Heroic Chat with William B. Irvine: What It Means To Be a Hero

Foreign. P.m. central Time, which means it is day one. Today we have a very special guest. Professor William B. Irvine is joining us and I cannot wait to tap into your heroic stoic wisdom. Professor, before we do, I want to say hi real quick. Alex, great to see you. Kelly, Kimmy, Coach Lanny, great to see you. Looking strong, Georgina, drive safely. Johannes. Coach Becky, Ryan, Sarah, et al, great to see you. Professor Irvine, great to see you. You are a rare breed, a professor of stoicism who practices stoicism. Great to see you.

Oh, it's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for the invitation. And hello to all of you out there listening. Thank you for putting aside part of your day to hear an old guy talk about stoicism, and I hope to give you a gentle introduction because it might not be what you think it is.

We talk about stoicism a lot and I lean on a lot of your wisdom and I'm excited to go deep. But community, as you know, if you've been following along, we have two notes on Professor Irvine's great books. One is most recent one, the Stoic Challenge. Check that out for some great big ideas. And the one that came before that, which was one of my deeper influences on stoicism, A Guide to the Good Life, the Ancient Art of Stoic Joy. And thank you very much, professor, for bringing to life Musonius Rufus's wisdom. Although you did not write this, of course, you played a role in making sure that we had access to the fourth great roaming stoic that most of us have never had the opportunity to study. So this note is one of my favorites and I just want to thank you for that. We also have a ton of plus ones in which I reference you and your work, good sir. And we've got a bunch of quotes I was enjoying in our database in which you reflect on some of these Stoic ideals in a pithy collection of wisdom, which we could frankly talk about each of those in depth. But before we go in, I want to step back. We like to take a moment and just deliberately connect to the best, most heroic version of ourselves. I'm going to put you on the spot. Do you have any practice that you engage in when you want to connect to. We call it the Daimon, but kind of that best version of ourselves. Is there anything that you do in a moment when you want to kind of center and ground and connect to that best version of yourself?

There is no one practice that I do, but there is as an ongoing thing, mindful living. And that is you're Living. You're going through your life, and while you're going through your life, you're playing the role of spectator. You're watching yourself go through your days, and it can get pretty. Pretty busy, and it can be quite entertaining, and it can be quite depressing at the same time. So you catch yourself doing things, and then you pause and you think, ah, what is motivating me at this moment? Or you. You have just done something, and you can have that same reflection right. The way an audience would who watched this. What was really motivating me at that point in the whole notion of courage. And I know we're going to explore this in heroism. We're going to explore this in. In greater depth. But it's. It's an interesting thing. And, you know, we live in a time when, if you talk to people about heroes, the thing that comes to mind is superheroes. Now, I'm not big into the Marvel universe, so I don't know my superheroes very well. So I kind of call on the ones I was exposed to when I was a kid. You know, Superman, he's a hero. Well, you know, he had kryptonite, I guess, to look out for, but other than that, you know, he was kind of bulletproof. So you can raise this question of what was he really heroic? You know, because for him, you know, he could fly. He could fly. So, you know, the standard of what for him counts as heroic, it's certainly heroic from our perspective. But from a broader perspective, you know, maybe not in the same way you can take a human who lacks his superpowers, who has normal mortal powers, and who can rise to the level of a heroic action. And it might be some minor, minor thing. You know, if you're a paraplegic, if you have a number of disabilities, what counts for you as a heroic action would, for a normal person count as just life? Just what you do? Yeah. So in my own life, you know, I try to do things that I find that are brave things, and brave would be very. I do not save women from burning buildings. Although if I've never come across a burning building, so I. I don't know for sure what I would do. But just doing things where I know I'm at my edge, you know, this is kind of risky kind of thing I'm doing. And the risk can take various forms. It can be physical risk, it can be professional risk, and then, you know, to take the plunge. And in my case, since it's often simply writing something and then hitting the push, you know, the send button, that. That can be a kind of a heroic act of knowing, you know, this can have blowback, this can have bad consequences, but it's a risk worth taking because somebody somewhere will be benefited. Will. Will be helped by what I'm doing.

I love it. And you just gave us an opportunity to arrive in a parallel fashion to. Our last guest was George Mumford, who's mindfulness expert, who worked with Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant and helped bring out their kind of presence on the court. So the way that you brought us in with the observing what's happening in our lives and what our motivation is struck me as parallel to the way that he helped us arrive here today, and then you went straight in. So I'm loving. I'm loving that we're already talking about what it means to be a hero. I love your distinction on Superman. And courage is not the absence of fear or the perfection of the impossible perfection that's expressed in a Superman and these other characters, but the willingness to act in the presence of fear. And then I was thinking of the etymology of the word hero. I've asked this question to a lot of people, and the only person that knew the answer was the one who told me the origin story of it. So I think you might be the second year. Do you know the etymology of the word hero from an ancient Greek perspective?

No. I know all about hero sandwiches. But heroes of the other kind.

Let's go.

Not quite so.

Let's go. So my understanding is that in ancient Greece, when they came up with a word for hero, they didn't pick tough guy or killer of bad guys. The word etymologically in ancient Greek meant protector. So from my perspective, we all have the opportunity to be protectors. The hero is a protector. The hero has strength for two, and the hero does the hard work to have that strength for two. And the way we operationalize it is playfully through two tattoos I happen to have in my body, that if you want to be heroic, then you need to live with virtue. Then you need to live with that deep sense of or to expressing the best version of yourself and closing the gap moment to moment to moment, living with more wisdom and discipline and love and courage. And I like to say that in the moment in which you do express that best version of yourself, you are heroic. You don't need to be rescuing a woman from a burning building or waiting 25 years to achieve something. You showed up as your best self. That eudaimonic ideal has been achieved, and there, boom. Let's Be the best version of ourselves. Longer chat on that. But I want to step back and hear your story and your journey. Because when I think of who you are and how you've shown up in a world in which philosophy is very, very different from how it was practiced in the ancient world. I know that you have taken a lot of creative risks to be who you are in the academic world and I would just love it if you could, to give us a brief biographical sketch of what brought you to this moment and maybe some of the challenges that you faced in your own quest and how we might be able to connect to that wisdom as expressed through your own journey.

Yeah, I stumbled into philosophy and you know, there are accidents and it's interesting. So listeners can think about their own lives, you know, pivotal things that were small things at the time and yet caused this deflection in the course of your life. Yeah, it can involve, I think about it, you know, and you, you meet your significant other. It's because you were sitting in a certain place on the bus on a certain day and had it not been for that, you know, the subsequent life would have been dramatically different. In similar fashion, coming under influences, certain kind of influences can deflect the course of your life. And so in my case, I didn't even know philosophy existed when I was a kid. I heard about them, but I had no idea. You just imagine it's somebody who sits there and has profound thoughts and then other people say that's a profound thought. But I was not exposed at all to it until my senior year of high school. I just happened to come across two different things. I came across Bertrand Russell. I think it might have been on pbs. They had a documentary about him. He had just published his autobiography, three volume autobiography, and then also became aware of Henry David Thoreau. And so I ended up reading Walden and reading Bertrand Russell's autobiography and then thought, you know, I kind of see this. You know, I think that what Thoreau is doing is really nice and what Russell is doing is really nice. And that's what philosophy apparently is. So went off to college wanting to be, wanting to take more philosophy, but not really knowing kind of what I was going to do. I started out in college as a physics major, found out that if I'm going to take physics, I need to take lots of mathematics. So I became a double major in mathematics and physics, went further and found out that physics gets really hard. You know, by about the third year I just hadn't seen that coming. Gets really hard. And I thought but you know, I still have this interest in philosophy. So I had already taken some lower level courses and I thought, so I'm gonna, I'm gonna do philosophy. And then talking to my philosophy professors, I said, so I want to, I want to do what you're doing. What does that require? And you know, I got this kind of, they would say, well, kid, it's really tough, it's really tough to get a job. And that would have been in the 1970s. And now it's very, very difficult to make a living doing philosophy. So I thought, okay, so here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to be a double major, not in math and physics, but in math and philosophy. Because what I really want is a philosophy teaching job. But if that doesn't happen, I can always fall back on the math degree. You know, you go to an employer, potential employer, and you say, I'm a philosophy major, you're not going to get hired. They're going to say, if I hire this guy, he's going to spend his day walking around saying, is this hand a human hand? Right. He's got other things to do. But if I tell him I'm a math major, they'll be impressed because they know about that. They know it's hard, it's difficult to do. So I ended up with a double major. The other thing that I discovered though in getting the philosophy major was that philosophy was very, very much unlike what Henry David Thoreau was doing. And what impressed me about Thoreau was he, it would connect up with the lives of ordinary people. And when I was doing philosophy, this is less true today, but, and because I was doing it in the United States, we did what's called analytical philosophy. So we solved, we dealt with that. These problems never get solved. Some of them have been around for thousands of years, but we, we fiddle with them and then we come up with insights to them and then we publish papers on them that other philosophers, professional philosophers, philosophy professors read so they can write their own paper about it. So it becomes about career promotion. You know, it becomes about getting, getting publications. But it's all, it's all hidden from the public. We have zero impact. Typically, an analytic philosophy has zero impact on the, on the public. And I, given this, I've written one thing about this. You know, if the garbage men go on str, we will all know about it. We will care very much about it. We will be up in arms about it. If the philosophers went on strike, no one would notice, right? And you'd pick up the New York Times and it would say, philosophers strike enters seventh year. And you'd say, huh, Wonder what that's about, right? The garbage men did that for seven years. We would know. We would desperately know. And that's just kind of backwards. And that's because in the Western world, philosophy. Philosophy in universities has taken a certain path. And I decided, okay, two step project. One is to get tenure, because that means you've got job security. And second, use that tenure to do something that I'm not supposed to be doing, and that is writing philosophy or for ordinary people in a manner that can affect their lives. So this would be. In the early 2000s, I wrote a book called On Desire. And what I was interested in is human desire. How do we get the desires that we do? Why do we act on them? And in the process of doing the research for that book, I encountered stoicism. And I just thought, this is the greatest stuff ever. Because, number one, people misunderstood it. They thought that a stoic is just a person who grimly takes whatever life throws at him. And that's not true at all. The stoics were some of the most cheerful people on the planet. And I thought, this is great stuff. And I got to share this with the world. So that's when Guide to the Good Life happened. And it's my. My effort to share with the world this ancient philosophy. Now, if I had been a professor at Harvard, I might have gotten in trouble for it. They would have said, he's off the hook now he's doing this stuff for public consumption. But I wasn't at Harvard. I was at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, which turned out to be a wonderful home for me because for them it's like, yeah, it sounds like philosophy. So I was able to kind of work it into my career path. And, and I'm really glad because I, I get. I get emails from people and I. I know there's an impact that I've had. I re. I re. Regard the writing that I do as a form of teaching. It's to a very broad audience. And the beauty of it is nobody says, is this going to be on the midterm? Right? There are people who actually care and actually want to learn. And I also have to work. You know, if you're an academic, you write in this style that's almost unreadable unless you're a fellow academic. But work to write in a way that ordinary people can pick up the books with no background. Never had any background in philosophy. Take them by the hand, walk them through and teach them stuff that they can use in everyday life and explain why it's useful, tell them how to do it, tell them how to become a Stoic. So that's kind of where I am today. About two and a half years ago, I actually retired. So I regard myself as semi retired because I no longer appear in the classroom, but I still write for public consumption. I've done a bunch of podcasts. So if you were a stoic, one silver lining of the pandemic was you were suddenly in demand. You know, a whole bunch of people saying, you know, okay, you're a stoic. What are we supposed to do under, under these circumstances? And it was nice to be around at that time and to meet that kind of broader need about how are we supposed to cope with this? So would regard myself as still a teacher but semi retired. I no longer appear in the classroom. I appear before big audiences, like the people present today who just, you know, they aren't interested in, in passing a test. They're interested in learning about life because they've got one life to live and they want to spend it to the optimal way, in the optimal way that they can.

I love it. Thank you for that. And then ultimately, we want to pass the ultimate test moment to moment to moment. Can we show up as our best selves, et cetera? So then, stoicism101, if you were going to boil it down into its essence, and then I want to step back and ask you about some other favorite distinctions and your favorite philosophers, how would you describe it for us?

Stoicism? Well, it's very broad. Philosophy has multiple components. And so my primary interest is in its psychological component. It's also very interested in physics, it's interested in metaphysics. And those are of less interest to me because they have less impact on you living a good life. So I'm interested in their psychological insights. So it turns out that the Stoics were premier psychologists of the first century AD and they came up with some really wonderful insights into how human minds work. These are insights that have only been rediscovered in the last half of the 20th century. A long period there where science sort of thought, oh, don't know about this, but toward the end of the 20th century, two things happened. One is this field called evolutionary psychology arose that tried to explain our minds in terms of our evolutionary past. You know, if you go back 2200,000 years ago, your ancestors do your extended family tree. Here's a project for you. I tried mine and I got Back like three generations. And then it dawned on me. You know, every generation back you go, there's twice as many people to track down. And every generation back you go, the, the information is going to be that less reliable. But imagine you could go back in your family tree for thousands of generations, you would find people who were, what, living on the savannas of Africa. That's where we came from, ultimately. And those people had lives nothing like yours. You know, they were much more exposed to the elements, much greater dangers. Didn't have books, didn't have written language, so they had to survive under those circumstances. We carry a whole bunch of the wiring that allowed them to survive under those circumstances. We have very little difference in our wiring compared to theirs, except we live in radically different environments than they do. Believe it or not. They didn't have computers, they didn't have cell phones. You know, they didn't have all of this stuff. And, and, and yet we, we have it. And we still have these primitive minds that are at work. And, and you can detect your, your primitive mind. And you can also figure out how little control you have on your mind. If you've ever tried meditation, you'll know the basic exercise is how is to empty your mind. Take five minutes, go to a quiet place, empty your mind of all thoughts you find it's impossible to do because there are these voices in the background that are always reminding you of what you should be doing and saying, yeah, what are you gonna have for dinner? And reminding you of somebody who insulted you two days before. If it's 2 in the morning and you're awake, those, those voices, they're, they're, they're in a chorus, you know, they're, they're putting on a play for you of the things you could be doing, should have been doing and everything else in, you know, so it can be hard to fall back asleep. And also you notice in your life, you notice yourself, you notice anger. Anger over what? Anger over the fact that somebody said something bad about you, they insulted you. Well, they're just words, you know, and they are just words. But the problem is 200,000 years ago, your status within the tribe you were in mattered very much in a life or death kind of way and in a way of your ability to reproduce. And so you're wired to care very much about your social status, except that, you know, now, if some people aren't going to come up and attack you, hope, hope not. Things are getting a little bit stranger, but it's no longer the issue. And yet the Wiring to react in a certain way is still there. And I don't mean literal copper wires, but the wiring of your brain, it will evolve very slowly to the new circumstances you're in. But until it does, you've got to live with this wiring. The wiring also encourages you to take shortcuts. Here's one I've been thinking about lately. You meet somebody new and you do what? Daniel Kahneman, the 20th century philosopher, he's still around though, so. But he did most of his work at the end of the 20th century. You do what's called fast thinking. You form a first impression of the person you met. And it was very important on the savannahs of Africa, because you're meeting a stranger, maybe he's going to kill you, but maybe he can help you. And you had to figure that out instantly. And how would you figure that out? No, and just kind of how they stood, the amount of eye contact, you know, subtle things like that. And then after that, once you got that first impression, the interesting thing is you would look for evidence that the first impression was correct and ignore evidence that it wasn't. So it sticks with you. And that still is true. And I'll bet you that the people in this audience, if you think about it carefully, there is somebody you've met and formed a bad opinion about, and you should really give that person a second chance because maybe it was just a bad day for them. Maybe they're actually a wonderful person. And the reverse of that, you've got a friend that you like from the first minute. Maybe it's not a good friend for you to have. Maybe they're a friend because they tell you what you want to hear and never tell you what you should hear. So it gets. Gets complicated. So we have that as something to work with. It's built in. So one of your principal challenges in life is how to take this monkey mind and make it as functional as possible in the modern world in which we live.

Perfect. And how does stoicism help us do that?

Stoicism helps us by. The principal concern is with negative emotions. I just mentioned insults. When somebody insults you, it stings. I can still remember cases where somebody insulted me decades ago. And that's incredibly stupid. That's so stupid. And yet, hey, I'm wired that way. So they thought about the emotions we experience, in particular the negative emotions. So other negative emotions, envy, anger, regret, remorse, those are all negative emotions. They're certainly emotions. What makes them negative? They feel bad. And so the stoics said, you know what we should come up with a strategy for, number one, avoiding having these negative emotions. And number two, for if they get through our defenses, for minimizing the harm they do to us. Okay, so. So it isn't that you stand there and just suppress emotions. And that's the first mistake most people think is that stoics are really good at suppressing emotions, their negative emotions. But that's not it. They don't allow themselves to have the negative emotions because they've got these very clever strategies to avoid having them. And they've also got these level two strategies for if that first level doesn't work, here's a second level that can help them minimize the harm that's done. Now, the flip side of the negative emotions are positive emotions. And in the course of a day, if you are looking for them, you will experience a number of them. One of my favorites are moments of delight. So it isn't a big thing, but it's. You're. You're going through your day and you realize, gosh, look at that flower. Isn't that something? Look at that sky. Okay, it's a blue sky. Didn't have to be there, but it is. There could been a different color blue if it's a cloudy sky. Ah, look at those clouds. Interesting shape. Moments of delight. And of course you'll have much bigger form of that is moments of joy. So those are positive emotions, moments where you experience a feeling of awe. Awe at the world around you. So I'm told you, I at one time I wanted to be a physicist. I still have a deep interest in science. And the interesting thing about science is the more you learn about the world, the more absolutely astonishing, astonishingly amazing place the world is. And so I can be walking along, see the bark on a tree, see the lichens growing on the bark on a tree, and just be swept away. So those are positive emotions. So stoics were not anti emotion. They were very sensibly anti negative emotions. They embrace the positive emotions and they, they dealt with the negative emotions not by stifling them, but by avoiding experiencing them at all.

I love it. And there's one of the quotes we have in our database that reflects on exactly that truth. Here we go. Yeah. Ideally, the setback won't give rise to negative emotions within us, not because we are successfully concealing our distress, but because we have no distress to conceal. What's your favorite practice or you think the most practical practice to do that? How do we, level one, create a life in which we just don't experience the intensity and frequency of negative emotions that those who are not practicing stoicism tend to experience.

Yeah, they have strategies. One of the biggest strategies that I discuss at great length in my stoic challenge book is called framing. And this is something that Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. Late in the 20th century, psychologists came up with this notion of framing. We may not have it in our power to determine the setbacks we experience, but we do have it in our power how we frame those setbacks. Okay, and. And. And that's an amazing thing. That's a minor discovery, but it can have major impact on. On your life. So go. Go back to insults. When somebody insults you, you can take it in a number of different ways. You are wired to take it as something. As a grievous attack on you, one that can reduce your social standing, one that can thereby impair your. Your ability to get food when food is present and your ability to mate and so on. You can go that route. You're wired to do that. But besides that wiring, you have a prefrontal cortex. You can think around that, and you can say, you know, I can do that, but I can also simply treat it up, put a comedic frame around it. So what I do is I turn it into a joke. I laugh at the person who has done that. Okay, oh, you insulted me that way. Well, if that's the worst you can say about me, it's clear that you don't know enough about me to be insulting me. Right? Whoa. You know, they're. They're gonna be taken aback. Wait a minute. I insulted him. I hit him with my best shot, and he just laughed it off. Another stoic response to an insult is just ignore it. Go on as if nothing has been said. And it's striking how the other person will react, because, again, they're out to ruin your day, and you're just acting as if nothing has happened. So sometimes if you try that, you know, they might be kind of off their stride and say, did you hear what I just said? And then you say, yeah. And then you just continue as if they had said nothing. It's a devastating kind of thing to do because it shows them you don't really care what they have to say, by the way, you shouldn't care what. What a lot of people have to say. And so this is another thing I explore. We all play games in life, right? You have certain values, and then the game is to try to attain the things that you value. Different people value different things. Very many people Want to be two, two big things. Fame and fortune. Fortune is a relative thing. So, you know, if you're living in a, in an impoverished country, fortune means what? Means having a roof over your head. If you're an American, fortune means you drive a certain kind of car, you fly a certain kind of jet. Oh, private jet, I might add. You know, you have all of these things going on. Fame can mean, you know, the obvious sense, but it can also mean Internet fame. You want people to admire you. Better still, although you should never admit it, you'd love it if they envied you and the life you were living. Okay, now, so the, the desire for fortune I, I think is connected to the desire for fame. It lets you buy stuff that's going to encourage other people to kind of want what you have. So that's one game you can play. There's another game you can play in the stoics play. It's not so much about things, acquisition of things. It's about having interesting experiment experiences. It's about developing yourself as a human being. It's about a sense that you're living a life worth living. Now, others who are living with different goals might look at your life and say, he's a failure. And you are measured against their goals, but you're not playing that game. You know, it would be if, if you're out walking on a field and somebody comes up from behind and tackles you and, and they're triumphant at tackling you. And you might say, well, what was that about? Oh, well, I'm playing football and I, I tackled you. And then your response is, well, I wasn't, I'm just walking. I don't care about football. So you go play your game with other people who play your game. I, I just don't want to be part of that game. Why don't I want to be a part of that game? Because I think it's a game that can't be won. And you know, this whole notion of our pursuit of happiness. So people work very hard to get the thing, the one thing they think is missing from their life, the one thing that will make their life complete, and they will live happily ever after. They work so hard to get it, and they get it. And yes, they're happy for five minutes, for five days long stretch, maybe for five weeks. And then what do they do? They find a new thing that if only they had it, they would live happily ever after. So they're on what psychologists call a hedonic treadmill. And stoic is going to say, get off the treadmill. Learn to want the things you've already. You already have. Learn how to appreciate the things you already have, because then you don't have to go out and pursue them. You've already got them. And they have strategies for, for doing that, for, for becoming more appreciative of what you already have.

Love it. And then winning, we like to say win the ultimate game. That's rule number one. You got to know the ultimate game. You're playing the wrong game. Love the football analogy. Wait, wait, wait. Football's a floor, but that's not the game that I'm playing right now. Let's go. All right, so stepping back, who's your favorite Stoic?

My favorite stoic right now. Ask me next week and I might have a different favorite. Stoic is Seneca, who is, who's quite a guy and in some sense was a heroic guy too. So this is 1st century AD in Rome. Stoicism was invented by the Greeks in about 300 B.C. we don't hear much about them because most of their writings were, were lost and. But fortunately the Romans took it and ran with it. So in the first century AD we find the four greatest Roman Stoics. Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Epictetus, and Musonius Ru. The unknown fourth Stoic. But Seneca was, he was the guy because he did all sorts of things. He was the leading playwright of 1st century AD in Rome. He was a billionaire, however they measured these things. He had lots of business interests going. He was counselor to an emperor, and he was a Stoic. And you know, you, you, one thing that I want to say is that he could do these other things in part because he was a Stoic, because he could manage the, the downside, the negative parts of, of his life which would otherwise make it hard for him to progress in life. He was also heroic. He was exiled and, and came back from exile. This was just the standard operating procedure. I guess. The Stoics, they had, they rubbed people the wrong way and, you know, so a lot of them had, had gotten exiled. And Musonius Rufus was exiled twice, and his stoicism played a key role in him getting through those exiles. One of them was a particularly nasty exile, but he, he, he survived. Seneca, though, finally was sentenced to death. He, he got on the wrong side of, of an emperor and was sentenced to death. And back then they said, here's the choice. You either do the job yourself or we send someone in who will do it for us. And that would mean just getting stabbed to Death. And Seneca said, I'll do it myself. And this is for me, this is heroic. Because he arranged. He figured out the day he was going to do it. He called in his friends, his relatives, you know, the people who knew him best. And they all knew what the deal was. And so they came in and they were all sad and tearful and trying to cheer him up, you know, to the extent that you could. You know, it's somebody you know is going to die from unnatural causes in a matter of hours. And what's heroic to me is that he spent those hours trying to cheer them up, trying to give them psychological techniques, you know. Well, do you really. Do you really care about me? Great. Then after I'm gone, I don't want you to go into deep mourning. I want you to live a life that I would want you to live. And I'm your friend. I don't want you to mourn. I want you to thrive. So. So if you need any instruction from me, that's what you do. So it turned out that his death, his self euthanization, call it what you will, was not easy. He kept trying things and she stayed alive. Finally, finally died. And you know that notion. So I have written that. Your own death, by the way. I hate to be the one to break it to you, but you all realize that someday you will die. Sorry, bummer, but that's kind of how life works. And to spend the end still trying to reach out to other people, still trying to say, no, no, no, no despair here, okay? And we can talk more about death if you'd like, but that from a stoic point of view. What did he do? Did he save a woman from a burning building? No, what did he do? He. He showed people how to have a good death and how to survive the death of somebody that they loved and cared for. And that to me is an act of heroism. Not in the conventional sense, but in. In some very important sense.

Yeah, I love it. And he talks about some of the same ideas in exile, writing to his mother, in. On. On the shortness of life. And just that counsel he was giving to her. Don't mourn for me. I'm good. Actually, I'm feeling even better over here. I got nothing to do but think about life. It's good. What I find most heroic about that was the fact that it was a function of the moment to moment to moment to moment to moment to moment practice of his philosophy in the decades that preceded that moment. And what I'm trying to teach our community is you don't need to wait for that moment, the moment you are practicing your philosophy in preparation, perhaps, for a moment like that in which the heroic gods, as we playfully say, blessed you with a real opportunity to practice your philosophy. But you don't need to wait for that. And the only way you're going to get to that point is if you had the wisdom and discipline to live in integrity with your ideals more and more consistently. Seneca wasn't perfect. There was never a perfect human being. But more and more consistently. And so that's. That's what I. What I see when I look at Seneca and that embodiment in the humility and just the. The audacity of approaching his. His end of his life like that as a demonstration of. The guy practiced his philosophy. He didn't wait till the end of his life to try to. He had been that demonstration for countless moments throughout his life. I love that. What, what do you think he practiced consistently that allowed him to show up with that equanimity at such a trying moment? If you had to think about, like, what is his, your favorite practice of his that you think helped him the most, that you've also perhaps seen the most benefit from as you've practiced it in your life, if that question, the way I framed it, makes sense.

So there would be two things I would point to. First is acts of voluntary discomfort. And I mean, going out of your way to do things that you know are going to make you uncomfortable, physically uncomfortable, mentally uncomfortable, and going out of your way to do things that you're afraid of doing. Going out of your way to do things where there's an interesting possibility of failure. Oh, since I've told you that you're going to die, let me give you a counter to that. I'm going to give you a way that you'll never fail in life. You ready? Don't ever do anything hard. Take the easy way out every time. You will never fail. Guess what? You'll never succeed either, in some sense of succeed. Right? But you'll never fail. And so one trick to having a good life is to get good at failing. And if you look at people who were successful, they typically failed many, many times. What made them different is they tried to do things that were difficult. And when it didn't work out, they learned from the failure so they could go on to make new, better failures and ultimately arrive at success. And also so they could practice bouncing back. You know, we live in a world of people who can't bounce. They're they're the eggs that when, when they fail, that's it. They, they are, they're out of the, out of the game. But it's important for you to develop the ability to bounce. And one way to do that is to put yourself in a situation where there is a chance of failing. Now, you shouldn't. So don't go out and climb a cliff, right, and say, this is what Irvin wants us to do, you know, and then if you're dead, you can't practice stoicism at all. So don't do that. But little things that for you would count as risky ventures. So I have been and do less so since COVID but, but a competitive rower, that's rowing with two oars, not with one or. So that's. It's called sculling, actually. And doing it competitively. And because it accomplishes two things for me, one is it gives me incredible discomfort. I go out of my way to do that. How come? So if life presents me with discomfort, I'm trained for it, I'm ready for it. So for instance, when we do these thousand meter races, it might take four minutes to do it, certainly on an erg, that's a rowing machine. And I call it the four minute flu. Because before you're, you start, you're just a happy camper feeling good. And by the end, it's like you got Covid, right, You're gasping to breathe and you know you're, you can't, you can barely move and still you have to row your, your boat back to wherever you have to go. And what's really interesting to me is along the way, those voices, you know, I told you that come out at 2:00am well, they're a chorus singing to you in the middle of a race, saying, you know, you could slow down, you know, you could just quit at this point. And so what you do is you tell them to shut up, right? And you row on, you show them, you show them that you're in charge, okay? Now another thing about Seneca is he had this, what he called his bedtime meditation. So the last thing he would do before falling asleep is rethinking what he did during the day and give himself basically a grade. You know, what did he do that was right that was in keeping with stoic practice? What did he do that was. Was wrong? And so that's that whole notion of watching yourself live while living, watch yourself live. That's often hard to do because life can be complicated. But at bedtime, there's nothing else to Think about. So my problem with that is when my head hits the pillow, I'm gone. My wife's always amazed she'll have a stopwatch there. Oh, you made eight seconds last night. Not quite a bit of an exaggeration. But for me then to do it while I'm awake in the middle of the day and just think about things, and it is amazing. You can catch the things where. What motivated me at that moment? Oh, I was experiencing envy. That's why I said that mean thing about that other person, because I envy that other person. And that's a stupid way to show that. And it's stupid for me to envy that other person or you did something. And it's really amazing, you know, because I find that for me, some of the most rewarding things are tiny little things where you make a difference in somebody else's life. So I'm not boasting here, but I was in a supermarket and shopping, and there was a woman who was of lower stature. Am I allowed to say shorter? I don't. I can. Don't know anymore. And there was a thing up on a high shelf, and she was reaching for it, and I said, hold on. And I grabbed it down and handed it to her. Tiny, tiny little thing. But when I looked over what I had done in the course of the day, I thought that was such a wonderful, correct thing to have done because I made a difference in someone else's life. So I've got one motto, and that is when you can make somebody's day, do it. When you can tell them something good about themselves, do it. Because most of us are starved for anyone to notice we exist or to sort of say, you know, you're doing a good job. I can see you're working towards something. And how much does it cost you to make someone else's day? Zero. Unless your ego is out of control, in which case you can't stand to praise anybody else. Right? Because you're just the best there is. You got to get over that and realize that it isn't a zero sum game. It isn't that if other people are good, that means you're bad. Everybody can be good. And, yeah, so I saw a background activity of mine. So you can do it at bedtime. That's what Seneca did. But you can stop in your day and you can say, what am I doing right? What am I doing wrong?

I love it. And I love your story that you tell in the Stoic Challenge of Power. You've got some great stories on rowing in that book, fantastic book, by the way, highly recommend that. I'm a big rowing fan as well. And then the cold plunge for me, which will be coming up for me soon after. This is one of those things I do every day that I don't enjoy doing it. Even that, you know, is asking me the other day, like, man, you love burpees. You know, I do one of the other things I do. And she's like, I just don't love burpees. And I said the word. I don't love burpees either. No one loves burpees. That's why I do them.

Yes, but people don't understand, you know, it's what makes you uncomfortable. Why would you do that? And the answer is, because I'm expanding my comfort zone. Because then I will be comfortable in a variety of circumstances and you never know what life's going to throw your way and you don't say what I'm about to say. But you who are used to comfort, you're going to be in big trouble, right?

It's the comfort crisis. I mean, this is again, George Mumford calls it romancing your discomfort zone. Steve Kotler, who was the week before that said 4%, 4%, 4% go out of your comfort zone. My coach Phil Stutz, who's back there, says, bring it on. Your infinite potential exists on the other side of your comfort zone. By definition, it feels uncomfortable when you exit your comfort zone. Therefore, if you want to tap into your potential, get really good at feeling uncomfortable. But again, you don't need to go crazy. It's the 4%, 4% and then the occasional 4 minute flus. And this again is what I admire about how you're sharing this wisdom and Seneca and the others that I find truly heroic. Ralph Waldo Emerson's up on my wall as well and he says, look, the hero is a hero because there's this invisible train of angels of prior moments of virtue that are following him or her. There's this subtle and even Confucius talks about it, the neuroscientists studying Confucianism and Wu Wei and moral charisma. To go back to your 200,000 year arc of evolutionary psychology, there is something about the person who is living in integrity with their highest ideals that we can feel that split second. Who is this person? Can I trust them? Again, goosebumps as I say that the individual who is living in integrity with their highest ideals have, that has that you can't even explain it is so fast. The trust that you have in that individual who's looking at you clearly who is embodying the good, the true, the beautiful. You want to be around them, you want to follow their lead. And this is what I encourage. Our coaches, who we train and others be that person, be the radiant exemplar. And this is what I think Seneca had. And I wish we could hang out, the three of us with Seneca right now because I believe we'd feel it, we'd feel it in his presence way before the moment in which he, he, you know, somehow managed to cheer up his friends at the moment of his preceding his death. But that's, that's what I find most inspiring about your work about stoicism and of course the modern application of it through cognitive behavioral therapy and the other practices. So inspiring. So many other things we can talk about. I know we've got a seven minute window here. Does anyone have a question they want to pose to the good professor who is now semi retired? His classroom no longer has walls, but is here with us on Zoom today. If you do raise your hand, we'll have an opportunity to connect. Is there anything else that you didn't share? Of course, knowing there's an infinite number of things we could explore. But does anything else arise for you that you want to make sure we discuss?

One thing I want to throw in is when you talk about your comfort zone, it's very important. There are two different ones. There's the physical one and there's the emotional one. And it's easy to focus on the physical one. That discomfort. But mental discomfort is a big deal. And I've been working on a number of different things where I know there's a fear. It's not a physical fear, it's a social fear. Working on overcoming those social fears, I've also lately project is striking up conversations with complete strangers. There was a time when I wouldn't have dreamed of doing that, but I've just had such wonderful experiences from doing that. You know what show someone else that you're interested in their life and it's like, it's like watching a desert flower. You know, it hasn't experienced rain for all year and then suddenly rain and, and they open up and they, they, they, they blossom. And there's a chance that you can make somebody's day doing that. But there was a long time, and I'm not sure why, when I didn't feel comfortable doing that, talking before big audiences. There was a time when I would have feared that. So how do you do it? You start with a Small audience, you get bigger audiences, and then it's. It ceases to be an issue. But so deal with your. Your mental fears as well as your physical discomfort.

I love it. And then so many different facets of that point. I find that my physical fears are often mental. Ultimately my, My, you know, cold plunge is a physical act in one way, but it isn't. It's a mental one. It is that moving through that. But then the. The socio interpersonal fears that I too have had and been fun to kind of stretch the comfort zone. And then your point on the grocery store, just that we call those micro moments of awesome. And there's a science to that. I mean, the neuroscience of connecting and being truly present and doing something kind for someone like that, of course changes your underlying physiology, the individual who receives it, someone who might be watching it. So in our app, we help people operationalize these practices. Who are you at your best? What virtues do you embody? And what specifically will you do today? We have them commit in the beginning of the day, hit the targets through the day. At the end of the day, reflect on it. But one of the targets is micro moment of awesome where we're deliberately actively looking for it. And I'm just noticing that we've hit that together 190,000 times, which is awesome since we've launched it, but, you know, fun. So many things we can talk about. I see your hand up, Dennis, and I would love to bring you up and unmuting you now. Good to see you. Hi, Brian. And hello, Professor Irvine. Can you guys hear me?

Yeah.

Yes, we can. And we can see you. Okay. I'm just reading your book, a Guide to the Good Life so far. I love it. It's not really a question, but I would love to hear a little bit more because I really like your distinction of the trichotomy of control instead of dichotomy. And I think a lot of people, myself included, get lost a little bit between, you know, what you have control over, no control and then some control. And if you can just go a little bit deeper on that in your thinking.

Okay. This was Epictetus, one of the four Roman Stoics who came up with this. And he says there are things you can control and things you can't control. So that's the dichotomy of control, and that's what most stoics think in terms of. But when I saw that, I realized that's. That's. That's not quite complete because the things you can't control, that's actually can be divided into two different groups. There's things you have absolutely no control over, like whether it rains tomorrow, you can't control that. There are things you have absolute control over, like your virtues, the virtues you choose to live by. Now, you know, there's the question of do you have sufficient self control to live by them. But you can choose the ones that you want to live by. But there's this third group and these, these are the things that you have some but not complete control over. And those are the ones. Well, the stoics said, you know, the things you can't control, you shouldn't worry about them because you can't control them and it's a waste of your time. The things you can control. Yeah. And it'll be easy for you to deal with them. So it leaves us with this middle ground and that is things you have some but not complete control over. And I would argue that a stoic should put the most, pay the most attention to those, the things in that category. So I give in the book the example of getting ready for a tennis match. You can't control how the other player is, how hard they're training, what they're eating, their strategy for the game. But you can control the same things for you. You know, how you're training, how hard you're training, the strategy for the game. So that's where your attention should be. When I'm doing coaching in rowing, I, I tell people, don't think about what's going on in the other boats because you can't control it. And there's a phrase among rowers, keep your head in the boat, think about the boat you're rowing and make it go fast. That's the most you can do. Some stoics, and I've gotten a little bit of pushback for this particular description of, you know, this middle ground. And some stoics say, no, no, no, that doesn't work. But for you to tell people there are things you can control and things you can't and pay attention to things you can control, it's bad advice just because there'll be people who say, well, you know, I can't control whether I'm going to win this tennis game, so I might as well just ignore it. Well, no, you can't absolutely control it, but you can affect the outcome by the choices you make. So that's where you devote your attention.

I think that's the hardest part in life, right? That that area, some control, but not all control. I also think of Stephen Covey, who goes things you can control, things you can't. And then you have a circle of influence, which means you have some, you know, influence, but you can't guarantee.

Yep. And the things you have some control over, I mean, there's also a difference between thinking about something and worrying about it. So I'm a big thinker about. I'm a big planner. And some people say, well, why not just relax? Well, because if you don't plan the future to the extent that you can, bad things are going to happen and then you're going to have things to worry about. So it's a problem avoidance technique. So I think a lot about things that can happen, like when I'm planning a trip to. I don't worry, I think. And you can think without worrying.

Thank you very much. Thank you, Dennis. Well, thank you, Professor. I appreciate you and your decades of commitment to both the theory and the practice. And I appreciate you taking the time to be with us here today. And bless you. Thank you. Look forward to connecting again. Soon we're going to have the community connect with one another. If you would like to stay on, then please do so. And I hope that you have a great rest of the day. I will be practicing my stoic philosophy, our stoic philosophy, to the best of my ability, with you in mind and with a heart full of gratitude. So thank you so much for all that you do.

Oh, thank you for inviting me. And let me say to everybody in the audience, there isn't going to be a quiz, so don't worry about that. Okay.

Every time you said that, I play for my playful rejoinder. Is there is you will have many life.

Is the quiz well. Okay. Okay.

That's so good. And you're preparing us well, but we are not your old students who are sitting there.

I can't give you a grade.

No, let's give ourselves a good grade at the end of the day, Seneca style. Right?

Yeah.

Too fun. All right. The ultimate quiz. The ultimate game. Bless you. Thank you. Have a great rest of the day.

Oh, you're welcome.

All right, Nat, if you would do us the honors of connecting. After we take a quick breath. Flipping the switch. What a beautiful man. I'm always charmed by the idiosyncratic differences of expression among our masters. Vlad, good to see you. Plus one. Look at you, too. It's so fun for me to see how everyone shows up and delivers their wisdom in such a beautifully differentiated style. With a smile on our face. Thanking Professor Irvine for his hard work and embodiment in our community coming together, committed to practicing these ideals. It sure is a lot more fun to move from theory to practice to mastery together. Look forward to seeing you tomorrow, 1:01pm Central Time. Nat, who's on the schedule for next week? Let's get ahead on that. We haven't done a good job since I've come back. We have not done a good job of giving a heads up. Let me look at my calendar. Who do we have? Oh, cool. We've got Caroline Miller, who's one of the world's leading positive psychologists, has written a number of great books, including Getting Grit, which I actually found in the midst of the Ojai fires forever ago. I found that while we were kind of evacuated then, who do we have the week after that? I don't see that on my calendar, but we've got a bunch of great calls. So it's Friday. The following Friday is Scott Parsons. We're going to talk about West Point, so we'll do a better job of letting you know what's coming up. I hope you enjoyed today and I hope you enjoy your time with one another and I look forward to seeing you tomorrow.