The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Lessons from an American Stoic: How Emerson Can Change Your Life by Mark Matousek

Episode Date: June 18, 2023

Lessons from an American Stoic: How Emerson Can Change Your Life by Mark Matousek https://amzn.to/43Qmybd A lifelong Emerson lover, teacher, and spiritual seeker reveals how American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson’s twelve essential teachings hold the answer to living an authentic and fulfilling life, one that is in harmony with our souls. Ralph Waldo Emerson was a spiritual revolutionary whose profound vision of human potential came to define the American character. Known as America’s original Stoic, he offered a radical message of optimism, authenticity, and self-realization that is more necessary today than ever. In this timely, remarkable book, noted memoirist and teacher Mark Matousek reveals the depths of Emerson’s extraordinary wisdom, demonstrating how his timeless philosophy can help us navigate the challenges of contemporary life. Using personal stories, psychological research, and life lessons from Emerson and his contemporaries—including Thoreau and Whitman— he offers practical lessons in the art of living. In the following pages, you will discover: Why Emerson should be considered America’s original stoic How to dispel the illusion of our own powerlessness and turn toward boundless human potential Practical tools for cultivating happiness in a fragile, unpredictable, dangerous world The gifts of self-reliance and spiritual renewal necessary for thriving A roadmap to discovering essential wisdom on living an authentic and meaningful life Emerson’s far-reaching vision of excellence and spiritual flourishing is the medicine we need to heal ourselves. “Trust yourself,” he teaches. “Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen.” This philosophy of hope, known as transcendentalism, is the vein of gold in the American psyche.Lessons from an American Stoic helps us to reclaim our national treasure. About the Author Mark Matousek is an award-winning author of eight books, Sex Death Enlightenment: A True Story, The Boy He Left Behind, When You’re Falling, Dive, Ethical Wisdom: The Search for a Moral Life, Dialogues with a Modern Mystic, Ethical Wisdom for Friends, Mother of the Unseen World, and Writing To Awaken: A Journey of Truth, Transformation, and Self-Discovery. He was the co-editor on the book Still Here by Ram Dass.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. It's Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, thechrisvossshow.com. Welcome to the big show, my my family and friends We certainly appreciate you guys being here Thanks for tuning in we've got an amazing gentleman

And mind multi-book author on the show He is going to blow your mind Change your life he's going to make you more Intelligent and You know we all know if you're smarter You're sexier so he's going to make you hot Like George Clooney or like Like I don't know

Beyonce pick your you know Whatever your flavor is he's going to hot like George Clooney or like, I don't know, Beyonce. Pick whatever your flavor is. He's delivering the hotness today. That's basically what I'm selling. And the lawyer says, I just pinged in my ear. I can't do that anymore. So anyways, there's no guarantees in life. That's the way it works.

So we're going to be talking about his amazing book. We're going to talk about Stoicism and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ralph Waldo Emerson. Did I say that right? And we're going to be talking about him and everything else. But in the meantime, you know, we're pumping out 1,400 episodes. There's already like, what, 500 episodes this year? Or no, we're going for 500. There's almost 200 episodes that are up for this year alone.

Two to three episodes a day. Please go watch all those videos and share them with your family and friends because sharing is caring. Go to youtube.com for it says Christmas. Goodreads.com for it says Christmas. LinkedIn.com for it says Christmas. And YouTube, TikTok as well. Oh, by the way, we just booked CNN's Jake Tapper on the show.

So he's going to join the illustrious lineup of CNN people we've had on the show. He should be on the show, I think later next month so we've got that so watch for that show to come out uh today he is an amazing multi-book author uh he's put out several books on uh you know just being a better person and getting to know yourself better i suppose i'm i'm gonna let him speak for himself on what he does but he has written the latest book that just came out June 13th, 2023, Lessons from an American Stoic, How Emerson Can Change Your Life. Mark Matusik is on the show with us today. He'll be talking about his amazing works. He's award-winning author of eight books, Sex, Death, Enlightenment. Sounds like my weekends in Vegas.

A True Story, The Boy He Left Behind, When You're Falling, Dive, Ethical Wisdom, The Search for a Moral Life. That also sounds like my Friday nights in Vegas. Dialogues with a Modern Mystic, Ethical Wisdom for Friends. If you can get friends, I don't have any friends, mother of the unseen world, and writing to awaken a journey of truth, transformation, and self-discovery. There's a lot of self-discovery going on here. Welcome to the show, Mark. How are you? I'm really well, Chris. How are you doing today? I am doing excellent. It's an honor to have you, sir, and so many amazing books. Let's do some self-discovery. Give us your dot com so people can find you on the interwebs. Sure. It's markmatusik.com, M-A-T-O-U-S-E-K.

There you go. And so you've written eight books. What prompted you to write this latest book on Ralph Waldo Emerson and Stoicism? Well, I fell in love with Emerson 40 years ago when I was in college and I've wanted to write about him ever since, but it was never quite the right time. And it just seems these days with the country falling apart, with everyone so polarized, people forgetting what it means to bridge differences, everybody looking outward at social media and the external world to tell us what we believe, it felt like now was the time for Emerson, who was really the king of nonconformity, originality, self-reliance, and listening to the guidance within you. There you go. I fell in love with Emerson.

We were talking about the pre-show back in the 90s and stuff when someone first handed me self-reliance. But Ralph sent me a note back on a text and said, I'm just not that into you. So there was that. So tell us, give us a 30,000 overview, like he had texting in the 1800s or whatever. Was it 1700s or 1800s he was around? 1800s. All right. Well, it's all relative after whatever. I don't know what that means.

So give us an overview, a 30,000 overview of what the book's about. Nobody has really written about Emerson as a spiritual teacher. So whether you're religious, whether you're somebody who is agnostic or an atheist, everyone acknowledges that there's an aspect of us that's bigger than our personality, that's connected to something more mysterious in the world. And so I wanted to write a book that really got to the essence of Emerson, which really hadn't been done. You know, so many people shy away from spirituality because they associate it with religion, but it's really the thing that interests me the most. You know,

what is it that brings us together? What is it that enlarges us, makes us bigger than ourselves? And it really goes to the heart of human potential. And that's what Emerson was all about. I had never, when I came across him in college, I was a depressed, disillusioned graduate student. And it was the first time I came across someone who had an image of human potential that was bigger than anything I had ever encountered before. And so I became addicted to him. He, uh, he really did change my life because I stopped blaming the world for my problems and started looking inside for answers, which is of course, you know, where the true deep answers are found. There you go. And, you know, I had the same kind of journey. I grew up in a cult, uh, and, uh, lots of brainwashing and I had problems with it.

I was always questioning stuff and trying to find some logic and reason and square. And I lived in an environment where there was no one around me like me. And I really struggled and I had a hard time. And one day I tripped across self-reliance. And I don't remember if I came across it in school or if it was a newspaper. I seem to have a vision of something of a newspaper type. And they quoted some of the principles from, from Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay on self-reliance. And I was like, holy shit, there's people out there that think like me.

I'm not, I'm not crazy after all, but you know, my psychiatrist says something different so uh as we were talking about before the show you know i keep uh marcus aurelius meditations uh seneca and uh epitetis near the thing and it never really occurred to me like the light bulb never went on that emerson would be a great stoic yeah a lot of people don't they think that that Stoicism sort of began and ended in the year, you know, 100 BC. And that's just not true. A lot of Emerson's philosophy came from the Stoics. And some of the core principles of self-reliance line up exactly with what Marcus Aurelius and Seneca and Epictetus were saying. You know, listening to nature as your teacher, you know, understanding that how that your thoughts create your reality, you know, recognizing that nobody can make you feel bad

unless you give them the permission to do that. These are vintage Emerson. And of course, they're the stoic, you know, pillars of that philosophy. So I wanted to kind of reconnect him with his philosophical heritage and show people that we have had this great spiritual teacher as Americans, this great philosopher that we're just not aware of. Most people read him in high school or read him in college and then forget about him. And the fact is that he can help you profoundly in how you live your life and how you come to understand yourself and and and believe in yourself too i mean self-reliance i mean it was my my biggest problem was i i i was raised in an environment about conformity uh you know and i i was questioning everything going well why does why is this uh one guy i got to do with that guy and

you know how come when there's some other puppet dude in the sky and he's, he's got, he's got some attitude problems and behavioral issues. And, and they're like, Hey, shut up, just have faith. And I'm like, I don't want to, I got to make sense of this thing. And so, you know, then, you know, I was just the weirdo. And, and so being able to find people like George Carlin saved me, uh, Ralph Waldo Emerson saved me. Uh, I didn't know about meditations at the time, which somebody would have thrown that book at me. Um, but, uh, so in your book is, you know, self is self-reliance the, the biggest, most well-known essay or work of Ralph Waldo Emerson or is there something else I'm missing? Well, self-reliance is the biggie.

He also wrote a great book called Nature. But what people don't understand about self-reliance is that it has nothing to do with arrogance, ego-chism, isolationism, not asking for help, machismo. That's not what self-reliance is about, and it's been co-opted to be that way by a lot of people, particularly on the right, who have used it as an argument against helping the poor and so on. But self-reliance is not about that. It's about understanding interdependence. It's about tapping into the thing that's larger than we are and really understanding that, as Emerson said, there's nothing so weak as an egotist. You know, if we're completely connected to our ego in terms of the personality, the image we're

trying to create in the world, we never touch into our own deep strength and there's always going to be this fragmentation and separation and polarization between us and other people. So self-reliance is really a bridge to understanding that we're all subject to the human condition and that there are ways of living with that, that can optimize it and that can help us, you know, help us be deeper and more productive, effective people in the world. There you go. So in your, in your pitch, in your, in your proposal, in your research of Ralph Walder Emerson and presenting him kind of how we should redesign our thinking that he is a Stoic, how do you present that? Do you go through a lot of his texts and pull out stuff and put it in your book as a reference to say, you know know here are the different points of of where uh uh he stood out on these things or or how do you present that or sell that in the book what i did

was went through all of his work his speeches particularly as well as the major essays and i drew 12 essential lessons that have helped me over the last 40 years in terms of my own neuroses and anxieties and difficulties. And so I took these 12 lessons as kind of signposts on the way. And they're not linear. You know, you don't have to go from one to the next, but they together create a kind of a roadmap for self-knowledge and cutting through so much of the noise of the mind. You know, we don't live in reality. We live in our ideas about reality. Yeah, that's what Bell Max says, tell me, I don't live in reality.

So Emerson is always talking about the angle of vision. You have to question your angle of vision. If you don't understand that your perspective creates your world, then you have no idea who you are or how deluded you are. Yeah. And according to my exes, I'm quite deluded. So my psychiatrist says in your frontal lobotomy. But yeah, there were so many great things in self-reliance and Emerson that just resonated with me. I grew up kind of, as as the band rush would call it a tom sawyer and i was a rebel and and uh i remember there's a there's a line somewhere in in self uh in self

reliance that says the boy the boy uh the nonchalantness of boys if you remember that the nonchalance yes boys who are sure of a dinner would disdain as much of a lord to do or say ought to reconcile one is the healthy attitude of human nature and uh and then he goes on to from there but that's one of my favorite phrases because it reminds me to think young to be young and stay young which my exes complain about as well yeah so he was all he was all about that because non-conformity as he said earlier was central central to his teaching. You know, he said imitation is suicide. Yeah. If you're copying someone else's idea of what courage or happiness looks like, you're living somebody else's life.

Yeah. And so we have to, when he talks about the nonchalance of boys, he's talking about really listening to what's natural to you and not following the crowd. You know, Emerson always said, society is not your friend. And I think that's a lesson a lot of people would do well to remember, particularly when you're swept up in social media. You know, really, social media is a manipulation tool for the majority. And when you understand it that way, you can be a little more careful about what you take in.

Wait, you mean all those people are paying, you know, a hundred bucks down in LA to sit in a fake stage to private jet. That's not real. I know it's hard to believe. Social media is fake. This just in folks. Yeah. Right.

Yeah. Hi, folks. Here's Foss here with a little station break hope you're enjoying the show so far we'll resume here in a second uh I'd like to invite you to come to my coaching speaking and training courses website you can also see our new podcast over there at chrisvossleadershipinstitute.com over there you can find all the different stuff that we do for speaking engagements if you'd like to hire me uh training courses that we offer and coaching for leadership management

entrepreneur ism uh podcasting corporate stuff uh with over 35 years of experience in business and running companies as ceo and be sure to check out chrisfossleadershipinstitute.com now back to the show I and you're right uh it's it's it's true uh one of my other favorite things you you kind of talked about your reality and stuff one of my other favorite quotes to him and I I won't this is not a quote so don't don't send me letters but it is something about uh when you travel you know to get away from yourself there you you still are, something to that effect. You could probably quote it better than I can. Yeah, yeah.

He talks about travel being a fool's paradise. It's like Jon Kabat-Zinn's book, Wherever You Go, There You Are. There You Are, yeah. And so, yeah, and so I'm adding this to my stoicism list of books that I keep to the right of my that's in my line of eyesight that sits by my thing in fact uh here we'll show people uh uh something that's kind of interesting one of my paradigms for my life is thinking out of the box and somewhere decades ago i got this little guy who thinks out of the box and so so I've got Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, um, and Seneca and some other books that sit right here on the thing.

And now I've added, uh, this and I'll be adding your book as soon as we get in the mail here. Um, so I, I think this is great. Uh, and, and what, you know, it just like, as soon as I saw your book, it just, the light went on in my head and I was like, holy shit. Yeah. People need this stuff now they really do and the reason stoicism is so popular is it it flourishes it thrives in the worst times at the worst of times stoicism is at its best because you can't argue with it you can't argue with the idea that your thoughts create your reality or that loving the learning to love the life you have is wisdom.

You know, you can't argue with the idea that mortality is a great teacher and that if you don't remember your own mortality, it's going to compromise the quality of your of your life. So the great thing about Emerson at this particular moment is that we need something that is inarguable, something that is common sense, that's universal, it cuts across political, racial, gender, ideological differences, and it goes to the heart of the struggle that a lot of us feel, which is how do we make sense of this insane moment that we're living in? And that's something that he has a lot to say about, because of course, he lived through the most violent time of in the country's history you know around abolition and and the civil war so he was he knew a lot about polarizing times and so that's why that's why he his voice can be so helpful now there you go and what's interesting is you live

through an even tougher time man he didn He didn't have iPhones electricity either. So there's that. Can you imagine that? Yeah, but that's probably why he wrote so well. He wasn't busy on social media, you know, tweeting out, I don't know, whatever he was having for lunch. And it also helped. It also helped.

He was an extreme introvert. He had social anxiety. He had a lot of trouble connecting with people. He was very, very insecure. And that's one of the things that endeared me to him is that he's so open about his own frailty and vulnerabilities. But it also made him a great writer because he could, like many great writers, stand back and observe. And it's that outsider perspective that gives us the real wisdom. There you go.

You've written a lot of books on self-discovery, self-help, and journeys. If you want to plug a few of them, plug away, but tell us a little bit about your life and your origin story and journey that kind of got you down this road writing about this topic. I grew up in a house where there was a lot of trauma, pain, violence, suicide, addiction, you name it. It was the whole magilla. And so from a really young age, I felt deeply confused and uneasy, and I kind of turned inward for answers to questions that nobody was giving me around me. So when I was about eight or nine years old, I started writing in a journal and just questioning what's going on in my mind, what am I thinking, what am I feeling? And that really led to my work first as a journalist and then a reporter. I worked at Interview Magazine and getting people's stories out of them. And

then I started writing memoir and I eventually became a teacher helping people understand the truth of their own narratives and how they are forming the lives that they live. So it's been a very organic process for me. I never planned to write about the things I write about. I never planned to be a teacher, but it grew out of my nature as a seeker. I'm a seeker. At heart, if there was one word that captures my essence, it's being a seeker.

I'm interested in the kinds of questions that don't usually come up at polite cocktail parties. Who are we? What are we doing here? What does life mean? Who am I really underneath this persona? That's the stuff that really turns me on. So I kind of went from pop journalism and interviewing rock stars to doing this kind of work because life got very means, if anything, and who I am. So Emerson lines right up with that search for me. And you inspire me so much. Thank you. This book has been hiding in a storage unit for the longest time. And I literally went after booking you on the show. I'm like, I've got to go dig up this book,

and I dug up the essays and found it, and I was just so overjoyed to see all my notes and my highlights still in it. There's some other interesting books that really struck me that you have. The Boy He Left Behind, A Man's Search for His Lost Father. Is that a story of

from your life yeah it is my dad left when I was four years old and I never saw him again well and I went through my whole life telling myself it didn't matter and who needs him and he was kind of persona non grata in our house so I brought the family line that I didn't mind not having a dad and then I hit my late 30s. And like a lot of men in their late 30s, you start wanting to reconnect with your father, whether he's alive or dead. You realize that you've become him in a certain way and you want more than you want to know more about him. And so on a dare, I hired a detective in my late 30s to look for my dad. And that book is about looking for him, the process of it, really looking at what does it mean to be a man?

I grew up in a house with I had three sisters and I was raised by my mom. And and so there was some confusion about what is real masculinity like? You know, what is all what does it mean to be a healthy, loving generous open real man and so the book became as much a search for that part of myself as it was for my physical biological father yeah and stoicism a lot of stoicism is rooted in masculinity masculinity and you correct me if i'm wrong i'm gonna i'm just gonna say my bit on it but it you know it logic and reason, and it's about controlling our emotions, not in a way of like hiding them, but processing them and going, well, how do I, how am I feeling right now? Well, is this productive for me or not? And I can logically and reasonably go, there's a better way to approach this.

And so Emerson and other Stoics, you know, they had a way like, you know, if you're feeling this, you know, here's how you approach it. And we have the ability to put them down. We can process through our logic and reason. And I know a lot of children that grow up without a father, that's one of the things that they miss is having that logic and reason, that masculine frame in their life that teaches them not only very hard lifelessness, because fathers teach you life isn't fair. They get you really ready for the, for the, for the knocks and, and, and bounces of lives. Moms are great for coddling you and hugging you and, you know, putting a bandaid on your thing and telling you it's all, you know, wiping your tears and telling you it's going to be fine. But dad kicks your ass and goes, get ready for life because there's more of it coming.

And I, I'm going to give you the tough love, He's going to prepare you for that. And so, yeah, what a journey to go through all that and then do the search. So people should pick up that book. You had another book that I'm always interested in, anything that deals with ethics. And so you had a book called Ethical Wisdom I'm probably going to be reading as well uh do you want to give me a plug-in for that to uh i'm curious about that book yeah i was interested in what it is that makes us good you know how much of human nature is good how much of it is evil you know what the difference between those two things you know where's the line between good and evil in human nature so that was the question that started me on that search so i did a lot of research into into evolutionary biology

and anthropology and philosophy and uh kind of it's it's a it's a guided tour through human evolution the evolution of human human goodness and virtue. Wait, there's good people in the world? And so understanding that evil, what we call evil, is ignorance. It's not because of some original sin in us. That's the takeaway from that book, is we've bought into this idea of being evil simply because we're born into human bodies. When in fact, if you take a Buddhist approach to it, our essential nature is good. There's compassion and cooperation.

The vast majority of people are helpful and loving most of the time. But we don't hear about that because it doesn't make the news. So I wanted to really give, this is my argument for virtue and the possibility of being better than the lowest common denominator, which is another message I think people need to hear these days. Can we mail that to politicians? No. I'm telling you, there's so much pessimism. I don't know about you.

I'm so sick of the doomsday pessimism that's going around. People are just falling into a rut. And the problem is the more of that, the deeper you get in that rut, the worse things get because there's self-fulfilling prophecy. But pessimism really is a failure of the imagination. And that's what this Emerson book does as well, is looks at what is optimism really? What does optimism mean? Because Emerson was a great optimist, but he was completely clear-eyed about human nature. He understood that there were plenty of assholes in the world, but he was an optimist because he had an essentially spiritual way of seeing, which means that no matter what's going on, something else is also true. And that there's always a potential for change.

If you believe in the potential for change, that's what drives authentic optimism. And you mentioned something in there that I think is really important. The, the, the bringing back self-reliance, if you really study the history of what we've become, cause I remember, you know, you and I grew up probably in the same sort of age, um, where we didn't have to have signs on plastic bags saying, don't let the child play with the plastic bags. We have to have signs on bridges that said don't jump off the bridge you'll die you know we didn't have to have all these stupid safe space crap and um and and suddenly we did and i remember as a young child going are the lawyers destroying the world do we do we have to we we have to put a warning label on everything that's obvious i mean i mean it used

to be we just let darwinism work that stuff out. Right. And, you know, that was the great filter if you would. But you know, and, and we, we kind of have evolved over the past three generations into what I see as a huge victim competition, competition society where there's no self-accountability. Everyone's competing to be the biggest victim, you know, and it's funny. You'll see people fight over it. You know, like I remember one time, I think Oprah Winfrey got in trouble because she was on the, on the view and she was trying to correlate that somehow, you know, African American people had a harder than the Jewish people in the Holocaust.

And she got in trouble with that. And, and you're like, I can see what you're doing. You're doing victimhood competition. You're trying to say I'm a bigger victim than this person. Yeah. And you see that a lot in social media and news. In fact, amazing how many stories I read now where they always lead with, I'm a victim. I was, I was a victim of this.

You know, I looked at the sun and now I'm blind. And you're like, well, come on, man. And so I think that's what's really important about your book and diving into Emerson is teaching it about self-reliance, self-accountability. Yeah. This is a huge point because you can be victimized without becoming a victim. And people don't get that. Bad things can happen to you. I, for example, I was be victimized without becoming a victim and people don't get that you know bad things can happen to you i for example i was certainly victimized when i was a little boy in certain ways that didn't mean that that had to become my permanent identity and a lot of people who've been victimized or experienced pain think you're trying to take their experience away from them yes you

know when you say you're not a victim in, what you're doing is giving them back their power and realizing that you have, as the Stoics would tell you, as Emerson says, you have some say over how things impact you and how you carry them throughout your life. One of the Stoic radical insights was that we have a choice over how we hold our past. That's enormous. because most people feel like we're their victims of circumstance what happened they're stuck with it and that their interpretation of it is is irrelevant yeah and the fact is we actually do have some control or we have a lot of control over how we hold our past and when you get that you don't have to be a victim in that kind of passive, cliche, woe is me kind of way.

Also, self-pity is disastrous for self-reliance, for self-belief, for empowerment, for having any having anything any love for the world self-pity conspires against all of that yeah and so i'm glad you brought this to the forefront because this is some values we need to return to we need to return to a merit-based society where people have self-reliance where people uh are not playing these self-victimization games. You know, there's people that do have real trauma. And just because you didn't get the half and half in your Starbucks macchiato at the drive-thru today, it's not a trauma crisis. Like you're not on the level of, you know,

somebody who's experienced some real heady trauma in their life. You know, and you see these people, and social media has just become this narcissistic sort of play and you're just you know i remember one time i was watching uh i went to a concert with tori amos and she said you know i went through a period of my life where i was always playing the victim and and i was always complaining all my friends about you know whatever i was complaining about and she says uh one of my friends just came to me one day and she says, get off the cross. We need the wood.

She goes, what do you mean? And she goes, you've crawled up on this cross and nail yourself to it. And we've just been hearing you crucify yourself over and over, but you know what? We need the wood now. So can you just get off the cross and let's move on?

And so I love that line, get off the cross. We need the wood. Uh, one other book that i wanted to plug on yours uh i just love the title of it when you're falling dive lessons to the art of living yeah and i i just like the paradigm of it i don't know what it means i don't know if you want to give a plug on it well it has everything to do with what we were just talking about is that when you're falling when life delivers you some blow when there's some loss when you have a choice of how you how you um lean into that or or optimize it or make it much worse and so i talked to people who had been through the worst things that you could go through who have nonetheless flourished and thrived.

So what is this common denominator between somebody who got through the Holocaust or cancer or losing a child to disease or whatever it happens to be? What are the qualities that help us prevail? And one of the major qualities is the willingness to change, the willingness to surrender in the spiritual sense, not resign yourself, but surrender in the sense of understanding there are things you can control, many things beyond your scope of control. And knowing that difference is huge. Otherwise, you're fighting the river. You're arguing with reality. There are a million cliches, but they're all disempowering. They all, particularly in

moments when your back's against the wall, they are not your friend. So it's really important to understand that you, uh, you can change if you're trying to go back to the way things were in the past, you're, you're, you're dead. As a guy, one guy said to me, he said, you, you're going to go through the fire. If you go through the fire, you're going to go through the fire. If you go through the fire, you'll come out gold on the other side. If you don't, you're just going to be cinders. But you have to kind of keep going through the challenge. And let it affect you.

Let it change you. Let it forge you. Yeah. Let it forge you. So many people don't let it forge them because they're too busy arguing with, why did this happen to me and that's why self-pity is the enemy of transformation yeah hey i love it uh and it's so important in today's world i mean you see the participation generation trophy i see these the rise of these incels young men who are really struggling right now and there's

a lot of reasons behind that but a lot of it is, is there they're lost in emotional and emotions and, you know, this whole trauma society that we've built of, of, you know, the, and you know, if you don't get the half and half in your Starbucks macchiato,

Hey, here's the newsflash. You're going to live. You're going to live. You're going to make it today. You're going to live. You're going to live. You know? So I started this interesting thing i'll run it by you since you've studied stoicism so about three weeks ago i you know i've

been trying to get my vitamin d up and my mat and my testosterone because i'm old and i don't want to start having to uh start taking the shots until i don't have to because once you start it you gotta you gotta do it and so uh a lot of people were like, you go sit in the sun in the morning and you soak up the vitamin D and also start your circadian rhythm. And so you got that going on. And I used to have my coffee and they used to have my two dogs. Those are my children. So I love spending time with them in the morning, but I never spend any time with them.

And usually when I wake up, you know, just right to the computer, all the world just kind of runs me over with all of its fires and whatever. And so I started this new thing about establishing frame in the morning. So what I do is I get up and I get my coffee and I grab one of the three, four books. Yours will be added to it when it comes in. And on stoicism. And I got my highlighter.

And the first thing I do is I make my coffee, give the dog some treats, and then we go out and play in the backyard and they're husky. So they love dad being out in the yard and they love to play. I take photos of them and then I sit in the sun and I highlight sometimes random things in the books. I just open a page and work on it. And I spend about 15, 20 minutes out there doing that. And I establish what I'm calling my frame. Yeah.

Where I'm going, this is my frame. I'm not, the world is not coming at me. Right. About the only message I check for is my mom to make sure she's okay. If she's healthy, you know, if she hasn't, she's 80. So I want to make sure that there's no emergency she has which she usually doesn't and but but the rest of the world waits emails wait the text messages wait all that's good stuff and so i sit out there i do the something and then i come in and i actually sit down at my desk and as i boot up the computers

the first thing i do before i get going on anything is I play piano music for about 15 minutes. So it's usually something calming like George Winston's solo piano. You know, play whatever you like. Some people like Baroque or something or, you know, play Metallica if that's your thing. That's my thing too, but not in the morning. And what I do is I establish this frame, this command center at my desk. Yeah. And then I'll start going to emails.

And so it becomes this frame of like, the world comes to me. I do not run to it. It does not drag me around the room. And I've been really loving that. I don't know what you think about that. Well, that's mindfulness 101. I think it sounds fantastic. What you're doing is, psychologists call it the internal locus of control. You're claiming, you're claiming your internal locus of control instead of looking at the outside world and saying, what do I think today? How am I going to see today? What do I believe? And so you're really getting, you're, you're, you're adjusting your angle of vision, your, you know, your frame, and then determining how things are going to impact you.

What are you going to let in? At what weight are you going to let it in? You're exercising choice. And that's another huge thing, Chris, is people don't realize we have the power of choice. Viktor Frankl, the great author of the Holocaust, said it's the last of the human freedoms is our ability to choose how we respond to circumstances. So you're claiming your freedom in the morning. You're saying, I do not have to be a victim of this world. I am going to set my parameters and adjust my own expectations and then do it my way. And I'm sure it's having, I'm sure it's having strong effect for you it's been really amazing

for for 15 minutes and just be just be able to sit at my desk and set up a frame of command you know uh and and but i didn't even know there was a topic for this so you've you've i'm going to be talking about this for a long time on social media and your book, Locus of Control of Your Life. I love this. Yeah, the internal locus of control as opposed to an external locus of control, which is how most of us live. Yeah, and it's, you know, social media and the phones, we didn't used to be this way. In the old days when we had just the rotary dial things, you know,

maybe you watch the news or turn on the TV, but even then, you know, you had to catch Walter Cronkite at 10 o'clock or whatever. But, you know, we didn't have this, but now you just, you wake up, your phone's screaming at you, you're ringing, you got 50 text messages from someone who's on fire or thinks they're on fire because they didn't get their half and half in their macchiato at Starbucks today. So there you go. I love this stuff. And so i've learned so much mark and i'm sure we'll learn a whole lot more from your book anything more you want to tease out of the book before we go it's been great talking to you just the fact that we live

with like the tail is wagging the dog which is what you're saying i like that and emerson helps you take back your tail and and say look i don't to be the, I don't have to be at the effect of everything in the outside world. I can enjoy it. I can not enjoy it, but I have an, I have my own inner life and that inner life is mine. And that's what self-reliance is really about. There you go. And you know, what's interesting is I've kind of started when I feel I've lost frame, when I feel I'm getting buggered and drugging around uh drugged around uh yeah okay uh then i will i will get it from my desk and i'll go make a coffee or i'll go do something and re-establish frame and it's like frames really becoming a key word for me

setting a frame and establishing it but i think it's like what you talk about the locust of control of your life. And so this will be great. It's been wonderful to have you on, Mark, and very insightful. People should pick up your other books as well. I'll be reading them as well. Thanks, Chris. It's really great to talk to you.

There you go. Thank you. Gibbouser.com, so we can find you on the interwebs. Sure. It's markmatusik.com, M-A-T-O-U-S-E-k uh and people are it'd be great to connect there you go lessons from an american stoic how emerson can change your life i guarantee you will he had an immense uh impact on my life changed my life for the better also made me realize that i wasn't a madman alone in the wilderness if it had been for him and for him and George Carlin and a few other

people, I would have been completely lost. And I think the world needs to return to self-reliance, self-accountability, and less emotion, more logic and reason. It's out June 13th, 2023. You can order it wherever fine books are sold. Thanks to my audience for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com, Fortress Christmas, youtube.com, Fortressmas, linkedin.com, 4chesschristmas. And we're trying to get cool on TikTok. Go help us out over there. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other.

Stay safe. And we'll see you guys next time.