You know, you just do in response to certain things. But once you become, the emotion becomes cognitive, now there is a story and you can counter that story. You can argue essentially with yourself. You can say, wait a minute, I'm getting angry because, but in fact, I could be reacting this other way. And really, is that really a good reason to get angry? You can enter. You can interpret. interact with yourself. You can argue with yourself. And that is what cognitive behavioral therapy is. They teach you how to argue with yourself, how to argue yourself out of your potentially destructive emotional responses. That's interesting. So what you do on a conscious and cognitive level is ultimately what the stoics are trying to advise for or against. It is not what's happening instinctually, much like the example before. Having an angry thought is completely permissible. Yeah. And that is entirely a natural function. That is instinctual. I can't control the emotions that I feel.

Exactly. If something bad happens to me, there's some type of injustice I receive, acting angry is truly natural. Yep. But it is the rumination on that emotion that then is going to violate the stoic principles. Let me give you an example of another emotion that probably did evolve for adaptive reasons, and yet it has become, as biologists would say, maladaptive in modern situations, and therefore we don't want to foster it. Xenophobia. So Xenophobia, which is defined as the fear of strangers, the fear of people that look different from you,

the people that are not from your circle, that sort of stuff. It probably evolved for adaptive reasons because, let's not forget, that until fairly recently, before the agricultural revolution, like the agricultural revolution, when people started settling down

and cultivating land, happened about 12 to 13,000 years ago. So before that, for the majority of human history, human beings existed in small bands of the estimate is between 60 and 100 individuals. And most of those individuals were related to each other. They were each other's aunts and uncles and nephews and stuff like that. In that situation, a small group of people who are all genetically related,

very likely if somebody comes from the outside, it's trouble. if somebody comes into your group from the outside, that's probably not going to use. And so developing an instinctual negative reaction or at least being on guard toward strangers, to our people that come in from outside your group, probably saved lives throughout the place to scene throughout most of human history.

But then the agricultural revolution happened. We settled down and we started organizing ourselves, in larger and larger groups. We established villages and then villages became town, town became cities, and now we live in places with millions of people.

If I act xenophobically in a place where there are millions of people, this is not good. Because in fact, what I need, first of all, because I would be xenophobic all the time. Yeah. I would be on alert all the time,

which is a too stressful situation. They're tiring. Yeah, it would be tiresome. But also, it would be counterproductive because, in fact, most of those people are not a danger to me at all. On the contrary, some of these people are going to be my colleagues at work, or they're going to be my students, or they're going to be all sorts of people that actually need to interact

or the barista at the local coffee shop. Right. They're going to be all people that actually need to interact with in a positive fashion. So today, we tend to counter, cognitively counter, we call it education, cognitively counter xenophobia, right? It's not a value, usually, unless you're fascist, being or a Nazi, being xenophobic is usually not a good thing. It's not, you know, people don't encourage xenophobia.

And for good reasons, because it's not prosocial. And yet it's evolved. And it evolved probably for adaptive reasons. So that is one interesting case where you can point at the fact that the situation biologically and socially has changed to the point where, a normal, instinctive repertoire of part of the human behavior repertoire. It's just not a good idea anymore, and therefore you need to counter it. The Stoics understood this.

Two of the major writers in Stoises, one is already mentioned several times in Seneca. The other one is Cicero. Cicero was arguably the most important Roman philosopher. He was not technically a Stoic, but he was stoic, adjutant, so to speak. He was very positive and very supportive of sort of the stoic way of doing things, the stoic ethics. And both Cicero and Seneca write explicitly that nature gives us the beginnings of virtue or the beginnings of wisdom, but then it's up to us to our reasoning ability to expand it. What they meant in modern parlance is nature gave us pro-social instincts because we're social. animals. But

those pro-social instance were originally meant to apply only to our in-group. Now we live in a society where reason tells us it's actually better to expand them. In fact, to expand them not only to everybody lives in your city, but to become

a cosmopolitan, that is, to expand it to the entire world. Especially today, because we live in a world where somebody on the other side of the planet could push a button and start nuclear armageddon. So being prosocial becomes a matter of

survival for the entire species at this point, not just for you and me. We need to be... Cosmopolitanism was one of the fundamental values of the Stoics, and they were among the first in the Western tradition, at least, to explicitly

call themselves cosmopolitan. Cosmopolita means literally a citizen of the world. Cosmos is the world. Paul is the city. The city of the world. He says it's a citizen of the world. Marcus Aurelius, the emperor philosopher, who was also a stoic, in the meditations, there is a bit what he says.

As Antoninus, Antoninus was his true last name. He was Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. As Antoninus, I am a citizen of Rome. As a human being, I'm a citizen of the world. And he said, and then he continues, and I have due. or both of these cities, but the cosmopolis overrides my specific one. I'm a Roman, sure, and I need to pursue the interests of Rome

because that's my job. But I'm also a human being, and a human being means that I have a much larger cosmopolis to take care of. And if the two come in conflict, then the interests of the human species at large are more important than the interest on my own particular group.

Wow, that's a very wise perspective. Isn't it amazing for, yeah, 19th centuries ago. Wow. What's up, guys? We're going to take a break really quick because it's 2024. And it's time to talk about something important. When you are seriously hurt, your injury could be worth millions. Yes, that's right.

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about marcus aurelius and his approach to stoicism obviously he writes uh in in the meditations and has been read now by millions of people and he really influenced the stoic movement i'm curious through his leadership style and your study of him as a leader how How did Stoicism benefit him and benefit the Romans? And how did humanity benefit by the fact that he was a Stoic? That is another excellent question. So he definitely was a Stoic. He tells us so pretty explicitly.

The first notebook of the meditations is made of 12 notebooks. And it was not meant for publication. It was his own personal diary, personal philosophical diary. Diary, think of a philosophical diary as a diary or a journal of self-improvement. So it's not that he was writing what he had for breakfast in the morning. He was writing about his problems, his struggles, and how to overcome them, right? And it's an incredible document because it gives us an direct insight into the mind of an ancient Roman emperor. And it's almost unique.

It's not easy to find a similar document. But it was not meant for publication, which is an interesting point to appreciate it, because often people read the meditations, they get the feeling that the book is both repetitive and preachy, which is true. It's preachy because he's preaching to himself. He's reminding himself, you know, you need to do better. And it's repetitive because he kept running over and over into the same issues,

just like everybody does, right? So, oh, damn, I got angry again. So now I need to work on anger and that sort of stuff. Now, to the question specifically of, you know, was he a stoic and did that sort of affect positively, in a sense, so the human cosmopolies. So the first book, the first notebook of the meditation is a long exercise in gratitude. Marcus starts out by saying, I'm thankful to my mother for this, my father for that, my grandfather for this, my teacher, so-and-so for this, my other teacher, so-and-so. so for this, et cetera, which is very interesting. It's a standard stoic technique to engage in exercises of gratitude and to list the virtues

of other people that you use as an inspiration for yourself. And he mentions several teachers, most of whom are stoic. The most important one to whom he devotes a lot of time in the meditations is a guy named Junius Rusticus, who was a famous stoic teacher at the time. And in fact, interestingly, Marcus thanks Junius for a number of things, among which is the fact that Junius gave Marcus a copy of Epictetus's handbook. If you go through the meditations, you'll see Epictetus popping up all over the place. It's a very big influence on Marcus. Now, to the question of, well, how did Marcus Stoicism inform his actual doing?

his actual, you know, actions in a number of ways. And I can give you maybe two or three examples with these. Number one, Marcus was, unfortunately, for him, involved in two frontier wars. One on the east against the Partians. The Partians were in modern-day Iraq. And one on the north against German tribes, particularly the Marco Mani. These were invasions into the Roman borders. These were not wars of expansion.

Marcus was one of the emperors, the Roman emperors, who decided that where we are, it's good enough. The border of the empire is good enough. We're going to just act defensively at this point. And so he's involved in two of these wars, in particular the one on the German frontier is important because it happened later in his life, and that was the period during which he actually wrote the meditations.

We know that he wrote the meditations in the field as he was fighting against the Markomania. We also know how he handled the war. And that was very unusual. His first response was diplomatic. So when the Markomanny and other German tribes started making trouble on the frontier, what they wanted really was a better economic situation. They wanted really to be part of the good stuff that was happening inside the Roman frontier.

So Marca's response was initially diplomatic. He said, okay, let's see if we can agree on things. When that failed and war actually erupted, he played a constantly defensive war. And when he finally won, unlike many of his predecessors, he actually resettled most of those people, most of those tribes inside the Roman Empire.

What would have been the normal approach? Kill them or enslaved them. Okay. That was the normal thing. The normal behavior was you either exterminate, we're talking tens or hundreds of thousands of people. You either exterminate them because, you know, they're enemies. Everybody did that.

They would have done the same on the other side. Which you could argue again, even at that time, was an evolutionary advantage that this is what happens. When humans take over a different group or a place, we kill all the people before because it's going to quell rebellion. Exactly. And keep more peace. Exactly. It makes sense. But he overrode.

He overrode that. The other thing is that you could have made him slaves. and he avoided that as well. He resettled them, which is a very interesting and a very stoic way of going about it. Again, you want to be pro-social as much as it is possible,

given the situation. So that's one example. The other example was at a, I think, the first year or the second year of the Markomanic War, Marcus also faced

a rebellion, internal rebellion. There was this very charismatic and very powerful Roman general, Avidius Cassius, who was in charge of the eastern provinces down southeast, in Egypt, you know, that sort of area, Mesopotamia, that sort of area. And Avidius Cassius, declared himself emperor and was at the head of seven legions and started basically a civil war. Now, again, it's interesting to see how Marcus reacted.

instead of immediately taking the field against the rebels, he stopped in Rome, he gave a speech to the Senate where he asked for con and clemency. And he said, okay, let's see if we can agree with this guy and we can have him back down without bloodshed. Eventually, what happened was the situation resolved itself because one of the centurions, one of the soldiers, officers that was working for

Avidius Casius actually killed him. And so the rebellion ended into nothing. The head of the rebellion died. At that point, again, Marcus intervenes, because the standard action that the Senate would have taken would have been to kill every single member of a Vidius Cassius family

in order to avoid further retaliation down the road. Maybe he had a son, and the son grows up and says, oh, my father was killed, Vosvenging. Yeah. Vengeance. That happened before.

So this is, this was not a, it was not an idle threat. And Marcus again said, no. The family has no, no bearing on what Avidius Casas did. So we're going to spare them. Now, of course, we're going to keep an eye on them because it was not stupid. But we're going to spare them. That's the second example. Another one was, there was at some point a major flood of the,

Tiber River in rum, which destroyed, you know, half of the city, killed a bunch of animals, which means that Rome was under threat of starvation, etc. Marcus goes there in person and he uses some of the imperial treasury as well as his own money to help out with the situation. So we have a pattern here of Marcus Aurelius acting as an emperor. I mean, he was very keen that he had a duty toward the empire. over, you know, and of course from a modern perspective, we don't want to talk about empires because imperialism is a bad thing. But at the time, there was no other option. Everything was organized

as empires. There was the Roman Empire. There was the Partians. There was, you know, if you go further east, there was the Chinese. There was, you know, there were empires everywhere. The Egyptians and so on and so forth. So that was just the way to do things. Oh, let me give you one more example, which I think is actually interesting. Sometimes people criticize Marx, for not having abolished slavery, which is kind of a weird thing to say because, again, slavery at the time was the foundation for the economy

of every nation in the world, not just the Roman Empire, everybody had slaves. And also, slavery at the time was very different from colonial slavery in the 18 and 19th century. The modern version of slavery was based on races.

It was based on the notion that the enslaved people are subhuman. They're not. You know, the famous compromise at the American Constitution where the slaves, you know, the black people counted as, what is it, what was it, three-fifth of a human being? That tells you right there what the thinking was. There's a dehumanization. Yes, it is a dehumanization.

That was not the case in the ancient world. The ancient world, you became a slave because you lost a battle. Planet Romans became slave. So they deserved as well as you said. No. No, I'm not saying that. But it was a part of daily life. There was no implication of the fact that the slave is an inferior person.

Right. It's like luck. It was a bit contractual, I guess. Or there was a debt that someone had to pay. Yeah. And it was understood within the society in that time. That was the way they thought about it. Plenty of Romans became slave.

Whenever the Romans lost a battle against the Partians, then they were enslaved. So there was no implication that the slave was somehow an inferior person. there was just like bad luck, right? So it was a very different concept. That doesn't justify, obviously, the whole thing. But it does put a different perspective on things. Now, people, as I said, in modern times, occasionally bring up the issue of, you know,

why didn't, if Marcus was really a stoic in a cosmopolitan, doesn't slavery go against that whole idea? And yes, it does. There's no question about it. It's a reasonable criticism. However, it would have been, simply impossible for a Roman emperor, even for a Roman emperor, to abolish slavery. And Marcus actually tried to do that. It would have been killed immediately.

There have been precedents. There were presidents of emperors being killed by their own guard or by the Senate for much less than doing something that momentous. If you abolish slavery, that means you overturn completely the entire economy and way of life of the entire empire. That was simply not possible. However, we have very good textual evidence, documents that survived, that Marcus was concerned about slavery. He passed a number of laws that made life for slaves easier. For instance, before Marcus, an owner could do literally whatever the hell they wanted with a slave, including killing them, or tortured them. Marcus made that illegal.

Marcus passed a law according to which if an owner had an issue with a slave the owner should bring the issue in a public court and it would be the court to decide what the situation was not the owner so that gave actually rights to the slaves Marcus also made it much easier for a slave to be freed one of the practices in ancient Rome

was that often masters owners would promise freedom and then go back on the promise. They couldn't do that anymore by law. Once you have a, you made a promise and there are witnesses that you made their promise, you have to go through with it. Another thing is that there was this practice

where master's owners would sell their slaves to be used in gladiatorial games. So they would make a profit out of selling their own slaves. for the arena. That was made illegal by Marcus. So we have a number of textual evidence documents

that showed that the guy was actually concerned. He tried his best, basically, to apply his principles within, of course, the constraints that were imposed on him by the kind of society where he was. In the meditations, he actually says explicitly at one point

what is policy, what his approach was to make things better. He says, remember he's talking to himself, right? So he says, don't wait for Plato's Republic, make a small difference right now because it matters. Plato's Republic is a book about a utopia, you know, about an ideal society. So he's telling himself,

don't wait until you get things perfect. Just get things done. Focus on progress. Exactly. improve things, even little, because that makes a difference. That actually makes people's lives better. That's interesting. Kant talks about this idea of the categorical imperative,

that if all people in the world did something, would still be a good thing. I'm curious if all the leaders of the world or all individuals practice Stoicism, do you think the world would be a better place? It's an interesting thing you mentioned Kant, since Kant was actually strongly influenced by the Stoics, Kant has a

puts the emphasis on notions of duty and virtue and he gets that from the Stoics although Kahn's system is very different its Kahn's system is a deontological system it's a system based on rules as you say the categorical imperative is essentially Kunt's only commandment

right so it's a different system from virtual ethics but in answer to your question yes I would say the world would be a much better place if everybody behaved more like a stoic or a Buddhist or a number of other philosophies. Certainly, especially our leaders.

But not only. I mean, I wrote a book, in fact, my latest book was, it's called The Quest for Character, which is about how to improve, you know, improving our character, and especially how to pick leaders that have good character. And I think that character is,

unfortunately underestimated. The importance of character is underestimated. We tend to be, when we have debates about, you know, who do we vote for and things like that, because we got into the notion of parties and politics or politics by parties,

right, which is something that, by the way, the founders of the American Republic were very skeptical about. They thought that the worst thing that people could do is to create parties. Because then people would align themselves along party lines

as opposed to individuals, right? The first president, the first American presidents, Washington, Jefferson, and so on, were elected because people thought that they individually had the kind of character that you want in a leader,

not because they had a particular platform. Right, ideology. Yeah, a particular ideology. They were simply considered to be the best men to do the job. End of story. And interestingly, Both of those that I just mentioned, Washington and Jefferson, as well as others like Franklin, for instance, they were all influenced by the Stoics.

They all had a copy of the Enkiridian of Epitius Manuel. George Washington went into battle with the Enkiridian. Jefferson had his personal copy that he donated to the University of Virginia. Franklin always went around quoting the manual. In fact, he rewrote his own version of Epictetus manual, updated to modern times. So a lot of the early, the people that were influential in the American Republic took this notion of character as important. Today, what we do, especially recently, character seems not to play a role at all. I don't want to get political, but I will.

A major reason why I don't support Donald Trump is not just because I find some of his specific policies misguided and bad for the country, bad for the cosmopolies and all that sort of stuff. Those are good enough reasons. But it's fundamentally his character. I just don't trust that guy. Somebody who is that level of narcissism and self-conceit

just cannot be trusted with leading the most powerful nation in the world. not only Americans shouldn't trust him, but nobody else in the world because it's going to affect the rest of the planet. It's not just Americans. Now, do I think that other people are better, you know, the other candidate, so to speak, is better? Yes. I have plenty of problems with the other candidates' specific policies. I disagree with a number of things that he's done or wants to do and so on and so forth. But in terms of character, it's a far better situation.

Perfect, no. But then again, we said before the perfection is not something that we should be aiming for necessarily anyway. So I do think that character should weigh much more. At the end of the day, you can vote on the basis of the stated platform of a candidate or a party. But you know that once that they're in office, they're not going to be able to do much of what they said. This is an empirical fact. If you study political science, that shows pretty clear. Why? Well, because there is the other party that they have to deal with, right? Politics is about compromise. So, yeah, you may control the presidency

but not the Senate or the Senate but not the House and, you know, that sort of stuff. So at the end of the day, if you actually want to get anything done at all, you need to compromise. You need to not do certain things you said you were going to do or do certain things you said

you were not going to do. So at the end of the day, the platform only gives you a general idea of the broad direction in which a candidate or a party wants to push things. But I much rather have somebody with a good character and with whose policies I don't necessarily align than somebody, I agree with the policies, but he has a bad character because I can't trust the person with a bad character. That's an interesting framework. I mean, I feel strongly about this in the sense that I

feel very politically disenfranchised. Throughout all of my time as an adult, I've felt that all the candidates politically I didn't align with, either on, you know, policy issues or personal character issues. And as a result, I've kind of removed myself from political discourse and sort of the, my civic duty, I guess you could say, because it felt like a Sophie's choice. It felt like a trolley problem where I was like, do I choose the lesser of two evils? Is that the just thing to do? So, you know, I look at someone like, you know, you could name any, any political candidate, any president say, I think this person was of moral character, but they also, you know, committed potential war crimes. Yeah.

I personally have an issue engaging in that. So what, what framework would you prescribe to me or what advice would you give to me when it comes to making decisions that I feel like, you know, is the lesser of two evils? Well, I don't know that I am in a position to give you advice, but I will call on CISIS. in this particular case. As I said, Caesar was not exactly a stoic, but it was kind of stoic,

stoic, it's close to it. Stoish. Yeah, stoish. It was close to it. He was also not only a philosopher and a public advocate, he studied his career as a public defender, he was also a politicianist. It was a statesman. In fact, at the height of his career,

he was consul, which was the highest political charge. in rum and so he knew what he was talking about when he was talking about politics and and the need to compromise and and getting things done and so on and so forth cicero would emphasize that we unfortunately live in a society where we we put a lot of emphasis on our rights and comparatively little emphasis on our duties you yourself said a minute ago I step back from my civic duties. Cicero will say that's a bad idea.

Because those are duties. You can't stop, step back from it. You're losing, if you do that, you're losing something important. Yes, you're absolutely right. I feel the same. I felt like no political candidate, certainly for major office, over a number of years, really reflected. In fact, it's hard for me to imagine one that I would pick

over the last 20 years that I say, Oh, yeah, I'm really happy with that sort of stuff. Occasionally, there was, you know, one or two, like the first Obama, for instance, for me was like, okay, this guy really seems to be doing the right direction. She seems like someone of high moral character. Yeah, and then it kind of... But then there's a drone strike here and there, and you go, oh, wait a second, is this good? Exactly. So I hear you.

I have the same reaction. But at the end of the day, it opens society, a democratic society, does depend on our engagement. even, yes, even when it is the lesser of two evils, because the lesser of two evils is still lesser. It still does make a difference. It's still, it's not, you know, we got into these, I think, really dangerous habit of mind and say, well, there's no difference between the two candidates

or between the two parties. Yes, there is. And we've seen it recently. The Supreme Court decisions over the last several years have changed or changed, dramatically the way life in the United States happens for millions of people. And those justices were appointed by presidents that some people voted for. So there are consequences to these actions.

Once again, I think with the Stoics, we need to forget about this issue of, I want my perfect candidate. I want the guy that always does the right thing. And look at politics for what it is. and make that choice and still exercise your right to vote which is also, however, your duty to vote.

In a lot of other Western countries, the duty to vote is taken seriously. You actually penalized if you don't vote. Right. I think Australia? Yeah, in Australia, you pay a fine. In Italy, they keep track of the fact that you haven't voted. If you haven't voted for a certain number of times, you're barred from applying to government jobs

because the thinking is, apparently you don't give a crap about the government, so why should the government give you a job? So in the United States, on the other hand, there is no penalty. And sure enough, the United States has by far the lowest turnout at elections of any Western countries. Often, a few years ago, there was a political scientist who published an article called the 12.5% solution, which sounds like a chemical thing. It's not. So the reasoning was this.

It's like in the United States, in general elections, often you only have about 50% turnout. So if you want to win an election, you have to actually win the majority of half of those people that actually show up at the primaries, because most of the times it's the primaries that defines the thing. And only 25, 30% of people show up at the primaries. So 12.5% is what you need. So half of that, a little bit more than that. half of that. And then you win an election. That's an abysmal statistic. The fact that our elections

are decided by a minority of the population. And that's without counting the structural issues like the editorial college, which it's a ridiculous leftover of a different kind of time. It made sense at the time. It doesn't make any sense today. I mean, the calculation, again, from this is not a partisan thing. This is from political scientists. The calculation is that, you know, an average voter in Iowa, in a place like Iowa, has something like 20 to 25 times more relevance that I voted in California or New York, just because Iowa, even though as a minute population, has the same number of senators as they have in California and New York. So it's like, you know, that makes absolutely no sense.

So there are structural issues. But even outside of the structural issues, it is an abysmal thing that our elections are decided by a rather small number of people. And the reason for that is because we don't take, most of us, many of us don't take our civic duty, not just the right, but the duty, seriously. Now, that said, a stoic would suggest that you should put most of your work, most of your actual actions where they matter the most. And that is not national elections, it's local elections, right?

So I have a friend, for instance, who is a stoic practitioner. And yeah, he does vote in the national election because that's his duty and he does it. But he doesn't put a lot of emphasis at that level. What he does is he's very involved in local, you know, New York-based or New York state-based elections. He calls up politicians, local politicians, who are much more likely to respond to pressure by individual voters because they literally count on every vote. at a national level, we're talking millions or tens of millions of people.

So your vote is very diluted, right? But at the local election, sometimes one vote really does literally make the difference. And often local elections hinge on hundreds or thousands of votes, which means that a politician is going to listen to you if you're donating money or if you're calling their office or if you want to meet with them.

Like I met already once, and I'm about to meet a second time with a group of people, with one of the state senators in New York, because there is a particular issue that I care about. New York has been considering a bill to allow what in general is referred to as a physician-assistant suicide or a right-to-die kind of bill.

I feel strongly that that is one thing that we should do. It has been done already in a dozen states in the United States, and for some reason it hasn't passed yet in New York. My local senator is on the fence on this. And so I've been together with other people, we've been trying to push him. And he has been responding. And we have actually had a Zoom meeting

with five people and the senator. And that is possible at a local level. It's not possible at a national level. If I call Schumer's office, they're not going to set up a Zoom meeting for five people because it's not on their radar. So there are ways to get involved in politics.

that actually are more relevant and more impactful than others. But the general idea is that we tend to think of politics as a bad thing. Like, oh, I don't, often I hear people say, I'm not political. What does that mean? If you mean I'm not partisan, then I actually respect that. I think that's a good thing. But not political literally means you don't care. about the polis,

right, about your society. That's bad. Do you know the word idiot, which we use as an obviously as a genetic insult? It actually comes from the Greek idiotis, which means somebody who doesn't care about society.

So somebody who is not involved in making society, making the polis a better place, is an idiot, according to the ancient Greeks. And that's the literal meaning of the word. It's a dangerous position. It's the kind of position that eventually leads to the unraveling of the republic, because if we don't care, somebody else will take over. Right. I've heard

some people criticize stoicism as saying it is too passive, that it is too much tending to your garden, quote unquote, and that oftentimes it is sort of just grinning and bearing whatever circumstances are prescribed to you based off the society that you're in, which obviously I think can be beneficial depending on the space that you're in. But my question is, is there any room for revolution within Stoicism? Oh, hell, yes. So it's interesting you mentioned the garden, because the garden was actually the name of Epicureus school, right? So he was literally tending to his garden with his friends.

You know, Epicureanism is about forget about the external world, get your friends together, and have a decent time. That's it. No, the Stoics were very different. So on the one hand, you're right. Stoicism is certainly about enduring the kind of. kinds of things that you cannot do anything about. Because if you can't do anything about it, your only two choices are either to endure them

with some kind of equanimity or being pissed off. But being pissed off doesn't help, so you might as well endure it. But that does create the perception that Stoises may be a sort of a passive philosophy, but that goes against the very history of Stoises. There are a number of cases in history of Stoics

literally starting revolutions, literally. One of the most famous stoics was a guy named Cato the Younger. He was a political opponent of Julius Caesar at the end of the Roman Republic. And Cato was a staunch stoic. He was a senator. He verbally fought Julius Caesar for like 20 years in the Senate. So, you know, with peaceful means. And then, of course, at one point, famously, Caesar takes one of his legions,

crosses the river Rubicon, which was in northern Italy, and it marked the point of entrance into Roman territory, into Italian territory. And if you cross that with armed men, you were declaring war to the Senate to Rome. And Cato at that point picked up arms. He literally started a revolution. He actually fought against Julius Caesar in several battles. He lost, but that's outside of of his control. But that's one example of a stoic revolution. Later on, a few centuries later, there is a group of stoics that is referred to

as the stoical position. These were people, senators and philosophers, who opposed the ruling of three emperors, Nero, Vespasian, and Domitian. All three of them were perceived as tyrants, as oppressing the people. And sure enough, a number of stoics, either picked up arms or openly defied the emperor in the Senate.

There's a bit in Epictetus' discourse is what he tells us about an actual dialogue that took place between one of these members of the Stoic opposition, a senator, and the emperor of Vespasian. So the emperor says, I don't want you to go to the Senate tomorrow because he had to pass a decree that the senator opposed. And the senator's response was, well, it's my duty to go because I'm a senator. And the emperor says,

okay, well, then you'd go, but you don't speak on the floor. And the guy says, well, it's my duty to speak. If you introduce the law, I have to speak. And this patient says, well, but if you do, I can kill it. you. And the senator's response is, well, I never told you that I was immortal. Your duty is to do what you think is right. My duty is to do what I think is right. And sure

enough, the thing actually happened. There was opposition on the floor of the Senate. The guy inquester was sent into exile and then killed on the orders of the emperor of respiration. So these kind of things happen number of times. These are not occasional episodes. There is the over a period of centuries. We have a number of instances. So that tells you that the stoics are not above, not only opposing what they disagree with verbally on the Senate floor and so on,

but actually picking up arms. If you need to start a revolution, you need to start a revolution. Of course, picking up arms and starting evolution should be the last resort. These are not things that need to be done, you know, that can be done lightly because there are all sorts of unforeseeable consequences. Once you start picking up arms and you start evolution, all sorts of crap can happen and things can really easily get out of control and you might not necessarily end up with the kind of outcome that you prefer.

Cicero is another one, although again the caveat is that he was not technically a stoic, But he was not involved in the conspiracy against Julius Caesar in person, the famous conspiracy that was done by Brutus and Cassius. But Brutus was most definitely moved by philosophical reasoning. And as soon as the scene, imagine this dramatic scene, right? We are in the Curia, which was one of the Senate houses, Julius Caesar has just been killed. by the conspirators, and Brutus has the dagger still in his hand, with Caesar's blood coming out of it. He turns around, and he addresses Cicero, who was in the Senate,

because he was a senator, he was present there. He didn't know anything about what was going on. But he addresses Cesar and says, okay, now we need to sit down and get stuff done. Now we need a leader to actually brings us forth. And Cicero tried to do it. the right thing. He said, okay, now that this thing is done, now we got rid of the tyrant, we need to actually act.

We need to rebuild the republic. We need to reestablish a state that actually works in a semi-democratic fashion because the Roman Republic was essentially a democratic republic. It didn't work out, as we all know, because eventually after the death of Judea Caesar,

we had Octavian who became Augustus, the first Roman Emperor. So things did not work out, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't try. So the Stoics definitely have a track record, a pretty good track record over a period of centuries of acting in a way to contrast tyranny, contrast injustice. Interesting. What is the role of stoicism in art?

I'm curious about this idea, because so much art comes from a raw emotion, right? I think you and I can both agree, you know, jazz music, you know, a beautiful spiritual sang by slaves. Like some of the greatest art that's ever been created came from some type of like transposition of an emotional state into a piece of music. And specifically stand-up comedy, an art form that I practice basically every day that I'm obsessed with that I feel like is, you know, the supreme version of expression. So much of stand-up comedy for me personally. comes from a raw emotional feeling and a desire to sort of exaggerate and kind of ruminate on those emotional feelings. Yeah. So I'm curious, is it, is a stoic able to do stand-up comedy?

Yeah, great question. So, you know, people have argued that comedy is not that different from philosophy. I'm one of these people. Right, yeah. I don't want to become too much of a self-masturbatory bloviating person that's going to say like, oh, we're the true philosophers. I don't think that's true. I tell jokes about my penis. But with that being said, if you were sitting front row of a comedy show that I was at, I find it funny to make fun of myself.

I also find it funny to make fun of you. I might bring up your earring. And I might make jokes about that. Of course. I wouldn't do that here, of course. Yes, naturally. But at a comedy show, I might. I think that would be funny.

Right. So I guess I see that as pro-social. You know, making fun of you is a form of respect and love. I wouldn't make fun of you if I hated you because then I would be trying to hurt you. Correct. But I would like to poke fun at you as a way of kind of showing intimacy because that's what I would do with my friends. I would do that with my wife.

We would playfully, you know, spar with each other because I find that funny and social. So I don't see it violating a stoic principle, but I'm curious if you see that way. You know who was one of the most funny people in antiquity? Cicero. He actually wrote a book on how to tell a joke. I don't know. There's a very nice translation by the University of Princeton Press that came out just a few years ago. He used humor and he saw the power of humor, sometimes bordering on sarcasm, in his political action.

He would put down his political opponents by making jokes about them. I just to remember one case where a very old senator kept opposing a law that Cicero was trying to pass. And his, you know, Cicero's allies were getting upset because this guy was basically, you know, holding the bill repeatedly. And at some point, Cicero says, you know, it's okay. He's not asking us for long. He's going to die very soon. So it's like we can wait. We have patience.

He kept doing, using humor because humor is a very powerful. tool for getting your message across, for turning people's attention to certain things that they may not have paying attention to. When I said that people have actually suggested that there is a close resemblance between philosophy and comedy, that's because in comedy, as you know, I don't pretend to tell you things that you don't know.

But often a joke, in fact, I think almost always, a joke works because the punchline is not expected. You're building in a certain direction. And then all of a sudden there is this rapid turn, sudden turn, that suddenly brings people's minds, your audience minds, in a position where they were not expecting to go. And that's what makes him laugh. Well, that sounds very similar to the structure of a philosophical argument.

A philosophical argument proceeds in going a certain direction. You think you know where it's going. And then all of a sudden the conclusion is surprising. The conclusion was embedded into the argument. If you had paid attention, you would have known where the person was going. But the way it's structured, it's surprising. And that is what has impact. When you're surprised, you pay attention.

Oh, wow, I did not expect that to happen. The same thing with a comedian. Comedians, especially comedians that at least occasionally touch on social and political issues. the beauty of it is that they will force you to confront things that may even be uncomfortable in a way that you did not think about. That, you know, I'm talking about people like John Stewart or John Oliver, Stephen Colbert, people like that, right? They are forcing you all of a sudden to come to terms with something in a way that seems familiar

and yet it's not. It's surprising. It's all of a sudden it's like, oh, crap, I didn't think about that before. laugh because the whole the first point is in fact laughter. It's to relax to allow you to relax. But then you start thinking about it. Wait a minute. I didn't

think about that thing in that way. Now you asked about the stoics and sort of emotion, the relationship between emotions and creativity in a sense. I guess the stoic aesthetics would be very minimalist.

So they would go for let's say a modern stoic would probably appreciate certain kinds of minimalist jazz or minimalist visual arts, you know, things like that. Certainly architecture in terms of architecture. That would be functional and minimalist. However, the stoics themselves, the ancient stoics, did have a concept of beauty. If you don't, you know, if we're talking about creativity, then you have to have a concept of aesthetics. You know, what is it that is worth creating? What is it that? How am I succeeding, how do I establish if I'm succeeding

in creating something that is actually beautiful? So you have to have an idea of beauty. And they did. They call it a sumetria, which sounds a lot like symmetry, but it's more complicated than the concept of symmetry. The stoic concept of symmetria is that something is beautiful, and that something could be anything,

a building, a painting, a human being, whatever. It's beautiful if it has two things. if the parts work harmoniously together, and if that working in harmony produces a function of the full finished thing. So you can easily think of symmetry applied to a piece of music, for instance. They wouldn't probably go for eternal music, let's say, something like that, because that does not have the kind of internal structure with parts going well with each other. And what is that? I'm sorry.

Eternal music, so things like there is music that is not based on the standard seven notes and stuff like that. This would be an experimental type of music. Experimental type of music. You know, Philip Glass kind of thing would be close to that.

John Cage. Yes, right. On the other hand, things that are, they will probably very much admire something like Bach. Bach has been often brought up as an example of music that is done almost in a mathematical fashion.

There is also these parts of the music that resonate and repeat themselves and integrate in a certain way so that the whole has a certain effect. That is an example of Sumetria. Or they would say that a human body can be beautiful because it's made of parts that work together in order to provide a functional thing,

a being that can run, that can lift weights, that can talk, that can do all sorts of things. So they do have a sense of aesthetics. And if they have a sense of aesthetics, then there is a sense of creativity. Some of the stoics, philosophers even, were actually themselves engaging creative efforts. For instance, Seneca is famous for his philosophical writings, but he also wrote a lot of tragedies. He was a playwright. And in fact, when people often say that Shakespeare was influenced by the ancient Greek tragedians, that's not like people like Asculos and so on.

Not true because the Greek tragedies were not available in Elizabethan, in England. There were just not, there were no translations. What was available was Seneca. So Shakespeare read Seneca's plays and Seneca's plays themselves in turn were based or were inspired on. by the Greek ones. So we have an example of a stoic who was good enough of a playwright to inspire Shakespeare.

And is that not a contradiction? I mean, if you look at Shakespeare, for example, I mean, Romeo and Juliet is just a complete indulgence in grief and pain. And these two star-cross lovers, you know, existing within this paramour, killing themselves in this act of love. and grief and tragedy ultimately,

that feels like that would be too indulgent. I don't know if that would, would that be temperate about their feeling, or would that fall within the lines? That depends on how you interpret the meaning of Romeo and Juliet, right? What kind of message you get out of it? For instance,

one of Seneca's best plays was the Medea, which was based on the original by Euripides. And the story of Medea is just as emotion, if not more, I guess, arguably, than Romeo and Juliet. So Bediah was a barbarian princess who falls in love with Jason of the Argonauts and helps Jason steal the golden fleece. And then they have two children together. And then Jason, who is a Greek, says, you know, we're going to get married as soon as we get back to Greece.

They go back to Greece and then Jason changes his mind and says, no, you're a barbarian. I can't have a princess. as a barbarian, I had to marry a local, local princess. Medea reacts with anger, right? Rage. And she comes up with a plan whereby she kills her own two children just to spite Jason. And she also end up killing Jason's bride. Now, the way, so it's a play, it's a drama, it's all about rage.

and betrayal and love that goes in a sort of a mad direction, you can hardly find a play that is more full of emotions than the Medea. But Seneca uses that as a mortal tale. See what happens when you go into rage? You kill your old children. So that's the message that he wants to get out of the play. So the Stoics had absolutely no problem engaging in emotional. recounting of stories.

In fact, the media was one of their favorite stories. Epictetus also talks about media in the discourses. But they used that as a moral tale. And that actually used to be a fairly common thing. Shakespeare arguably does the same. There are moral messages in, you know, in Hamlet, for instance. Right. That was a standard thing.

I mean, today we think of, we tend to think of, you go to Broadway or off Broadway and you do it for entertainment. It's only, it's very, very unusual, it's somewhat unusual that you go to see a play and you actually expect a message in terms of politics or social or morality or something like that. But in ancient times and until the Renaissance included, which means including Shakespeare, this was the standard thing. You go, you know, the ancient Greek tragedies all had that were meant as a, as moral tales. the ancient Greek comedies Greek comedy went through three faces there was old comedy

and then there were middle comedy and new comedy they were referred to and especially old comedy the real masters of comedy in ancient Greece people like Aristophanes there were social critics this was pretty clear these people were

Aristophanes wrote in for instance some of these comedies in the middle of the Peloponnesian War that was pitting Athens against Sparta and eventually led to the destruction and the downfall of Athens. He was funny. I mean, we still, I mean,

what is there? A couple of years ago, I just went to see one of Aristotle's plays right here in Brooklyn. So we still do that. We still present his, and they're still funny today. But they clearly had a message.

The people that went to the theater, including comedy, not just drama, including comedy, they were expecting to learn something. This was the equivalent of going to a cultural event where you will learn something about history, morality, and politics, and so on and so forth. So there is no necessarily a contradiction

between using emotions to make a point, to create something that is beautiful in itself, Seneca's plays, are beautiful in themselves, and yet they have a message. Must it have a message? From a modern perspective, I would say, no. Of course, you can do entertainment

for the sake of entertainment. And the Stoics actually do say, Seneca particularly, it does say in some of his letters to his friend Lucilius, who he was trying to sort of coach into stoic philosophy, it does say, no,

sometimes you just just, entertain yourself because that's what you need. In fact, very uncharacteristically, I guess, compared to the stereotype that we have of stoics, but Seneca says sometimes you just go out and dance. Sometimes you get drunk because that's what you need to do. Sometimes you just go out for a walk and enjoy nature. That's normal human reaction. You need it as a human being.

But you don't want to do that all the time or most of the time. And that's the temperance. That's the temperance part. I see. So hypothetically, this is not a true thing. But hypothetically, if I had a joke where I was complaining about the New York City subway. And I went on stage and I was like, the subway sucks and it's stupid and it smells and there's crime and it always runs late and da-da-da-da-da. And I was angry about it.

And I was on stage and I was sort of enraged talking about how annoying the subway was. And this is not a joke I have. Okay, this is not very funny. But hypothetically, let's say it was rife with punchlines and it was very funny. And there was no meaning other than the fact that this is a thing that bothers me. Right.

Would there be, would the Stoics have advice for me or would they caution me in approaching that type of a joke on stage? Yeah, I think they would say you have a certain amount of power as a performer, as a commier, somebody who goes on a stage and as audience that comes to see you.

And as that other famous philosopher, Spider-Man, says, with great power comes great responsibility. Well, with small power, there's a certain amount of responsibility anyway. So power always brings responsibility. And so, yeah, you should ask yourself, you know, why am I doing this? Is this really good thing to do? Sometimes people do make jokes. In fact, it happened to Cicero as well.

Sometimes Cicero would indulge in jokes that he probably should not have indulged it. And he realized it. We have one of the nice things about Cicero is that we have a lot of his personal correspondence that survived. And he wrote hundreds of letters to his lifelong friend Atticus. And he also wrote to important people at the time like Brutus. There is a correspondence between Cicero and Brutus. And we see Cicero engaging in self-reflection. and at some point into articles he says yeah you know i made a joke the other day on the floor of the senate

and probably that was not a good idea it's just like it run away from me before i realized i could catch it and and it was probably unwise because you probably actually undermined uh you know my cause so so it does seem to be self-aware of the fact that yeah sometimes that happens you you know you react emotionally you're in the moment and uh or you think that you think think it's something it's a good idea. It's like, hey, this is funny. Let me, let me rant about the subway. Okay, but what is it that you're doing and why? So I guess my answer to that would be the cause is to give the people in the room here tonight at this comedy club a really fun night. Yeah. My cause is to have everyone have a good time. I want to have fun and I want the audience

to everyone to laugh. And so to that end, I feel like the cause has been satisfied because the joke is really funny and there's no real meaning or moral, but I, you know, talked about how annoying the subway was and everyone in the room laughed but let me ask you would you apply the same concept uh to let's say jokes that come to my to your mind uh making fun of the jews during the holocaust or black people or lgbcq or something like that well you're not going to like my answer because my answer is i think that there is something funny about everything i don't think all things necessarily are funny i don't think that you know genocide is funny but i do believe that there are funny about genocide.

Sure. And I feel like my role as a comedian is to explore what are the things that are funny. And I personally am drawn to the more challenging and taboo topics. Sure.

I actually like that idea. I mean, one of the problems with some comedy these days is, in fact, a little too much of self-censorship. But that isn't exactly what I asked you. So there are clearly examples

of comedian, Mel Brooks, for instance, the producers. I mean, come on. Springtime for Hitler, right? Right. That is clearly making fun of the Holocaust. But it's in a certain way. It's making fun of about the Holocaust, but not the Holocaust.

Correct. Correct, exactly. Or that Italian movie by Benigni that won the Oscar a number of years ago called Life is Beautiful. Right. Which people did criticize because it seemed like a comedy set in a concentration camp was like not the thing to do. And yet it was a beautiful film and it had a point. But my point is, there are ways to do that, there are good ways to do that,

and they're not good ways to do that. And I'm sure you do pay attention. When the topic is that consequential, right? It's not a joke about penises. It's a joke about the Holocaust. You think about what you're saying and you prepare it accordingly because you realize that there are certain things

that are actually hurtful in a way that it's not funny, not productive, no, doesn't do any good, in fact, that it does some bad. So this isn't about censorship, self or not. It's about responsibility. And, of course, I cannot tell you, or anybody else, for that matter, what you should or should not do, say or not say. But the stories would say, ask yourself, because the only thing you control is what you say and what you think and how you act.

Ask yourself, okay, this may be funny. But am I also doing something here that might actually outweigh. the funniness, may they be perhaps another way to entertain these people, I haven't had a good time, that doesn't involve something that might be hurtful or undermine the cosmopolies, so to speak. That makes sense. I bring up this example. When I first went to college, I went to a very liberal school, and I got into an argument with one of my professors because it was on this exact topic.

And the professor, and it was a conversation. It wasn't a heated argument, but it was a spirited conversation about, is there something funny about everything? And the professor brought up the conversation of rape. The is never funny, is what they said. And I agreed. I said, is not funny. But I do think that there are jokes that you can make about the most awful things. Yeah, I agree.

And the professor disagreed. He said, there's nothing funny about. And I said, okay, we can leave it at that. A few weeks later, we went into a conversation within, like, like a, this is like an orientation for school where they talked about consent. Uh-huh. And they showed this video called How to Drink Tea. And so it's a really funny video.

You can look it up. And it basically is illustrating consent through tea. Yeah. So are you familiar with this video? No. No. So effectively, I can imagine. Yeah, go ahead.

The way the video works is, you know, if someone comes over and you offer them tea and they want to drink the tea, then that's totally fun. Right. If they come over and you offer them tea and they say, I don't want tea, it would be rude to dump tea on their head. Correct. If they come over, they say, I would love to have tea at your house, and then they come over and they say, actually, I wouldn't like tea. It would be rude to then dump tea on them again. If someone comes over and they say, I would like tea, and then they fall asleep, it would be rude to dump tea on them while they're sleeping. So we're illustrating this point, and I find it funny. It's funny. The idea of dumping tea on someone while they're

sleeping is funny. This video that they show to the entire school is a joke. This is a joke that is making fun of the idea of... So I pointed to this video, I said, this is a rape joke. Everyone in the auditorium is laughing about the idea of dumping tea on someone because it seems so preposterous. Why would you dump tea on someone or try to force it into their mouth

while they're sleeping? Correct. But that's where I said, this is a joke that is used to illustrate consent that would lead to less sexual assault and through the use of humor in this silly analogy about consent, we actually got someplace that was progressive joking about...

I'm in complete agreement. I don't think that there is any a priori limit to humor. It's only a question of context. It's how you're doing it and why you're doing it in a particular way rather than another. Yeah, there are some topics that are not inherently funny, rape, you know, holocaust and things like genocide and things like that. And yet you can, as you just said, you can make the point in a funny way, concern, even concerning those kind of topics.

Your example of the T is great. Mel Brooks writing about the Nazi marching on Poland, it's another one. It's, yes, you can absolutely do that. It's a question of how you do it and why you do it. So you as a comedian want to ask yourself, a stoic would say, you as a comedian as somebody who has an influence with the audience, you want to ask yourself, Why am I doing this? How am I doing this?

Is this something that is good? It's actually funny. Does it have a pro-social reason for it? Even entertainment is a prosocial reason. Entertaining people is prosocial in and of itself. Because if I would rather live in a society where people laugh at stuff, then in a society in which people get angry at stuff, right? I'm much rather doing that.

So comedy to me is fundamental from that perspective. it's only a question of doing it the right way. Doing it in a way that actually works that actually achieves your goals. And that's up to you. That's up to the performer. Nobody from the outside can say, oh, no. Yeah, I think, I agree.

I think that makes a lot of sense. And I'm actually curious, do you know what Jews' least favorite part of the Holocaust was? No. The cost. You shouldn't laugh at that. You're Italian, okay? That is racist.

You can't do that, Massimo. Okay, my, my, you know, You know, I did the 23-a-mean thing, the DNA stuff. Oh, here we go. It turns out. Oh, my goodness. I have a 1% Ascanazi Jews. Okay, so there you go.

So I can laugh. That's why you're so smart. At least 1%. Well, Mastimo, this was awesome. I really appreciate the conversation. This was really, really fun. Thank you for answering all my silly questions. Oh, thanks.

The question we're not stealing, and thanks for inviting me. This was a pleasure. Thank you so much, brother. Let's do this again soon.