TRIGGERnometry - Stoicism: Get Better at Life with Massimo Pigliucci

Episode Date: December 19, 2022

SPONSORED BY: easyDNS - domain name registrar provider and web host. Use special code: TRIGGERED for 50% off when you visit https://easydns.com/triggered/ Massimo Pigliucci is Professor of Philosophy at the City College of New York. He has a doctorate in genetics from the University of Ferrara, Italy, a PhD in biology from the University of Connecticut, and a PhD in philosophy of science from the University of Tennessee. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Music by: Xentric | [e-mail] | https://www.xentricapc.com/ | Channel ID: UCo_8zzSxKeL3arKWVuP8wdQ Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod​​​/ https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. 00:00 Intro  04:46 What is Stoicism? 11:15 How to Become Wise 24:24 The Need for Philosophy to be Taught More 29:02 Why is There a Lack of Stoic Values in the World Today? 33:45 Does Human Tribal Instinct Outweigh Virtue? 40:41 The Difference Between Sympathy & Empathy 51:19 How to Learn From Past Civilisations’ Mistakes 1:04:37 What's the One Thing We’re Not Talking About? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The problem with empathy is that it's easily manipulated. Because it is mostly an emotional response, you can easily fool yourself that you're actually in somebody else's shoes. Well, in fact, you're not. So sympathy means that you are trying to be helpful to other people. You're trying to understand how other people might be going through, let's say, a tough time and how you might be helpful. but at the same time, you realize you're not them. You're not in that situation. The case of social media, it turns out,

they're not neutral platforms. It's not just a matter of how you use it. It's something structurally built into the system that biases behaviors of many people, not everybody necessarily, but in a lot of people, in a direction that I think it's destructive. And so my response was, I'm done. I'm out of it.

It is the rise of social media that has made Trump possible, but also has made the outrage culture possible, the easily offended culture possible, etc., etc. I mean, you know, I don't know whether social media is the beginning or the end of civilization. I certainly hope not. But it is a problem, and we really ought to fight back against it. Hello, and welcome to Trigonometry.

I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kisholm. And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations, with fascinating people. Our brilliant guest today is a professor of philosophy at the City College of New York. He also has a PhD in evolutionary biology and he's the author of 16 books.

Massimo Piucci, welcome to Trigonometry. Thanks. It's a pleasure to be here. It's really great to have you on the show. We're going to get into all the philosophy, the stoicism, how to live a good life, all that great stuff in a second. Before that, just tell everybody who are you, how are you where you are,

what has been the journey through life that leads you to be sitting here talking to us. Oh, sure. That's a short question. Let's see. I am a professor of philosophy of science, actually, at the City College of New York. But before that, I was an evolutionary biologist for about 20 years. And how I got here, it's a complicated journey that started in West Africa, where I was born, moved to Rome, where I grew up, and then eventually over to the United States for my biology career, and then finally in the New York area as a philosopher. I was just about to say you look very African. Welcome to the show. It's really great to have you on, and one of the fascinating things about you is you combine evolutionary biology, and we've had a number of evolutionary biologists on the show, with the philosophy, which seems to me actually very complementary skill sets.

Is that fair to say? I think that's fair. One of the advantages that I have in this field is that I'm one of those rare philosophers who have actually been. scientists and actually have been in the lab and doing experiments, have practical experience, you know, hands-on experience of how you actually do science. And at the same time, I'm one of those scientists, rare in my experience scientists who actually have the luxury of stepping back and looking at things from a broader perspective and

say, oh, okay, so this is what we're doing and why we're doing it. Fantastic. So you were an evolutionary biologist. You segued into philosophy. Very quickly, how does that affect the way that you approach philosophy, the way that you approach your practice, the fact that you are an evolutionally biologist? Does that influence you in any shape or form? Yeah, better, I think. The whole notion of science in general, of biology in particular, is that whatever you're interested in, let's say, in this particular case I've been spending the last few years, as you know, in sort of what they call practical philosophy.

Yeah, but it helps having some understanding of how the world actually works, because after all, we're trying to navigate the world as it is, not as we would like it to be or as it would be in an idealized form. So, yes, having an understanding, particularly of biology, because it helps you position human beings as a species in a broader context, having an understanding of where we came from, more or less, and what we are all about. So that certainly is going to give perspective even when it comes to tackling everyday problems. Like, oh, I have this urge. Maybe that's because, and then you tell yourself a story that makes more sense of what's happening to you. And that leads us very neatly into stoicism and the beliefs around stoicism. So as somebody who has never studied philosophy and who is an absolute layman, as will be most of our viewers and listeners, what is stoicism? Stoism is an ancient Greco-Roman philosophy that has the goal of helping us to find a happy life.

In some respects, I think of it as the Western equivalent of Buddhism. And in fact, there are a lot of similarities between the two approaches in terms of ethics, that is, in terms of how to lead your life. They're very different in terms of their metaphysics, that is, in terms of how they see how the world works. But fundamentally, stoicism is about giving you a confidence. a mortal compass to navigate your life in the best possible way. And that compass is based on four cardinal virtues.

Virtues are character traits, their behavioral tendencies or dispositions. And there is a number of them that have been named and studied over the millennia, literally, both in the Western traditions and in Eastern traditions. But the Stoics focus on four. Practical wisdom, courage, justice, and temperance. practical wisdom is the knowledge of what is good and what is not good, which you think is fundamental. If you don't have an idea of what you should be pursuing and what you should be staying away from, then you're really in trouble.

Nothing else really matters. Once you settle that one, and we might talk about a little bit more about how the Stoics actually settled that one, then the other three come in. And as I said, they are courage. Courage is the notion that you want to do things that are the right things, even though it might costume at a personal level. Justice is the notion that you should be treating other people fairly with respect just in the way which you would want to be treated.

And temperance is the idea that you need to do things in right measure, neither too much nor too little. And so as a stoic, you constantly ask yourself, okay, am I, is what am I thinking of doing here or my course of action? Does it fit the four cardinal virtues? If the answer is yes, you do it. If the answer is no, you don't. And as an evolutionary biologist, one of the things you'll be very familiar with is the fact that people evolved to act in the way that they act quite often.

And how does any philosophy really, but particularly this one, which seems quite intellectual, reckon with the fact that human beings, you know, we've had Dr. Robert Plurman on the show, talked about how much of our behavior is genetically predefined. How does one reckon with the fact that quite often you have a genetic predisposition to do on that? not do certain things that may or may not be practically wise, courageous, just, and temperate? Well, there's two responses there. First of all, actually, my area of interest in biology was gene environment interactions, that is nature and nurture. And I am always skeptical of any claim of this human behavior is largely genetically determined or is not largely determined. We really don't know, because most of the times we can't do the proper experiments in order to actually

figure out how genes and environments interact, you will need to start out with a specific breeding program so that you get a set of offspring that are obtained in a certain way, then you have to be able to grow those offspring under contrasting environments in a control condition. You can't do anything like that in human beings, both for practical reasons. We have a long lifespan, so it would take 25 years at least in that experiment. And also, more importantly, perhaps, for ethical reasons. You know, you can't, you know, keep just going out and breeding people in the way you like them and then growing them under control conditions. So we do know something about gene-en-von-earned interactions in human beings, but nowhere near as much as we would want to, which means that as far as

these kind of practical discussions are concerned, I think we should be agnostic. We really don't know how much any specific behavior is, in fact, genetically influenced or not. That said, no matter what the behavior here is, there is pretty good evidence in animal studies in general that almost any behavior, especially in complex animals like mammals, is subject to even when it is, when there is indication that there is a strong genetic component, is still subject to plasticity, what it's called plasticity, that is flexibility. It can still be altered within certain range, of course. I mean, we can start flying all of a sudden. We're not, we're not genetically. capable of flying, so we're not going to do that. So the focus for these discussions in terms of

practical philosophy should really be on, well, can we in fact alter our character? Can we in fact alter our behavioral dispositions and to what extent? And the answer is to the first question is clearly yes, there's plenty of evidence from cognitive science that yes, we can alter, even though we certainly do have dispositions. We can alter them. We can work on them consciously. We One of the things, the interesting things about human beings is that unlike as far as we can tell most other animal species, we can actually reflect critically on our own behavior and say, no, this is not acceptable. I'm not going to do it. We all have, for instance, a very strong instant for survival, which is certainly natural and certainly genetically determined. I don't think there is much of a question about it. We share it with pretty much every other animal species. And yet, we can sacrifice willingly our life if we think that there is a good enough reason

or at least put ourselves in potentially mortal danger if we think that there is enough of a good reason. So we can act, I think, in a certain respects in a way that overrides our genetic instance. I still remember even a fairly strong evolutionary psychologist like Stephen Pinker years ago, he wrote that, you know, he made a decision in his life not to have children and instead to devote himself to science and writing. And his comment was, and if my genes don't like it, they can go jump into the lake. So if a strong evolutionary psychologist like Stephen can say that, I think we're on good grounds. We're okay. Maybe he doesn't like kids, though. No, could be as simple as that. But Massimo, so that being the case,

we've established that to some extent we are in control of our own behavior and our choice. practical wisdom strikes me as fundamental to all human life, really. So how do you become practically wise? Practice, practice, practice. So it turns out that this discussion about, you know, can you teach virtue, can you learn virtue to be more virtuous? It's been going on for literally two and a half millennia. It was studied by Socrates back in Athens in the 5th century BC.

And the general emerging answer is that wisdom or virtue is a practical skill, like what the Greeks call the technique. So it's similar to, let's say, learning a language or learning how to play a musical instrument. Now, how do you learn to play a musical instrument? You need, ideally, three components other than the instrument itself. Number one, you need a little bit of theory. You want to know something about notation. musical mutations and how the notes relate to each other, because otherwise you kind of

going blind. You have no idea what you're doing. You also want a good teacher, if you can get a hold of one, because the teacher cannot obviously learn the thing for you, but it can point to places where you might improve, places where you're making mistakes, that sort of stuff. And then mostly you do practice, practice, practice, every day. Those little simple scales first and the more complex scales after, and then simple tunes, more complex tunes, etc. It's the same, arguably, with virtue. This has been something that's pretty much been settled since Aristotle, and there is modern evidence from modern cognitive science that this is a good way to think about it.

So what do you want? You want the theory. For instance, the practical, the four cardinal virtues that I mentioned earlier are part of a theory. If you subscribe to a philosophy like stoicism or variations thereof, then you think, okay, that's a good way to think about it. in general. Ideally, you need a good teacher. I don't see a lot of Socrates around, unfortunately,

but there are people that can help you simply because they're more advanced than you are. They have been practicing for longer than you are. In the case of Stoicism, for instance, there are large online communities and a number of smaller in-person communities scattered throughout the world where you can show up and say, hey, I need some help for the practice. But mostly, it is a matter of practice. we all understand how to practice a musical instrument or a language.

It's a little bit more counterintuitive to say, yeah, but how do I practice virtue exactly? And so let me give you a couple of examples. Let's say that you figured that you need to improve your temperance, for instance, right? Your self-control. Then one simple way to do that is to be mindful about a number of situations where you know from experience that you have trouble in terms of temperance. For instance, every time you sit at the dinner table, you know, you eat too much or you drink too much or you have a tendency to go overboard and things.

Well, if you do it in a mindful way, in other words, before you sit down to dinner, you remind yourself, sometimes in writing, actually, of, okay, here's what I want to do tonight. Here's how I'm going to handle the situation. For instance, let's say you're going out to a restaurant with friends. So there is the chances that you're going to be pushed into, you know, by social, by social, conventions to eat more and drink more. You can tell yourself, you can set yourself rules. You can say, okay, whatever the waiter is going to put on my plate, I'm going to eat half of that.

And I'm going to stop at two glasses of wine or something like that. Once you do that, then you basically, it becomes a challenge with yourself. You basically keep scores. You kind of gamify the situation. And there is very good evidence, again, from modern science, that this actually works. if you go ahead in a situation like this, mindfully, so knowing what might happen and having decided ahead of time how to behave,

your chances of actually behaving in a temperate fashion are much higher than there would have been otherwise. Or let's say that you say, well, you know, I realize that I'm not really generous enough. Generosity is something I need to work on. Okay. Well, then you can come up with an exercise, let's say once a week or twice a week,

where you do something like before leaving your house, you put some pocket, you know, changing your pockets, and then you give it to the first homeless person that you encounter, no questions asked. Now initially, this is going to look a little awkward. Like, really, do I need to go to dinner and write down ahead of time what I'm going to eat or do I really need to do this thing about the homeless?

But with time, it becomes habit. It's like, as I said, learning a musical instrument. Initially, you have to pay attention. to every single move of your fingers, let's say on an alto sacks, which is something that I try to master. But eventually, you get, you see your fingers just going on their own. You know, you don't have to actually think about it explicitly, consciously. They'll just do it. And that's the same idea with altering your behavior. Initially, it takes mindful attention, but then eventually it becomes automatic. Well, does that make sense? Sorry, Fras, just want to finish this point. They make sense

in terms of temperance and generosity and many other traits that you can practice. And it's something I've focused on a lot in my life and forced myself to behave in different ways and build healthier patterns and so on. I totally get that. But the reason I asked you about practical wisdom is that that to me seems quite different because that when I look around at the world and I look at my own behavior at certain points, I think that is a much harder skill to gamify. it is a much harder skill to learn consciously because you don't know that you're making mistakes

sometimes and you certainly don't know at the time quite often. And especially, you know, one of the things I hear out of what you're saying is the importance of being present because if you're not present, you won't even notice, A, that you are overeating or making a bad decision or whatever. But also if you're not present, then life sort of happens to you and you never go, well, what was the decision that brought me to the point that I'm at now that I can actually learn from and not be as stupid next time in terms of the bad decision that I've made? So how do you how do you gamify and how do you practice practical wisdom? That's the interesting thing to me. Yeah, that's very

good point. The thing about paying attention is, for instance, something that the second century historic philosophy, Fred Epictetus really emphasizes. He says, nothing ever got done better by not paying attention. If you get distracted from something, you're not going to do it better. But yes, the question about practical wisdom is a good one. There is a fundamental technique in stoicism that is also adopted by modern kind of behavioral therapists. And the Stoics referred to it as philosophical journaling. The CBT practitioner is probably used some other term for it, but it's the same basic idea. So this is a notion that goes back at least 2,000 years. a good example of it is Marcus Aurelius' Meditations.

Marcus Surrealus was a Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher. And he wrote this book, The Meditations, which is essentially a personal diary. It's a philosophical diary where he asks himself, keeps track of his progress. He asks himself what you should do and so on. In fact, it was not meant for publication. It was his personal thing. Then eventually somebody got hold of it and published it. So here's the basic idea.

There's many, there's different ways of doing philosophical journaling, but the one that is most common, arguably, is this. Every night before going to bed, you take about five or ten minutes, get yourself into an area of your house that is quiet. If you live with somebody else, you know, ask for five or ten minutes of peace, and open up your laptop, your tablet, or, you know, Zeus forbid your actual diary and where you're going to write in handwriting. And then for the day, think about anything that happened

that might have been problematic, the body being ethically salient, where you might have made a mistake or you might have done better, et cetera, and ask yourself three questions and answered them in writing. One, what did I do wrong? Two, what did I do right? Three, what could I do better if something like this,

happens again. Here's the point. Asking yourself why, what you did that was wrong, it's not about, you know, self-flagellation and regret and all that because the Stoics think that, you know, whatever you did, it's in the past. You cannot change it. It's out of your control. So it's like, it's done. But you do want to learn from your mistakes. And writing down, thinking, reflecting critically about your mistakes and running them down helps fixing them literally on paper and in your mind. It's like, okay, I need to pay attention to this. You also want, conversely, to write about what you did right.

Why? Because now you've established two points of reference. What you want to get away from, your mistakes, and what you're going to work toward more, the stuff that actually you've done right. And then the third question in my mind is the most crucial one, actually. What is it that I could do better the next time around if something like this happens.

You know, we tend to think of our lives, or perhaps some people think of their lives as incredibly varied. Oh, you know, the same thing is never going to happen again. But in fact, you know, we pretty much get up in the morning during the week and go to work and see the same people and do the same things and then come home and see them the same people and do the same things. And then during the weekend we see friends, et cetera, et cetera. Our lives actually far more stable typically than we might necessarily think.

So the notion is that, therefore, whatever situation you made a mistake in today, let's say one of your colleagues did something, you got really upset, you got angry in a disproportionate fashion, you overreacted or something like, or your partner. How did you know? Yeah, exactly. Or your partner or your children, you know, whatever it is, that's likely going to happen again. And so what you're writing your diary is, okay, here was the situation.

Now, let me think, the next time around, I'm going to be better prepared because I know the symptoms, know what's coming. I have an idea of what might happen and therefore I know how I need to react. That doesn't mean that you're going to be doing it perfectly the second time around, but you are going to be, again, it's about paying attention, it's about mindfulness in that sense. And so there is actually fairly good evidence, again, from cognitive behavioral therapy and similar approaches to psychotherapy. That this thing really does work over. But of course, you have to do it regularly. I do it every night, every night, but at least several times. times a week and you have to do it over a prolonged period of time. It's just, it's like going to the

gym. You don't just go there, look around in the machines and wait to pick up a couple and then say, okay, I'm done. I'm ready for the Olympics, right? It doesn't work that way. Hey, Francis, do you like locals? I live in London, mate. So obviously not. The only pleasure I get from the locals is when we share an intimate moment as we watch a Japanese tourist get trapped in a tube door. That is good. But I wasn't talking about their locals, I was talking about our community on locals. You mean the one where you get phenomenal behind the scenes content when you... ...that you...you space, svi, spee,

where you get to ask incredible guests like Jordan Peterson, Brett Weinstein, Bill Burr, Sam Harris, Adam Carolla, Heather Hying and others your questions? Not just that, you can get supporter-only benefits like trigonometry mugs, monthly calls with other top supporters and even a regular meal with me and Francis. You also get phenomenal behind the scenes footage of our trip to America where we met a whole host of incredible guests and gave ourselves terminal indigestion. We're also starting to do monthly giveaways for locals only.

The first one will be signed copies of Andrew Doyle's new book. Plus you get access to an incredible community of like-minded people who share me have fun conversations, and most importantly, you get to make new friends. You can support us with as little as $7 or about £5 a month, or give us more for the higher tier benefits. Go to trigonometry.com. Go to trigonometry.com and support the show. And Massimo, I've heard you talk about this on several podcasts,

and it's very interesting. And to me, I don't think it's... it's a coincidence that a lot of these great philosophers were also teachers, because these are the lessons that we should be teaching our children. And in fact, we're teaching them things that aren't going to help them in life, whereas very important skills like these, we don't teach. Oh, I couldn't agree more. It's one of the baffling things. In my latest book, The Quest for Character, I emphasize that point. There's one thing that we ought to be doing, which is teaching character and virtue to our kids, and that is the one thing that arguably we almost never do. In fact, it's so

rare that recently I've seen a documentary that was done focused on one of the exceptions to this general rule. The documentary is called Young Plato, and it's about the principal of a elementary school in Belfast in Northern Ireland, who decides that it's going to be a good thing to teach his kids, these are elementary school kids, to teach philosophy, practical philosophy. And mostly Socrates and the Stoics, although it varies a little bit. And the movie is incredible. It's a documentary. It's incredible because you can see how much practical impact that kind of teaching has on the kids. The kids experience things like bullying, for instance. And now they have to figure out how to react to it, how to handle the situation. It's Belfast. So these kids are growing up in a

culture that it's still marked in violence and, you know, religious strife and stuff like that. And so the principle sits them down and gives them a lesson in, you know, on anger management from Seneca, for instance. Of course, done at the level of understanding of, you know, of a kid of that age. But that kind of approach is so rare that in 2022, we have a movie made about it. So it's not the kind of thing. that is very common. And in my mind, I think it's really bizarre. It really ought to be the standard approach, not only in school, but at home, of course. And Massimo, it also ties into biology as well, because it's also, just like learning a language or like learning a musical instrument,

these things are so much easier to do when you're young. Exactly. In fact, again, the analogy is an apt one. Yes, you can learn a language or, musical instrument as an adult, but it takes a lot of effort, a lot of dedication, and you're not going to get likely as good as if you study as a kid. And the same goes for virtue and for behavioral modification, character modification. Yes, you can certainly work on it as an adult, but it's going to take you a long time and it's going to yield a little bit of improvement. If you start, on the other hand, with kids of elementary school level, then things are very different. And, you know, this has been known for a while. The ancient Romans talked about the age of reason, which was about seven to eight

years old, and that's when fathers and teachers started talking to their kids about virtue and character, et cetera, et cetera. During the Middle Ages and Renaissance, the Jesuits among the Catholics used to say, give me a child of seven and I will give you a man of 14. Because they realize That's the window. Now, modern science actually tells us there's some good news there, that the window is even a little longer than that. It does start around seven years old, six to seven years old. That's the time when kids begin to appreciate, you know, abstract reasoning and engage in more abstract reasoning. It's about six, seven, eight years old, depending on the kid.

But actually, that window is extended, according to modern neuroscience, until your early 20s. Because that is when your brain finally settles down, basically. and it becomes pretty much what it stays with you for the rest of your life. The human brain is still very plastic, so that's why you can keep learning and improving things. But the broad scenario is pretty much set by the early 20s, earlier in women, in girls, than in boys, which explains why boys mature later than girls, as most of us realize, if you have a daughter or a son, you'll realize that that is the case. there is a gap of about three or four years.

But that only means that you have three or four extra years to work on boys. And so, Massimo, let me ask you a provocative question. Sure. If stoicism, and I actually do think this is true, and it's something I've implemented in my own life, but if stoicism is so good and if it makes your life so much better, when I look around at the world right now, when I look at, you know, politics or culture or, you know, Francis and I both form a stand-up

comedians. I don't see a lot of stoicism going on. Instead, I see a lot of people being taught to constantly criticize and complain about things that are outside of their control, to not act in a temperate way, to not seek justice and not to seek to treat other people the way they'd want to be treated, but to punish. You know, we don't teach a lot of practice. We don't teach a lot of practical wisdom and so on and so forth. And particularly in recent years, it seems to me, you know, in politics, which we talk about a lot on both sides of the political spectrum, there is, we like to be victims a lot. It's something that we crave, actually. And we've, there are people who now make this into an identity. So how do you explain all of this?

Well, for one thing, yes, you're right. You don't see a lot of stoics these days, although you do see now many more than you would have seen 10 years ago or 15 years ago. Stoicism is definitely on the rise. And of course, stoicism, again, is not the only philosophical approach that is useful in this case. Yeah, I mean the values of stoicism rather than stoicism itself. Exactly. So, for instance, as I said before, this stoicism is very similar to Buddhism. And there is a pretty good number of Buddhist practitioners around the world.

But you're absolutely right. We find ourselves in a society where all the incentives seem to go exactly in the opposite direction. And the Stoics did notice that. I mean, the ancient Rome was actually fairly similar to our society today. Yeah, there was no Facebook or Twitter. But nevertheless, it was still a society. It was pretty much engaged into disruptive and destructive politics. It was all about how much money or stuff you had and et cetera, et cetera.

So it sounds very familiar. The Stoics, of course, blamed culture for it. Their distinction was their, their, point was that, look, naturally, we are cooperative animals. We're social animals. And so if we're talking about, of course, they didn't know anything about evolution, but a modern primatologist would agree that we have very strong pro-social instincts because our survival depends on it. That doesn't mean we're always altruistic or doesn't mean that we don't do things that are good for ourselves. Of course, we do. But broadly speaking, human beings are naturally pro-social. They're

naturally cooperative, et cetera, et cetera. That's what the Stoics meant when they said that we should live in accordance to nature, right, or in agreement with nature. We should take seriously the kind of species that human beings are, and there are, according to the Stoics, at least two fundamental characteristics that differentiate us from most other animal species. One, we're incredibly, as I said, highly social. And the other thing, of course, is we're capable of reason at a very high degree,

much higher than any other animal species. So for a stoic, to live according to nature, it means to use reason to solve your problems and to be social, pro-social, you know, cooperative. But they observed the same thing, and you just pointed out that is, yeah, but majority of people don't do that. So what happens?

And their answer was they're corrupted by the culture in which they grew up. Human beings are also very plastic in terms of behavior. We absorb whatever culture we grew up, with and therefore the problem, as we would put it today, is structural. That is, unless we've changed the structure of society, the incentives at a societal level, our value judgments, our, you know, objectives and the things that we think are good to pursue or not good, then we're going to always have an uphill battle. Now, stoicism, of course, is a personal philosophy of life, just like

Buddhism or Christianity or stuff like that. So it is meant to help those people who realize that, this is not a good thing. The kind of values that society shares are not good. So I'm going to need a different framework, a different way of thinking about it. And therefore, Stoicism is useful in that sense. But if we're talking about changing society at large, then we need structural changes. And that's a whole different conversation because structural changes are far more difficult to implement than individual ones.

There is an obvious, at least to me, and again, provocative. I hope you don't take this personally. As a stoic, I know you'll deal with it. There's an obvious flaw in that argument, which is, yes, human beings absolutely are incredibly cooperative. But if we look at the history of human beings, which is the best way to analyze how people behave, I think, then what we would conclude is human beings are incredibly cooperative while also being incredibly tribal. And most of the cooperation happens within the tribe. And a lot of the cooperation frequently happens in order to allow that tribe to defeat another tribe or allow that tribe to get more resources than another tribe. So isn't the problem with all of this that actually

human beings are driven also by the tribal instinct, which doesn't really get taken into account by these great virtues? You're absolutely right, except for the very last part. Again, the Stoics were very aware of this. I mean, they lived, you know, Stoises started in ancient Greece in Athens around, you know, the fourth century, the end of the fourth century BC. And at the time, the Greek cities were always warning against each other, right? So Athens versus Sparta versus Cornynth versus this versus the other. So they were very aware of these notion that people are prone to cooperate and to help each other within group, but on the other hand, they're just as equally prone to, you know,

beat the crap out of other groups. That is why the stoic notion is that nature gives us, as they put it, the beginnings of wisdom. In other words, it provides us with a basic pro-social instinct. But by nature, we apply that instinct. And in fact, there is an interesting passage in Cicero where he summarizes the stoic argument. He says that by nature, we apply this instinct of cooperation to our caretakers, you know, our parents, typically, our siblings.

And then eventually we start expanding it to our friends. And then eventually we expand it to our acquaintances and to people that live with us in our general community. And the stoic point is that's what nature gives you. That's where nature stops. Then reason comes in and says, yeah, but wait a minute, the people that live in Sparta are not different from me. The people that live on the other side of the planet are not different from me.

I ought to strive to expand further those circles of concerns. This is a notion that modern Uttitarians also subscribe to, like Peter Singer, for instance. He has this idea of the expanding circles of concerns. But interestingly, the first time that we know in Western history, that that image of expanding circles of concern so that the largest circle is humanity itself, the first time we find that, that image is in Ahierocles, who was a second century stoic philosopher. So, yeah, these people have been thinking about it, but they also realized that the idea of what they call cosmopolitanism, the notion that we should be thinking of humanity as a big family,

where we're all brothers and sisters or whatever other gender you subscribe to, it's difficult. It doesn't come natural. It needs a combination of your natural instinct, which then is expanded. on the basis of reason. Now, question is, is this possible? I think it is. And I'll give you one argument for it. Massama, may I interrupt before you give me that?

I'm just, sorry, Francis, I just want to kind of get to the bottom of this. But if I, I don't know if it's a troop of chimps or whatever the word is, a group of chimps, a tribe of chimps, whatever, lives on a certain piece of land and another tribe of chimps shows up. I imagine they don't go, you know, let's embrace each other as friends and brothers. they go to war, right? So nature also gives us that too, doesn't it? And so it's not a culture that makes us tribal and competitive and warlike and willing to kill each other.

It's also our nature. Wouldn't that be true? To an extent. It's certainly true from chimps, who, however, are, of course, different from human beings because they don't actually think about what they're doing. They go by instinctively. But here's what I was going. You're absolutely right.

But there is an important point here. What is the tribe? We tend to think of a tribe today as a fairly large group. My tribe is New York City. I'm naturally more sympathetic to people in New York than to people outside of New York. Or my tribe could be the United States. That's a large tribe. It's 350 million people, right?

There is the World Cup is going on right now. And, you know, we all go USA. What does that mean? That's a very large tribe. That's not the evolutionary tribe. During most of our evolutionary history, our tribe was about 60, 80, 100 people at most. And we're all relatives. Most of them were relatives, cousins, aunts, uncles, stuff like that.

So our instincts are not actually tailored for things like cities or nations or anything like that. They're tailored for a very, very small group of mostly relatives. That is what nature gives us. So by culture, we've already expanded the tribe dramatically. Now we're talking about tribes of millions or hundreds of millions of people. So we're already on the trajectory, the Stoics would argue, toward cosmopolitanism. All we need to do is to go from hundreds of millions to a few billions, and then you're good. You're set.

That's going to be difficult. I'm not suggesting that it's going to be something that happens tomorrow. But what I'm saying is actually the historical trajectory seems to be going in that. direction. Our tribes are getting larger and larger and larger. Eventually, we might spill over onto other planets. And then I guarantee you, as soon as we start colonizing, let's say, Mars, we're going to have the Earthlings versus the Martians. And, you know, that's going to be another tribe. But at that point, it's a planetary tribe, right? And so on. The process can keep going. So I think that that is a very good objection, but it's already something that actually has been

happening, our culture has started to take over or to redirect our instincts about 12,000 years ago with the agricultural revolution. Once we started, we invented agriculture, we started settling down and creating large settlements, much larger than the typical group of or band that was featured during the place the scene. That's when our culture started messing around with our biology, and then the notion is, okay, we want to realign the two as much as possible. And Massimo, you talk a lot about sympathy and empathy. Let's have a look at that. The differences between sympathy and empathy

and why the Stoics actually had far more sympathy, should we say, for one particular value than another. Yeah. So part of the problem with sympathy and empathy is that actually there are different and sometimes contrasting definitions of the two terms. But for the purposes of this discussion, let's define them this way, if you don't mind. Empathy is the idea that you want to somehow put yourself in the shoes, in somebody else's shoes.

You want to try to feel what that other person is feeling. You want to try to, so it's an emotional response. Sympathy, on the other hand, it's a little bit more, it also has to do with emotions, but it's a little bit more intellectual because it's the notion that, well, I might not be able to put myself in another person's shoes, but I am a human being. He or she is a human being, so I can imagine that she might not feel okay with this or she might feel, you know, angry or something like that. So sympathy is a little bit more detached, but also broader than empathy. The Stoics are certainly about cultivating sympathy, but they're wary of empathy. empathy. And some modern psychologists are as well. There was an interesting book that came out a few years ago called

against, literally against empathy by Paul Bloom, who is a psychologist at Yale University. And why, why would you be against empathy? Empity, you cannot avoid empathy. And it's a basic natural human instinct. And in fact, arguably, you don't want to eliminate it because otherwise you turn us into a bunch of psychopaths. And that's not what we want. But the problem with empathy is, is that it's easily manipulated. Because it's mostly an emotional response, you can easily fool yourself that you're actually in somebody else's shoes.

Well, in fact, you're not, and it even pretentious for you to think that you might be because they have very different experiences. And also, it's very easy to manipulate externally. For instance, I don't know if you remember, but the first Iraq, when the first Iraq war was about start, one of the things that happened was that we were bombarded with news of the Iraqi soldiers

going into hospitals and throwing babies out of incubators on the floor and stuff like that. And we all felt empathy for that situation. In fact, we felt outrage for that situation. To bad, it was entirely made up. It was a, you know, a completely fake news before fake news was a thing. So it's easy to manipulate somebody emotion. The idea with sympathy on the other hand is that your cognition kicks in. The stoic model is that emotions and cognition and reason are not separate. They are two aspects of the same thing. They are very deeply interconnected so that you can talk to your emotions in a sense and reason with your emotions, come to terms with your emotions. So sympathy means that you are trying to be.

helpful to other people. You're trying to understand how other people might be going through, let's say, a tough time and how you might be helpful. But at the same time, you realize you're not them. You're not in that situation. And that puts you in a different, you know, different, from a different standpoint. You're looking at things from a different standpoint. So yeah, the Stoics were very wary of emotional responses or motion-driven responses, especially anger or fear or things like that. But they were, on the other hand, very much into practicing sympathy, because practicing sympathy is precisely what it allows you to expand those circles of concern that we were talking about earlier. I cannot be empathetic with 8 billion people. It's just not

humanly possible. But I can sympathize with, let's say, hundreds of thousands of people who might be going through the results of, you know, dealing with the results of a flood on the other side of world or something like that. And therefore, I can help, I can do my part, I can send money, let's say, to some organization that it's helpful out of sympathy, but not empathy. It's not my experience. I'm never being exposed to a flood. I'm not on the other side of the world. It's just not, it's pretentious. It would be pretentious of me to say, oh yeah, I empathize with people in Bangladesh. It's like, I don't know anything about people in Bangladesh, other than there people. And that's enough to trigger my sympathy.

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Yeah, that's right. We're hiring two professional comedians. When we make our ads funny and engaging to the point where some people say the ads are their favorite parts of the show. Yeah, we probably shouldn't admit that, mate. All you need to do is contact us on Marketing at Triggerpod.com.uk. That's marketing at Triggerpod.com.com.com. Advertise with us and we'll get your business cancelled. And Massimo, do you think that at the moment we have a society that is too empathetic? Where we essentially, we allow our feelings to override our logic and our reasoning.

That makes us less stoical. And that therefore means that we make ourselves, vulnerable to be manipulated by certain people seeking victim status forever, for instance, as a way to raise their status. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. On this one, I'm with Paul Bloom than I mentioned before. That's exactly the argument that it makes against empathy. Yes, I think one of the negative turning point of contemporary civilization, for instance,

was Facebook's invention of the inquiry button, which was not by chance at all. was the result of careful research into what is it that can maximize the number of hits on a particular page so that I can maximize my revenues from advertisements. And Facebook researchers discovered that the angry button got eight times more responses than a like button. People like to be angry. People really fall for that sort of stuff. And now that is an interesting example of structural change. You know, because the introduction of that button, as I said, was not random.

It was very much on purpose. And it was on purpose to, of course, pursue the goals of the corporation that is behind Facebook, not to be helpful to humanity in general or to be helpful even to the individual user. So that is one example of how structural changes can hijack natural tendencies and bring us in a direction that we don't necessarily want to go. Now, how would you react to that? Well, I tell you how I reacted to that. I quit Facebook.

So, because I used to think, naively, as it turns out, that, you know, technologies are neutral. It depends on how you use them. You can, you know, nuclear energy. Yes, you can certainly build atomic bombs, but you can also, you know, power entire cities out as a result of it. So it's neutral. It depends on how you use it. That is true for some technologies.

But it's definitely not the case for other technologies. Right. And the case of social media, it turns out, it's definitely not the case. They're not neutral platforms. It's not just a matter of how you use it. It's there's something structurally built into the system that biases behaviors of many people, not everybody necessarily, but a lot of people in a direction that I think it's destructive. And so my response was, I'm done. I'm out of it.

And you must have experienced this as well, being a university professor on campus, where you see empathy in inverted commas getting weaponized. Empathy is a means to shut down somebody who disagrees with you. Empathy being used as a way to like, well, I don't want you to say this because this is offensive. This could harm this particular person. I mean, that's another aspect of this, isn't it? It is. I have not honestly seen that much of that particular phenomenon. on the campus at City College.

But yes, I've heard from colleagues who certainly have experiences, something like that. And I'm wary of a lot of terms that have become very popular recently, such as safe spaces and, you know, oh, that's hurtful and so on and so forth. Well, there are situations where a safe space is, in fact, a good idea,

meaning a space where somebody knows that they are not going to be physically assaulted, for instance. That's definitely a good use of a safe space. But on a university campus, by safe space, you mean a space where you can present your opinions but not subject to criticism. That seems to me to run exactly counter the whole point of a university. Well said. Right? I mean, some time ago I read one of my favorite writers from two or three decades ago was with Neil Postman, who was a professor at Columbia University.

And you wrote a great book called Teaching as a Subversive Activity. And his point was that if you don't make your students uncomfortable at least several times during the semester, you're just not doing your job. You're not doing the right thing. And so, yeah, I don't, I really not concerned with making my students uncomfortable. And they know it. I tell them in the beginning of the semester, it's like, you know, this is a philosophy class. The point of it is to make you think about stuff that you don't want to think about. And moving on to the idea of leadership, a lot of start.

was focused on producing good leaders. Now, there's a particular example that you talk about where it didn't produce a good leader. I can't remember I can't actually pronounce the name of the person, but I'm sure you'll be able to explain who he was. So how do we get better leaders and how do we learn from the mistakes of the civilizations in the past and the empires that have crumbled? Yeah, that's a good question. So in the quest for character, I have two chapters where I go through two different sets of examples. One group is philosophers trying to teach leaders and statesmen about virtue and good behavior, so to speak. And those are almost invariably a failure.

Almost invariably. Plato tried twice with two different statesmen in Syracuse, Dionysus the first and Dionysus the second, and he almost lost his life in both cases. It didn't work. And Janica tried with the Roman Emperor Niro, failure, complete failure. I mean, that was a pretty significant failure, Massim. Definitely. Now, Aristotle did much better with Alexander the Great.

As it turns out, I tell the story in some detail in the book. That was actually one of the success stories. But by large, when philosophers try to come into politics and tell politicians how to do things, it's a disaster. The second group, however, is much better. These are statesmen themselves, politicians themselves, who realize they want to do the right thing, and therefore they ask the advice and the support of philosophers. We have Marcus Aurelius, for instance,

who had, you know, Junius Rusticus, who was a stoic teacher, who influenced him very much. We have Plato succeeded on a third attempt with his student, Dion, who in turn did become a leader in Syracuse and worked out much better. But that's because Dion sought Plato, not the other way around. Cato the Younger, who was a Roman senator during the period of the Republic, that also worked very well.

And Seneca himself, for one thing, because he was also a senator. So what do these examples tell you that you can teach virtue to somebody, but you cannot learn it for that person, which frankly doesn't come as a surprise to any teacher. I mean, you know, when I occasionally get pissed off in my students because I think they're not doing, you know, making enough of an effort, that's exactly what I tell them. I can teach you guys, but I cannot learn for you. You have to make the effort. It's again, going back to the analogy that we were making in the beginning of, you know, learning a musical instrument. You can have the best musical teacher in the world. But if you don't practice every day and if you don't want to practice every

day in a mindful fashion, you're not going anywhere and you're certainly not going to Carnegie Hall. So that's what we need. Now, therefore, what do we do in terms of our leaders? Well, I think we do two things. First, we get rid of most of the current leaders because most of the current leaders are simply not interested in virtual character and stuff like that. They have their own agenda and they're pursuing in ways that are, I think, largely destructive for the rest of us. Now, Now, you said, but that's a tall order. It is. But if we're talking about a more or less democratic society like most Western countries are,

let's not forget. The buck does stop with us. We are the people that elect those people. It's very easy and even satisfying to complain about the politicians, right? It's like politicians are like Congress in the United States has a rating, a favorable rating that is barely above that of rapists as a class. So it's like, you know, it's an approval rate of like 10% or something like that. Because it's very easy to complain about politicians.

But who the hell voted these people in there in the first place? And I understand the things are not that easy because there are, again, there are two structural problems. There's especially in American politics, there's a lot of money that comes from large corporations. Basically, a lot of our politicians are simply bought by large corporations. So it's complicated. But ultimately, we are the ones that cast the vote. And so it's our own damn fault. So before starting complaining about the politician, ask yourself, well, who did you vote for last time around? So that's step number one, getting rid of the people that are there now. Step number two is the long-term one. And that's the one that I was talking about earlier when I mentioned the documentary Young Plato. We need to work on our children. We're not going to get a new generation of people who want to act on behalf of society. and do the right thing.

If we don't teach our children, if we don't bother teaching our children, if we put our children in front of an iPad so that we don't have to bother, you know, being concerned with them. I see a lot of parents here in Brooklyn, New York, going around with their children, allegedly they're having their time with their children.

But in fact, what happens is that the parent is on a cell phone and the child is doing something else. There's no interaction. There is no coming together at all because we're all busy doing. other things, most of those things being completely relevant anyway. So those are the two things we need to change. We need to think much more carefully about who we elect, especially at a local level. Because, you know, I understand the national election. My vote in a national election

counts for close to nothing, especially in New York, where there is such a majority of, in this particular case, democratic voters that it doesn't matter who I vote for. It's the Democrats usually get elected. The opposite happens, of course, in other states in the country. But at the local level, that's a whole different matter. Because at the local level, you know, elections are won on a basis of hundreds or thousands of votes. And so not only one vote counts, but one person who contacts a politician and donates, you know, gives money, but wants to have some conversation, those are actually, do actually make a difference. And before one becomes a national politician, usually, often, they start at a local level.

So, again, it's up to us, but we need to do it in a concerted way, not just one time. We just need to make it a priority. And Massimo, isn't there another dimension to this problem, which is that I agree with you that we're responsible, but I think the way that we're responsible is actually less about politics. And I've written about this, about the decline of, we used to call them the big beasts of politics here in the UK. They're not as many big beasts anymore. And I think one of the reasons is you talk about social media and the 24-hour news cycle and whatever. We've got to a point where quite a lot

of politicians who would have made it in the past, you know, at Winston Churchill, I don't imagine, would get through the current political system because he had too many the wrong views. He drank too much. He did this. He did that. And he had these character flaws that we might think of. And so when we find out that somebody said the wrong word or was a bit insensitive or did this or did that, we filter them out or the media filter them out for us. There's a massive outrage on social media. People get upset about this person said this or did this or whatever. And so you're kind of left with the only people who you're left with are the people who are pretending to be perfect, even though we know that people aren't perfect. But it's more about you're not

getting anything wrong as opposed to actually having virtue. Yes and no. Yeah, I totally agree with you the church you probably wouldn't make it. In fact, it's kind of funny that you mentioned this because I'm just reading his biography and because I wanted to get a much better understanding, not only of the man, but of his times. I was in London recently with my wife and we went to the war rooms and the Churchill Museum. So it was a great, great experience. Yeah, I think you're right in that, in that department. But at the same time, at least in the United States, and my understanding is possibly in the UK, certainly in Italy, of which I have more of a direct experience, the situation is actually very asymmetrical between the right and the left at this point.

What you are, what you're pointing, the problem you're pointing out, it's certainly the case on the left, on the left. You know, in the United States here, if a left-leaning politician says anything wrong manages to somehow insult somebody at whatever level, they're out. There's no way. On the right, it's exactly the opposite. The more. or treaches and insulting you are, the more you get ahead. I mean, you know, do I need to mention Trump or boys? I think it's not on all of the right, but yes, I know what you mean. It's never all the right. No, I mean, by the way, it's not because I want to argue with you, but just to disagree, we've had a conservative government for the last 12 years. A lot of the damage done to the

conservative party and their government has been because somebody has said the wrong thing or had the party in the wrong place or was caught doing this or that. So your point about Trump is absolutely right. Trump is a unique individual in that way, I think. There may be examples elsewhere of people who on the populist right will go out and say something outrageous and that will help them in the eyes of some people. I would also maybe argue that, you know, Donald Trump probably lost the last election because of how obnoxious people felt he was too, right? certainly. Well, I don't know about certainly. It's a little too strong, probably. Yeah. But Trump is not, unfortunately, from my perspective, it's not an unusual situation. I mean,

he certainly is the most egregious example. But he has started something, at least here in the United States, so that now we have like more than half of Congress that represents that kind of ethos. And that's damaging to the fabric of society. And so I see a different. there. As I said, I'm less familiar with the UK situation. But, you know, there are, there are, even there, there are limits to what we should, in fact, accept from a politician, right? So the question isn't one of, well, you have to be careful what you say. You should be careful what you say, especially if you're a politician. The question is what kinds of things get you disqualified. Right. Right. So if, if, what gets you disqualified is to express a perfectly

reasonable opinion that happens to insult or whatever, rail up a group of people, that really should not be grounds for disqualification. But if what gets you disqualified is the fact that, you know, you pass laws for the country to behave in one way and then you do exactly the opposite in your private life. Well, then you should be disqualified. Then, you know, that's a good reason for it. So it gets, it's complicated. But certainly what you're talking about is there. It's, it's press, present, and it is one of the many problems that we've had. And, you know, you probably know Jonathan Haidt, who is a social psychologist here at NYU at New York University. Jonathan and I usually don't see Hi-Dou-I, and we've had these agreements even in print over the years.

But recently he has been pushing this notion that a major source of our contemporary problems is, in fact, the rise of social media. because it is the rise of social media that has made Trump possible, but also has made the outrage culture possible, the easily offended culture possible, etc., etc. And I think he has a point. I mean, you know, I don't know whether social media is the beginning or the end of civilization. I certainly hope not.

But it is a problem, and we really ought to fight back against it. Now, fortunately, Elon Musk is doing part of the work for us because he's making such a mess of Twitter that, you know, a lot of people are actually living the platform. But the problem is what is the alternative, right? So people are now beginning to throw around ideas about, oh, there's this alternative social platform, et cetera. Yeah, but we need to be careful about considering

whether the problem isn't the very notion of social media and not the specifics of Twitter or Facebook or something. Yeah, I don't think you're going to put that toothpaste back in the tube, I'm afraid. And actually, I disagree with you. I mean, I know that some people are leaving Twitter because they think Musk is making a mess of it. I think he's doing his best to try and improve it.

Now, some people won't like it. But I think the attempt to improve it is better than what we had before, which was no attempt to improve it at all. We could have a whole separate show about how just bad your Musk is. Yes, we definitely could. We're actually on the hour. So we will ask you a couple of questions from our local. supporters that only they will get to see. But we do as always have a final question for you

that we ask all of our guests. Which is what's the one thing we're not talking about as a society that we really should be. Don't say Elon Musk. Otherwise, you know about that kind of words. No, I think we're, it's not that we're not talking enough about it, but sorry, not talking at all about it, but we're definitely not talking enough about it. And I'm sorry, but it does have to do with mask, not him personally. I think we're not talking enough about just how much of our alleged democracies are actually plutocracies. That is, how much money there is in politics and basically buys elections. One of my favorite examples is a few years ago, the federal government was after Microsoft for an antitrust issue. And what Microsoft responded, the way Microsoft responding

was simply to literally buy a senator who introduced legislation, which was written by Microsoft, to cover Microsoft's ass and worked. So if you can do that now, you and I cannot do that. We don't have enough millions of dollars to do that sort of stuff. That undermines democracy in a really serious fashion, and I think we're not talking about it. Enough about that. Well said.

Well, guys, if you've enjoyed this, make sure to subscribe to our locals so that one day we could buy a politician. But you're, I'm asking my money joking, but you're actually right. I mean, look at this, what's this guy, SBF or whatever his name is from? I mean, he was spending a crap ton of money trying to influence politicians to basically implement the laws that would benefit his company. We actually don't have that problem nearly as much in the UK because you can't really donate in the same way to political parties and political candidates quite in the same way.

So I couldn't agree with him more on that. Before we let you go, though, tell everybody where to find your books, where to find your work, and how to access other things that you do. The books, of course, can be found anywhere you get books online or in person. For everything else, massimo pillucci.org. You'll find all my interviews, podcasts, videos, links to books and essays, everything you want. Fantastic stuff. Well, thank you for coming on the show.

We'll ask you a couple of questions for our locals in the second. And thank you guys for watching and listening. We will see you very soon with another fantastic episode like this one or Rorscho. All of them go at 7pm UK time. And for those of you who like your trigonometry on the go, it's also available as a podcast. Take care and see you soon, guys. How does a good Stoic manage to care enough to want to be virtuous, but not so much that they become overwhelmed by all the things there are to care about?