The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Stoicism For Dummies by Tom Morris, Gregory Bassham

Episode Date: June 3, 2025

Stoicism For Dummies by Tom Morris, Gregory Bassham Tomvmorris.com Amazon.com The philosophy that will help you become more resilient in the face of life’s challenges Stoicism For Dummies will teach you the basic principles of stoic philosophy and show you how it can help you navigate the ups and downs of life. We all face challenges and setbacks, and, if we have the right mindset, we can sail through them with ease. This book offers a comprehensive look at Stoic philosophy, uncovering its strengths and attractions and shedding light on its limitations, both in the ancient world where it was developed, and in our world today. Learn how you can apply stoic principles for personal growth and better living, and how you can adapt this philosophical outlook to your unique circumstances. Written in terms anyone can understand, this friendly Dummies guide helps you understand stoicism, and also apply it in your life. Understand the basics of stoic philosophy, including virtues and practices Learn how to keep calm and carry on when life throws you curveballs Apply stoic principles to improve your relationships and quality of life Discover the history of stoicism and how its principles can apply to today’s world This book is great for anyone who wants to learn more about stoicism and its benefits.

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. Cause you're about to go on a monster education rollercoaster

with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. I'm Oaks the Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. Please, you know, one of the earliest things that makes official, welcome to 16 years, 24 hours of the Chris Voss show. We've been doing this so long, my back is tired already and I can't feel my legs, but we're still going to keep on keeping it on. Go to Goodreads.com, Ford says Chris Voss, LinkedIn.com, Ford says Chris Voss, Chris

Voss 1 on the TikTok, and Chris Voss Facebook.com. You ever have one of those people that's in your Facebook feed and they write this really smart, intelligent stuff? Very philosophic. That's good. That's good. I got a new title for you, Tom. Philosophic. Most people don't know, but that's my political license there at work. And you're like, where did I ever end up following someone this darn smart on this dumb of a platform, which is, you know, how Facebook is. I've seen Mark Zuckerberg, I'm not impressed. Anyway, and so one day I saw some really interesting stuff he posted and his, about his book and

I was like, Hey, let's get you on the show, darn it. And he's like, I've been waiting for years for you to ask. And I was like, you should have told me. Anyway, we have Tom Morris on the show. He's a philosopher, brilliant mind and multi-book author, I should say as well. He has written one of the books we'll be talking about today, Stoicism for Dummies, so that he can come help me learn stoicism because I'm a freaking idiot. But we're going to get into his book and all that good stuff and

any other ways that I can self emulate myself on my own show. The book came out January 11th of 2024. Tom Morris is one of the world's top public philosophers and pioneering business thinkers. He was a Moorhead-Kane scholar at the University of North Carolina where he graduated with honors in religious studies and then went on to Yale University where he near earned PhDs in both philosophy and religious studies. He taught for many years at the University of Notre Dame and received many grants and fellowships in support of his work from such institutions as Brown University and the National

Endowment for Humanities. He's the author of over 30 groundbreaking books and a legendary speaker who's electrifying talks re-engage people around their deepest value and reignite their passion for work and life. He's now available by zoom and other platforms as well as in-person talks and he's to serve business navigating our time of radical disruptive change. Welcome to the show. Tom, how are you? I'm good, man.

It's good to be here with you. I enjoy what I see you post on Facebook too. Yeah. It's mostly just bitching, complaining and moaning. But when I say it, I just, I get it off my chest and then I forget how I said it. But you write some brilliant stuff, Tom. Give me your dot coms. Where can people find you on the interwebs?

Oh, Tom V as in Victor, Tom V Morris dot com is my main site. There's a secondary site called the Oasis within dot com. Come to either and see what I'm up to. Now you've been a philosopher all these years. You write these great posts on Facebook, unlike me. And how many chicks do you get with this thing? You just have a whole mess of Victoria's secret models. Keith Richards had no idea that it could be philosophy that would do it.

Mick had no idea. No, it's, it's an, it's an amazing thing because people get excited about philosophy done right. I mean, who knew? I mean, my mother kept saying, who's going to pay you to know this stuff? I wish I could have told her while she was still alive, pretty much everybody. You know? So, wow, that's funny. Who's going to pay it? Well, sometimes mom's wrong. Moms are always wonderful though. Sometimes I should say, most times I should say. Anyway, so give us a 30,000 overview. What's inside your book Stoicism for Dummies?

Okay. Yeah. I was asked to do, first of all, people call me the OG of Stoicism because in 1998, the novelist Tom Wolf had a book come out called A Man in Full. It was number one on the New York Times bestseller list. I had just done a book called If Aristotle Ran General Motors for Henry Holt, big New York publisher, and I was writing philosophy for dummies. They asked me to do their first philosophy book in the dummy series. And I got a call from my editor one day. He said, hey, Tom Wolf's written this

book about a rich Atlanta businessman who gets in trouble gets thrown in jail He discovers the stoic philosophers and it changes his life and now everybody's saying who the stoics who are the stoics now? Remember, this is 1998 and so he said if you will write a book in 90 days about the stoics We will make it in New York Times bestseller. We'll publish it in six months, which is unheard of in publishing. And he said, we'll put all the weight of the company behind it. And I said, I'm writing a book called the philosophy for dummies. I can't take a break. He said, you got to take a break, 90 days. And so I did it. And I turned in a book called the stoic art of living. This was how stoicism for Dummies got started. Turned in this book on day 89,

and he calls me says, geez, I don't know how to tell you this, but Wolf's book fell off the New York Times bestseller list and our publishers not interested anymore in the Stoics. And so I forgot, Chris, I forgot to get a contract. I should have talked to you. So the book took six years to get published because nobody at that point, people stopped caring about the stoics. Now Ryan Holiday comes along with his marketing background in 2014 with the obstacles away in 2016 with the daily stoic. But this book came out in 2004. I mean, in years earlier and so time passes and I got a call from the people at dummies,

which is they have this great history of publishing in and having their books in every bookstore in the world. And they said, hey, look, stoicism has become big in business in the military and sports and entertainment. Should we do a book called Stoicism for Dummies? I said, yeah, you should. And they said, okay, you do it. And I said, I don't have time. I'm writing two or three other books and I've got all these speeches and they said, you

really should do it. And so I called an old graduate student of mine, a guy named Greg Basham, who's a historian of philosophy and he's just a really good philosopher. And I'm a kind of a conceptual guy. So I said, Greg, you wanna write a book together called Stoicism for Dummies? He said, dude, I can't believe you're asking me this.

I've been in a deep dive on stoicism for about four months now and decided to write my own book. But yeah, let's do it together. I wrote it with a former graduate student who's a great philosopher in his own right. The book came out about a year ago, year and a half ago, and geez, Chris, the emails I'm getting from people saying, you helped me understand Stoicism completely for the first time ever. Your book helped change my life.

There's a lot of humor in the book. There's a lot of humor in the book. There's a lot of energy in the book. We tell crazy stories about the Stoics, but we basically tell them that, look, the Stoics believe half of wisdom is knowing what to embrace and what to release. So many people go through life releasing things they ought to embrace and embracing things they ought to release, and they get it all backwards. So the Stoics wanted to help us understand the inner is more important than the outer. Get the inner right first, the outer will take care of itself. Pete Slauson

One, you know, I, you're the pro here. So, I call Stoicism the owner's manual to being a man, a masculine. Pete Slauson Yeah. Pete Slauson Is that accurate? Do you, I mean, we're logic and reason in how we process data. Women, of course, process emotion first, and that's the beauty of the yin and yang, of our opposing sexes, they complement each other. But to me, when I read Stoicism, I grew up with an alpha grandfather. He

taught me how to be a man. I grew up kind of on this cusp of where a lot of men became feminized and became very feminine. And so I had this dichotomy of different pictures to look at of femininity, masculinity, alphas, betas. And so I had this, you know, I was young and I was looking at these, all these people going, why does this person have a healthy relationship? This person doesn't. This woman's angry all the time.

This woman is just the greatest matriarch ever known to womanhood. In my opinion, she was my grandmother. A little bit of a bias there, but she was. And for all I've seen. And you know, for me, it embodies the true masculine alphas that I grew up with, my Boy Scout leaders, anyone I've seen who fits that mold, my grandfather. And so yeah, you could build on that. Nat Fassbender You see something there that's there to be seen. I mean, why did it get picked up by Ryan Holiday, by Donald Robertson, by Massimo Piccolucci, by Tanner Campbell, by a lot of guys who are writing on there, some really great women writing on Stoicism too, like Nancy Stutt, Snow, but the original Stoics themselves, you know, Zeno, and then

you leap, and his followers, Cleanthes, Chrysippus, you leap forward to the Romans, Epictetus, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius. They were concerned with how to be strong in a healthy way, how to be a strong human being in a turbulent world. That's why people relate to him so much now. You know, the philosophers we're talking about didn't live in easy times. I mean, Seneca, for example, who's one of my favorites, Seneca became so popular in Rome that the Emperor Caligula started thinking about having him killed. Yeah. Did he exile him or was that... He did exile him and he ended up, and then another guy, no, Nero exiled him and Nero ended up telling him

to kill himself, you know, basically saying, you kill yourself or I'll send my guys to do it. Wow. I mean, this is how the, the philosophers, the times they lived in. And so it's not, oh, these guys have plenty of time just to kind of sit around and philosophize what they have to say to us in our busy, crazy time. They lived in busy, crazy times in their own way.

And so that's why when they got it right, their wisdom echoes down the ages to us. Not how to be strong in a brutal way, how to be strong in a virtuous way, how to be strong in a healthy way, how to be a strong person inside so that your relationships are strong, so that you help make your community strong. I mean, that's what they're all about. So you're right in seeing that, that strength was something they were really concerned about. In fact, there was a guy almost nobody talks about, second century Roman guy named Heracles. Heracles said, your life, Chris, my life, everybody's lives can be mapped by a set of concentric circles like an archery target. In the innermost circle, get your own

heart and mind as strong as they can be. Then you can contribute to the next circle out in a positive way. Your family, your closest friends, get that strong. You can contribute to the next circle out, your neighborhood, your workplace, your town, the next circle out, your state to the next circle out, your neighborhood, your workplace, your town, the next circle out, your state, the next circle out, your nation, your world. He said every circle should contribute in a positive way to the next circle, and the outer circles should reach back and support the inner circles. I mean, what a beautiful way to think about community in the world today. Pete Slauson Yeah. I mean, and we need it more than ever. I mean, masculinity has been under attack for a long time.

We've kind of seen what a gynocentric world looks like in this experiment over the last 60 years. And I have a huge dating pool. So I have a dating pool that sounds like I'm dating them all. Wow. I have a huge dating group that we do meetups and in-person stuff because apps doesn't work. And I've dated all my life. I've had my playboy years and then I'm starting to trying to settle down, but

it's a good look finding people, but this 5,000 group and one of the things that women constantly complain to me about, and it's very valid is they can't find masculine men and even though, you know, all this feminism and I'm a boss, babe, and all this sort of stuff, deep down, when you get them alone, they are ceding that they desperately want a masculine man. And one of the things they want is that emotional intelligence, that non reactionary, non emotionally reactuary logic and reason that a man brings to the table. All my girlfriends have always called me the rock. They're like, you are my rock.

I can be in an emotional storm. I can be losing, you know, maybe up to my feelings too much. They like to call it and you will hold space. You will, you will hold frame, you'll hold space and, and containment for the feminine. As I quote one gal who refers to it at that. And so, to me, it's almost, it really is almost the teaching of emotional intelligence and hierarchy that most men have. They're masculine, let's put that way. Pete If you're right, I mean, the Stoics thought that two things set us apart, human beings from

the rest of the animal kingdom, our ability at rationality and our ability for relationality to use our reason to form healthy relationships, solid, stable relationships, solid, like a rock, relationships. So Marcus Aurelius, and I know Marcus means a lot to you as he does to me, and that's what turned Ryan Holiday around and sort of got him excited about philosophy, Marcus Aurelius' Meditations. Marcus, at the beginning of that book, thanks a lot of people. A lot of the people he thanks for the insights that have made him the person he is, a lot of the people he thanks are the guys, his father, his grandfather, you know, his adoptive father, people like that. But he thanks his mother,

you know, he thanks like you were talking about your grandmother earlier. We do benefit from the full range of humanity, but we need to cultivate who we are in a healthy way, not trying to be something else, not trying to be somebody else. We need to be, each of us, who we are in the best possible way. And Marcus often found himself falling short. You know, as a reader of the Meditations, I know you know, one of the things people love about Marcus is he's honest. He's vulnerable. He says, man, I screwed up yesterday,

but I'm going to try to do better today. The Meditations is full of that, you know? Like, oh man, I shouldn't have done what I did. I shouldn't have said what I said. And in fact, I won an internet competition last year. There was this big conference on stoicism and the person leading the conference from down in South America or someplace said,

Meditations is not a good name for Marcus Aurelius' book. Suggest a new title for his book that better reflects the contents. And I just blurted it out and won the competition, How I Try Not to Be an Ass asshole by Marcus Aurelius. And the organizers said that is perfect for him. I'm writing the opposite of that book,

how to be an asshole, evidently according to people on the internet. So evidently I'm almost got it. It's as thick as a war and peace. But you know, we were talking in the pre-show, before we came home, we were talking about our animals and our lives too, our pets, and how Marcus Aurelius and how the Storks can help us deal with that crazy thing we have to get a grip on that our animals don't live that long.

We've had wonderful dogs who died at the age of four or eight, or we have one that's 14 years old now, and I'm thinking, oh man, I'm on thin ice with her now. But I know you lost a dog, a really long dog a year ago. Yeah. Yeah. We were just talking about how the Stoics help us deal with the fragility of life, with the transience of life, or the fact that, you know, they look back to some philosophers of the past in their past, like Socrates and even beyond him to Heraclitus who lived 500 BC and Heraclitus said in that age. He said everything is always changing

It's try to step into the same river twice He said you can't do it the waters are always moving on and with the people we love with the animals We love it'll sound silly, Chris. But we had a wild rabbit in our backyard two years ago. She almost became a pet. She was so funny. She was so great. And a predatory bird took her out one day. And it was just, you know, if I hadn't studied the stoics, if I hadn't built up that inner strength that they talked about, it would have been a bad day.

And that way, it was a bad day, but it would have been much worse. As we were saying earlier before we did the show today, you know, the Stoics help us to be strong in times of grief. They help us to understand we're not here forever. Let's make the most of it while we can. Pete You know, let's, it's early in the show, so I want to get a misnomer out of the way. The one big pushback I get from especially men online that makes me mental is, and it's, I know where this programming comes from, because they don't want to be taught this,

but they believe that being stoic is shutting off your emotions. It's like shoving them down, closing them off, denying they exist and just sort of fester inside until you die. And I'm just like, are you... Read the book for hell's sakes. That's not what it is about. Pete Slauson That's right. It was my dad's generation. You know, it was Clint Eastwood. It was Clark Gable. It was, you know, so many of the movie stars of the day were almost trained not to show emotion, be a tough guy, don't show any emotion. And the Stoics weren't about bottling up emotion.

They were about cultivating your beliefs, attitudes, and emotions so that you will only have healthy emotions. And learn to express those emotions in a rational way so they don't take control of you. So it's not the tail wagging the dog is the old expression says, because there's so many people, men or women who are sometimes like little toddlers,

they let their emotions get the best of them or I should say the worst of them. And one guy, my book, I have a little novel called The Oasis Within that some people have said is the most stoic novel they've ever read. It came to me as a movie in my head and the book came out a few years, several years ago, and a CEO in California wrote me this email where he said,

page five of your book changed my life. And of course I gotta find out what, I didn't even remember so I write this guy back I said tell me tell me what you mean and he said I'm a he's a head of an international firm financial firm real estate firm and he said I've always been a screamer if I don't get what I want in a negotiation I'm the guy who yells I'm the guy who screams I'm not of that, but that's the way I've been all my life. I'm in the midst of the most difficult international negotiation I've ever been in." And he said, I just read page five of your book. And so for the first time ever, I'm being reasonable, I'm being calm, I'm not screaming.

So everybody says, hey, what's wrong with the boss? What's happened to the boss? He said, but I will tell you something. You've got an image on page five of your book. And I know it relates to stoicism, but you've got this image that has made such a difference for me so fast. He said, I'm calm for the first time in my life. And I think as a result, I'm going to get the best result of a difficult negotiation I've ever achieved. That's what the philosophers have always wanted for us. That's what the philosophers have always wanted.

Pete Slauson And for me, you know, and this has become hyper-focused, but I've always known that for me, you know, when I deal with my dating groups and I hear what women talk, what they want and what they're looking for in a man, a masculine frame, a man who can hold frame, a man, they're going to challenge him man, a masculine frame, a man who can hold frame, a man, they're going to challenge him because that's what women do. If you understand human nature, they want to make sure that he's on guard and he's on his thing.

But women look to a provider and protector. And as men, we're designed to look around at danger and evaluate it and strategize it. If we do war or marauders are coming to kill our community and our family and children, And, you know, make them watch like friends, the TV show. Anyway, I'm just kidding. They didn't do that folks. That's, that's, that was against the law back then too. So anyway, but we, we have to be able to deal in danger. We're also, we're also, we're also, we're also, we're also, we're also, we're also in danger of being killed by the police. And so, you know, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're

we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, that, folks. That was against the law back then, too. So anyway, we have to be able to deal in danger. We have a pension that makes it easy for us to kill, and we're designed that way because that's the world we live in. We are the protectors and providers. We are the security guards of the world and life, and we do the hard. And so we need to not be consumed by emotion because emotional decision is the worst decisions. Ask any gambler, ask anyone who makes them

on a consistent basis or look at their history. And we don't have the time for that. When you're in a crunch time where it's war or some sort of emergency or engagement, you see so many men that will leap to protect women or protect, run into burning buildings. You saw that with the firefighters in 9-11. We have to be able to do that in a manner that we're not overcome with emotion where we can look and see strategy.

Okay, I need to hide the wife and kids, someone's at the front door, they're kicking it in, I need to find my gun, you know, we need to go through a logical process, we need to have a strategy of how are we going to fight the invaders, how are we going to fight the marauders, how are we going to protect our family, we have to plan, we have to do all these things to think about. And we can't be emotionally reactive. I mean, there's time for fight or flight in a situation where, I don't know, some sort of emergency is happening right in front of you and it's fight or flight or die. But for the most part, we have to have that process.

We have to be able to, you know, war, we have to strategize to win wars so we can protect our family, our community, whatever the case may be. In business, it's really just war. I mean, when it comes down to it, it's modern war, really. And you know, business-wise, you've got to be able to play these different games and stuff to do. And so for me, it is the essence of manhood and masculinity. Chris McAllister A lot of people who've even heard of Marcus Aurelius' meditations, and we'll just stick with that for a minute, they don't realize it was written on the battlefield. It was written during a time of war when he was in camp with the troops. He didn't stay back in the palace. He didn't

stay back where it was safe in Rome. He went out with the troops. And at night, when he'd seen the worst of the day's battle, he would go back into his tent and try to think through all he'd experienced and come up with wisdom about it. And so when people push back against philosophy and against Stoicism and say, wait a minute, you're talking about using reason, sometimes in life's emergencies, you don't have time to reason things through. The Stoics knew that, so they thought that

if we train ourselves with reason, we will train our intuitions, we will train our emotions so that we will instinctively do the reasonable thing, the rational thing, the right thing without having to sort of let's have a debate here while the house is on fire. No, we don't use reason in that way. It's when we're off the battlefield, we train ourselves with modes of responding, reacting and taking initiative that can be done in a split second in dangerous circumstances.

And like you say, whether we're talking about times of war, whether we're talking about difficult business situations like the CEO who was writing to me, we have to be able to have instincts that don't just blow with the wind, but that are rooted in rationality, in real wisdom, in real virtue, because the word virtue comes from the Latin virtu, which meant strength, you know? A virtue is like honesty, like courage. A virtue is supposed to be a strength that we bring to any set

of circumstances that might be challenging. The people who can't bring those strengths, who don't have those strengths, are going to be overcome by the circumstances. And I see this, Chris, a lot in championship athletes. They don't depend on their circumstances for their confidence. They bring their confidence to their circumstances. Same thing with courage, same thing with all the virtues that Aristotle listed and that the Stoics valued so much. In fact, the Stoics kind of boiled it down to four virtues. Aristotle had 10 or more. And the Stoics said, look, you need the virtue of wisdom. You need to think well, have wise perspectives on situations, be able to size things up quickly. You have to have the virtue of justice. You have to

know how to have a right result come from your actions. You need to have courage so that when you're facing pressure, when you're facing danger, you can still do the right thing. And you have to have temperance or self-control, which a lot of people lack, so they never develop themselves. They never grow. I know you're a guy who's going into the gym. I always kind of went into the gym to do a little exercise and kind of feel like I could

check that off. But when I was 58 years old, I'm 73 now, when I was 58 years old, I said, I'm going to go into the gym two hours a day, seven days a week for a year and see if that makes a difference. Because I saw old guys in my neighborhood who could barely walk down the street. And so I did that. And a young guy comes up to me about two months into the year and he says, Hey, you make more noise than anybody else in this gym. I said, dude, you should hear me get up in the morning and walk to the bathroom.

I'm like an old man. He said, I want to be your workout partner. I said, why? He said, you're the only person in here really trying. And so he does with me, the Sto only person in here really trying. And so with me, the Stoics talk about encouraging each other. They talked about the importance of consistency and what we do. Chris, this guy every day would say to me, come on Tom, you're looking strong. Let's put on more weight today. Let's do a little bit

more. He's he met me when I was benching. I never benched before. Chris, I was benching 85 pounds at the age of 58. He said, come on, you're doing 20 sets of 20 reps. You got to put it up higher. You got to do 90, you got to do a hundred. And so every day it was like, Hey, Tom, you're looking strong today. Let's put another five pounds. When I was 63, I was benching 315 pounds. Damn. Because of this friend, his name is Don, because of consistency, his encouragement. And I remember thinking, and I hit that for five years until the pandemic

shut down the gym every week. I do three 15 work my way up to three 15 and, and I had to stay in the 300 club, you know, but, but he, he really convinced me two things. Like I say, his name is Don. We all need a Dawn in our lives. Somebody to encourage us, to support us, to all need a Don in our lives. Somebody to encourage us to support us to insist on our consistency day to day. But secondly, we need to be a Don for the people around us. Everybody needs an encourager. Everybody needs if he had said

to me when I was 58 years old, okay, Tom, here's your goal. You're gonna bench 315 pounds. I said I would have said that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. There's no possible way. But what he did was he helped me set incremental goals in a consistent way. And when I wanted to, when I wanted to not show up, like one day we're in the gym, I'm ready to leave. And he said, see you in here tomorrow. And I said, God, tropical storms on the way. It's supposed to rain really hard tomorrow. And you know what he said to me? He said, not in here. There's a guy with consistency, right?

And that's what all that way you can just hold the roof up. So anyway, consistency in the moral life, the Stoic said is just as important as consistency in the physical life. And in fact, when you get the two together to go together, you have honesty and courage, you have, you have the right to go together, you have honesty and courage, you have the right kind of generosity, you have the right kind of ability to set big goals as well as small goals. The Stoics believe you could make this progress in life where you could inspire a lot of other people to do good things as well. And that's a great worldview.

Pete You know, and somehow we need to advertise this more. You can still have, you're still have feelings as a stoic masculine man. I can have feelings that, you know, I'm going to cry when my dog dies. Okay. That's going to happen. My girlfriend leaves me. I'm going to go count how much money I'm going to save. No, I'm just kidding. But you should, you're honoring their value when you have that reaction.

Sometimes Epictetus went too far. One of the stoics who's kind of like a drill instructor. I mean, Seneca was like a motivational speaker. Epic Titus was like a drill Sergeant. And Marcus was like the guy you meet at AA who says, yeah, I had a bad day. They, yeah, me too. You know, but, but sometimes Epic Titus takes it too far. He thinks you're not supposed to agree if you're not supposed to

have any negative emotions at all. He doesn't mind positive emotions, but he doesn't like negative emotions. But I'm saying, listen, when I was at Notre Dame, one of my colleagues' son died in a mountain climbing accident. And it would have been wrong for him to say, oh, that happens, people die. Okay, next. He grieved his son's death because that was a reflection of the value of his son. Now, the good Stoics will say, don't let it take you apart. Don't let it put you in a tailspin. Don't let it ruin your life.

Your loved one would not want that. But if you don't recognize the value they had in your life in this world, you're being sort of too, you're being Mr. Spock with your emotions, and that's not stoic. Pete Slauson Yeah, definitely. You know, we had Fred Hayes, the astronaut from Apollo 13 on the show. And it was interesting, he wrote a book called Never Panic Early. And that was what they taught him in NASA. And part of it was they, you know, these guys were naturally stoic and masculine back then, but they would

run 10,000 failures. When they were practicing to go into space, they would throw everything they could at them at failure. They'd pull a switch and something would fail and they would have to scramble and fix it on the fly. And so what they were always taught was never panic early. In fact, I was talking to him about, you know, the HBO film series and I was like, you know, there was some drama there and sweating and people, you know, dealing with the stress of the situation. He goes,

that never happened. He was the only time that I broke a sweat or had a little bit of worries when we were coming in and then the plane was overheating a little bit when we're coming in to the earth's atmosphere. He goes the rest of the time is I was cold as ice man and he goes he goes the thing is is you can't afford to panic you can't afford to get in that emotional state because you will fuck it up and he's NASA would teach that to us if you get emotional you will fuck it up. You will make the wrong decision. I learned this in an interesting way last year.

I met a bunch of astronauts last February a year ago and one of them got named Tom Marshburn. He's either done more spacewalks or the longest spacewalks and he's been the oldest person to do one out of the International Space Station. And I talked to him about it. And he said that every single spacewalk, when you're in the part of the space station where you're going to leave, the door is going to open, you're going to leave. He said there was a moment of stark terror. A moment, always a moment. And I said, how did you deal with that? And he said, first of all, you make your world as small as it can be.

You're not thinking about the infinite beyond you're getting ready to step into. And he said, there's safety guards, there tethers and stuff, but anything can go wrong. You know that. He said, but you remember your training. You remember all the times you've practiced this. You think about the job at hand, and this displaces from your mind any of those negative emotions that could keep you from doing your job. I love that you make your world small.

You think about what your job is. You think about what you're supposed to do and you don't let those negative emotions take any control of you whatsoever. And people on the outside would say, man, the guy's so cool. And some people say the guy's cold.. And some people say, the guy's cold. And he'd say, no, I'm disciplined. And that was one of the virtues according to the Storks. Pete Slauson I love it. Disciplined.

You know, the way I do it, I think I make my world small and in control is I operate that I am the center of the universe and I'm the, I know this is going to sound narcissistic and Machiavellian as hell, but dark triad traits are a part of being masculine. Healthy balances of them, I try and keep mine healthy a little bit, but someone get out of control. The- Jared Suellenthal You know, they say everybody's got a little narcissism in it, and it's just not letting it get out of control.

Pete Slauson Women seek it. I mean, there's a reason women seek hybristophilia, which is where they're attracted to killers, men who are on death row in prisons and they go marry him and all that stuff and fantasize him. You've probably seen, who is that pitiful young man who killed the health insurance executive recently? That guy has a million marriage offers. Part of it is because women's brains, and we're all operating a hind brain when it comes

to cavemanship, both those sexes, but they still see that a man who can kill is a man who can keep them safe. It is something. Yeah, it is. If you study in Bristophilia, it's quite interesting. I mean, we talked about Keith Richards and Mick Jagger earlier. When people clearly have some form of power, whether it's social power through fame or their wealth or whether it's physical power through their, you know,

too many hours in the gym or financial power, whatever kind of power it is, then a lot of people around that individual feel more protected. And it comes from our ancient past, right? Like you say, there are survival needs in early human prehistory that wired our brains, and now we live in very different circumstances in most ways, but our brains are still wired that way. So on come the philosophers like the Stoics, and they said, look, you are what you are. You're wired in a certain way.

Now let's make the best of that we can so that it works for you and not against you. That's what they were always, Stoics had this view that very few things in life are intrinsically good or intrinsically bad. Most things have the value we give them by how we use them. I call it the functionality principle. How's it fun. How about wealth,

for example? People criticize Seneca because he was very wealthy at the Roman court. But Seneca believes that wealth, the value of wealth is all in how you use it. You can use it badly or you can use it well. This has to do with almost everything. In fact, I was studying a 17th century philosopher many years ago, Blaise Pascal, and I discovered some ideas in his thought that I turned into what I call the double power principle. I say in this principle, the more power something has for good, the more equal and opposite power it has for ill. Anything that has power to help us also has power to harm us, and vice versa. It's up to us how we use it.

So the philosophers have always been discovering principles and ideas like this. So if you come across something in your life that's very powerful, you see a reaction among people that's very powerful, you say to yourself, okay, how am I gonna use this phenomenon? What am I gonna learn from it?

How am I gonna use it in my own life? Like you don't say, oh, this guy killed a health executive so so I'm going to go find one to gun down. No, you don't do that, but you recognize how people are attracted to power and you say how can I use the power that I have in my life in a positive way for people, right? How can I provide a path forward so I'm leading people in a healthy direction? And that was what Marcus was all about. That's what Epictetus, that's what Seneca was all about. So that's again, why the

Stoics are getting so popular again, because they help us understand just crazy stuff in our world. There's all kinds of crazy stuff around us. And the Stoics had their versions, and they had, they put a lot of thought into it. And they learned from each other. Like me learning from my friend Don, we learned from each other. And I know I met one of Don's neighbors that I met not too long ago as a vocalist for a heavy metal group called Lamb of God, very popular group, Randy Bly. And Randy got turned on to the Stoics a few years ago too,

because again, when you're living in a world where there's a lot that's crazy, you want principles and ideas that can, like a flashlight in the dark, that can help you see the path ahead, that can help you with solid footing in your own life. That's why, Chris, before the show, I was talking about, I used to do really theoretical philosophy,

philosophy that involves a lot of logic and modal logic and metaphysics and stuff that 37 people in the world could understand. And I said to myself at one point, do I want to spend my whole life doing stuff that hardly anybody can understand? And then about that time, some local business people in South Bend, Indiana, they had heard about my classes that were popular with the students. And they said, hey, could you come and speak to our group?

You're supposed to be a really good teacher. Could you come and speak to our group? Did the philosophers ever think about something like success or ethics or partnership? And I said, dude, I don't know. Let me look into it. That's not the kind of stuff I studied in graduate school. But then I discovered there's this whole practical side

of philosophy that everybody was ignoring for the sake of all the theoretical stuff. So you go into a philosophy class in a college and it's like, how do you know you exist? You know, or, or the world popped into existence five minutes ago, exactly the way it was then, prove me wrong. That was my first philosophy class. And I think really, I mean, this is, is there a practical side of all this stuff? Yes. But we had forgotten it trying to make philosophy more like logic and mathematics and the sciences, we'd forgotten all the practical stuff. So I've been for 40 years now, I've been rediscovering the practical stuff that you have been using in your

life, that I've been using in my life, that I try to bring a little bit to Facebook every morning. I didn't know when I left Notre Dame 30 years ago, I'd ended up giving 1200 public talks in football stadiums, basketball arenas for 10,000 people at a time on people's private jets in the jungle, in all kinds of crazy places because people want to make sense of their lives. And that's a good sign in a bad time. Pete Slauson And we live in, you know, the old Chinese curse,

may you live in interesting times. Pete Liesvold Exactly. Pete Slauson Seems like everybody's kind of living in challenges to themselves. So, Bill, in that astronaut story too, we had a gentleman on the show, Hazard Lee. He was a US Air Force combat pilot instructor. Bill Burt I know him. Pete O'Brien You know him? Bill Burt He's a good guy. He's a very good guy.

Pete O'Brien Yeah, he wrote the book, The Art of Clear Thinking. Bill Burt I got a copyright behind me. Pete O'Brien Yeah. Bill Burt He said, we'll copy not too long ago. Yeah. And you know, he talks about the split second, I forget the term he uses in the book, maybe you remember, but there's a term he uses in how men can think, and I think most air force pilots have to adopt this if they're women too, but they have to be able to make the

calculations in split seconds and they have zero room for emotion because they're flying a, I don't know, a $35 billion plane. You know, there's a couple of stories, the book where he's got to make, he's got to make ditch bail decisions or fly, try and fly to the next base. He's in Iraq, he's under fire, he's in the war. Maybe he's protecting a base. The planes, you know, he doesn't know if he's got enough gas to make fly to the next base. He's in Iraq, he's under fire, he's under war, maybe he's protecting a base. The plane's, you know, he doesn't know if he's got enough gas to make it to the next place, but he can't land because the base is under fire, you know, and he's having to make these balance. And he also knows some personal things that are in danger to himself. Not only can he get shot at

the sky, but if you bail out of a plane that's, you know, operating a certain G-Force, you're going to endure some bodily harm that might be permanent. I mean that's operating a certain G force, you're going to endure some bodily harm that might be permanent. I mean, there's a, you know, and then of course, you know, probably snowing in the Pentagon to be happy, a ditch to $35. You don't get the hero's welcome when you show up. You get a bill. We'll take that in the payments, sir, out of your paycheck.

Yeah, yeah. We'll deduct it from your paycheck. It was like, I got to, deducted from your page. It was like I got to, I got to be friends. I had this weird friendship for 32 years. I got to be good friends with a TV producer, Norman Lear, you know, all in the family, Sanford and sons, all those TV shows. He was a tail gunner in war war two bombers.

And he told me stories exactly like that. The, the number of hazards you face. And that's why I love that our friends, they name is hazard. the number of hazards you face and the quickness with which you have to make decisions where it doesn't look like any of those decisions are really great. And you have to kind of, okay, what's the minimizing the damage, minimize risk now, maximizing the benefit? How do I do this? And you've got your, you're moving so fast. I mean, it's not like when you're driving your car way too fast. It's like when you're in that jet. I mean, you really have to be split second. And it's amazing that we can cultivate that. It's a skilled behavior.

Some people just seem to be naturally better at it than others, but it can be cultivated. Again, back to the Stoics, anything good they believed can be cultivated. And that's what they were trying to help us in their works. And of course, Epictetus didn't write anything. He just talked to students, but he had a student, Arien, who took notes. And that's how we have his manual, his discourses, just like Socrates didn't write anything, but Plato took notes. Xenophon, who was a military man and a really good student of Socrates, he took notes. And we have the memorabilia from him. And actually, there was a guy named Peter Drucker, kind of father of management science,

who said, Zinophon's book, The Education of Cyrus, that I had never heard of at the time, he says the greatest leadership book ever written. And I said, I got to get a copy of this book. So I found University of California Press did a version. I read the book. I've read it four times. So this is probably the greatest leadership book ever. So he takes philosophy. He's a military guy. He wasn't even in a leadership position and he gets behind enemy lines. The king they're supposed to be supporting gets killed or something. And he's somebody's got to lead their army back to Greece. And they say, Zeninavon, you're a smart guy.

You lead us back. He didn't have any training in this, but he had enough grounding in philosophy. He had enough grounding in wisdom and virtue. He got the army back safe. And it's in another book called The Anabasis, but Drucker and others have said, what is philosophy good for?

Philosophy can make you a better leader. Philosophy can make you a better leader. Philosophy can make you a better person, a better decision maker under stress, a better decision maker under duress. I'm writing a book called The Gift of Uncertainty. And my astronaut I was talking to last year, Tom Marshburn, I said, can I use your story in my book? He said, yeah, man, if it'll help people,

tell them my story. So it's all about how philosophy can help us deal with uncertainty, how philosophy can help us deal with the unknown, because we've got it swirling around us now, and we have to know how to keep our heads when everybody else is losing theirs. Pete You know, the other thing, you mentioned the origins of Epitetus, Seneca and some people. Marcus Aurelius would be horrified if he'd found his journal had been printed, to my understanding. At least that's what Orion Holliday says. It wasn't meant for publishing.

Steve McLaughlin It was his private notebooks. I mean, what if your private notes to yourself got published? Pete Slauson Mine are mostly just lots of drooling and ugh. He liked ice cream. I bang rocks together and shit. Steve McLaughlin But Isn't that amazing? When you think about that, it wasn't a polished book that he wrote for publication at all. It was something just for his own use. And he thought we should all kind of take notes on life.

You know, you take notes when you're a student in school for the test, life gives us a test every day. We better be taking notes in life. That was his attitude. And at first he would probably be embarrassed to death and he would shake his head, but then once he heard how much it's meant in all our lives, he'd probably say, okay. Pete Slauson Oh, yeah. I mean, we live in a very emotional world now. We live in what I call a victimhood competition world, where us, and I think a lot of this has been created by social media, dark, narcissistic virtues of, you know, of constantly, you know, brand building and, and, and trying to, I don't know, be the next

Marcus Aurelius and stuff. But it's, it's this thing where there's this emotional victimhood climate where, oh, you're a victim. Oh no, I'm a bigger victim than you. I've got, you know, more victims going on. It's almost movements are based on that, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's almost like a bonus for it. And it's celebrated. You know, people will be like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh yeah. You're a big victim. You got the, you won the victim of your award of the week this week there. You know, it's really- It's a funny political time that people who, one political party denounces another political

party for being too involved in victimhood, and then they become the biggest victimhood political party of all time. It's like, what is this? People are rushed to the bottom? I mean, you know, again, the philosophers we've been talking about today, they were all about victory, not victimhood. They were about being strong, not about complaining about what's going on in the world, but taking charge, making things

better. You know, they were all about the strengths we bring to every situation, not the complaints we can issue. Pete Slauson Yeah, it's pretty wild. Final thoughts as we go out on stoicism, why people should study it. I think your book is probably a good place for people to start, especially those people who go, it's about repressing your emotions. And you know, I mean, I can feel like I can feel an emotion, like I feel, I can feel anger, I can feel upset, but I don't have to fully emote it and flesh it. Women usually have to experience their emotions because they're very valuable and important to them. And that's

their first process. But you know, men, we can take and pick it up and we can look at it from logic and reason and go, hmm, why do I feel jealousy? Why do I feel anger right now? Do I need to emote this? Or maybe I just need to figure out why I'm angry and I'll fix that so it doesn't happen again. Look at the picture on the book.

Here's a picture on the book of a guy who looks like he's exhilarated. He's gotten to the top of a mountain. He looks like he's having a moment of joy, a moment of exhilaration. That's an emotion, but it's emotion that's proper to that moment. And he's not going to get so excited he falls down the side, right? So, mostly the Stoics said, look, I want to eliminate the negatives from your life. I want to help you eliminate the negatives from your life so you can experience the positives. It's like Epictetus said, hey, I was a slave, but guess what? So are you.

We're all enslaved to something. I want to be your liberator. I want to free you from all the false beliefs, false attitudes, false emotions that keep you from experiencing your natural joy. So they were not against emotion. They were just against unhelpful emotion, emotions, emotions that tangle people up and tie them down. They want us to be liberated, to be our best and do our best in the world. I'm still a slave to coffee and express a, but yeah, it's a, it's funny.

So that becomes, I used to laugh at my grandparents. I'm like, that is a nasty as shit. Why do you old people drink that crap? But now that I'm old people, I'm like, this is life. This is the fountain of life. Oh, and my first step was like, oh my God, this is horrible. And then now I'm like five cups a day. So in graduate school, I was 24 cups a day.

That was a little bit too much. Those are rookie numbers. As that one guy would say in the movie, five cups a day. But yeah, final, as we go out, any pitch you want to take and give to people, dot coms, where you want people to follow you. TomVMorris.com or they can just Google me, Tom Morris, philosopher, that'll take you to my website. Come shoot me some questions, you know, shoot me an email through, there's a contact page there, you can email me, I'll answer your questions. I love philosophizing with people. I love getting into deep issues with people. I try to make time for that. People said to me, people who work for me said, why do you answer all these emails yourself? I said, listen, if I'm just reading Plato and

Aristotle and Marcus Aurelius, but I'm not hearing what bothers people now, I've only got half the formula for being of help to people. So tomvmorris.com, go to Amazon, type in Tom Morris, look at some of my books. I've written a book about how to deal with difficulties in your life called Plato's Lemonade Stand. I've written a book about how Steve Jobs overcame all his negative emotions to build such a valuable company called Socrates in Silicon Valley. I've written so many books that I would love to hear people's reactions to. So yeah, let's keep philosophizing. You know, just get on Amazon and just just hit the cart all button. I don't think there is Just just Google Tom Morrison Biles books. He writes. It's the most amazing brilliant stuff

I mean, I honestly on Facebook, I've got a lot of great friends and they write good stuff, but some of her pretty Blase. I mean, they're just like, my kid graduated. And that's great, you know, you did your kid thing. I mean, it's great, but it's just not for me on a daily consumption basis. And so I've unfollowed so many people. I like have people from 1984 that I followed on Facebook or something.

I don't think it was around then. I have this weird shit that pops up like, when the hell did I follow this person? And then nowadays I just get like groups and ads like I don't even I barely see any friends anymore Yeah, and it's hard for people. I like intelligent stuff like Sam Harris is my favorite podcast Yeah, I like people who are thinkers and that's cuz I'm I'm not one but I love your content So people should check it out as well. Thanks people should also follow. Thank you. Thanks for coming on the show.

We really appreciate it. And you're welcome to come back anytime. I'd love to have you, Tom. This would be fun. We've got so much we can talk about, man. And just like Johnny Carson, not a lot of people get that offer and check out my channel for stoicism channel or I'm fucking joking. I got you playing right there.

I had it right there. Nude stoicism on onlyfans.com. Follow the Chris Fox playing right there. I had it right there. Nude Stoicism on OnlyFans.com. Follow the Chris Foss channel over there. No one wants to see that. Don't Google that people or you're really wrong if you want to see me naked. Anyway, people pay me not to be naked. So there you go.

Anyway guys, order up his books wherever fine books are sold. Stoicism for Dummies out January 11th, 2024 by Tom Morris. Thanks for tuning in. Go to Goodreads.com, Forge this Chris Foss, LinkedIn.com, Forge this Chris Foss, Chris Foss 1 on the Tickety-Tockety and all those places. Be good to each other, stay safe. We'll see you next time. And that should have us out.