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Learning Stoicism: A Systematic Approach to Stoic Praxis · The Stoic Handbook with Jon Brooks

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_04: Hello, fellow Stoics.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_04: Welcome to the Stoic Handbook Podcast.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_04: This is John Brooke speaking.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_04: Today I would like to share with you a guide to learning stoicism.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_04: I was recently invited to the Stoic community run by Peter Limberg, and I gave a talk called Learning Stoicism: A Systematic Guide to Stoic Praxis.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_04: In this 40-minute talk, I provide the exact method that I use to learn Stoicism and teach my students to learn Stoicism in my 10-week program aschesis.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_04: The method that I created is called the 4885 system.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_04: I call it the 4885 system because there are four skill categories, eight core skills, eight specific principles, and five learning methods.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_04: In this talk, I give a brief overview of my biography and how I've used Stoicism to cope with tragedy, loss, and suffering.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_04: I reveal how I've used martial arts, specifically Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, to help create this model for learning stoicism.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_04: I go into some of the central problems I see with Stoicism as a philosophy and the areas that I would like to innovate and improve upon.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_04: And in the end, I hope to offer a fresh perspective on this wonderful philosophy of life.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_04: Enjoy.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_02: But I'm happy to invite uh John Brooks here today.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_02: John is the co-creator of a platform called High Existence, uh, which uh I've written uh for before.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_02: Um and he wrote something called the Stoic Handbook.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_02: I really appreciate John's approach to uh stoicism.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_02: I've never seen anything like it.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_02: It's very innovative.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_02: And uh this is what excites me about talking about Stoicism at the Stoa is a different approach to Stoicism.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_02: Because that's sort of one of my um secret, not so secret projects here is to kind of breathe life into stoicism by investigating everything that's not stoic that could be infused with stoicism.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_02: Um so I'm quite excited about this session and how it's gonna work.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_02: Uh I'm gonna take John in a moment and he's going to um share his uh screen and his thoughts for about 30 minutes on how to learn Stoicism, the praxis of Stoicism, and then we'll uh pivot to QA.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_02: So if you have any questions anytime, just put them in the chat.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_02: Uh if you don't want to be on YouTube, because this will eventually be on YouTube, just indicate that and I'll read your question on your behalf.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_02: So that being said, uh John, welcome to the STOA.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_04: Thank you so much, Peter.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_04: Really honored to be giving a stoicism uh discussion in the STOA.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_04: Feels feels right.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_04: I'm just gonna share my screen with you so we can have some structure to this discussion.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_04: Um, so first of all, I'm just gonna tell you that I'm not an academic when it comes to stoicism.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_04: For me, the interesting question is how do I apply Stoicism?
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_04: Um, and I'm gonna get into a little bit about my story, how I find how I found Stoicism, um, the things that I used as stoic training devices, and then how I've used martial arts as a learning device to innovate stoic practice praxis.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_04: So the first question I want to open up to you guys is how how does one go about learning stoicism?
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_04: Right?
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_04: It's a it's a very complex philosophy.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_04: If I were if I were to ask you, what is your approach to coaching someone to be a stoic?
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_04: I've read a lot of modern Stoicism books, and some of them have been amazing, right?
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_04: Life-changing, full of amazing ideas, useful ideas that I've kind of implemented.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_04: But then when I've watched talks with Stoic authors and they're asked, well, how do you practice Stoicism?
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_04: the answer is quite dissatisfying to me.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_04: I've heard some authors say that you can think about stoic uh visualizations for two minutes in the car here or there.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_04: And yeah, I just didn't get a sense that that's how one becomes a Stoic sage, or that's how someone really trains in the kind of way that Seneca and Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus trained.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_04: When you hear stories about the ancient Stoics, like Seneca taking his own life with complete equanimity, I don't think he got there by thinking about Stoic imagery for two minutes in the car every day.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_04: Um, and then I I've seen other Stoic authors, and and they asked, what do you do to practice Stoicism?
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_04: And sometimes they they don't even have an answer.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_04: And I really want to move away from this idea that Stoicism is a set of claims and really see it as a practice, see it as a way to train and to live life.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_04: And that's what we're going to be going into in this talk.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_04: Um, there's a great book, The Practicing Stoic.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_04: What's great about this book is the author, Ward Farnsworth, takes ancient quotes and puts them into context.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_04: So it's just full of contextualized quotes from the ancients.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_04: And he says claims of stoic hypocrisy usually arise from a misunderstanding of what stoicism is for.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_04: Its purpose is to help those who use it, not to give them a basis for judgment of others.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_04: The exhortations of Stoic teachers sometimes create a different impression, but explaining Stoicism and practicing Stoicism are different activities.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_04: Stoicism may have to be taught if it is to be learned, but the practice of it involves thinking and acting, not preaching.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_04: If Stoicism inspires claims of hypocrisy against the students, the students are probably bad Stoics, not because their actions are impure, but because they are talking too much.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_04: And I really like this angle of seeing Stoicism as a practice.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_04: And I kind of take pride in the fact that I'm not an academic, and I and I don't think you have to be, right?
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_04: Like the Stoa was a place where anyone could come and discuss ideas about wisdom and living the good life.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_04: And stoicism is for everyone, and I really take pride in that.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_04: And I don't think you need to have a certain qualification to be a practitioner of Stoicism.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_04: Um, I want to give you a little bit of a background on my life.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_04: So here are some significant events that inspired me to become interested in stoicism.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_04: These are quote unquote negative events, right?
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_04: So when I was 18, I was in a band and I was held at knife point in a moving car.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_04: Um, we had a new bass player and he got really drunk, took Valium.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_04: Next thing I know, I've got a knife against my throat.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_04: It was like a bit of a hostage situation.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_04: Not long after I got involved in a violent incident and I got jumped by a group of guys in my local town.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_04: And soon after I started to develop anxiety for the first time in my life as a young guy, I started developing hypervigilance and PTSD.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_04: And I went from having a very nice, happy childhood to start to start to see some of the dark facets of the mind.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_04: And it was a scary place to be, you know, just on edge walking around at night.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_04: I would have to leave public transport or nightclubs or bars if I got too agitated, um, trouble sleeping, relationships got worse.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_04: Around about this time, uh, I was studying filmmaking in university.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_04: I got braces to correct an enderbyte.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_04: And the the doctor said two years it would take, and it ended up taking five years, and the surgery was invasive, you know, five hours of both jaws being broken, reconstructed, wisdom teeth taken out.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_04: The surgeon said to me a couple of weeks before the surgery that your body is gonna feel like it's been thrown through the front uh screen of a car.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_04: That's the amount of stress that you're gonna take.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_04: Do you still want to take surgery?
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_04: Um, and obviously I said yeah, because I was waiting so long for it.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_04: And that's when I really started to look for answers because I was anxious.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_04: Um, things were spiraling downward for me.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_04: And now I had this surgery.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_04: I was feeling insecure, a guy in my early 20s, having braces, waiting for surgery.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_04: I didn't feel good about myself.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_04: And that's when the photo was taken.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_04: That was me in my early 20s.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_04: And that's when I started to really start uh start to read uh Seneca, Epictetus.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_04: And I was I was reading it not because I just thought it was cool or interesting, I thought it was those things, but I was reading it because I needed help.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_04: I needed someone to hold my hand through this difficulty, and I found that whenever I read these ancient words, I felt better.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_04: So I took some of the principles like premeditation of adversity, where the Stoics visualize the worst case scenario, and I took some of the ideas of framing things a different way, frame control, um, I call it, and I started to use video editing as I was awaiting surgery as a way to reframe the surgery.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_04: And I would find examples of people that had much worse situations than me and meditate being them.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_04: So I started to use modern technology with stoicism.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_04: I didn't really know what I was doing at the time, but I just thought it would be useful and it was.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_04: Um, so I had my jaw surgery.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_04: Then soon after my jaw surgery, I started a blog, and then I started working with high existence, and I traveled alone to Thailand, to Amsterdam.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_04: A few other notable incidents.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_04: When I was 28, my dad had cancer.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_04: He made a recovery.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_04: When I was 29, I had a child, and that and I became a single parent.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_04: There was some child-related uh custody stresses and court things as well at that time, which is difficult to deal with.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_04: And then I lost my mother during the pandemic extremely unexpectedly.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_04: She was um someone that was my support, my rock um, to depression, like very uh unexpected situation.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_04: So the reason I'm sharing this with you is because with each of these different events, I've been able to reinterpret Stoicism in a different way.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_04: And I think that when you experience hardship and difficulty, when you go back and read the ancient Stoics, it does make more sense and it becomes more urgent that we learn it.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_04: I like this frame of stoicism is preparation for the worst day of our life.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_04: I don't know.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_04: You could replace Stoicism with spirituality, but the training in philosophy is preparation for these difficult things that are going to happen to us because you know, nobody has an easy ride all the way through life.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_04: Life is full of tragedy.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_04: And I found the ancient Stoics very inspiring in this way, you know, Seneca lost his son, Marcus Aurelius lost.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_04: I think out of 14 children, six survived.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_04: You know, so so these people knew suffering and hardship and tragedy.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_04: And I found that every time I experienced uh something difficult, I was able to understand the Stoics more.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_04: Um, and I know I'm not alone, I know we've all experienced difficult things as well in our lives.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_04: But two positive things that were my constant during these tests, at least past the age of 25, was high existence.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_04: Um, the high existence team and culture showed me that there's a there's another way of being in the world.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_04: You can use philosophy and spiritual tools in in a way that's modern and updated, and you can use it to become an entrepreneur, you can use it to create something like the Stoa, like Peter has done.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_04: You can combine with the wisdom traditions with modern technology.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_04: Um, and yeah, I just found this deeply inspiring.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_04: Um through high existence, I was introduced to plant medicine, um, different types of philosophies and meditation practice, and they provided me with a support network that was very deep.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_04: And then the other thing, which was my constant, was the the martial art Brazilian jujitsu.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_04: Brazilian jujitsu is what I consider to be an apex habit, in the sense that when you do jujitsu, many other things fall into place.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_04: So exercise becomes easy because you're in flow state when you're training.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_04: Acts of voluntary hardship and discomfort are part of the deal.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_04: You can't get the black belt without experiencing difficulty.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_04: Um so you have a sense of community, you have a sense of touch, you have a long-term vision.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_04: You know, it can take 15 years to become a black belt in in jiu-jitsu.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_04: So you're always focused on something, on a larger vision.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_04: But the most important thing that jujitsu gave me was it showed me how learning works.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_04: Okay, so learning Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, you can't you can't fake it.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_04: If you put on a black belt and you come to the gym, it doesn't matter how well you can talk, it doesn't matter how many facts you know, you have to go on a mat and roll or spar.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_04: And you're either good or you're not.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_04: You either can roll with the black belts or you can't.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_04: There's no faking, there's no talking, there's no sophistry.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_04: Your skill level is your skill level, and that's it.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_04: And I started thinking about the Brazilian jujitsu framework in relation to stoicism, because um, let's go into a little bit about learning.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_04: So if you go into a jiu-jitsu class, there are a few different elements of learning.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_04: So the first thing you have to do is show your mind a particular move.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_04: So someone before you has has innovated something, has come up with a move that works.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_04: So you need to mentally understand the schema of that move.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_04: The next step is to go and drill it, and you drill it in such a way that you understand the mechanics of the move physically.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_04: Your body moves in the way that you want it to and is mechanically correct.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_04: The next phase is to be able to have automaticity so you can you can perform the move slowly and smoothly without any stress.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_04: But then the last stage is to be able to do the the move smoothly when you have a lot of stress and you have a resisting opponent.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_04: So this is a basic framework for how you learn martial arts, and the same would apply to boxing or anything else.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_04: So the question is where does stoicism fit into this?
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_04: And that's something that that uh I've been thinking about for a while because a lot of us we read meditations by Marcus Aurelius, and we we're on the mental schema section.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_04: And maybe we go off and we do a few things that are physical, we might implement it.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_04: Maybe not much, but I think some of us might then do the low stress perfection of such a move.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_04: But real stoicism, the the true practice of stoicism is to be able to do stoicism when you need it most.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_04: And when you need it most is when you're the most triggered, when you're the most agitated, when you're in the most discomfort, when you're grieving.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_04: That's when you need stoicism most.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_04: And if you don't have skills, if you haven't practiced correctly under stress, under pressure, you haven't gone through all the stages, it won't be there for you.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_04: So you can read books and you can get ideas and they are useful.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_04: But to me, that's very similar to reading a book of jujitsu moves or reading a book of martial art judo throws.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_04: It's interesting, it shows you what's possible.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_04: But if you are in a confrontation with someone on the street or in a competitive match, there's no way you're going to be able to do it.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_04: And so, my question and my work with Stoicism is how do we get people?
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_04: How do I help people, including myself, to make stoicism something that I can do under high stress in an automatic way?
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_04: Um, and I'm using martial arts as a framework for that.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_04: So in Stoicism, you don't often see the fundamentals and the advanced.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_04: This is something that is runs through all of martial arts.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_04: You go to a boxing class, they'll talk about boxing fundamentals and they'll talk about advanced.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_04: In in jujitsu, you might have escaping from pins or passing someone's legs.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_04: These are fundamentals, very basic things you need to learn.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_04: Advanced, you might have creating dilemmas, trilemmas, quad lemmas of attacks.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_04: You have the same thing in chess.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_04: You have chess fundamentals and you have advanced tactics in chess.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_04: Is there such a thing for stoicism?
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_04: Uh, I haven't seen it outlined.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_04: I've read a lot of stoic books and I haven't seen it broken down in this way.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_04: And I think there's a lot of potential here to do that.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_04: In my jujitsu journey, I found a man called John Danaher.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_04: John Danaher studied epistemology and was a professor and he taught at Columbia University.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_04: He was a cripple.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_04: He injured his hip and leg and his knee in a rugby accident.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_04: So he could never be an athlete.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_04: So he committed himself to becoming the best coach that he could be in jiu-jitsu.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_04: He became disenchanted with philosophy and teaching philosophy.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_04: So he applied all of his philosophical training to coaching martial arts.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_04: And he became the coach of legends like George Saint Pierre and the current best jujitsu athlete in the world today, Gordon Ryan.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_04: He's widely known as the best martial arts instructor on earth.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_04: And I learned a lot from the way he teaches jujitsu, and I see that it can be applied to stoicism.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_04: So when he when he approached jujitsu, jiu-jitsu was this body of knowledge that was not meant to be messed with.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_04: Danaher had the idea that this large system could be broken up into smaller subsystems, and these subsystems could have its own algorithmic or heuristic type of system in place.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_04: So, for example, he has a leg lock system.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_04: In Stoicism, I don't see subsystems.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_04: I see one large system, which is kind of messy, but I don't really see it broken down.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_04: I see a large set of ideas and claims, and then I see techniques.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_04: That's what I see.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_04: Danaher also talks about knowledge as the precursor for skill.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_04: We don't just want knowledge, knowledge is the first step, but what we really want is skill.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_04: Okay, so as a martial artist, yes, you need knowledge, but ultimately you need skill.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_04: If if knowledge was the only thing that counted, then um, yeah, you you wouldn't need a body to be good at martial arts, but it isn't skill is what wins matches.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_04: So, how can we develop skill in stoicism instead of just knowledge?
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_04: Uh, Danaher also didn't see jujitsu as this thing that couldn't be questioned or ridiculed.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_04: He saw that there were many problems with this martial art, and he set out to find the central problems and then address correcting for them.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_04: And I think that stoicism is like this too.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_04: There are problems in stoicism, there are things that are not addressed.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_04: It's an old philosophy, 2,000 years old.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_04: It's it would be very impressive is if this 2,000-year-old philosophy couldn't be improved upon with modern science and understanding.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_04: It clearly can be.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_04: Um, and that that again interests me.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_04: Danaher also thinks that the integration of skills is more important than any isolated skills.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_04: So seeing life as a whole and how we are in life is more important than perfecting any one facet of life.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_04: Uh and he also had aspirations of mastery beyond mainstream conceptions of possibility.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_04: So he was never satisfied with what people were saying was the upper limit of this.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_04: And how can we use that for stoicism?
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_04: How can we ask, well, these modern books on stoicism, they're great, but can we go further?
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_04: Can we create something more spectacular?
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_04: And for me, that comes down to stoic training.
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_04: I think that's the thing that is missing.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_04: To be a legitimate monk in certain Buddhist traditions, you need to meditate for three hours a day.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_04: If you want to practice meditation, you can go on retreats.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_04: But what where is this for stoicism?
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_04: Again, I don't see it, and it's it's a it's a major hole.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_04: And if anyone knows about anything like this, I'd I'd love to hear it, but I haven't come across it.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_04: The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_04: That's a classic stoic quote.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_04: And Socrates, uh little little known fact, he was a military hero.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_04: And to be a military hero, you need training, you need to understand how to train, how to fight.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_04: And there are other examples.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_04: Plato was a wrestler, he was named, that was his wrestling name, Plato.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_04: Um, and then you have Marcus Aurelius, he trained him pancreation, which is like modern-day mixed martial arts, boxing, wrestling, kicking, and choking were used in this in this ancient form of martial arts.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_04: And I'm not saying that you need to become a martial artist, um, but what I'm saying is that when you learn hard skills, whatever that is, you learn about learning.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_04: You learn how learning works.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_04: And then when you learn how learning works, you can apply that to Stoicism.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_04: So In my own journey of understanding stoicism, I did what I do with jujitsu.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_04: And what I do is I break down instructionals into small, the smallest kind of um data sets that I can.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_04: And then I draw flowcharts and I map things together.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_04: And when I first read the handbook of Epictetus, the Encaridian, I read it very quickly.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_04: And I had the same thought that many of us have had when we read such books, and it's like, this is amazing, this is full of wisdom, that's great.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_04: And then I didn't apply any of it to my life.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_04: Um, so I went back through the book very slowly, and I started trying to create maps of everything he was saying.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_04: I had the belief that there wasn't a single sentence that Epictetus wrote or his student Aria wrote in that book that wasn't perfect, that wasn't exactly how it should be.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_04: And I started taking it as gold, pure gold, and trying to create more visual understanding of it.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_04: And then this eventually became um the blog, the Stoic Town Book, where I'm currently going through all of Epictetus' writings, and then after that will be Marx Aurelius and Seneca, and trying to find the subsystems inherent within Stoicism.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_04: So here's a flowchart when you have that expectation uh versus reality frustration that comes.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_04: I hope events turn out as they wish.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_04: And you have two different paths here.
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_04: Um and epicthetis writings in the Caridian work extremely well in this way as subsystems.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_04: But I haven't seen that many examples of it.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_04: If you go on Google, you can find some flow charts of stoicism, but but it isn't emphasized much.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_04: Um, so I'd like to ultimately get to a point where we can truly upgrade our mental operating system by having a subsystem that is trained through varying levels of stress to the point that when we get triggered, the stoic subsystem can activate immediately and we can go through the different systems and arrive at a healthy, wise, rational response.
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_04: That that's the ideal.
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_04: That's what I'm looking for.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_04: And what I'm going to present to you now is my is my idea on this.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_04: And this this would be a fundamentals approach to Stoicism.
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_04: Stoicism is is big, it's large, it's intricate.
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_04: Uh primary sources are Seneca, Marx Aurelius, and Epictetus.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_04: And and yeah, a lot of Stoicism has been lost, about 95% of it has been has been lost through history.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_04: And it's very complex.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_04: How does how do you learn stoicism?
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_04: Even if you have the ideas that I've had, you still need something, something structured and something simple that you can work with.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_04: And so the 4885 Stoic system is my uh best effort to come up with such a system that if you can learn this, you have an extremely solid understanding of stoicism.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_04: And for me, the goal of stoicism is not to memorize techniques, but to understand the principles so much that you can innovate techniques to bring stoicism into the modern world.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_04: So the four, eight, eight, five system.
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_04: So stoicism has four cardinal virtues.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_04: Well, I'm interested in turning them into skills.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_04: So there are four skill groups, and out of those four skill groups, you have eight essential skills.
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_04: Then you have eight critical principles.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_04: Those are the underlying principles in all of Stoic thought, according to me.
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_04: Um, I'm sure there will be disagreements, but that's fine.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_04: And then there are five learning methods which we have to keep in mind the whole time as we progress in our stoic practice.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_04: So I'll just go through these now.
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_04: So this the first skill category is agency skills or discipline skills or temperance skills.
• 26:55
  SPEAKER_04: And there are two main aspects of this.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_04: The first one is to eliminate cravings.
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_04: This is when something outside of yourself, a subpersonality of craving or something in the environment, makes you enslaved.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_04: And so you you no longer act um according to your values, it pulls you away from it.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_04: The other side of it is following your values.
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_04: I much prefer this phrasing, following values, instead of discipline, because you can have a lot of discipline, but be doing the wrong things, right?
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_04: Like you can have extreme discipline and still there's issues in your life.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_04: Very often you find people that get into a particular job and they they get really successful at it and then they're miserable.
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_04: So following values to me is about locating what's important and then being able to act on those.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_04: And you find people like Socrates is a great example of someone who followed his values no matter what.
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_04: So the agency skills broken down into eliminating cravings and following values.
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_04: Then we have emotional skills.
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_04: So resetting frames.
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_04: We can't control externals, right?
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_04: It's not with within our control, but we can choose how we respond to situations.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_04: So taking that in our control and deciding how am I going to frame this?
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_04: I love the example of framing that um Sam Harris gives, um, which really drives the point home.
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_04: The the feeling of lifting weights, the burn you feel in your in your muscles, when you're lifting weights, it feels really good.
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_04: Like, you know, it's it burns, but you feel like you're progressing, you're getting stronger.
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_04: But if you woke up in the middle of the night with that exact same sensation, you'd you'd have a panic attack, right?
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_04: Because the context is completely different, even though the actual sensation is identical.
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_04: So that's the power of frames.
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_04: And navigating negativity, which I divide into uh frustration and anger, sadness, melancholy, and also anxiety and panic.
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_04: Um, so navigating negativity.
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_04: This is a lot of CBT, cognitive behavioral therapy has done great work on this.
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_04: And to be honest, cognitive behavioral therapy have done a good job of systematizing certain aspects of stoicism.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_04: Then we have social skills.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_04: This would be the virtue related to justice.
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_04: So this is handling incels or dealing with negative, difficult situations, and then being able to speak wisely and effectively with integrity and tell the truth.
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_04: And then we have wisdom skills, clarity of thought.
• 29:29
  SPEAKER_04: So if you if you read uh Seneca and Marx Aurelius, their precision in their words is very impressive.
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_04: And I like George Orwell said, that if you want to improve the way that you think and the clarity of your thought, you should learn how to write.
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_04: And the ancient Stoics, I think, were pretty big writers, at least most of them.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_04: Um, so yeah, there are various things we can do to improve the way that we think, the clarity of our thoughts, and then concentration.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_04: This I think is missing.
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_04: I'm gonna get into some of the problems with stoicism, but I think this is missing from a lot of stoic practice.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_04: If your mind is very distracted and you're being pulled up around by a lot of different things in your environment, you're not very concentrated, you're gonna have a much harder time um practicing as a stoic and making good uh decisions.
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_04: And we know that this is this is a skill that we can train, we can train our awareness to and bring it back to the present.
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_04: Now we get into the eight critical principles.
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_04: Um, so these are these are principles that I could tell you them now and you might understand them.
• 30:39
  SPEAKER_04: But the goal is to truly embody these.
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_04: So you you believe these to be truths about reality in the same way that you believe that the sun is going to rise tomorrow morning.
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_04: So the first one is this idea of the illusory world.
• 30:53
  SPEAKER_04: Um, so that when we have a strong reaction to something, it's not the event itself that the causes the reaction, but our impression of that event.
• 31:03
  SPEAKER_04: Um, so if if you it's cognitive behavioral therapy, does a lot of work on this.
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_04: If you get into an argument with someone, um, you might be convinced that that that person disrespects you.
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_04: But that's not necessarily true.
• 31:19
  SPEAKER_04: Um if you if you dive a little deeper, you'll see that you didn't interpret the situation correctly, you can't read their mind, um, you're thinking in all or nothing, black and white terms, you might be blowing things out of proportion, you might be minimizing the positives that they did that day.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_04: Um, and so the world is to a large extent an illusion.
• 31:40
  SPEAKER_04: We don't have perfect accurate representation of it.
• 31:43
  SPEAKER_04: Zeno described it as having a grip on the world.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_04: That's what we want to do.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_04: We want to get a better grip on reality.
• 31:49
  SPEAKER_04: Uh, it's not that we we will ever be reality, but we can get a better grip of reality through reason, and we don't want to lose grip of it through distortions.
• 31:59
  SPEAKER_04: The Stoics also saw the external world as being neither good nor bad.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_04: It was indifferent.
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_04: You had preferred indifference, like you know, being healthy is preferred, but it's still indifferent because you can still have a terrible character and do bad things and act with vice, even though you're healthy.
• 32:18
  SPEAKER_04: And so it's something we prefer.
• 32:20
  SPEAKER_04: But people who get really caught up on the external world and are chasing things, they're enslaved to it.
• 32:27
  SPEAKER_04: If you're needing someone to respond to you a certain way, you're in a sense a slave to that person.
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_04: On the flip side of that, you have the internal good.
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_04: So stoics focus all of their energy on their thoughts, their actions, their intentions.
• 32:40
  SPEAKER_04: And these two points form the dichotomy of control.
• 32:43
  SPEAKER_04: There are some things within our control, there are some things not within our control.
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_04: Let's say to the things outside of our control, this is no concern of ours, and the things that are within our control, we should put our effort into changing.
• 32:55
  SPEAKER_04: The fourth point is uh irrational pain.
• 32:58
  SPEAKER_04: So maybe all of your suffering in life comes from irrational thinking.
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_04: Not all, um, and there are some forms of cathartic pain, of course, certain forms of grief.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_04: You know, we know that Mark Aurelius uh sobbed when when people close to him died.
• 33:16
  SPEAKER_04: But there's a type of pain that is self-perpetuating.
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_04: So, for example, we might have a burst of anxiety, and that anxiety teaches us a quick lesson, alerts us to something.
• 33:27
  SPEAKER_04: But if that anxiety lasts 10 minutes, 20 minutes, two hours, the self-perpetuating mechanism for that anxiety is irrational.
• 33:37
  SPEAKER_04: Same thing with anger.
• 33:38
  SPEAKER_04: If you're angry for more than a few seconds, it's probably because you're keeping it alive through rational thinking.
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_04: Um the this is my favorite one, the psychological immune system.
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_04: If if you if you get sick with a virus, um if you've had the virus before, you have antibodies, and then you're less likely to get sick in the future, so your immune system can strengthen.
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_04: Stoic practices are like vaccines.
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_04: You you practice poverty, for example, so that when poverty comes, you've strengthened your psychological immune system.
• 34:13
  SPEAKER_04: You do these acts of voluntary discomfort so that you can strengthen your psychological immune system.
• 34:18
  SPEAKER_04: You might sleep rough, sleep on the floor.
• 34:21
  SPEAKER_04: This is something I tell some of my students to do.
• 34:24
  SPEAKER_04: Um, but you don't just do it for the act of breaking out of your comfort zone.
• 34:27
  SPEAKER_04: You do it and you uh so that you can feel much more grateful about your bed when you wake up the next day.
• 34:34
  SPEAKER_04: You do it so that you can show yourself that you could actually cope sleeping on a floor.
• 34:37
  SPEAKER_04: You know, as much as you like sleeping in a bed, you'll be fine if you sleep on the floor.
• 34:41
  SPEAKER_04: It's not the end of the world.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_04: You can do it, and that strengthens you.
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_04: Uh, principle six is the gap theory of happiness.
• 34:49
  SPEAKER_04: A lot of us have inherited this idea that happiness is on the other side of this gap that we have, and the way to fulfill ourselves is to close the gap.
• 34:58
  SPEAKER_04: So there's a Ferrari that I don't have.
• 35:01
  SPEAKER_04: The way that I get happy is by getting that Ferrari.
• 35:05
  SPEAKER_04: There's a relationship that I don't have, the way that I can become fulfilled is by getting that relationship.
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_04: Um, the Stoics saw this as a type of external enslavement, right?
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_04: Because if you're always chasing something mindlessly, um, now it can be it can be, you can chase something for the pursuit, like with reason, you know, like because you enjoy it as a game and that's different.
• 35:29
  SPEAKER_04: But if you're really thinking that this external thing is going to fulfill you, um first of all, it won't because desire is inexhaustible, especially unnatural desires or inessential desires, you know, beyond food, shelter, and water.
• 35:44
  SPEAKER_04: Um and also we we can become disgusted by our possessions.
• 35:49
  SPEAKER_04: You know, many of the things that you once loved in your life, maybe your laptop, your phone, certain relationships, there was a time in your life where you absolutely loved and cherished these things.
• 36:00
  SPEAKER_04: And over time you might have become disgusted by them even.
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_04: You don't even care if they break or you kind of want to get rid of them and get the new thing.
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_04: So this is not a fulfilling way to live.
• 36:10
  SPEAKER_04: And so the Stoics recommended that instead of chasing this thing that we don't have, we instead learn to love the life that we already have.
• 36:19
  SPEAKER_04: The life that you have, there are people in this world that they would go to bed at night dreaming for that life.
• 36:25
  SPEAKER_04: There are aspects of your life that people would consider to be paradise.
• 36:29
  SPEAKER_04: You know, there are people that are really struggling in this world, and the life you're living would be would be a dream for them.
• 36:35
  SPEAKER_04: And we forget that.
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_04: The Stoics put a primary emphasis on virtue, um, wisdom, and excellence of character, more so than happiness.
• 36:45
  SPEAKER_04: They saw happiness as a byproduct of virtue.
• 36:47
  SPEAKER_04: They didn't chase happiness, they chased wisdom, justice, those virtues, these skills that I've outlined.
• 36:53
  SPEAKER_04: Um, and they just saw the good life as a symptom of that.
• 36:58
  SPEAKER_04: And a good example of this is Daniel Kahneman, uh, he's a Nobel Prize-winning behavioral economist.
• 37:04
  SPEAKER_04: He he made a distinction between the remembering self and the experiencing self.
• 37:10
  SPEAKER_04: And if you think about your life, there might be times when you've helped someone.
• 37:16
  SPEAKER_04: And maybe, you know, maybe you went to visit someone in a hospital and you were really busy, or maybe you cleaned up for someone and you didn't really want to, but they were struggling.
• 37:25
  SPEAKER_04: Even though the experience of doing that was not as fun as watching Netflix, you don't regret that later, you know, and many of the Stoics believed you don't really know if you've lived a good life until you're at the end of your life when you're about to die.
• 37:39
  SPEAKER_04: And that's when you can look back over your life and go, Do I regret anything?
• 37:43
  SPEAKER_04: Is my remembering self regretful right now?
• 37:46
  SPEAKER_04: And if you've been a valuable member of society and you've you've tried to develop excellence of character, the likelihood that you would live with regret is very low.
• 37:55
  SPEAKER_04: And then the last principle, this is something that we've already covered, is this idea of stoicism being not just a set of claims, but an actual practice, and that we should train in stoicism like we train in in martial arts.
• 38:09
  SPEAKER_04: The five comes down to the five learning methods.
• 38:12
  SPEAKER_04: And again, martial arts has this really well, uh, well dialed in.
• 38:16
  SPEAKER_04: So in martial arts, you have you set days that you train and you spar.
• 38:20
  SPEAKER_04: And when you spar, you retrieve the information from your memory and you put it into practice.
• 38:25
  SPEAKER_04: And that's what we got to do with stoicism.
• 38:28
  SPEAKER_04: We need to, as much as possible, pull out the lessons that we learn in these books and apply them in life over and over and over again.
• 38:36
  SPEAKER_04: Even if we don't feel like we're doing it well, we need to always be trying to do it.
• 38:40
  SPEAKER_04: We need to be talking about it, sharing ideas about it, teaching other people about it.
• 38:44
  SPEAKER_04: That's retrieving the memory.
• 38:46
  SPEAKER_04: The act of retrieving the memory encodes the memory into more of a durable form over time.
• 38:53
  SPEAKER_04: Uh, we're not looking for shorter memory, we're looking for durable memory, the kind of memory that will be with you in six months or a year time.
• 38:59
  SPEAKER_04: Spacing is this idea that there's a forgetting curve, which I have here.
• 39:05
  SPEAKER_04: So when you first learn something, you rapidly forget it.
• 39:07
  SPEAKER_04: But then if you space it like a day or two later and you you relearn it, you retrieve the information again, it takes longer for you to forget.
• 39:15
  SPEAKER_04: You do it again, it takes longer for you to forget.
• 39:17
  SPEAKER_04: So now when someone asks you what's the capital city of France, you don't have to think about it.
• 39:23
  SPEAKER_04: You know what it is because it's been spaced so much.
• 39:26
  SPEAKER_04: You'll never forget it.
• 39:27
  SPEAKER_04: And we want to be doing that with our stoic principles and skills and practices.
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_04: Interleaving is this idea of mixing topics up, so not just focusing on one facet of Stoicism, but interleaving it with different philosophies and ideas.
• 39:42
  SPEAKER_04: And I like to see Stoicism as something that we can read while we're doing other things.
• 39:48
  SPEAKER_04: You know, why not read some Epictetus and then at the same time read some Buddhism and try and find the connections between them?
• 39:57
  SPEAKER_04: Reflection is talking and asking questions and having discussions like this.
• 40:02
  SPEAKER_04: The stoa is amazing for reflection and generation, um, super valuable for learning.
• 40:09
  SPEAKER_04: Um, so yeah, I really appreciate that about the stoa.
• 40:12
  SPEAKER_04: But anything we can do that helps us ask questions, be independent problem solvers, talk about ideas, this is at the heart of stoicism.
• 40:21
  SPEAKER_04: Um, this is this is vital.
• 40:25
  SPEAKER_04: And uh there's a great book on learning, if you're interested, called Make It Stick by Peter Brown.
• 40:30
  SPEAKER_04: And he he says when you space out practice at a task and get a little rusty between sessions, or you interleave the practice of two or more subjects, retrieval is harder and feels less productive, but the effort produces longer lasting learning and enables more versatile application of it in later settings.
• 40:47
  SPEAKER_04: Trying to solve a problem before being taught the solution leads to better learning, even when errors are made in the attempt.
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_04: So, me asking you, how do I solve this particular life problem using stoicism, and you trying to think about the answer to that, that will help you with your stoic training because you're using generation, you're thinking about the problem.
• 41:09
  SPEAKER_04: And then when you do learn the the ancient technique, it'll stick with you much longer.
• 41:15
  SPEAKER_04: So these are quite counterintuitive ideas on learning, but but the research backs them up.
• 41:21
  SPEAKER_04: Um, as I said, with John Danaher, he kept finding problems with uh with jujitsu and and martial arts.
• 41:28
  SPEAKER_04: And the three problems that I found with Stoicism, I'm curious if anyone agrees with this.
• 41:33
  SPEAKER_04: There's a lack of emphasis on mindfulness training, and there there is some evidence to suggest that the the original stoics were inspired by Buddhist meditators, monks.
• 41:47
  SPEAKER_04: Um, there's some evidence uh about that.
• 41:49
  SPEAKER_04: And I do I do think there's an overlap.
• 41:51
  SPEAKER_04: I do see Stoicism as Buddhism filtered for the Western mind.
• 41:55
  SPEAKER_04: Um, but there seems to be a lack of systematic mindfulness or insight practice.
• 42:01
  SPEAKER_04: It's not saying that they didn't have that, but we there's not an emphasis on that in modern stoicism.
• 42:06
  SPEAKER_04: Uh, there's no talk about trauma processing.
• 42:09
  SPEAKER_04: In fact, uh Seneca encourages people not to think about the past, but but we know that trauma lives in the body and can can do a lot of harm to us.
• 42:19
  SPEAKER_04: And if we don't go back and process it, then it can really stop us from meeting our potential.
• 42:24
  SPEAKER_04: And that's not what we want.
• 42:27
  SPEAKER_04: And then finally, there's not much emphasis on the ecstatic present.
• 42:31
  SPEAKER_04: So, Jules Evans, who I've interviewed a couple of times on the High Existence podcast, he wrote his first book on Stoicism, and then at the end of that book, he saw some of the problems in Stoicism and then wrote a book called The Art of Losing Control, which is all about ecstatic experience.
• 42:45
  SPEAKER_04: Um, believe it or not, but Socrates uh really encouraged exercise, and his favorite way of exercising was dancing.
• 42:55
  SPEAKER_04: So Socrates would dance every day alone.
• 42:59
  SPEAKER_04: And we know that dance is a form of ecstatic experience, it's one of the best ways to access peak experiences.
• 43:05
  SPEAKER_04: So it's not that the Stoics didn't practice with ecstatic experience or various kinds of parties, and it's not like they didn't process their trauma through writing, uh, but there's not much emphasis on it in modern Stoicism.
• 43:18
  SPEAKER_04: William Irvine, author of Guide to the Good Life, writes, why combine mindfulness with an exploration of Stoicism?
• 43:25
  SPEAKER_04: Because mindfulness and stoicism are curiously complementary.
• 43:28
  SPEAKER_04: In other words, learning about stoicism while practicing mindfulness is like accompanying your cup of coffee with a bit of chocolate.
• 43:37
  SPEAKER_04: And bringing this full circle, the way that I see us learning stoicism in the future is through these three methods.
• 43:45
  SPEAKER_04: We have dialogues, discussions, we have coaching.
• 43:51
  SPEAKER_04: So having like Marx Aurelis had an actual stoic coach, someone who was watching over him, someone he could ask questions to, someone who he could go to for guidance.
• 44:02
  SPEAKER_04: Um, some people say that the meditations that he wrote, he just wrote those uh in an attempt to continue the conversation with his dead stoic teacher, because he didn't have anyone to talk to anymore about stoicism.
• 44:16
  SPEAKER_04: So he kind of role-played that.
• 44:18
  SPEAKER_04: And some people say that's what the meditations are.
• 44:20
  SPEAKER_04: So having a coach, someone who can look at your life and analyze you, and you can tell anything too, specific to stoicism is great.
• 44:27
  SPEAKER_04: And then sparring, we need challenges, a community, accountability, we need to practice stoicism, not just talk about talk about stoicism.
• 44:36
  SPEAKER_04: That's an important component of it, but we need to turn knowledge into skills.
• 44:40
  SPEAKER_04: Um and yeah, and that's that's my my overview, that's my approach to stoicism and something that I'm that I'm currently working on.
• 44:48
  SPEAKER_04: So I'm gonna pass you back to Peter now, curious if you have many questions.
• 44:54
  SPEAKER_04: Awesome, awesome.
• 44:55
  SPEAKER_02: High quality uh presentation, man.
• 44:57
  SPEAKER_02: Really, really enjoyed it.
• 44:59
  SPEAKER_02: Um do you have uh uh can you stay 15 minutes after the hour?
• 45:04
  SPEAKER_02: Um yeah, yeah, cool.
• 45:05
  SPEAKER_02: Um I imagine we'll have some good questions.
• 45:08
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so feel free to drop your questions in the chat.
• 45:11
  SPEAKER_02: I'll call on you and you can ask your question to John.
• 45:13
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I'll warm them up with uh some thought, some thoughts, some questions on my own.
• 45:19
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so like what's dawning on me, what what drew me to Stoicism is the fact that it is a virtue ethics.
• 45:27
  SPEAKER_02: Um and I think it's like you using the Hellenistic school where you got like Aristotle over here, where you said, okay, virtue is important, but like, you know, we need external goods, and then you got the cynics on the other end, it's like fuck that, we just need virtue.
• 45:39
  SPEAKER_02: Well, or Stoics to me is like the cleverest move in a way.
• 45:43
  SPEAKER_02: It's like it gets the best of both worlds because it's yes, you need virtues, but then you can enjoy external goods as well within reason.
• 45:49
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and then it's like no one really talks about virtue or the praxis of virtue, and like to double-click on virtue, the cardinal virtues, you know, it starts with prudence, then courage, um, temperance and justice, which your your four skills really nicely map over.
• 46:04
  SPEAKER_02: But the the first one, prudence, like everything unfolds from prudence, you know.
• 46:07
  SPEAKER_02: So the biggest bang for your buck is is prudence or fresh or whatever.
• 46:12
  SPEAKER_02: Like, how do you practice that?
• 46:13
  SPEAKER_02: You know, that's that's the thing.
• 46:14
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm with you with the modern stoic movements.
• 46:16
  SPEAKER_02: They they they talk a lot about it, but they don't really have kind of a good system like you presented.
• 46:21
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and so what I'm really focusing on, how to practice Fhrenesis, prudence.
• 46:26
  SPEAKER_02: And my best answer right now is journaling, daily journal.
• 46:28
  SPEAKER_02: Uh a journal every day for 90 minutes.
• 46:31
  SPEAKER_02: And we have uh uh in our wisdom gym here at the STOA, people can do come together and journal.
• 46:35
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so we're applying reason to like the things that's most existentially salient.
• 46:40
  SPEAKER_02: But what are your thoughts on that?
• 46:41
  SPEAKER_02: Like how to actually practice uh um prudence or practical reason.
• 46:47
  SPEAKER_04: So the the very like the first thing I would say is it sounds almost obvious, but you have to really want to practice it.
• 46:56
  SPEAKER_04: I I know that sounds like almost like too obvious, but if you look at Marcus Aurelius, um he he he wrote some some entries in his in his journal about other stoicism books that he read.
• 47:07
  SPEAKER_04: And you you got a sense from his writing that the most important thing to Marc Aurelius was having an excellent character.
• 47:14
  SPEAKER_04: That was his thing.
• 47:15
  SPEAKER_04: Like that, that he would feel bad if he saw someone else doing things that he would crumble um if he attempted.
• 47:23
  SPEAKER_04: You know, he like that was his his biggest ambition to develop an excellent character, to see people like Socrates um as like a true role model.
• 47:33
  SPEAKER_04: Many of us we don't we don't have that first that first belief that our values are worth dying for.
• 47:40
  SPEAKER_04: You know, we kind of want to we want to be half stoics.
• 47:43
  SPEAKER_04: That's the kind of sense that I get.
• 47:45
  SPEAKER_04: But in terms of of practicing it and baby stepping it, um, I think we need to get really clear on on our values.
• 47:53
  SPEAKER_04: So we need to we need to get good at listening within.
• 47:56
  SPEAKER_04: And I think that's difficult with just pure reason.
• 47:59
  SPEAKER_04: Um, I think that we need some some more intuitive practices.
• 48:02
  SPEAKER_04: That's why I'm big on meditation, um, listening to the inner voice.
• 48:07
  SPEAKER_04: There's some research that um some of the ancient philosophers experimented with different kinds of mind-altering substances as well, um, different kinds of visualizations to really listen to that that inner voice, that that that daemon, that that thing that that tells you what you should do, but very often we don't do it.
• 48:28
  SPEAKER_04: Um, but in terms of daily practices, I encourage everyone to do morning and evening reflections, um, mindfulness practice.
• 48:36
  SPEAKER_04: And the cynics saw um voluntary hardship as shortcuts to virtue.
• 48:44
  SPEAKER_04: Uh, that's how they described it.
• 48:45
  SPEAKER_04: And I think there's a place for that.
• 48:47
  SPEAKER_04: You know, I think there's a place for for fasting um and and various activities alongside that as short bursts of cultivating virtue.
• 48:57
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 48:58
  SPEAKER_02: That's that deja, my thinking is like, you know, reason.
• 49:01
  SPEAKER_02: Like what is even reason?
• 49:02
  SPEAKER_02: Like let's like uh conformal life to reason.
• 49:05
  SPEAKER_02: What's that mean?
• 49:06
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and I think it's reasonable sometimes to put reason in its place so you can start listening to something else, what I call the the Daemon or you know, the daemon.
• 49:14
  SPEAKER_02: And like you said, you can access this stuff through different practices.
• 49:18
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but it's sort of like I find the balance of some people uh over-relying on reason, and then some people like under-relying on it.
• 49:27
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, and it's sort of and you know, having that kind of sweet spot where you know how to operate with it.
• 49:31
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, and for me, at least journaling feels like a good kind of um sweet spot.
• 49:35
  SPEAKER_02: And yeah, I'm curious if you have any reflections on that.
• 49:38
  SPEAKER_02: And then the the last question I had is what's dawning on me with your, and I really like that thing you said about jujitsu, the apex habit, I think you called it, or practice.
• 49:47
  SPEAKER_02: Um, it's kind of like, and I was talking about massive Picalucchi, but how stoicism is an ecumenical practice.
• 49:53
  SPEAKER_02: It's almost like positively parasitic on anything else, as long as you have that kind of like stoic frame to it.
• 49:59
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, so lots of things are an opportunity to practice one's stoicism, uh, including like things that quote unquote fuck up.
• 50:05
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so every time there's a tech issue right here, I get so happy.
• 50:07
  SPEAKER_02: I'm like opportunity to practice my stoicism.
• 50:09
  SPEAKER_02: Um, you know, it's like a stoic dad joke here at the Stoa, me saying that all the time.
• 50:14
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but what's your thoughts on that?
• 50:15
  SPEAKER_02: Like the positive parasitic aspect of stoic practice.
• 50:21
  SPEAKER_04: Um yeah, I mean, it I I I'm completely with you.
• 50:25
  SPEAKER_04: That's why I listed those um difficult events at the beginning of the talk, because I wanted to to to show that yes, they these are these were really difficult times in my life, of course, but um they they had the gift of helping me practice stoicism.
• 50:42
  SPEAKER_04: They had the the gift of helping me deepen my understanding about myself and about life and about how I how I view um difficult situations.
• 50:50
  SPEAKER_04: I see uh mindfulness as well being like that.
• 50:53
  SPEAKER_04: You know, mindfulness can be applied to anything, like no matter what comes up, it's it's another opportunity to practice.
• 50:59
  SPEAKER_04: Um so yeah, I'm I'm with you.
• 51:02
  SPEAKER_04: I I like Joco Willink.
• 51:04
  SPEAKER_04: He has this this uh mantra called good, he's a navy seal.
• 51:08
  SPEAKER_04: And a lot of a lot of us in the in the self-improvement movement are using stoic principles without crediting stoic thinkers because it's it's become diluted and and repeated and copy and pasted.
• 51:23
  SPEAKER_04: But that's completely a stoic technique that he's using there without realizing it.
• 51:27
  SPEAKER_04: And just having that mantra good whenever you have a setback and looking for the the reasons why it gives you a gift or provides a silver lining is something that I that I actively do on a daily basis.
• 51:39
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, I like that.
• 51:40
  SPEAKER_02: And then um my last share, then I'll take someone else in.
• 51:43
  SPEAKER_02: Yesterday we had Alex Butt come in.
• 51:45
  SPEAKER_02: He's from the military and he was talking about tactical uh, you know, virtues within the military and stoicism.
• 51:51
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, Donald Robinson often talks about like the the three kind of careers that are attracted to stoicism, uh, are the military, uh, people in medicine and entrepreneur.
• 52:01
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and they basically do stoicism without knowing what stoicism is.
• 52:05
  SPEAKER_02: And when you tell them about the philosophy, you're like, oh yeah, that's what I'm already doing.
• 52:08
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, because those three things they have like uh what they call VUCA, you know, they're high in volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity.
• 52:15
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so they're naturally it's like a forcing function to be stoic, even if they don't know the term.
• 52:19
  SPEAKER_02: And the world is becoming more VUCA.
• 52:21
  SPEAKER_02: So we're like, it's like this is why I think stoicism is becoming more popular with a lot of people.
• 52:26
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so I'm really glad that you know you're here to get a real um concrete system for it.
• 52:32
  SPEAKER_02: Um so uh I'll pivot to QA.
• 52:36
  SPEAKER_02: And uh Nathan, you had a pretty good question to start us off with.
• 52:41
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, thanks, Peter.
• 52:43
  SPEAKER_03: Um let me find that.
• 52:46
  SPEAKER_03: So um it seems like a lot of your focus uh when it comes to implementing the philosophy of stoicism is um focused on the physical, like a uh physical implementation of another um say like of something else like jujitsu.
• 53:04
  SPEAKER_03: Um how important is that physical hardship key to learning this philosophy and any others?
• 53:13
  SPEAKER_03: Is it more important than just like say learning the information?
• 53:21
  SPEAKER_04: Um so I'm gonna try my best to answer that.
• 53:26
  SPEAKER_04: Uh so you're asking, is uh the physical component of learning uh stoicism more important than just learning information?
• 53:36
  SPEAKER_04: Is that is that correct?
• 53:37
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, learn just learning the philosophy, like how much more important is it more important or is it just a major part of it?
• 53:45
  SPEAKER_03: Like a forced physical activity that's that introduces some physical hardship, uh a pairing with the philosophy.
• 53:55
  SPEAKER_03: Is that is that most important for you?
• 54:01
  SPEAKER_03: How do you see that pairing?
• 54:03
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, um, so uh so the jujitsu example is interesting because most of the jujitsu training I do is it with my mind.
• 54:13
  SPEAKER_04: Um I don't I do most of my jujitsu training um with flashcards, um, committing ideas, concepts, principles to memory so that they will be available to me when I'm sparring.
• 54:27
  SPEAKER_04: Because if then I can I can have things stored in long-term memory, but if they're not available to me, I won't pull them out at the right time in the right place.
• 54:34
  SPEAKER_04: So I do about an hour of jujitsu training a day without actually doing jujitsu, just with my mind.
• 54:40
  SPEAKER_04: And a lot of chess players do this too, you know, um, thinking about moves.
• 54:45
  SPEAKER_04: Um, I had a a piano teacher, and he would just look at cheap music and play it in his mind without having a piano.
• 54:52
  SPEAKER_04: So I think that uh you can you can train in stoicism without physically doing things.
• 54:58
  SPEAKER_04: Um, I think a really good example of this would be pre-meditation of adversity.
• 55:04
  SPEAKER_04: A lot of people see premeditation of adversity as this way to ease anxiety about the future and it and like a form of cognitive exposure, which it is and it's great for that.
• 55:14
  SPEAKER_04: But the real value of it is to practice stoicism, to practice virtue, to practice your response in your mind.
• 55:22
  SPEAKER_04: It's like, oh, there this this this thing happens and that knocks me back, or this challenges me.
• 55:26
  SPEAKER_04: Okay, cool.
• 55:27
  SPEAKER_04: Now the interesting part, retrieval practice, how do I respond?
• 55:32
  SPEAKER_04: And then you pull it out and you practice, you practice your response, you rehearse it mentally, and then you go through it.
• 55:38
  SPEAKER_04: So um, yeah, I don't really, I don't really put a like a massive emphasis on you know, you you have to focus more on physical than mental, but we are embodied, and I I think we should just place a lot of emphasis on both.
• 55:53
  SPEAKER_04: Just both.
• 55:57
  SPEAKER_02: Any follow-up question, Nathan?
• 55:59
  SPEAKER_03: No, that's great.
• 56:00
  SPEAKER_03: Thanks.
• 56:02
  SPEAKER_02: Eric, uh, you had a question.
• 56:07
  SPEAKER_01: John, that was awesome.
• 56:09
  SPEAKER_01: Good to see this stuff coming out.
• 56:11
  SPEAKER_01: Uh yeah, I wanted your take on I wanted your take on community.
• 56:15
  SPEAKER_01: Uh at least for me, and I I would imagine for many, you know, you look back at at some of the classic Stoics and they seem like islands to themselves, right?
• 56:25
  SPEAKER_01: They just seem like these extremely independent dudes.
• 56:28
  SPEAKER_01: And I think even the modern stoic practice is a highly individual endeavor.
• 56:33
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, it does deal with your inner domain, but I mean, Buddhism has the Sangha as like an extremely essential component, like being in community of practitioners that I just don't could be a lack of exposure, but I just don't really see it addressed or enacted anywhere in the world.
• 56:51
  SPEAKER_01: Like, what's your take on a community of practice when diving into stoicism?
• 56:56
  SPEAKER_01: And is it helpful?
• 56:57
  SPEAKER_01: Is it necessary?
• 56:58
  SPEAKER_01: Is it detrimental, backwards?
• 57:00
  SPEAKER_01: Like any of that type be super interested in?
• 57:04
  SPEAKER_04: It would be amazing.
• 57:05
  SPEAKER_04: I think that's the ideal for sure.
• 57:07
  SPEAKER_04: A community.
• 57:08
  SPEAKER_04: I think that I think that yeah, like a lot of the ancient Stoics seemed like these islands themselves, but they did live in a time when you could go and go to a stoicism lecture.
• 57:18
  SPEAKER_04: Like I can't go down my street and go to a stoicism lecture and talk to aspiring Stoics, and I can't do that.
• 57:24
  SPEAKER_04: Um so yeah, I think that that there were there was community there.
• 57:30
  SPEAKER_04: It's not really talked about in those days as community.
• 57:32
  SPEAKER_04: Um, stoicism started on the painted porch through discussion, um, through disagreements, through elaboration.
• 57:39
  SPEAKER_04: Um, what I think you get from community, you need to be on the same wavelength, of course.
• 57:45
  SPEAKER_04: You know, you need to have you need to be able to converse and have dialogue in a constructive way.
• 57:50
  SPEAKER_04: But what you get from community is innovation.
• 57:53
  SPEAKER_04: You know, like, hey, I'm struggling with this issue that no one else has has addressed.
• 57:58
  SPEAKER_04: Uh can you help me figure out a solution to this problem?
• 58:02
  SPEAKER_04: And then you have innovation.
• 58:04
  SPEAKER_04: Um and yeah, and I think that's uh that's that's a beautiful thing about community, right?
• 58:09
  SPEAKER_04: Is like is innovating, creating together, creating new solutions to problems people didn't even know existed.
• 58:18
  SPEAKER_02: Any follow-up, Eric?
• 58:21
  SPEAKER_01: No, that was great.
• 58:22
  unknown: Thanks.
• 58:24
  SPEAKER_02: I'm curious what um I know High Existence had a course on Stoicism, uh, which uh I imagine had a communal aspect.
• 58:32
  SPEAKER_02: Um how did that go?
• 58:35
  SPEAKER_04: Uh yeah, so the first uh stoicism course that that we launched, the Stoic quest on High Existence uh was live, sort of a live component.
• 58:44
  SPEAKER_04: And there was an emphasis on um every week there'd be theory and then there'd be daily stoic visualizations, and then there'd be various kinds of challenges, um, so sort of like gamified stoicism.
• 58:59
  SPEAKER_04: That was a couple of years ago, and I've I've since then been been trying to innovate and improve, and and that's where this new framework has come from.
• 59:09
  SPEAKER_04: And and yeah, now I I'm I'm trying to to create um as much as I can at the moment, like an online stoic training camp, very much in the same way that if you if you had a like a um a contest coming up of some kind, like a boxing match or something, you could you could go and do a training camp for it, you know.
• 59:30
  SPEAKER_04: Um, you could get ready for it, you'd have structure, you'd have community, you'd have mentorship.
• 59:35
  SPEAKER_04: Um, and then I think that the long-term plan is to be able to do something like that in in real life, to have a space where people can come together and actually train um because yeah, I think I think that's that's the future.
• 59:50
  SPEAKER_04: I'd love to see that to go.
• 59:53
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that's something that um I feel like my uh daemon is pushing me towards as well.
• 59:59
  SPEAKER_02: Uh next question is Kevin.
• 1:00:02
  SPEAKER_02: Uh you can ask your question, Kevin.
• 1:00:08
  SPEAKER_00: Hey John, really great presentation.
• 1:00:10
  SPEAKER_00: Um really interesting.
• 1:00:13
  SPEAKER_00: Um I'm looking forward to looking into your uh your blog and your website.
• 1:00:17
  SPEAKER_00: Um I'm wondering, uh, as someone who's formerly experimented like through, I'm assuming um high high existence, as someone who's experimented with plant medicine is now a stoic, I wonder like what your experience is and the relationship between like the possibilities of like you know very intense imaginative or psychedelic experiences in Stoicism.
• 1:00:40
  SPEAKER_00: Because to me, it seems like much of Stoicism is very like present and reality-based.
• 1:00:44
  SPEAKER_00: For example, like the three professions that were mentioned earlier, like entrepreneurship, healthcare, military, they're all like you know, very present in a media versus like say the imaginative mind of like a poet or a writer or an actor or something.
• 1:00:59
  SPEAKER_00: I'm wondering if you have any thoughts on that, um, based on your experiences.
• 1:01:07
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, um, so the first thing is I I try my best not to identify as a stoic, um, but to identify as someone who practices stoic stoicism, you know, because I really like that.
• 1:01:19
  SPEAKER_04: I really want to keep bringing that distinction up as like a practitioner, um, not to see it as this fixed thing, but like you you can call yourself a stoic and not actually do any stoicism, right?
• 1:01:29
  SPEAKER_04: Like you can just sort of just say you're a stoic, but um, what separates a practicing stoic is that they're actually practicing, they're doing things about it.
• 1:01:36
  SPEAKER_04: Um, so I found that my experiences on ayahuasca, I saw them as almost like mini training experiences relating to my emotions.
• 1:01:47
  SPEAKER_04: So I had, you know, panic and anxiety and fear and love and all of these things come up.
• 1:01:53
  SPEAKER_04: And for me, it was like an investigation and an understanding of how is this working, how is this linking up.
• 1:02:00
  SPEAKER_04: And there was nothing that I saw in that that disregarded stoic thought or like it didn't didn't work with it very well.
• 1:02:09
  SPEAKER_04: I still see a lot of truth and beauty in in Buddhism as well, and I and I'm always trying to kind of bring that back in to my discussions with like mindfulness and acceptance of emotions and things like that.
• 1:02:21
  SPEAKER_04: But um, yeah, I think I think that the stoics get this bad rap of being too rational.
• 1:02:30
  SPEAKER_04: And yeah, I mean, I I see myself as as a creative person, as an artist.
• 1:02:35
  SPEAKER_04: And for me to live according to my nature, um, of course, yeah, use reason, that's like human nature, but my personal nature is I I have to be creative and I have to think and dream and and be that kind of person.
• 1:02:47
  SPEAKER_04: And that's important to me, and that's how I'm gonna flourish.
• 1:02:49
  SPEAKER_04: If if you take an artist and you stop that artist from making art, that's not wise, that's not rational, right?
• 1:02:56
  SPEAKER_04: So, like it's sometimes rational to be irrational, sometimes rational to have ecstasy and peak experiences.
• 1:03:02
  SPEAKER_04: Um, yeah, I see I see the the the reason in stoicism to be kind of like a common sense approach as well.
• 1:03:12
  SPEAKER_04: Like it's not like they're doing really complex logic puzzles, it's like going to a wise elder asking for advice.
• 1:03:19
  SPEAKER_04: You know, you wouldn't go, whoa, you're being hyper-rational.
• 1:03:22
  SPEAKER_04: You just would go, yeah, that that makes sense.
• 1:03:24
  SPEAKER_04: That that seems reasonable.
• 1:03:26
  SPEAKER_04: I should probably follow that advice.
• 1:03:28
  SPEAKER_04: Um, so I kind of see the the reason in stoicism to be that kind of reason as opposed to hyper-rational and logical and uh nitpicky.
• 1:03:37
  SPEAKER_04: So yeah, that's what I think about that.
• 1:03:41
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, thanks.
• 1:03:41
  SPEAKER_00: That's a good good response.
• 1:03:43
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, yeah, Nathan worded it as psychedelics as a mini emotional training experience.
• 1:03:48
  SPEAKER_00: And I think when I sort of asked the question, I was like, yeah, maybe that's sort of a those intense experiences can sort of act as like the the training grounds for when you're in a more extreme situation that you sort of mentioned.
• 1:04:02
  SPEAKER_00: So cool.
• 1:04:03
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:04:05
  unknown: Yeah.
• 1:04:05
  SPEAKER_02: But my sense is that a lot of people who are into extreme things are discovering or rediscovering stoicism.
• 1:04:10
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, but once it gets more out there and popular, then other kind of temperaments will will discover the fruits and have different expressions of it.
• 1:04:19
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, and sort of like Pierre Hideau's uh thinking to mind is like, you know, philosophy as a way of life, which stoicism is a part of, is like the artists of life compared to modern philosophers who are artists of reason.
• 1:04:29
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and yeah, I think you can have an artistry of life when you uh practice stoicism properly.
• 1:04:36
  SPEAKER_04: Um I had something to say, Peter, on a point that you raised earlier about people practicing stoicism without knowing they are, like their whole lives.
• 1:04:45
  SPEAKER_04: And I think in general, there's there's a lot of confirmation bias that that makes us drawn to certain books.
• 1:04:52
  SPEAKER_04: Like a lot of a lot of our reading lists are not books that we should read, they're books that tell us things that we already agree with, you know.
• 1:04:59
  SPEAKER_04: So we kind of create echo chambers.
• 1:05:01
  SPEAKER_04: And people that are that are naturally practicing stoicism, they stumble on a stoic quote and they go, That's what I do.
• 1:05:07
  SPEAKER_04: I should, oh, that's great.
• 1:05:08
  SPEAKER_04: I'm gonna read some more of Seneca.
• 1:05:10
  SPEAKER_04: And it's just another form of confirmation bias.
• 1:05:12
  SPEAKER_04: And and yeah, I'm interested in like what would the people that that when they read stoicism, they're like, that's nothing like me.
• 1:05:19
  SPEAKER_04: I I want to know what they'd be like if they practice stoicism.
• 1:05:22
  SPEAKER_04: You know, I think that stoicism is for everyone, it doesn't have to be for the people that already practice it.
• 1:05:27
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, that's a really good point.
• 1:05:29
  SPEAKER_02: Like, you know, how uh quote mining, how they're like they're quoting like Buddha in order for like some self-help success literature or whatever.
• 1:05:35
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and a lot of stoic mining happens too.
• 1:05:39
  SPEAKER_02: And and I was talking about this at Interintellect actually, how a lot of people are just like, don't like stoicism.
• 1:05:45
  SPEAKER_02: Um, perhaps because it's like the burden of the dictionary definition, but there's like um a vibe about it that I think uh has been cultivated due to that stoic mining that comes from uh you know the people who have that bias that you said, because it's like a more of a man energy, masculine energy, dude bro energy at times.
• 1:06:03
  SPEAKER_02: Um but yeah, if you just look at the propositions of the philosophy and the potential of it, it's really uh open to anyone.
• 1:06:10
  SPEAKER_02: And I think it would provide lots of benefits for many people who otherwise would um overlook it due to the current vibe of the quote unquote community of it.
• 1:06:20
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 1:06:21
  SPEAKER_04: Agree.
• 1:06:23
  SPEAKER_02: Um so yeah, that's uh um all the questions in the chat.
• 1:06:27
  SPEAKER_02: So perhaps we can close out here.
• 1:06:29
  SPEAKER_02: Uh any any kind of thoughts you'd like to uh leave us with or summarize um what has been said today?
• 1:06:37
  SPEAKER_04: Um so the main thing I want to leave you with is just is like I don't have all the answers.
• 1:06:42
  SPEAKER_04: I'm trying to figure this out myself.
• 1:06:45
  SPEAKER_04: And um and I encourage you to do the same thing.
• 1:06:48
  SPEAKER_04: This is a project we can all work on together, you know, taking ideas about stoicism or any kind of uh wisdom tradition and trying and try to create systems so that we can learn it and coach people um and understand it better and get rid of all that complexity, you know, because for a long time I found so much complexity in in stoicism.
• 1:07:08
  SPEAKER_04: And I I didn't, like I said, I didn't get a clear like how do you practice this thing?
• 1:07:13
  SPEAKER_04: Um, and that's a shame.
• 1:07:14
  SPEAKER_04: So let's let's all work on it together and share and discuss.
• 1:07:17
  SPEAKER_04: And and yeah, I I really appreciate this opportunity, Peter.
• 1:07:21
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, my pleasure, man.
• 1:07:22
  SPEAKER_02: And really glad to finally meet you.
• 1:07:24
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you, Eric, for uh introducing us.
• 1:07:27
  SPEAKER_02: Um are you familiar with Michael Tromblay?
• 1:07:29
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I imagine you are the jujitsu guy uh that the Stoicism.
• 1:07:33
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, we should have some like round table with uh uh a bunch of people who are practicing Stoicism in a different way here at the STOA to have some immersion dialogue um uh uh about this.
• 1:07:42
  SPEAKER_02: So if you're if you're open, we'd love to have you back.
• 1:07:44
  SPEAKER_02: Uh conversation with others.
• 1:07:46
  SPEAKER_02: Cool.
• 1:07:47
  SPEAKER_02: Um so that being said, I'll make some uh announcements in a moment, but John, uh, thank you so much again for coming to the STOA.
• 1:07:54
  SPEAKER_02: Uh I'd love to have you back.
• 1:07:55
  SPEAKER_02: And um tomorrow we have two events.
• 1:07:57
  SPEAKER_02: Uh Dave Snowden um is coming back to the STOA at 12 p.m.
• 1:08:01
  SPEAKER_02: to talk about HR bullshit.
• 1:08:03
  SPEAKER_02: So, how much bullshit is prevalent in the human resource industry, um, which I'm super looking forward to that because I was in HR for a bit and it was traumatizing for me.
• 1:08:12
  SPEAKER_02: Opportunity to practice Stoicism, definitely.
• 1:08:14
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and then uh at 6 p.m.
• 1:08:16
  SPEAKER_02: Eastern time, uh uh Jeff Salzman from um he's a he's a guy that's prominent in the integral theory movement.
• 1:08:22
  SPEAKER_02: He's talking about how the culture war creates integral consciousness.
• 1:08:25
  SPEAKER_02: So um to non stoic events again to practice our um was it inter interleaving, interweaving uh aspect of stoicism here at the STOA.
• 1:08:36
  SPEAKER_02: So that being said, yeah, everyone, thanks so much for coming out today.
• 1:08:39
  SPEAKER_02: Coming out today, coming out today, coming out today, coming out today.