The People, Process, & Progress Podcast - How Practicing Stoicism can Lead to a Better Life with Anderson Silver | PPP #57

Episode Date: November 5, 2020

"Are you living the life you want to live?" - In this episode I discuss stoicism with Author and Podcast Host Anderson Silver. 

Congratulations. You are alive. This means you share the same unfortunate condition with 7.6 billion other people. The human condition. You did not ask to be here, yet you were given life and consciousness. You were also given a death sentence. What's more is you were not given a purpose or a reason. You just are with an unknown yet unavoidable expiration date. This is at best a confusing circumstance and at worst, a scary and depressing

condition. Why am I here? You wonder. Why must I suffer? And what is the purpose of life? I don't know if we can solve the purpose of life, but on episode 57 of the People Process Progress podcast, Stoicism for a Better Life with Anderson Silver, we're going to delve into some of the philosophies. We'll learn about Anderson, how Stoicism has shaped his life, some of the processes he's gone through, talk about some of the books he's written that we can all benefit from and help everybody else make progress. Thanks, everybody, for listening to the show. Thank you so much, Anderson, for joining. It's really good to reconnect after we initially met. So thanks so much for joining. Hi, Kevin. Wow, what a great intro. uh first things first i i when i write my fourth

one i'm going to give you a call for the audiobook that was a great read it's the interesting thing right trying to get like how can i sound so dramatic with the grab at the beginning uh i you know to your credit the material uh you know looking through books and again, we'll get into where those are. You know, of course, the name is on everything. But that passage, I think, just totally speaks to it's a great. OK, I want to know more, you know, and for everybody here and, you know, everybody listening. Let's let's if we can learn more about you, you know, where are you, where are you from? Would you grow up and just get a little bit about your background. Sure.

So I'm born and raised in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. I grew up, I summarize it as I was a capitalist wet dream. I did awesome in school, got my CPA, got a bunch of other certifications after I got my CPA, crushed it in the corporate world, got the executive level job, six-figure salary, you know, family, kids, dogs for pets, check, check, check, check, check. Everything that society told me I should be striving towards. And when I was at the top of the game, I started having these existential questions. I'm like, well, hold up a minute. I did everything I was told should bring me happiness. I have everything, empirically speaking,

that society told me I should have to show that I've won and I should be happy. But I'm still kind of hollow inside. You know, you buy that new gadget and it's fun for a few days. And then, OK, what's next? And this is about 10 years ago. And that's where I started doing my own re-education, if you will, because I realized that I was not taught the right thing

on how to live a good life, a purposeful life, a meaningful life. You know, I started thinking about my deathbed and looking back and, you know, look at all the money I made. Look at all the titles I had. Just didn't seem enough. And so as I started this reeducation process, I was looking for answers in a lot of places. And by sheer luck, and I mean by complete sheer luck, I stumbled, completely stumbled upon stoicism. And here we are 10 years later. Not only has it improved my life and the lives of the people around me. When I saw that there was an appetite for this i i wrote my first book uh three years ago four

years ago and it was just supposed to be a one-off uh but when i saw what an appetite there was for this and and how many people were picking it up and not just picking it up but taking the time to reach out to me to say man thank you i feel like you wrote this for me. Like, how are you in my head? I decided, I realized I'm having an impact. I can help make the world better by helping people who are asking the same questions as I started asking 10 years ago. And so I wrote two more books. I've completed the series of Stoicism for a Better Life. I also write weekly articles, small exercises that people can apply in their daily lives. I have a Better Life. I also write weekly articles, small exercises that people can apply in their daily lives. I have a podcast series, Stoicism for a Better Life. We just finished season two. We just finished releasing season two. And it's been amazing, man. I really enjoyed

interacting with people and hearing these great success stories. That's cool. So 10 years ago, you stumbled on it. Was there anyone, now that you look back, and then I'll kind of come back to kind of how you stumbled on that by chance or what the circumstance was. So was there anyone now that you look back that was in your life, whether it was at work or family or friends or anything that you see that actually kind of represented some of these stoic philosophies as you're now more educated in them when you were growing up and in that kind of business where it sounds like, you know, the stuff you had and the job you had really wasn't as fulfilling as kind of that capitalist dream. But do you look back and see

any of that in your life there? None, none whatsoever. And that's part of the problem of our society. We don't teach the right values. We teach kids to be good consumers, good cogs in the machine. I absolutely believe philosophy should be a part of the curriculum in school. And this is why I do such a big effort, such a big push to help bring philosophy to us normies, because I'm not an academic philosopher, right? I'm a philosopher in that, you know, philosophy, when it began in ancient Greece, it was literally a way to live your life. It was a guide on how to live a life. Christianity came in and shut that whole thing down and then it only ended up being talked about in academic circles now it's finding a resurgence because people are asking these questions and religion is not answering them anymore so in that sense I'm a philosopher and I try to bring it to us normies because it's heavy stuff like I read Arthur Schopenhauer's world as Will and Idea. Oh my God, man, 3,000 pages of like, it's heavy stuff. So I try to distill it down to bare bones.

And my philosophy is, although it encompasses all, everything I read, it's heavily dominated by stoicism. Can I ask, so you mentioned that in reading both some of your books, listening to some of your podcast episodes, dipping my toe just the smallest bit in stoic you know philosophies um you mentioned religion right and and from what i've seen stoicism isn't here to say this one's right this one's wrong or anything like that before you tapped into stoicism or stoic philosophies did you ascribe or prescribe

to to religion and then find oh oh, wait, this has given me a different perspective than the religion did or that religion didn't? Yes, I was a member of the religion of atheism, whose church is capitalism. And now today, I actually argue that there is no such thing as an atheist. There is a thing as an anti-theist, and I will declare myself as an anti-theist, because spirituality, you know, we don't need an institution to be able to be spiritual, you know what I mean? So I don't believe in organized religion, the way it's run. I do believe in spirituality. And later on in our conversation, we'll do the mental exercise of the ship of Theseus, which is what I use to prove to any

atheist that no, no, no, there is something more than just a physical and whatever that is working on that is necessary. So if there's something more within us is let's call it a spirit, then spirituality becomes the exercise of taking care of it the same way. You know, we feed our bodies and go to the gym. We should be taking care of our consciousness as well. That's an interesting perspective. I grew up when I was younger, Irish Catholic, pretty traditional church, right? Varied history there. And then my, which is interesting, my my mom is irish catholic my dad's english so it's like i'm in conflict with myself you know and there and but but not like a you know push i got to a point you know i just didn't want to get up on sunday i didn't go

anymore and then but i am i agree with it and you know kind of the sentiment on it and honestly i think one of the greatest and i'm a huge movie guy and I love Kingdom of Heaven, that movie. And one of the things one of the quotes in there, I'm going to screw this up, but is the the religious kind of warrior. And I forget his name of the hospitaler. Have you seen that movie? No, no, I have not. So so it's about the crusades or in Jerusalem. And basically, Bailey and there's this prince who's taken over from his father who has this land in Jerusalem. And they're part of the Crusades. But they're kind of like, hey, we should all live here together.

But it's the Hospitaller who is a trained religious person but also a warrior. It's like I've seen men put stock in religion as opposed to kind of spirituality or faith or like doing the right thing. Right. And so as a father, like the episode before this one was kind of tips like on fatherhood been doing it 14 years. Like I'm not the pro. I'm not also not like an academically trained fatherhood guy that I've been a dad for 14 years. So that's cool. But but talking to my kids, it's interesting to hear you say that because to me, I don't want to necessarily say you have to think this way because I do or because this person that studied this religious text told us to. So I'll be interested to hear more as we kind of delve into that in that exercise later, because, you know, there's a whole gamut across the world from super extreme to kind of not. And so it's interesting. I'll be interested to hear kind of the context with psoasism and those different aspects as well. So how, you know, getting into

psoasism. So how did you, what was the source of the context or kind of the circumstance that you, that you kind of stumbled onto it? Oh man, I wish I had, I get asked this question all the time and I really wish I had some really cool story I could tell. Like I was on a mountain top looking across the valley and blah, blah. No, I was actually, after having a little too much wine one night, I was just binge shopping on Amazon before going down to, we were going down to Cuba for a trip, vacation. And I was just buying books.

And at a certain point, you know, I was just a glossy-eyed. I wasn't even looking at what I was buying. It's just whatever Amazon suggested, you know, recommended, hey, people who bought this also bought this. I was like, okay, okay, add to the shopping cart. And one of those books happened to be Letters from a Stoic written by Seneca. Seneca is one of the most influential Stoic philosophers of ancient times, and a lot of his work is found in Christianity, because as Christianity began its growth in the Roman Empire, at that time, the Stoic philosophy was the predominant philosophy, right? I mean, Marcus Aurelius, the emperor at that time, was a Stoic philosopher himself.

So a lot of Seneca's stuff is also found in biblical writings. But yeah, it was that book and I read it and it just, it resonated with me. The stoicism just makes sense to me because there's no requirement for blind faith. There's no, you know, as an agnostic, everything that we see and make sense is what you believe in and focus on. And everything else that we don't know about doesn't matter because it doesn't affect us in our lives over here. So I read that book. I loved it. And then, you know, I bought the other the Holy Trinity of Stoic philosophers is Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, and Seneca. That's where I bought their books.

And then from there, I just went on this binge of ancient Stoic scholarly work and a lot of other Hellenistic philosophies. Because Stoicism, like other ancient Hellenistic philosophies, like cynicism and skepticism and Epicureanism, is kind of like the brainchild of Socrates, right? It's when Socrates came about and just completely changed, that is, if he existed, completely changed the way we think about everything, including philosophy. And there was this boom of philosophical ideas. So I read a lot about the other ancient Hellenic philosophies as well. But Stoicism specifically is the one that resonated with me. One, thank you, Amazon, for the suggestions. Now, algorithms can be sketchy because they hook you

in, but it sounds like this was a good change, a good suggestion. Like, hey, you might like this also. Customers almost bought those kind of things. But let's, too, I think, because we've said it quite a few times, what, for folks that are listening, is stoicism? If you can give them kind of the definition, I'm sure we're getting a different philosophy. But what can folks know that stoicism is? It boils down to this. Using a rational mind as much as possible in the present moment is the key to a good life. That would be the one sentence definition. If I can expand on that a little bit, we recognize that life is short and ephemeral, at least this temporal world. There's no opinion on whether

there's an afterlife or not. We don't know that there is. We don't know that there isn't. What I do know for a fact is I'm here right now in this life. And I know it's very short. And I know I can die at any time. Therefore, every moment becomes precious. I also recognize that the past is in the past. The future is undetermined.

The only thing I really have control over is the present. Furthermore, as far as control versus influence, I can't control anything outside of my own mind. I can try to influence things around me, but I can only control my thoughts and intentions for actions, right? Even if I start an action, it doesn't mean on logical, reasonable, rational observations of my environment, I know I have 100% certainty of outcome over my thoughts in the present moment. And so I focus all my energy to control my rational mind in the present moment to work towards virtuous ends. And the footnote, a Stoic defines virtue as working towards the betterment of humanity.

That's a pretty good footnote. If there could be one, that's it. I would say from your initial, your first sentence in the description as far as rational thought and cooperation. So I guess Stoicism is not for 2020 or presidential election years. I'll just say that. But it also sounds like it could be the ultimate philosophy that could be applied going forward that could help folks

kind of out of the banging heads and things. It's the only way forward. It's the only way we can, I'm not saying stoicism is, but using our rational minds, checking our ego, checking our emotions, just using logic, ethics, and our intelligence with a reasonable, rational mind is the only way we can uh you know build bridges again and begin the dialogue because the problem i see right now as a neighbor from the north looking down south is people just don't listen to each other everyone has their own opinions and ideas and on both sides there's facts and lies uh some more than others but again that doesn't matter the problem is no one wants to hear anything else other than what they hear and the social media algorithms is just exasperating this

problem oh yeah that's that's a i mean it is and it's documentaries on netflix and everywhere else so there's there's whole whole trails to go down that's just an amazing thing that's one thing honestly consciously lately i've tried not to click as much on the clickbait to get sucked into the algorithm but it's pretty astounding the uh terminator cyberdyne systems going active seems like it could be sooner than sooner rather than later because it knows how we think and all that all that kind of stuff i'd like to that it's you know centering yourself to think i can control me only, but I can influence other folks. So it's it kind of helps folks realize that you can't control what that person is doing, but also knowing you can you can influence them, which, you know, I would imagine there's some stoic philosophies that help guide a person towards letting control go outside of yourself, but also being influential? So you make a great point. And this is the firm distinction between Epicureanism and Stoicism. So these two philosophies are, and cynicism too, to an extent. So they all believe, okay, that we live

in this, and don't forget, these are written ago. Yeah. They all believe that we live in this superficial construct that we call society, which is absolutely true. Okay. What is a title? What is a company? A company is a make-believe thing. It's just a bunch of people agree. We all nod our heads and go, okay, from now on, we're going to call this IBM and it'll be a thing and there's going to be employees that work for it. It's not an actual thing that exists.

Titles, money, we don't need these. This is all superficial. So the way the cynics approached it is they said basically microphone drop, sell everything, and you live on the streets with nothing but a staff and a little satchel and beg for alms to eat. Diogenes, one of my favorite philosophers, he was homeless. He was living in a wine barrel. Yet he was, like Alexander the Great came to visit him on numerous occasions. And he even said, Alexander the Great told Diogenes, if I wasn't Alexander the Great, I would wish to be Diogenes, to which Diogenes responded, if I wasn't Diogenes, I would wish to be Diogenes as well. Diogenes was a savage man. I love this guy. Just another quote, just for some fun for your listeners. So he protested against this superficial construct. And the way he protested was to do extreme things like he would defecate

in public, he would masturbate in public, to show people like, look, this is our nature. Why are you so ashamed? He has a famous quote that says, I pissed on the man who called me a dog. Why was he so surprised? Right. Yeah, we put so much weight into it. But anyways, I don't want to go down the rabbit hole of diogenes. I can talk about him for hours. hours. So that's cynicism. Epicureanism also agrees to this, but they say,

well, I don't want to be homeless. I think the purpose of life is to seek happiness, to be happy. So an Epicurean would confine themselves in little communities and confines and live, you know, grow their own food and do their own thing and just live a life as happy as possible. Now, where the Stoics differ, to get back to your original point, the Stoics say, okay, look, I get where I live. It's weird and it sucks. However, I can kind of see it for what it is and i know my fellow human beings my cosmopolitans don't so i choose to actively participate in this fake construct to help my fellow human beings because i can't help them from the outside looking in so it's uh it's akin to playing a board game that you absolutely hate just to help the other players along and so the stoics took

public office they took uh you know uh influential positions they spoke up against corruption right uh um this is why you have stoics that are that were you know beggars and homeless and then other ones like seneca who was he was the richest guy in all of rome he was richer than the emperor. Then you have Marcus Aurelius, who was a Roman emperor and a Stoic philosopher at the same time. You have Epictetus that was a slave, you know, yet he was the greatest mind of his time and one of the most influential Stoic philosophers. So a Stoic can be from any walk of life because we are completely detached from what our title or position in society is. We ultimately just want to work towards its betterment.

Because what more could you create in life, in this short temporal life, other than wanting to help other human beings? I can't think of anything else that would bring value to my life. Yeah, absolutely. And it's hard, I think, as a human, not to want to achieve things, right? So one for yourself. And then two, if you start to have a family to go, Oh, do I want my family to live in two barrels next to each other or in a house? You know what I mean? So, so, so practically, like what's their comfort and safety and many other you know things and i can see the different thought patterns between each of those the simplicity of one versus the practicality of

another and all that kind of mix which it sounds like with stoicism is kind of in that thinking look i'm going to be in there so i can help from the inside i also recognize that there's value in minimal stuff and there's value in you know going all in and i i um really do one i i didn't know it but i've used so i i was in public safety in these incident management teams so i'd go in like after a missing person or disaster or something like that and help the place with my teammates and so when we would train folks before there we would always start with a slide or a statement of there's no egos and there's no silos, right? So one, just out of the gate, recognize that if you come here or you'll go somewhere to

help somebody else, and then by default, that would help you day to day, like your ego can't be in the way, you know, so it's neat to hear that you just have to, you know, kind of brush that out of the way. uh one practically now and then also thinking about there's all these constructs and i can see i have this lot so i'm in an information technology now i've been in it for a little bit and i know that if we took everyone's logos away from various companies and made one logo that we could accomplish sharing data for every Avenue, healthcare, infrastructure,

whatever, very quickly. Right. But, and with a lot of work, but, but the competition piece of my logo making money, we're not wanting to share this or that would be reduced.

And so I can see from what you mentioned about these constructs and they're false or they're real. And I can also see the value of uniting people in the company behind your own logo as like your team. So I'd be interested to hear your take on modern workers now, particularly working from home, you know, and that stoicism of the construct that we're all in working virtually, you know, some kind of thoughts for folks as they unite behind their logo, as they try and unite, you know, companies that hire vendors or hire people to work with them, you know, how can we help bridge those gaps so we're all kind of in the same construct, you know, without kind of walking them through

ancient philosophy. But how have you envisioned this in kind of the modern workforce and really, I guess, in 2020, this unique workforce that we have now? Look, again, the starting point is that none of this is necessary. But then I accept that I can't change it, so I have to live within it. Regardless of 2020 and how we're working now and before, here's what I'll say. Like, for example, myself, my own story, after I had this literally 180-degree transformation in my way of thinking and doing, I didn't quit my job. I'm still working, you know, a high-level job.

But now my approach is different, and I'm trying to lead by example on how I treat my staff so that other so other managers don't like it. Other directors, whatever, they don't like it. But their people sees how I treat my staff. the next level of management, at least one or maybe more, hopefully, will have seen my example and been like, no, I can be a good business person and still respect the human being that's working for me, right? But these are not dogs that you whip to get the most out of it. So I think, regardless of what you're doing, how you're doing it, who you're doing it with, whatever it is, we all have a choice every time we make a decision to do something, to do it better. We, you know, using any uncomfortableness as a justification to also, you know, fit into the mold and be the way we're being treated is an excuse. We have that choice

in the present moment again, and we should rationally make the better choice that's good for everyone, even though we might not be benefiting from that. Yeah, that's a great thought. I had a similar thought earlier episode and called conscripts on your project teams. Right. And talked about, you know, for thousands of years, it's been conscripts. You beat somebody in war, hey, we're going to pull this team together. We're going to work together. We're going to treat each other well. I'm going to as a project manager, I'm going to look after the team, make sure they're doing well, not just in their tasks, but as people. How did how have you changed or how can some other folks use stoicism or some of the stuff that you do to help their teams be healthier, be better, you know, just have kind of gel and I guess some of the stuff that's helped your teams be more productive and just be well, I guess, with each other? So what I tell my staff is respect the people around you, be loyal to the people.

You know, I don't say be disloyal to the company, but I don't necessarily preach be loyal to the company either because the company is a giant machine, right? You only interact with the people directly around you, your upper levels, lower levels, whatever, lateral. And the way I go about it is, like I said, I respect the human being that's in that chair. So when I, you know, when someone comes into my office to chat with me, I ask advice on something. At the end of the conversation, when I ask how their family is doing and when I ask about their wives by, you know, by their first name, because I remembered when I asked about their kids, you know, how did the X and Y's project go? You were telling me about last time, you know,

I remember these because I care, because I don't dismiss the fact that this is a human being with their own narrative. You know, they have their own thing happening. It would be egocentric of me to just view them as here's what I need, get it done, end of transaction. No, this is another living, breathing human being that wants the same thing as me, a happy, pain-free life. So when I treat them like that, I can see it immediately in their eyes and their reaction that, oh, this person cares about me, so I'm going to care about them. And they become extremely loyal and supportive. And therefore, it shows in the work and the output as well. They're willing that they want to do good, as opposed to the drudgery of the office. I guess I got to get

this done. So it's all relationship building. And why shouldn't it be? It should be relationship building because we're all you know one and the same are we not yeah absolutely and i love that um our incident management team leaders were always about relationships before process meaning you make sure that your relationship is solid and taking care of people before you start getting people to fill out forms and do these meetings and this and that because that's the key both practically and it's the right thing to do. So it's, that's a great, um, great thing to hear and a great philosophy for folks listening to, to look at. Um, so getting into your book, so your, your first book, your user's manual guide for purpose, um,-free life in the 21st century. Does this share some of the

basics of Stoicism? And then also, so I guess first kind of part of the question, and then the second one, anxiety-free, why in particular anxiety-free? Is that something that you or somebody you know had a history with, so you wanted to highlight that? So kind of what's the, does this help get somebody into that, into Stoicism and Philosophies, and then why the focus on anxiety? Right. So, the first book, again, because when I wrote it, I didn't imagine having a whole brand after that. It was supposed to be a one-off. So, it does kind of cover a little bit of everything. You know, when you read the second

and third book, there's a little bit of an overlap. But again, for your listeners who haven't read the books, in true stoic fashion, I don't waste any time. I'm an independent author, so I have no obligation to put out page numbers, right? When you work with a publishing house, you need page numbers. I don't have that. And this is why I remain independent, even though I was approached before I wrote my third book. I choose to stay independent because I want to control my content. There is no fluff. The first book is 86 pages. The next two are around 140 pages. Chapters are like two to five pages each. It's bing bang boom here's information let's move on there's no kind of uh fluff in there so uh so the first one yes it covers a little bit of everything in stoicism but there's a big focus on

identifying one's purpose because um necessities and this is what i call uh our spiritual necessities you know we have our physical necessities. We have to eat, we have to drink, we have to sleep, but then there's this something more within us, and we have to tend to it as well. And to be able to do that, we need to identify its spiritual necessities. I refer to it as simply our necessities. To quote Nietzsche, he who has a why can deal with any how. And as a Stoic, to be able to, you know, not give into my emotions, not give into externals and only focus on me, I need to have my why clearly written out. And so in the book, I help the reader through steps and exercises, you know, outline their own necessities, their own purpose in life. And this is unique to each individual. There's no one fits all answer. You know, we all

come from different walks of life. We have different realities um i have the luxury of having everything all of my basic needs taken care of so my necessities are a little bit more altruistic but somebody else might be in a more difficult situation where their necessity is just to provide for their family you know what i mean so i help the reader identify these uh as a starting point and uh it's a good segue to the next two books because once you figure out your why, then we get into like how you can actually, or rather once you figure out your necessities, we'll get into how you can actually put that into practice. It's like having a roadmap before you start executing projects, right?

Oh, yeah. And so why the anxiety? Because at least in my experience, anxiety and depression are the two most common mental ailments of people around me. And people are, including yours truly, up until I found stoicism, I was kind of dealing with this through self-medication, whether it's, or some people do through, you know, doctor medication, which is, you know, really potent drugs. And now I know, I know for a fact, because I'm living proof, all of this can be overcome with just organizing your thoughts. I mean, I don't want to say power of the mind because it sounds a little too like crystals and whatever. But, you know, you organize your thoughts and you think rationally and all of it can be overcome. It really can. And this is

what I'm trying to accomplish is trying to share the stuff that I learned over the years with people who are looking for better answers than, you know, give me another beer or, you know, give me another prescription pad or whatever. And that's a huge, I don't know if it's the same in Canada as far as, you know, in the U.S., the mental health system used to be more robust. It's hurting now, especially this year, but overall, not just this year. You know, certainly since lockdowns and unrest and presidential and all that kind of stuff, it's certainly, you know, worse for sure. And, yeah, anxiety and depression and the medication, the quick medication, right, as a solution seems to be pretty rampant. I don't know if that's just, you know, in the U.S. or kind of everywhere.

Are you seeing similar in Canada where it's, you know, someone goes for exudated depression to the physician or that you've heard of, and to your point, either self-medicating, drugs, alcohol, something like that, but more kind of from the prescribed sense where the antidepressant meds are kind of a quick, not really fixed, but a quick band-aid that's given to people? It's everywhere. And you know how we know this? We know this because of sewage plants, because they test the water and these drugs remain in the system. And we have empirical data showing that it is a worldwide phenomenon. It's actually affecting fish. It's affecting the ocean life. We know we we know this but we kind of conveniently ignored because we're all complicit in this right right um and uh i i guess this was part of like my the beginning of my journey was i was like i can't i can't i don't want to live like this anymore

i i don't want to you know i was uh i was uh every night i'd come home and you know what's the most expensive bottle of scotch I can buy? So at least I feel like I'm fancy. All I was doing was getting drunk. You know what I mean? And now here I am. You know, I've quit everything from I used to smoke, too. So I've quit.

I've quit alcohol, cigarettes. I've quit even coffee and tea. Like no stimulants in my body because the more I recognize that my rational mind gives me that freedom and bliss, the more I want it to be present. And so I don't want any kind of stimulants in my body because I want to try and strengthen, not just strengthen my rational mind, but I want to give it all the um uh like you know i i don't want it to fade away uh if you will did you combine um following the stoicism you know stoic philosophies implementing those in your life did you combine that with exercise eyes uh so uh no i used to actually work out a lot more before okay um because of my focus on my so the the stoic term is pro-hiresis i keep saying rational mind but let's use the good jargon here my pro-hiresis which is my higher faculties my capacity for reason my capacity for judgment okay that is what I have to strengthen. And so time spent at the gym does not

strengthen my pro-hiresis. Time spent meditating, whether it's stoic meditation, i.e. journaling, or it's a Zenful meditation, that strengthens my pro-hires i i actually against gym time unless it's something necessary example i suffer from sciatica so i do have to work out my core to make sure i don't you know it doesn't flare up on me but beyond that i won't spend any time trying to you know look uh look uh look cut or look whatever uh. Healthy body, healthy mind, obviously. I, you know, I'm careful with my diet. I take care of my body. I'm very active. I'm very healthy, but I don't spend time in the gym just to build muscle or look cut. Any kind of like yoga to that core or anything or you know so so and i think that's interesting too

because yoga has a lot of philosophical thoughts in it too as far as you know i don't know how that meshes with stoicism um but also less for you know getting jacked if you will but um but you know building an overall health and then also seems to really focus on the mind as well. Have you delved into that at all? Yes. So huge overlap with Buddhism and Stoicism. Huge. And I talk about this in the books as well.

Notably, Tibetan Buddhism, because Tibetan Buddhism is a lot less on the infrastructure of the religion and more on the Buddha Dharma. Buddha Dharma is Buddhist teachings. So I really appreciate Buddhist teachings. I also use a lot of Lao Tzu in my philosophy. You know, there's a huge overlap there. Yoga, I'll be honest, I can't do it, man. I've tried. I can't do it. I. I've tried. I can't do it.

I'm not as patient as I am. There's something about yoga that just doesn't jive with me. There is two yoga poses I'll do to stretch because it absolutely helps. But I just, I can't. I'd rather sit and meditate on my mind's eye than spend 30 minutes doing yoga. But again, that's the beauty of stoicism. It doesn't say you have to do one thing or the other. It's just whatever works for you as long as you're working towards your necessities and

virtuous ends. You know, and that, you know, for me, part of the spark asking is for me getting back into, because I've been pretty athletic my whole life got into it's really sounds similar dark spot overworked had some traumatic incidents those kind of things so you know we're staying up late drinking that kind of stuff so got into okay tomorrow get up early exercise the next day so it was a a mental focus in addition to physically doing something so working out the demons in the garage gym, you know, not looking at myself flexing that the byproduct is you do get in

better shape, those kinds of things. And I do yoga kind of for maintenance and it's hard. And so to your point one about getting into it, um, one of the greatest quotes I heard about yoga, uh, I also do Brazilian jujitsu and Nick, uh, Gregor areas have probably just killed his name. Um, so he's a black belt he had this whole YouTube channel but he says yoga is the martial that you do against yourself which I think is awesome because one physically even

what seem like simple poses and then you get into them just makes your arms shake and you're like wait a minute I'm a grown man like I should be able to do this for more than five seconds. But also the feeling you get when you do stretch yourself after sitting in a chair for five hours or something, I think is really neat.

And yeah, wondering, so it's cool to hear the crossover and philosophies between Stoicism and it sounds like the Buddhism base from yoga. Yeah, and again, I just want to specify it's more Buddha Dharma because Buddhism has a lot of rituals associated to it and all that jazz, but Tibetan Buddhism or Buddha Dharma. But yeah, to your point, if that physical exercise helps you reconnect with your rational mind, then by all means, go do it.

You know what I mean? It's all a matter of trying to control that discussion, that discourse within. Yeah. It's amazing what our minds, one, to your point, what they can do for you and what they can do against you. The brain and the human mind to me is an amazing and sometimes terrible thing, but it's just astounding how it works and who we are. And speaking of those, the help and the harm in those. So your second book is your duality within. So what is the duality that you take readers through and kind of advise them or provide them with stoic philosophies about.

Right. Great segue, by the way. I'm trying. I'm trying to get on a local radio show. Speaking of radio shows, I'm actually going to be... I know this podcast is not going to air for a while, but tomorrow I'm going to be on the radio for the first time. So that's pretty cool. If you get on the radio, give me a call. We can do a radio thing. Yeah, absolutely. So the duality within, we keep talking about this, something more inside this rational mind, this consciousness, whatever you want to call it. That is the real you. Why is it the real you?

It's a good time for the exercise of the ship of Theseus. So indulge me, Kevin, for the benefit of your readers, for your listeners. So Theseus is the mythical finder of Athens, right? And he fought the Titans. He was a warrior. He fought the Titans with this awesome ship he had, awesome battleship, right?

And so Theseus dies and the citizens of athens say you know what we should keep the ship of theseus in good shape for posterity to come see and visit because he was such an awesome badass guy okay so they keep it like a museum thing and it's it's sitting there in the harbor and then one day one of the planks just rots. And so a carpenter goes in, removes the rotten plank, puts a new one in, in the exact same place, in the exact same shape, right? Old plank on, new plank in. Is this now still the ship of Theseus or is it something else? Right? Most would say, no, it's still the ship of Theseus, right? It's just being repaired maintained so years go by and more plants get replaced more plants let's say half the ship gets replaced uh is it still the ship of theseus then time goes on a little bit more and let's say like then the sails

are being replaced and the rope and now like three quarters of the ship has been replaced with new things but each piece one by one in the exact same way in place is it still the ship has been replaced with new things. But each piece, one by one, in the exact same way and place, is it still the ship of Theseus? Right? So then, fast forward a few more years, the entire ship has been replaced piece by piece in the exact same way, in the exact same shape. Has it just been maintained or is it a whole new ship? Right? Is it still the ship of Theseus? It's a question, isn't it? It's subjective ship of theseus it's a question isn't it subjective

yeah but it's in the same form as the original yeah it's in the same form as the original so some might still say no look it's the ship of theseus because it's being maintained so then let's say this whole time with each rotten piece uh that was taken off some guy collected these pieces and rebuilt the original ship of Theseus on land because it can't float anymore. And he rebuilt the entire ship with these pieces. So now the question is, is there two ships of Theseus? Is there one or which one is it? Right. So this whole, do you want to chime in on that? No, thinking through it, it's a deep question.

Exactly. But not deep, which I don't know if that's the point, but. And it is, it is, because the whole point of this mental exercise is to disassociate physical form from identification. Right. It's not the physical ship that's the ship of Theseus. The ship of Theseus is something more, which is why it's not easy to determine, is it the ship of Theseus? Are there two now? Are there none? And so we turn this exercise onto ourselves. And, you know, we look in the mirror every day and we age every day. We get older and uglier and we lose this tooth and then we lose that one and our hair starts falling out. We might have a tragic accident and lose limbs.

But every time you look in the mirror, you still identify yourself as you, right? God forbid, Kevin, if you were to have an accident tomorrow and you lose both your arms and you look in the mirror, are you going to see somebody else or are you going to see Kevin? You're going to see Kevin, right? I hope. And honestly, as a comic book fan, I hope I then have some sweet robotic arms. Oscar Pasterius.

So the point is, and this is where I disprove atheism to any atheist, which I used to be, is clearly, clearly, there is something more than the physical. Because otherwise, we would not identify ourselves as Kevin or Anderson. When we look in the mirror as we age, we would identify ourselves as something else, like Anderson 2.0, Anderson version 76, Anderson whatever. No, the whole time we identify ourselves as ourselves, as me, which means me, the real you, is something more within. And it's the something more, this consciousness, the spirit, the soul, call it whatever you will, that's the real us. The physical part, like the Shepethesius,

is just, it's just there. We exist in it. We cannot exist anywhere outside of it yet. But, you know, we lose arms, we lose legs, we're still going to be us because us is the thing, the something more that's inside, right? So the duality within is a study and reflection on the rational mind, the intelligent mind, the something more versus the primitive animal monkey brain, the one that feels feelings, the one that wants to pick up a stick and hit people, right? And we've seen this throughout history. You look at, you know, we've all seen this in cartoons, a character with an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other shoulder. That's an image, an imagery of the duality within. We see even in religion, take any religion, most religions have a spirit and a soul inside, and then the

impure body that wants to do other things, right? We're aware of this duality within, but we, at the same time, are not. We ignore it. We just kind of go into this autopilot mode. And at times of consciousness, when we're thinking about things is when we have these existential questions. But then we forget about it and go back with our day to day drudgeries. Yeah, it's a spirit and just if folks do take a time disconnect from the internet disconnect from you know the the crazy matrix that we're all plugged into um it is amazing to me because i've thought about this as a 46 year old guy with certainly aging gray beard and all this kind of stuff but thinking about the the kind of magic the amazing piece of just

just being able to walk around as a living being. You know what I mean? So the ship of our bodies with the spirit or the concept of us or anything like that is something I think that's a good thing for folks to think about just how amazing it is, especially, honestly, when you see people, you know, i've been i i enjoy starbucks coffee every now and then i'm i'm sucked into that machine but i'll say you know someone's standing in line i have to wait like two extra minutes and they may have forgotten their cream and their coffee and they freak out you're like you understand you're freaking out in this world in this country wherever you are in the world and look what you're doing like Like, look what you have to think about.

Like, it's not really a big deal. Like you're getting a coffee at a coffee shop, right. Where someone else in the world has like no water. Yeah. So, so starting to think, you know, thinking about things like that and, um, you know, and then about the individual folks and just how amazing it is to, to be alive. And, and for me as a dad and, and, you know, for having a family, looking at your kids and kind of the magic, I think that's a great way to look at it, especially,

and I like the analogy, to me, the ship, you know, you replace the hip. You got a new knee. You got a new anchor. You're still the same person. Or to your point, you know, my arms are gone, but it's still me. So that's a great thought for people to appreciate, you know, my arms are gone and it's like, but it's still me. So that's a that's a great thought for people to appreciate, you know, kind of who they are and kind of kind of what they are. Yeah. Yeah. And this is what the second book discusses. So first, I make the reader uncomfortably aware of the duality within and then reassure them they're not crazy.

And by sharing, you know, examples through history of this duality within, and then reassure them they're not crazy by sharing examples through history of this duality within. And then I go, in the second one, I go into anthropology a little bit of how this duality came to be through evolution. There is a reason behind it, right? There's a reason, rational reason behind all of it. And I also anthropologically explain why we're so depressed and anxious, because it's normal. And that's the, you know, we have to tell that to each other, that it's okay, it's normal to be anxious and depressed. It's a built-in survival mechanism. It's just not necessary anymore, which is why it's causing so much angst. But back in the day, the guy that was a little bit

more pessimistic about the winter around the corner put one extra bag of grain in the cellar, and he survived a freakishly long winter when the other non-pessimistic ones died, just to use one example. Think of our ancient ancestors a hundred thousand years ago sitting in the savannah uh or back then it was you know lush jungle and they hear a rumbling in the bush one of them just starts running because they're anxious and scared and then the other one is calm and collective and turns around and looks at the bush with the rumbling in it and goes, huh, this is curious. It's interesting. There's a noise coming from here. And that's the guy that gets eaten by the lion that was in the bushes. But the scared, pessimist, anxious one that's running is going to survive and pass on his

genes. These are survival mechanisms. So it's absolutely normal why we are where we are and why we feel as a society, you know, we keep talking about how anxiety and depression is rampant. It's normal. It's just being exasperated by our modern times. It's not something that's new to humanity, which is why texts from 3000 years ago still make so much sense today, because physically speaking, the hardware hasn't changed, right? The software hasn't changed. It's just the reality has changed. So I go down that route with anthropology. And then at the end, I help the readers with some exercises on how to tap into the rational mind more often because we can't be there all the time. That's impossible.

And how to not ignore because we can't ignore the body. We can't suppress emotions. You know, I make the analogy the body's mind and its emotions. It's like an annoying roommate you have to live with. You have to live with them. But it doesn't mean that you have to let them ruin your day. You know what I mean? You can just be like, okay, okay, yeah, the government's watching you.

Sure, all right, go have some Cheetos, watch some Netflix. So I give some tips on how to be able to live alongside, like live a good life despite emotions. Because one misconception of Stoicism is that we don't feel emotions because the adjective to be Stoic is to walk through life with a stiff upper lip and not feel emotions, right? Nothing could be further from the truth in what Stoicism teaches. Buddhism is actually closer to that. They say, you know, it's like water off a duck's back. You don't care about emotions. Stoics will say, no, no, no.

They're very much real and they very much affect you. But we can choose to be better despite emotions, right? We talk about bravery. Bravery is not the lack of fear. Bravery is the capacity to do the right thing in the face of fear. And so virtue is not the lack of emotions, but the capacity to do the right thing despite emotions. That's a great from, you know, listeners here from from me, from other folks, I know that we're in public safety first responders that thought that emotions are natural that it's okay not to be okay you know you're going to get through the critical incident you're going to work you're going to have this horrible thing and then you're going to be screwed up about it you know get help for sure when you can but it sounds like too you know the stoicism is you know can help people's mind kind of accept that, like, it's not normal to see some of the stuff responders see. It's not normal for us to be locked in our house. Like, you know,

what we're going through now, what folks go through each day and traumatic experiences. But it sounds like, you know, would prompt folks to check that out, duality and users manual and dichotomy, which we'll get into in a second, you know, of ways and other ways to think about handling that other than, as we talked about earlier, self-prescribed drinks and pills and whatever. But that's a, it's a good concept. And I hope folks that are listening that are having a tough time, if you're working in hospitals or on the street or anywhere else, you know, it's, it's not normal to see folks wrecked in a car wreck. It's not normal to you work and have to have your kids at home in school and all these stressors and craziness going on. So it sounds like this, you know, socialism and your guidance could be really helpful to folks.

So so you get people started kind of in the manual. You talk about the duality and then you talk about the dichotomy of control. So kind of some opposing forces maybe within folks. And so how is that? What can that help folks with? And kind of what's the focus of the dichotomy of control, the third book? Right. So dichotomy of control kind of brings the conversation full circle in that, okay, life is short.

So let's control the heck out of our lives because it's like life and time, at least from our perception, it's like running water in the desert. You know you want it and you know it's going to run out. You just don't know how long it's going to run for. So you want to try and get as much of it as possible. The mistake we make is that we try and do more of the wrong things as opposed to taking a step back and trying to do the right things. So I make an appeal again to reason and reason alone to say, look, time is short. Let's control life as much as possible. But let us first define what we can control. And we touched on this earlier. You know, I make a very scientific appeal to why we can only control our thoughts and judgments in the present moment. I go about this very scientifically again. Point zero zero in space and time. Past is in the past, future is undetermined, present is the only time when we can do stuff. We can plan for the future but you can't, you know, you can't

foresee what's gonna happen, you can't control what's gonna happen. Right. So time is the easier one to lay out. In terms of space um you know i go through examples of what you think you can control um but you actually can't and the further you know uh things that are not example world hunger we can't cure it right you can't just go out and tackle world hunger because it's kids hungry kids are all over the world. We just, you wouldn't have the capacity to do that. So let's go a little bit closer. Can we control things in our house? Well, no, not really. If you have dogs or kids or both, you know very well, you can't control things in your own home. At any point, you know, a dog might decide this pillow no longer belongs

in this world, or a kid might decide this wall needs new decoration with crayons, right? We go further in towards our bodies. We might think we can control our own bodies, but we can't, right? We don't control our own breathing. We don't control our genetic dispositions. We don't control our digestive system. Even our bodies are only open to influence, right? We can try and physically train ourselves to be healthier, but it doesn't mean we're going to be able to accomplish that right a lot of things might come into play we might get hit with a bout of depression and then you don't go to the gym anymore or whatever whatever uh so we boil it down to what you can control literally with 100 certainty of outcome is quite literally your thoughts and your intentions for actions

in the present moment, because nobody, nothing can go inside your squishy bits and make you make decisions. No matter how bad a tragedy is happening outside, right? These externals, externals, meaning anything outside of my judgments, no matter how bad something is like, okay, let's say somebody walked up to me on the street and just punched me in the face. It's pretty irritating, right? And the monkey brain is going to want to pick up a stick and hit him back but i still have the choice on how i respond yeah i tell this to my kids all

the time that when they get into arguments and why are you doing this oh because he did this okay why are you doing this because she did this i said no no no you're not doing this because your sibling did this to you you're doing this because you chose to do this. You're just using that as an excuse. And so then we fast forward in the book. I just try and lead the reader through examples of how we can, again, tap into the rational mind in the present moment to control ourselves and our thoughts and find happiness in that and only that. Because to judge our lives based on anything else is like playing the lottery, right? If you want to judge the success of your life based on, I don't know,

your job, well, that's kind of a lottery, isn't it? If you're born in Africa, you're not going to have a high-level job, right? If you're born in North America, you have a much better chance of having an opportunity, a shot at having a good job. If you want to define your life based on anything external, it's kind of luck of the draw. So we should define happiness of our lives based on the one thing that's 100 in our control and that's our thoughts and judgments so that helps focus my energy to be the best me that i can uh every every moment of every day so that's it let's let's touch on that so you're talking about um folks born in africa independent of where they're born, talking about, so someone's applying stoicism, right?

And they want to become a stockbroker in New York and they're from somewhere in Africa. So is that to say that what they can focus on is what can I control and the things that I can control or then influence or steer myself toward that I can control is what I should focus on to get to each next step to kind of get me to where I want to go or or how how would how could they kind of apply those philosophies to get where they want to go? Just just from the standpoint of, you know, folks going from different, you know, from wherever to somewhere else to succeed. So does this have to do with kind of just taking note that, okay, here's what I can actually directly control. And then here's what I can direct myself towards or influence. And then how, and then that person balancing those things. Right. So when we talk about where I want to get to, we're talking about goals. Okay. And goals are, they're good to

have. They're important to have because it gives you some type of direction in life. But if we go back to our necessities, one of the things I point out in my first book, in the steps in figuring out your necessities is we cannot be assured that we will survive the day. There's no guarantee. And one of the biggest mistakes we make is we live as if we have 10,000 years to live. As a Stoic, you are always reminding yourself, we have a saying, memento mori, remember death. We are always reminding ourselves

that we will die at any time. And so your necessities must necessarily be something you can accomplish within the day. Right? So goals fall outside of this. Goals, life goals, you know, you want to be a stockbroker in New York, that takes more than a day. It's good to aim towards, but your necessities are daily, meaning things like, I want to lead a benevolent, a kind life, right? So you hold doors open for people, you take insults on one cheek and then respond in kindness or whatever. It's things you can do in the present moment. So as a stoic, if you want to be that stockbroker in New York, you're focusing on what you can control.

And that's where you find your happiness, not in whether you have become a stockbroker or not. You work towards it and you work as hard as you can towards becoming a stockbroker. But you evaluate whether you're a good person living a good life based on your intentions and judgments and actions in the present moment, not on whether you've accomplished a long-term goal. That makes sense. That makes sense. So to that, I would really like to get your take on some different areas, I think, that are pertinent to what we've talked about, to the state of the world today, and kind of how folks can apply stoic philosophy, stoicism,

kind of if they're experiencing some of these things. So the first one I think, which is pertinent for the various lockdowns all across the world, is loneliness. How, for folks that read your books, listen to your podcast, Stoicism for a Better Life, how can folks apply some of these concepts if they're if they're feeling lonely, they're isolated, they're locked down, what's some guidance we can give them there? Right, so the first thing and you know again stoicism is very down-to-earth and straightforward. So the first thing I will say and I do say because I do a lot of mentoring as well, when someone approaches me with, I am going into depression,

I'm losing my mind, I'm lonely, I need human interaction, whatever, I say, well, that's a flag. That's a problem that shows you're not comfortable with your own thoughts. And so before you can even begin to deal with the loneliness, you have to deal with the fact that you're not comfortable with yourself, right? If I may quote Atticus from How to Kill a Mockingbird, which is a book everybody should be reading right now Atticus said before I can live with anybody else I have to live with myself and so this would be a huge flag red flag indicator that it's time to work on yourself and it's time

to start the most important relationship, which is the relationship with yourself. We go back to your dichotomy within, your duality within, excuse me. And you need to be honest with yourself. Because if you're uncomfortable with your own thoughts, that means the lies you have been feeding yourself have exceeded a level where you don't even want to talk to yourself anymore and we know we lie to ourselves more than anybody else we all do it but if this reaches a level that's you know gone too far that's when we stop wanting

to listen to ourselves and that's when we're always chasing external distractions like social media, TV, other people, just not to talk to ourselves. So that's, you know, folks that are looking for those likes and the hearts and the living by that, you know, minute to minute looking at that, or just, you know, lonely because they're isolated, they're introverts, those kinds of things is, it sounds like, look at yourself, look at how you can help yourself, um, and kind of be comfortable with yourself. Uh, it sounds like good guidance. What about, you know, all across the world, we've lost a lot of folks from COVID-19 from, from other things. There's folks going through cancer, other, you know, diseases, ailments, loss of life of loved ones, how, how can stoicism be applied for folks that

are experiencing grief or, or does it speak to kind of how humans can handle grief or, or, you know, provide that guidance? Right. So, you know, there's no quick and good solution to these things. There's either quick, which doesn't last, or good, which takes time to build like anything else. You need a good house. You need to build a good foundation first. So it's easy for me to sit here and say, so here's the answer that I would say is death happens all the time to everybody. Why am I so special to think that it's not going to happen to the people around me or me myself why would i think i'm so special um that it would be a sad thing for me and yet i don't weep for everybody else

right it sounds cold but it is facts and reality uh so it's easy for me to say this because I've been doing this for over 10 years right someone who's new to this it would be kind of cold and cruel to say this so you know the advice I can give is before we you know before you can run a, you got to run a mile first, right? So let's focus on being able to deal with certain realities, like being able to talk to ourselves and be comfortable with our own thoughts. And eventually, you know, through stoic meditation, which is journaling, which is talking to yourself yourself because and the reason why I can use this opportunity to mention this the reason why stoic meditation is journaling is because it's a it is

impossible to write pen to paper without triggering your rational mind right you can type through muscle memory you can do art you can draw through with your autopilot but you can't physically write pen to paper without triggering your rational mind. And so we will write multiple times a day to talk to ourselves, to clear our ideas, work through our emotions, to tap into our logical thoughts. So for someone like me, you know, we spoke about Promethazim and Melorum before, and I speak about this in my, I think my second book, I make reference to this. I reflect on the death of one of my kids. Okay. And even now, after years and years of trying to be comfortable with the thought of losing one of my children, I still get physically irked. Talking about it now, you know, my chest is tighter. I can feel it.

I just cannot get used to the idea. Yet, the rational mind knows children die tragically young before their parents' death all the time. It happens everywhere around the world. Why should it not happen to me? I mean, it can. I know this. So I try and prepare myself by reflecting on it. And a lot of things I've been able to accept, including my own death. But, you know, my own kid's death is something that I've, again, after almost half a decade, I still can't get my mind around. So losing someone close to you, yeah, it hurts. It's, you know, it's an emotional minefield. But we have to try and tap into that logical side.

There's no other way around it. You have to try and tap into that logical side and accept reality that this stuff happens and it happened and it's unfortunate. You wish it hadn't. Everybody wish it hadn't, but it did. So do we let this ruin the rest of our lives or do we recognize that other people depend on us? We must move forward.

We must wake up the next day. The sun will rise again and march forward. It sounds like, you know, there's the stages of grief and going through that. And it sounds like the stoicism kind of cuts right to the acceptance phase, like the last phase of it, right? Not that as humans, I would imagine whether you, you know, are practicing stoic or believe in stoic philosophies, not that you're not going to feel the other phases, but it sounds like the focus is on the acceptance piece for folks that may be more familiar with kind of that stages of grief. It sounds like it kind of cuts to the end. Yeah, the five stages of grief.

The first four are emotions. The last one is logical. And as a Stoic, again again we don't believe in suppressing or ignoring uh emotions you you can't just pretend they don't happen we just try and tap into that rational mind so uh here we refer to something a stoic would call a proto emotion it's like you know when you stub your toe on the coffee table everybody and i mean everybody goes ow right it's a natural reaction um but once the proto emotion that initial knee-jerk reaction is gone now i have the choice to either keep swearing at that table and let out my day's frustration on this inanimate object

or i accept that okay so, so I feel pain. Yeah, it hurts. I've hit my toe. Yes, I'm a klutz. It happened, but I'm here now. It's not happening right now. So, okay, let's move on. Pretty straightforward.

I'm sure in the practice, it's not getting into it, but that's something too process-wise. As you got more into stoicism, as you studied more, learned more, read all the different great leaders in stoicism, what was kind of your process that you could share with listeners that they could maybe emulate in not only taking in that vast amount of information, and sometimes it sounds like heavy stuff and straightforward stuff, but then to say, okay, I'm going to start applying this. Did you just say, okay, tomorrow I'm going to try this thought that I read?

And, you know, what was kind of, it was an incremental, did you kind of go all in or, you know, what did you do? And then what would you suggest for other folks? Yeah, it was absolutely incremental. You know, there's nothing good in life that you can do kind of like an on-off switch. It's not a mathematical equation you plug in once and it works for the rest of time. And the thing about stoicism, it's a practical philosophy, meaning you don't do stoicism by memorizing quotes You do Stoicism by actually applying it in life.

And so it's with the little things. And this is why I started writing my weekly articles, which are very popular, and they're actually sticky on the top of the Stoicism subreddit on Reddit. It's little things. Like the first one I wrote was, you know, put away your cell phone at the dinner table. You're sitting down to have dinner with your family.

You know, if there's an emergency, they'll call. The phone will ring. But what we do every time it buzzes, you reach into your pocket and you check out the notification. Worse, it might be on the table and you're just looking at the notifications as they pop up. This takes your attention away from the conversation you could be having with real life people that are right there. We know it's the right thing to do, but we don't because it's really easy to grab that phone. And it's an addiction. It's actually the biggest addiction that we have right now, more than drugs and alcohol. And so one simple stoke exercise, put the phone away for half an

hour while you're eating. Don't even look at it unless it rings. So it's little simple things like this. You know, I don't sleep with a pillow, for example. Why? Well, because I travel as part of my job. And anyone who travels for their work knows one of the main reasons why you can't sleep in a hotel when you're traveling is because the pillow is either too stiff or too soft. And so I removed pillow from the equation. The first two weeks sucked. It really sucked. But after I got used to it, now I sleep without a pillow, no problem. And when I travel, I am the same me every day. I'm not a grouchy me because I didn't sleep well the night before. So this is a simple way I've been able to give myself a better chance of being the best me possible, of being able to access my rational mind because I had a good night's sleep.

So it's really simple things like this. It's not it's not rocket science. It's not like it really is pretty straightforward. It seems like it. And I'm sure folks wouldn't equate it to ancient theories, philosophies. I love the phone one. We're all about that. In fact, yesterday at dinner, didn't have our phones. They were over on the counter, not on our table.

It rang. One of my sons got up. We're like, what are you doing? He's like, but it's like, just leave it. That. And I think when you're somewhere where there's, you know, nature, beauty, some experience, one that you can, you never really capture it the same on a picture anyway. So, and then also, but many people get lost looking through their phone at the thing that's right in front of them. Yep. Instead of just the thing that's right in front of them, which it's never as good. Um, no, plenty of people also thankfully have friends that,

you know, we'll call each other out if we get a little too busy checking things on the phone, like, Hey man, what are you doing? Like we're doing this or how's the internet? Is it still working?

You know, you know, just to call each other out. But I think that's, that, that would make a huge difference. And it, and it sets the example,

you know, as adults, if you're not sitting there on your phone constantly looking up every now and then to talk to your family, as opposed to you're talking to your family more so than, and then every now and then touching, you know, getting your phone, um, then your kids aren't going to emulate that practice either. So it's a good example to set for them. Yep. Absolutely. We have this, uh, no uh no um picture policy during our vacations uh kids uh myself my wife uh we don't take pictures anymore because when was the last time you actually looked back

at your pictures and enjoyed the moment never no one ever looks through their pictures and goes wow that was a good moment no the only time we access pictures is to show somebody else, hey, look what I did. Right? It's the social media devil. It's just, you know, stop worrying about what other people think and other people want. Stop worrying about how to conserve this moment and start focusing on, let me enjoy this moment. Let me be in this moment. Yeah, I definitely like that i do i looked at some

i have a three boys one of middle ones 10 and we watched a video of him when he was little like two or three kind of talking about the horses at my my wife's farm and stuff so looking back at some of those is neat nostalgic but you're right it's it's the memory that i already have in me that gives me the value um i've definitely been sucked into the, you know, uh, sharing things and stuff like that. But yeah, there's, there's a huge value in disconnecting from that when you're, especially on a trip purposely where you're trying to disconnect on vacation as opposed to just staying connected and just being somewhere else. You know, it's a, it's a, I think a great, a great thing. And, you to your journals and your posts, you have a podcast, Stoicism for

a Better Life, right? And so where you share this kind of information, but in short bites, and was that kind of a natural evolution? And did you start doing that before you were an author or around the same time? Was it kind of a package deal? How'd you get into that? That came much later, actually. First, I started writing the books. First, I wrote the book. And then I started writing the articles. And then I wrote the book series and started the podcast at the same time because through the articles, I recognized a real appetite for this stuff. And the podcast is actually the same thing as the articles it's just a different medium and some people prefer you know listening to exercises some people prefer reading them but it's all the same content essentially in fact i pull my podcast

content from my articles um it's all short every episode is one way in which you could be more virtuous more stoic uh and and be more present in the moment uh simple stuff one thing you can do and and the reason i think the podcast and the podcast is the most popular thing right now um the reason i think it resonates with people is it's a very simple thing. They listen to one episode and they do it for as long as they want. Then they go to the next one. Whereas with the weekly articles, every week there's a new one. Somebody might not have, maybe they haven't applied it yet enough and they're not ready for the next lesson or whatever.

So with a podcast, they're able to go more at their own speed um plus you know you get to hear this awesome voice talking into your ear for a few minutes so that's cool yeah i was gonna say i listened this week it's very soothing that the cool intro music and and that's something as a podcast you're like all right what how what music am i gonna get how am i gonna you know make this kind of hook in the beginning and make it sound cool it it really does sound great. Um, and to your point, it's very consumable, especially now, which for the podcasters listening is practical. Cause what we've lost is the commute times, right? Short of some people that are commuting now,

which is not near as many as there were, you know, nine months ago. Yeah. Uh, which was a, you know, a target kind of thing like oh the sweet spots this time that's commute time or whatever else so um you know when someone can they're sitting there working or walking around or whatever um it's both the content is great and then yeah the timing that the length of them is is super helpful so folks can catch that in a short amount of time so whether they have a short commute or not. And that's on all the platforms, all the typical podcast platforms out there, right? Yes, it is.

And actually, this is the first time I'm going to mention this, but we just launched a website three days ago. Stoicismforabetterlife.com. Nice. So you can access them, all the articles, all the podcasts, everything is free. I'm just trying to get the information out there for people. You can go

check them out there. And yeah, this is the first time I'm announcing the website. Awesome. Well, thanks for the exclusive. For sure, I'll get the exclusive here. That's awesome. And so do you have links for your books through the website too that go to Amazon or wherever those are sold? It's kind of a one-stop shop. If they go to the stoicismforabetterlife.com, can they get

to you and to all your products and great content? Yeah, you have all my contact info. You can email me directly. You can find me on social media i have all my uh uh twitter instagram facebook i'm even on tiktok now because of my daughter or thanks to my daughter uh i i am very much open to uh helping anyone who who has questions i'll be very transparent since the beginning of this pandemic i've kind of been overwhelmed i'm being contacted a lot more than i can handle but i do get back to everybody sometimes it just takes a few days um and all the content all the articles all the podcasts links to the books uh on stoicism for a better life.com uh although the links to the books i just put the amazon links but you can find them at your local shops your barnes and nobles, your Kobo, Google, wherever you look.

Very nice. What, yeah, so folks, check them out. Like I say, I've listened to it. I've read the free pages on Amazon. The content's great. The readability is great. So it's not, because I also did get some of Marcus Aurelius's content and depending on the what you get some of it's kind of tough to read some of it you just got to be in the mindset um but the way that you present the the content and particularly speak to it in the podcast and i think too that's one thing a great practical thing that you do is is you're making the content kind of evergreen via the podcast you know and i guess the content's kind of evergreen because it's what, two or 3000 years old as far as the core of it, right. Which is, I don't know how much more evergreen you get than that. Um, but that's, that's pretty fantastic. Um, so what do

you want to leave folks with? Uh, you know, this show is called people process and progress. I think we've talked about some process stuff for sure. and some ways to make progress how how do you and then by you know by way of some some stoic philosophies think others can make make progress through your materials or reaching out to you or just stoicism in general well look people in process fall into progress if you want to progress in life, let me ask you and leave them with this thought. Are you living the life you want to live? Have you thought about what you want to do in this time that you have? Have you consciously and conscientiously identified what it is you want to do in life? Or are you just following something that everybody

else is doing answer that question and you'll find a lot more tranquility that's awesome i just wrote that down so i can use it when i post this episode that's fantastic and and so true and and you know it's it's one of the amazing things to be about one and what you've shared and then stoicism is the, it is pretty straightforward, but some stuff that's straightforward is hard to get to eventually. I feel like, you know, come around and you go, oh, yeah, and then it can really, you know, get your mind going. But I know for me, this has been super educational. I know for everybody listening, you know, so stoicismforabetterlife.com, right?

And through there, they can reach you on all those social media connections everywhere. And you're on Facebook, Instagram, and a website. Yep. Everything on stoicismforabetterlife.com. That's awesome.

Anderson, thanks so much. I'm glad we connected, you know, share a little bit over an hour, hour and 25 minutes of content. So hopefully I know folks listening will benefit from it. I know I have, and I'll look forward to reading, reading more and listening to more and

I'm sure we'll stay in touch. Thank you so much for your time. All right. Thank you, Kevin. I hope to do it again sometime. Absolutely. Take care.